The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  “That sounds not bad,” Alexandra admitted.

  “Lexa, you must grow up. That part, for us, is over. Even Sukie can see that for her it’s over.”

  “So, Jane, what’s left?”

  “Being wise is left, darling. Seeing the world is left. Using your eyes and ears is left. Just think—you have consciousness, isn’t that amazing, all those neurons? This fall I went on a garden tour of the Himalayas. Ssikkim. Bhutan. We had to cancel some of Nepal, with the Maoist uprising. There are some lovely princely estates, still, and Kashmir really is paradise, once you get past the hopeless politics.”

  “So Paradise is left. Who did you go with? Whom.” Expecting her to say that it had been with Sukie, Alexandra braced for a surge of jealousy.

  But Jane said, “Nobody you know, dear. The Brookline and Dedham Garden Clubs. There were two or three husbands along—pathetic people, always in the way. I love women, it turns out. Did you know that about me?”

  “Well, not exactly know. Jane, I think all women, more or less, are more comfortable with other women. With women you know what to expect, and don’t expect too much. Is that what you called up to talk about? You’re coming out of the closet? I understand your state permits homosexual marriage. Every other state is up in arms about it.”

  “You can stop trying to be funny. Sukie and I have a serious idea for you.”

  “Antarctica.” Something menacingly purposeful in Jane’s call made Alexandra want to fend her off with jokes.

  Jane didn’t take it as a joke. She said, “No—but people who have gone there sswear by it, they say you can’t believe the beauty. But no—Sukie says you’re too poor to go anywhere pricey, so what about going back to Eastwick?”

  “Eastwick? Now?”

  “Next ssummer, Lexa. For a month or two, depending on what rentals are available. Don’t forget, we didn’t notice because we were trying to live there, but it’s a summer place. The beach, the Bay, the little shops selling kitschy watercolors and stained glass and candles on Dock Street. Surely you need to get away from all the beassstly heat in New Mexico.”

  “Usually it’s not that bad—we’re high, you know; we have snow on the ground right now—but last summer, I admit—”

  “Well, then. And you know the summers are all going to be hotter from now on. Aren’t you curious to see how the town has changed?”

  “I know how it’s changed. Or, rather, I know how little it’s changed. Marcy and I still communicate, somewhat. It has a few more chi-chi restaurants, and art galleries that come and go. Those scrawny trees downtown are strung with white Christmas lights all year long—they have an improvement society and that’s their idea of improvement.”

  Jane resisted being dragged under, with her inspiration, by Alexandra’s depressive side. She said, her sibilants bristling, “How ssad, but I don’t believe it. Or I don’t believe it’s all there is. There’s something there, there always was. The ssspirit of Anne Hutchinson, it could be. It was liberating, empowering. We came into our own. We never should have found husbands and left.”

  “Oh, Jane, how can you say that, after what we did?”

  The other woman’s hard voice pounced. “What did we do? What? We fucked a few of the local jerks, which was a great kindness. We played tennis with what’s-his-name, Van Horne, and used his hot tub. We played.”

  “We killed Jenny Gabriel, that’s what we did. After bewitching Clyde’s wife so that he killed her with a poker and then hung himself.”

  “Dearie, this is all hearsay. It can’t be proved. And so what in any case? That was over thirty years ago. Most everyone who would remember us is dead.”

  “I do not want to go back,” Alexandra said, with such conviction that she was momentarily blind to the winter sunshine on the dusting of snow and, inside, the comforting Southwestern artifacts, in their humble tans and browns and rusty reds borrowed from the earth by an indigenous people with no concept of sin, the eclipsing blackness of sin. The First People, they were called in Canada. The braves fought and tortured other braves, the women pounded corn into cornmeal. All was harsh and taciturn and innocent. “Marcy at first was always asking me to come visit her and I always ducked, so she stopped asking. She didn’t press me. She was more than a child at the time it happened, you know. She was seventeen. She was aware of things. Of evil.”

  “Oh, you sweet tender-hearted thing, how you do go on. Evil, my goodness. Reality, I’d say. Doesn’t life these days seem terribly flat to you, the way it never was in Eastwick?”

  Can this be true? Alexandra shifts the terrain to the other woman’s widowhood. “Why would you want to go there in the summer? Didn’t Nat’s family have a big place in Maine, near Bath or Bar Harbor?”

  “The old lady sold it. She said the only reason she hung on to it was so Nat could do his sailing in August.”

  “She’s able to do things like that? Buy and sell and so on, at a hundred and four?”

  “Nat’s funeral energized the old bat. She even goes to Friday-afternoon Ssymphony again, with a big black chauffeur. For a while, while Nat was still here, she didn’t know who she was or where she was, only that she didn’t like the wallpaper she stared at all day and was sure the nurse was poisoning her. The upkeep on the Maine place had become monstrous. It was one of these huge shingled barns with a hundred dormers, and the thing about shingles is, they dry out and warp and fall off. I always hated it there. It was heated only by fireplaces, and the ocean was always too icy to swim in, even in August. The people who went to Maine for the summer were Puritan stock and wanted to be punished for being rich. So no, I’m happy to go to Rhode Island. Not Newport or Jamestown, though. They’re overrun with gawkers in the summer. Just Easstwick. Nobody goes to Eastwick but oddballs.”

  “Oh, Jane, how can you? Sound so enthusiastic. I’m sure Sukie will agree with me, it’s a horrible, horrible idea. Talk about the scene of a crime.”

  “I repeat, there was no crime. There was healthy exploration of our female potential. Sukie loves the idea. She gets all bright-eyed and pink in the face when we talk about it. Didn’t you think, in China, she had gotten alarmingly pasty? Washed-out, with her pathetic dyed hair. I mean, the poor dear has only two half-lungs.”

  “You’ve been seeing her? Where do you meet?”

  Jane’s voice put up a shield of terseness. “She comes to Boston. Lennie had some interests here. Once we met at New Haven, where one of Nat’s great-nephews goes to Yale. Do you mind, Lexa? It’s not our fault you live so far away. You never invite us to visit you.”

  “I did, but you pooh-poohed it. You said the West was full of fat religious people.” Still, Alexandra found herself reluctant to pollute the dry clarity of Taos with whiffs of her guilty, swampy past. She backtracked: “Why would Sukie want to go back to Eastwick?”

  “Oh, you know her. Journalistic curiosity. Maybe she’ll get something for her next ridiculous romance novel. Maybe she’ll meet an old flame or make a fresh conquest. In Connecticut, apparently, the wives run a tight ship, and what loose men there are have those city skills at commitment-avoidance.”

  The phrase made Alexandra wonder if Ward Linklater didn’t have those skills. It emerged over red wine that in his prior life sculpting had been a weekend hobby; his real work, and the source of his comfortable wealth, had been as a contractor, filling the helpless desert between Albuquerque and Santa Fe with acres and acres of the kind of cut-rate retirement homes that Alexandra despised.

  “Well, I have no such delusions,” she told Jane. “I am not going. Absolutely not. Eastwick was a phase, and one I’m very glad I’m out of. Period, dear.”

  When, a few rankled days later, she called Sukie, the younger woman was vague; it was like talking to somebody at a party whose eyes keep darting over your shoulder. “Sukie, I can’t believe you want us to rent for the summer in Eastwick.”

  “Do I? Jane seemed so keen on it, I could hardly argue. It might be amusing, I don’t know. Couldn’t we all use a change? Ar
en’t you curious to see what would happen? Either way, don’t make it into such a big deal, Lexa. It’s only an idea, a way of us getting together.”

  “A very repugnant idea, if you ask me. To me, that town is something I left behind. It’s hexed.”

  “Well, who hexed it?” Sukie asked.

  “It wasn’t just us. There was Brenda Parsley and Marge Perley and Greta Neff and Rose Hallybread and I guess you’d have to include Felicia in that category.” Superstitiously, her tongue hesitated to pronounce “Felicia,” the murdered wife of Clyde Gabriel—Clyde who went crazy partly with drink and partly with love of Sukie. It was where the maleficia had deepened to a depth they couldn’t escape, and she disliked pronouncing the name because Felicia was dead. But, then, probably, so were all the others by now.

  Sukie laughed; Alexandra felt that her laugh covered up the start of a yawn. “She certainly frothed at the mouth,” Sukie said, of the late Felicia, “when she’d go on and on about Vietnam.” She sensed that the nostalgic tone wasn’t meeting Alexandra’s present need, and said more briskly, “Darling, you’re so sweetly superstitious. Hexes don’t last forever. That poisonous atmosphere had to do with the times, the Sixties decaying into the Seventies, and with us being young and still full of juice and stuck in the middle class.”

  “Well, these aren’t exactly Happy Days on television right now,” Alexandra claimed. “People are as unhappy about Bush as they were about Johnson and Nixon. It’s another quagmire. And meanwhile the infrastructure and the public schools and the national parks are going to hell.”

  Sukie paused, as if she were weighing these assertions, and then, maddeningly, concluded, “Well, it doesn’t sound to me as though you like the idea, and we just can’t do it without you.”

  “Why not? You and Jane seem suddenly to be perfectly on the same wavelength on everything.”

  “Don’t be jealous, darling, there’s nothing to be jealous of. Jane is not an easy person. But as I say she’s not entirely well, and I think she feels very lonely, in that big dark house, with not only Nat gone but the matriarch showing so much pep. As to me, I don’t know, Lexa; I just feel so washed-out, so unreal, with Lennie dead. I thought Eastwick might bring me back to reality. In China I kept thinking how delicious it was, as life begins to close in, to have old friends who knew you when, who can laugh at the same things and remember the same awful people. But maybe I was silly.” She sighed, with her tender half-lungs. “Forget it, doll, let’s just forget it.”

  “You’re making me feel guilty, Sukie, but I still won’t go. You can both come here if you want, and visit Indian reservations. They’re fascinating. They still have shamans that can do mind-boggling things. Really, I’ve seen it. You might even talk me into a cruise to Antarctica, to see these animated penguins.”

  Silence. No laugh. Then: “Lexa, I should get back to work before I forget what color the heroine’s eyes are. I was in the middle of ripping her bodice. But do understand, Jane and I don’t want to talk you into anything. We just were offering you an opportunity.” Since they had once been, in the steamy black hot-tub room, lovers of a sort, Sukie knew how to communicate hurt; Alexandra hung up still rankled.

  When, somewhat later in the winter, the phone rang again, with the caller-ID panel showing OUT OF AREA, Alexandra picked it up with a heart fluttering between the possibility of repairing her relations with the two other widows and the need to keep standing firm against them. But the female voice on the other end of the line belonged to neither. “Mother?” it said.

  Of her two daughters, the younger, Linda, lived in Atlanta with her second husband, and had developed over the years a feathery touch of a Southern accent, and the high-pitched coziness of regionally inculcated femininity. This voice had no such pitch—it was a low, sexually neutral, aggressively flat voice, with the hardened “a”s and dropped “r”s of New England. “Marcy!” Alexandra exclaimed. “What a nice surprise!”

  Neither daughter telephoned more than courtesy demanded, and Marcy a little less even than that. “I hear you may be coming here next summer,” she said, in that lumpish factual tone of hers. Marcy had thickened, after that gracile teen-age moment of virgin womanhood, and had darkened, especially in her thick eyebrows and her sullen, deep-set eyes.

  “Where would you ever hear that? It’s not true, dear.” Alexandra heard herself sounding, in the defensiveness her older daughter aroused in her, a shade like the younger daughter, feather-headed Linda. Her voice, strained with feigning, seemed to plead: “Jane and Sukie—you remember them, Jane Smart she used to be, and Sukie Rougemont—have been trying to talk me into coming back to Eastwick as a summer person. I keep telling them no. For one thing, you wouldn’t like it, I tell them.”

  “Why would you say that? That’s hurtful, Mother. It would give us some time to be together, in a way we’ve hardly had, and you could get to know Howie and the boys better.”

  Marcy had married the local electrician Howard Little-field at the point where it seemed she might stay a chunky spinster forever, and had borne him two sons as she approached forty—typical of her mulish, late-blooming generation, thought Alexandra, whose own generation had relegated childbearing to a post-teen interval, clearing the decks for an adult life unencumbered by hospital stays and around-the-clock nursing schedules. “The boys—are they still in high school?”

  “Mother, it’s so discouraging. You don’t pay any attention. Roger is twelve and Howard Junior just turned nine. You sent him a computer game, remember?”

  “Of course. I hope not one of the violent and obscene ones.”

  Alexandra disliked facing the fact that she had a daughter over fifty, with gray hair she did nothing to hide and a wart on the side of her nose she didn’t bother to have removed. Marcy’s brother Ben, the next-oldest child, was even worse—balder than Oz had been at his age and thoroughly pompous and conventional, living in Virginia and doing something in Washington that he couldn’t discuss in detail. He actually was a Republican, like his father; but it seemed much worse in a son than in a husband. You expected it in a husband. To Alexandra there was something so bizarre about being the mother of males—their penises and testicles once packed inside you along with their genetic predispositions to messy rooms and televised sports—that she could relate to her sons more easily, their connection being at bottom a kind of joke, than to her daughters, whom she regarded with the same appraising eye with which she regarded herself.

  “They’re all like that,” Marcy was saying. “It’s more about hand-eye coördination than sociopathic content. Anyway, he loved it and uses it constantly. Did you get his thank-you note?”

  “I did,” Alexandra lied. “It was charming.”

  “What did it say?” Marcy mulishly pursued.

  “The usual sweet boyish things. I’d still like to know who told you I was coming to Eastwick.”

  “Jane Tinker has been in touch with me. Isn’t she amusing, by the way? A real game old gal, unlike—”

  “Me, you’re going to say.”

  “Unlike the mothers of a lot of my friends, I was going to say. You’re not ungame, Mother. You just keep your distance.”

  “Darling, I’m out here trying to survive, by selling pots. I’ve learned how to turn them on Jim’s wheel. At the end of the day, I’m dizzy.”

  “She asked me to look around for rentals.”

  “Jane did? After I kept telling her no?”

  “She said it might be for her and one or two other women.”

  “One or two. I can’t believe the two of them would do that to me. Go behind my back that way.”

  “She was just asking for me to give her a feel for what’s available. And I didn’t find much, in fact. Eastwick never was a go-to kind of place; all those are on the island side of the Bay. There’s the motel toward East Beach, past the shuttered-up pizza place—”

  “Oh? It’s closed? The pizzas used to be so good. Thin and crisp, instead of gross and cheesy.”

  “The
man who made them retired ages ago and went to Florida. That’s where we’d all go, if we could afford it. Howie and I already have our town picked out. Right on the water, on the Gulf side. We go there two weeks every winter. Around here, there are a few houses for rent, but for the full three summer months and usually to the same family, that keeps coming back. There’s a Days Inn a few miles north, on Route One, but it wouldn’t give you the small-town feeling.”

  “No,” Alexandra said, and then regretted saying even this much; she was being drawn in.

  “The only thing possible I could find—and this is why I’m calling you—is, do you have any negative feelings about the old Lenox mansion? The bank that had to take it over turned it into condo units, really rather charmingly.”

  “The Lenox mansion. Is that what they’ve gone back to calling it?” She and her daughter had moved into uncomfortable territory—the scandalous past—but there was no easy way out. “I guess it wasn’t the Van Horne mansion very long. I do have negative feelings, yes.”

  “The tennis court is still there, but not the big bubble Mr. Van Horne put over it. It’s been a struggle with the condos—tenants don’t like the causeway being flooded once or twice a month—so some, on the side without a sea view, are available for short rentals. Three women, the manager told me, could take two adjacent suites on the second floor. They cut up the old hot-tub area—you remember it, with the retractable ceiling—and created a second floor in all that space. It’s a little jerry-built, I guess—he showed me one of the rooms, and the ceiling did seem pretty low—but by leaning out the window there’s a view of the causeway, and unlike the middle of town it would be quiet at night.”

  “How can a condo be quiet? Suppose the neighbor on the other side of the wall watches television compulsively?”

  “Mother, really. Don’t be such a snob. It isn’t as quiet as the New Mexico desert, no. In the real world almost everybody lives with somebody else’s television set on the other side of the wall.”