The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  It was not Jane who answered the ring. “Tinker residence,” a pretentious voice, young and male, responded.

  “Hello!” Alexandra exclaimed, taken aback. “Could I speak with”—“Jane” seemed too familiar, and “the lady of the house” could mean the mother as well as the widow—“Jane Tinker?”

  The frosty voice answered her question with another: “And whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Tell her Alexandra.” She added needlessly, “We’re very old friends.” What business was it of this snotty boy’s?

  “I will see if Mrs. Tinker is available.” As if being in the house and being available were two different things. Alexandra tried to picture Jane at the head of those broad dark stairs, sequestered in her grief, protected by thicknesses of old money. She had risen a long way from that little ill-kept ranch house on a damp quarter-acre of the Cove region, its bleak Fifties modernism overlaid with a dilapidating coat of faux-Puritan cabinets, mock cobbler’s benches, and light switches carved like pump handles by the previous owner, an unemployed mechanical engineer. It was in that kitchen, with her dirty-faced children coming in and out, that the three of them had put the fatal spell on Jenny Gabriel.

  Though those days seemed forever away, Jane’s voice, when she came to the telephone, was little changed—it still had that old accusatory sting, delivered with a bit more of a whiskey rasp. “Lexa! Can it be really you?”

  “Dearie, who else? You told me on your card to call you. I was sorry to hear your sad news. Nat must have been a lovely man; I’m sorry I never met him.” She had prepared this much to say.

  “But I wrote you two months ago,” Jane accused.

  “We Westerners move slow. I wasn’t sure you meant it.”

  “Of course I meant it. There hasn’t been a day in thirty years you haven’t walked through my mind, lightly clad and quite majestic.”

  “How nice, Jane. You haven’t seen me lately. My face is crackled like an old squaw’s with too much sun, and I’ve gained weight.”

  “Listen, doll: we’re ancient. It’s the inner woman that matters now.”

  “Well, I’m an inner woman wrapped in too much outer. I have twinges all over my body.”

  “That sounds rather ssseductive,” Jane said. Her “s”s still hissed. “Come east. I know a wonderful spa, and an acupuncturist who takes off years. The more the needles hurt going in, the better you feel lying there. I fall asleep right on the table, bristling like a porcupine.”

  How like Jane Pain, Alexandra thought, smiling into the receiver. She told her old friend, “I’m a widow now, too. It’ll be two years this July. Jim, his name was. I think you met him a few times, back in Eastwick.”

  “Yess. I did, toward the end, after Darryl’s pathetic charade had fallen apart. Jim Ssomething. I hated him, because he was taking you away from usss. As to my ‘lovely man,’ well, yes, you could say that. It was a deal. He did nice things for me, and I did nice things for him. He gave me money, I gave him ass. He needed a lot of special attention. Only certain things turned him on. Weird things.” The husky acid voice hovered close to something—indignation, or tears. “Well, shit, sssweetie,” she said, closing the door on that closet. “It all worked out.”

  Alexandra tried to picture the working out—the implied intimate details beyond the dark head of those broad stairs. “It worked out for us, too,” she offered. “I loved Jim.” She waited for Jane Tinker to echo this conventional sentiment, but in vain. So she added, defiantly, “And I think he loved me. You know, as much as a man can. Loving makes them feel helpless.”

  At this Jane, with one of her alarming shifts of direction, plunged into suggestive and possibly sardonic flattery. “Lexa, nobody could help loving you. You’re so open. You’re a force of Nature.”

  “I’m not sure I like Nature any more. She’s too cruel. As to not loving me, I think my children are managing that.” She thinks of the impervious Mr. McHugh, on last year’s Canadian trip, but doesn’t mention him. Such confiding with Jane would take physical proximity, and drinks and snacks on a little table between their knees. “How are yours?” Alexandra asked instead.

  “Oh, they’re ssurviving somewhere,” Jane said. “All four, here and there; I keep losing track of exactly where, along with the grandchildren’s birthdays. I never believed they could, somehow—sssurvive. I couldn’t picture them handling jobs, and houses, and marriages to strangers, and getting raises and catching the right airplanes, but they do, amazingly. I never could fathom how until I realized that it wasn’t our world they had to survive in, competing with the people of our generation, but their world, competing against the sssame little people they went to kindergarten with. And growing up with the same idiotic technology. That’s where you feel old, I find. The technology. I can’t do computers and hate dialing ten digits. At my grandfather’s big old place in Maine the phone was one of the first in the region and the number was two digits—two! I still remember them: one, eight. Only seventeen phones ahead of ours on the island. And I hate talking to these sugary automated voices that only when you make a mistake act like machines, repeating themselves absurdly. Though Nat made me carry a cell phone for my own protection, so he said, I never think to turn it on and can’t believe anyway my voice is getting through, with this little grid thing you talk into halfway up to your ear. Now you see these self-important kids just out of business school wearing them clipped to their heads and talking out loud as if in a trance. And the things take photos and videos, too, as well as being cell phones. I can’t ssstand it, all these tiny circuits crammed in there making everything digital, it’s worse than our brains, which are bad enough. They liked coming to this house, though,” she continued, lurching back to the subject of her children, “hanging out and filling the third floor with the smell of hashish or whatever the controlled substance of the week was, until they all got houses and children of their own—amazingly, as I said. They liked Nat. They thought he was cool; they used the word ‘cool’ of this utterly uncool little stuffed shirt. That did hurt, I confesss. And he loved having them around, having been too infantile to get married before and have any children of his own.”

  “Mine, too!” Alexandra had to interject. She’d forgotten how insistent Jane could be, how possessed she could be by her own harsh tongue, her complaints against the world. “My children were crazy about Jim, and he seemed to enjoy them until they got weird or went off to college. Somehow their not being his helped. Did you ever think, Jane, the men we had children by, that that was all they were good for? A kind of specialized function, like parasites and sea anemones have? And then we really married, the second time.”

  “A specialized fucktion,” Jane said. That was another of her deficits, a weakness for puns, dragging them out in the middle of anybody else’s thought. And yet, talking to Jane, Alexandra felt warmed as by no other female intercourse in the thirty years since the three divorcées went their separate ways. “Oh, Jane!” she exclaimed in a spurt of irrational gratitude. “We must get together now, now that we’re widows.”

  “You come here, darling. The house is huge, and my mother-in-law keeps to her room, surrounded day and night with nurses giving her breast milk and mushed-up monkey glands or whatever. I’ve hardly seen her since Nat’s memorial service. She’s over a hundred, it’s monstrous—like having a two-headed mother-in-law; people laugh at me. I’d like to say she hated my guts and made life here next to impossible for me, but in fact she was secretly relieved that I took Nat off her hands; he was one of those men with so little ssubstance to him that he needed not just one but two strong women behind him. He was her only child, and I think to her generation having children was rather unnatural and very odd, something you felt obliged to do only because your parents and their parents before them had obviously done it; otherwise there wouldn’t be ancestors. Before she became quite so batty she used to say these uncanny things that made me laugh. In fact”—Jane’s voice lowered into a virtual rustle; Alexandra strained to hear
it—“I used to wonder if she wasn’t another—” The word stopped her tongue.

  “Witch?” Alexandra asked.

  Jane didn’t answer, saying, “I used to avoid seeing her undressed, for fear I’d spot a false teat.”

  “Jane!” Alexandra had to exclaim, shocked and thrilled. “You still believe all that horrible, medieval nonsense!”

  “I believe in what is,” came the answer, in a voice still low, but sizzling at its sibilant edges, “and if that’s horrible, so be it. But sseriously—do come see me, sssweetheart.”

  A dark old house, a dark old friend. “It’s so far,” Alexandra fended. “It’s so sunny where I am. You have more money—why not come see me? We have wonderful Indian reservations, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, and the Continental Divide. Santa Fe hosts spectacular opera in the summer.”

  “Yes, I have some money now, but it’s New England money. It hates being sspent, except for educational purposes. Nat was always giving to Harvard, which doesn’t need it, and Roxbury Community College, which does, I suppose, though the politicians will never let it go under. I made him give to Berklee and the Conservatory, despite Ssymphony not agreeing with him. He would get quite rigid in his seat listening to it, especially after intermission, so I’d take his hand to see if he still had a pulse. It would be icy cold, especially during Brahms and Mahler. With Mozart and Bach he hovered nearer room temperature; you would even see his fingers twitch when the beat picked up.”

  “You sound quite fond of him,” Alexandra told her, trying to infect the other woman with her own generous-spirited humanity.

  Jane’s response was testy, betraying after all the fury of bereavement. “What if I were—what good would it do now?”

  “What would he want you to do? Not stay in his house with a moribund mother, I bet.”

  “Sweetie, I don’t want to come to New Mexico, I’m sorry. It’s all too American, everything from the Hudson west, like something you’d switch off if it were television. But you can’t, it’s too big to flip off, growing all that boring wheat and corn and cattle, full of fat religious people flying flags on their pickup trucks with their shotgun racks. It’s frightening to me, Lexa, like a foreign country, only worse, because you can understand the language.”

  In this spiky, inviting discourse Alexandra glimpsed a possibility of breaking out of her widow’s monotonous life: pushing through her book club’s monthly choice of “literary fiction,” having drinks and Dutch-treat dinners with her Taos “girlfriends,” leaving querulous messages on the telephones of her evasive children, fighting her weight with cheek-stinging hikes in the high ranch country north toward Wheeler Peak, her only companion the arthritic old black Lab she and Jim had raised from a puppy they had called Cinder because of his ash-gray fuzziness, his eyes the wonder-struck white glass of a husky’s. In Eastwick her Lab had been called Coal. Cinder and she tugged each other along through the tall tan fescue, united by a leash meant less to protect the small game from the dog than to protect him from the coyotes. She carried Jim’s Colt .45 in case a pack attacked. But suburban tracts were climbing higher into the hills, and an old woman in jeans and leather jacket with a half-gray head of hair and a decrepit dog and a holstered .45 was viewed by these tract-dwelling strangers as strange herself, and suspect. You live, she saw, surrounded by more and more strangers, to whom you are a disposable apparition cluttering the view. Only someone like Jane who knew her when she was in her handsome, questing prime could forgive her now for becoming ancient. She grasped at this straw of connection. “We could travel to a real foreign country,” she suggested to Jane. “Together.”

  “Widows on the road. Widows on the world,” Jane said, punning as only a very heartless person would on the name of a well-patronized restaurant on the top floor of a Manhattan skyscraper infamously felled not many years before.

  “I went to Canada the year Jim died,” Alexandra pursued, sounding craven in her own ears.

  “Canada,” Jane rasped dismissively. “What a sstupid country to go to.”

  “Their Rockies are quite beautiful,” Alexandra weakly protested. “The other people on the trip were nice enough to me, especially the Australians, but I felt queasy being alone. Queasy and timid. Two of us might be braver, and could share a room. Couldn’t we at least think about it?”

  Ensconced in her posh dark house, Jane resisted being coaxed. “I don’t want to go to any place as dreary as Canada.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The whole North American continent is dreary.”

  “Even Mexico?”

  “People get the runs. And now there’s social breakdown. An American isn’t safe in the middle of Mexico City. In fact, Americans aren’t safe anywhere. The world hates us, face it. They’re jealous and they hate us and blame us for their own stupidity and corruption and misery.”

  “Oh, surely not the hotel concierges. And the people who run tour buses. I can’t believe there isn’t anywhere you want to go. Did you and Nat ever go to the Nile and see the Pyramids? Or to China and see the Wall? Don’t you want to see the world, before we leave it? Once we break a hip and can’t walk, we can’t travel.”

  “I don’t intend to break a hip.”

  “Nobody intends to. But it happens. They just snap. As you just said, horrible things happen.”

  “Did I say that? I don’t think so.”

  “That was your sense. About the world not being safe any more for Americans.” Alexandra surprised herself, being so aggressive. Just having Jane back in her life to push against got her blood flowing. She heard herself pleading, “You don’t have to decide now. We’re in touch again, and I love it. Think about a trip together, and call me. I’ll go anywhere you want to go, if I can afford it. Not the South Pole or North Korea.”

  “Nat always said the Communist countries were the safest in the world. The state had all the guns, and kept a good tight lid on things. Not that he ever went. He got as far as England, which was sssocialist enough.”

  If they talked any more about travel, the subject might grow stale in their mouths. Alexandra, her wrist aching from holding the phone against her ear, changed the subject. “Tinker,” she said. “Tell me about the name. Were there Tinkers on the Mayflower?”

  “They greeted the Mayflower. The Tinkers had come over years before, rowing a dinghy.”

  “Oh, Jane. It’s so good to hear you joke. The people my age I know down here are all so solemn, talking about nothing but their medications and real estate and the sad state of government support for the arts.”

  . . .

  But when Jane called her back, enough time had passed that Alexandra didn’t recognize the menacing voice. Sounding like a man’s, it pronounced one word: “Egypt.”

  Alexandra was so taken aback that she stammered: “B-beg your pardon?”

  “Egypt is where we ought to go, you ssilly thing,” the voice explained, with a twist of impatience that made it clear Jane Smart was speaking. Alexandra had trouble thinking of her as Jane Tinker.

  “But, Jane, isn’t it dangerous? Aren’t all the Arab countries dangerous for American tourists?”

  “For one thing, Lexa, the Egyptians aren’t Arabs. They think of Arabs as scary crazy people just as much as we do. They are Muslims, most of them, it’s true, though the upper classes are agnostics just like ours, and there are still some Coptic Christians.”

  “But wasn’t Mohamed Atta an Egyptian? And haven’t there been massacres of tourists?”

  “I asked about that at the travel agency,” Jane said in her stoniest, steadiest voice. “They gave me a pamphlet. I have it right here. There have been ‘incidents’—sseventeen Greek tourists at a Cairo hotel in 1996, nine Germans at the main museum in 1997. Later that year, the worst of all—fifty-eight foreign tourists, including thirty-five Sswisss, plus four Egyptians killed outside some ancient queen’s quite lovely temple in Luxor. But there don’t seem to have been any Americans, and the Egyptian police acted very efficient
ly, killing all six of the terrorists quite quickly. If tourists stay away, Lexa, then you’re letting the terrorists win. The Egyptian economy will suffer, which is what the Islamic Jihad or whatever wants. It wants poverty, ignorance, and desperation, because they make people more religious. What it doesn’t want is the peaceful operation of the global marketplace and its modernizing influence. What it very much doesn’t want is the education of women, which is the key to everything good and progressive happening in the world, from lowering the birthrate to combatting AIDS. I can’t believe that you are against these things, darling, you and Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.”

  “Oh, Jane, of course I’m not against the idea of going to Egypt; in fact, I think I mentioned it to you originally. It’s just the fact of going there, right at this unsettled time, that’s worrisome.”

  “Things will never not be unsettled, not for a long time,” Jane said, with a certain relish, bred of malice and fatalism.

  As she listened to this far-off voice from a distant, sinister house, a hissing harsh voice from the past, Alexandra’s eyes rested on the straight-edged splashes of Southwestern sun on her glass-topped coffee table, its shiny stack of art books, and the stripes—black, red, green, and tan—of the tough wool Navajo rug underneath it, with a fringe throwing tiny fuzzy shadows on the earth-colored floor tiles. Her heart resisted the idea of leaving this safe island of known satisfactions. Jim’s pots, delicate in tint and silhouette, sat on shelves and sills in the sunny large room, and each fabric and piece of solid, sensible furniture had been chosen by her, after thought and discussion with Jim and leisurely shopping. Back east, the furniture had just grown around her, like a fungus, inherited and cast-off and stop-gap all jumbled together; her home had been a way-station like the stages of the children’s growth, needing to be supplied with new clothes, toys, equipment, and lessons only to demand at the next stage totally different equipment. Here, in high, dry, precious Taos, she had settled for good, until nothing needed to be changed. But then Jim had died, leaving her with the need to keep reinventing the motions of living. “Jane,” she said, fending for time in which to frame a refusal that would not irrevocably break this link with her old self, when she was less afraid of fresh possibilities, “you’re sweeping me off my feet.”