by John Updike
“Is that so, dear? I didn’t know you knew so much about the real world. You wouldn’t come with me and Jim to New Mexico because you had this boyfriend you were so hot for, and then you were dying to go to Rizdee and show me up as an artist, and then you dropped out after a year and became a greasy-spoon waitress right back where you were born. How much in your life have you ever been out of Rhode Island? Tiny, tiny Rhode Island.”
“Whereas you’ve been all over the world lately, right? Mother, I love you dearly but you’ve always been spoiled. Your parents spoiled you and then poor Daddy and then Jim. You’ve never had to face real need or real loneliness.”
“That’s not true, darling. Just being human is having to face those things.”
“Don’t call me ‘darling.’ It’s too late for ‘darling.’ I’m sorry; I don’t mean to bitch. My mother just happened to be a May Queen, a nice big queen bee full of royal jelly, and I’m a plain worker bee, a wallflower.”
“That’s not true, dar—Marcy. You’re very attractive. You were a perfect baby.”
“That’s just a way of saying it’s all been downhill since. Well, life is all downhill, it turns out. Except that, believe it or not, Howie and I have our fun. Our modest fun. With the boys and without. And some day we’re going to retire to Florida and buy a boat.”
“A boat you fish from? That’s lovely, dear.”
“Just the way you say that—you’re such a snob, so above it all. Where do you get it from? Everybody wants to serve you. Jane and this Sukie woman, they want to serve you, I’m trying to serve you, and you turn up your nose at the idea of a condo, for even a month or two.”
Alexandra didn’t mind this quarrel, now that it had settled into a certain tone. At least it was conversation; it was something happening, Marcy spilling out all this absurd resentment, as if her mother were God and had created the universe. In New Mexico, since Jim’s death and even before, Alexandra had battled spells of depression. The dryness of her aging skin, the thinness of the desert vegetation upon the depth of rocks and minerals, the monotony of the sunny days, the mountain winds hollowing her out, Nature’s grand desolation unsoftened: it all added up to a fearful weight to push through the day. In Eastwick, she had been many things—scared, ashamed, exhilarated, hopeful—but never depressed as best she could remember.
“You,” she told Marcy levelly, “are the main reason I don’t want to come. I thought I might be an embarrassment.”
“Now? The time to worry about my embarrassment was when I was fifteen. The things the other kids at the high school said to me, having to look Eva Marino in the eye when we both knew you were fucking her father, all those nights when you’d be out till way past midnight—”
“I’m so sorry. But I had to have a life, too. A parent is a person, not just a function.” A fucktion, Jane had punned. Oh, evil Jane, Jane Pain, her saw-edged truthful tongue. The three of them dancing, the night Darryl and Jenny announced their marriage: “Har, har, diable, diable, saute ici, saute là, joue ici, joue là,” linked hands smeared with wedding cake. And now this adult female child presuming to pass judgment on them, putting everything in the worst possible light. Alexandra went on, trying to keep her tone level and maternal, albeit chastising, “Have no fear, I won’t be an embarrassment. I won’t come. Tell your new friend Jane she won’t need any condos as far as I’m concerned.”
The child burst out, “Mother, anybody who ever cared about all that is dead. I thought you’d care enough about me to want to come. We could get to know each other b-better.” She was crying.
“Oh, my goodness, Marcy,” Alexandra hurried to say, guilty, panicky. “What a sweet idea! After that tirade of yours?”
Perhaps she had imagined the tears, for Marcy said, calmly enough, “It was good to let it out, I think. My feelings. But it wasn’t the whole story. You could be a pretty good mother. You weren’t priggish and scolding, at least. I loved it when you used to put up tomato sauce, and have us weed with you in the garden. You taught us about Nature.”
“Did I, though? I used to think Nature was on my side. Now I doubt it.”
Marcy wasn’t listening, she was going on, “Howie and I have a little patch we eat from, mostly easy things—two rows of lettuce for salads, and some parsley, and Brussels sprouts. Isn’t it amazing, how Brussels sprouts just keep coming, more and more, right into frost? I’d grow tomatoes except that Howie hates them. They’re the only thing he won’t eat.” And this little confession hoarsened her voice and threatened to bring back the tears. How stable, really, was Marcy?
“Yes, it is amazing,” Alexandra agreed. Just hearing about her mothering wearied her. Bowing to Nature’s demands, going forth and multiplying, In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee, the whole patriarchal bad rap. Not that Adam had it much easier: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, for dust thou art. And onward to the next: Cain was a tiller of the ground, but unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect. The thought of Marcy growing a few vegetables in that stony, impoverished, acid Eastwick soil, sprinkling with pinched fingers the lettuce seeds scarcely bigger than grains of sand and sealing them hopefully into their temporary grave, and bearing two sons by a terrible stretch of her nether parts, and loving the boys even as they turned out to be just two more excess male Americans avidly consuming junk, lifts Alexandra to a dizzying height of parental sorrow. “Dear, I feel a little faint. This is all so unexpected. Let me rethink a bit, if you really do see our renting next summer as having a positive aspect.”
“Oh, I do,” came the almost musical reply. “It would mean so much to the boys.”
News that the damnable trio were back in town percolated from ear to ear like rainwater trickling through the tunnels of an ant colony. Betsy Prinz, Herbie Prinz’s granddaughter, heard it from Amy Arsenault in what used to be the Armenians’ hardware store but was now an under stocked, demoralized True Value—no match for the Home Depot over on Route 102 or the giant new Lowe’s slapped up overnight, it seemed, on Route One toward Warwick. Betsy, too young at twenty-seven to have ever actually seen any of the purported witches, passed the rumor on to Veronica Marino, with an innocent dim sense that there had been, in the remote past, a scandalous connection with the Marinos. Veronica, the youngest of Joe and Gina’s five children, still lived, at the age of thirty-nine, with her mother in her parents’ narrow clapboard house some blocks beyond Kazmierczak Square. Not only she but her husband, Mike O’Brien, lived there; he was a shiftless drinker but at the age she married, six years ago, she was lucky to catch a man at all. They had no children and made do with two rooms and a bathroom back from the street. Some took their childlessness to be the natural result of a mismatch between an Italian and an Irishman; others blamed the proximity of the all-powerful mother—Joe had died of a heart attack the year his youngest daughter married. When Veronica told her mother that no less an authority than Harry Perley of Perley Realty had told Amy Arsenault that the three women had rented two units for July and August in the Lenox Mansion Seaview Apartments, Gina, moving painfully on a hip ripening to be replaced, scarcely glanced up from rinsing and trimming a bunch of the season’s first local asparagus for a microwave container. “Returning to their mess,” she mumbled.
“What’s that, Mother?” Veronica asked, a shade too loudly, her eyes widened by something like alarm. Her mother frightened her with her aura of the Old World—her leaden deliberation and her mannish laced black shoes and the fringe of dark hairs on her upper lip.
“An old saying. Too nasty for you to understand.”
“Mother, I’m not a child,” Veronica stated, with the sinking feeling that without a child of her own she was. “Mike says all sorts of things to me.” She reddened, feeling more foolish still.
“Your father used to say, ‘It’
s a free country.’ I’d say to him, ‘The way some people don’t pay their bills, they think it’s free all right.’ That man who had the Lenox place way back was one of the worst. He owed your father a fortune, all the fancy plumbing work he had done over there. The police never did catch him.”
“Tell me exactly what happened back then. All I ever hear is vague things. Amy was quite agog, whispering right there in the Armenians’.”
“You don’t want to hear,” her mother said, clumping on her hurting hip to the refrigerator and placing the plastic container on a shelf, to be heated up for tonight’s dinner. Because Joe had been a plumber their kitchen had always been smartly up-to-date. They were among the first homes in town to have a microwave oven, and a trash masher, a built-in sink Disposall, and faucets sealed not by rubber washers but with hard plastic ball valves not so different, Gina imagined, from the plastic ball and titanium socket with which they intended to replace her excruciating hip. In the meantime, she lived with it. Living with things can outlast them. Since Joe died the kitchen has stood still and even slid backwards; her own mother’s old spatter-pattern blue enamel pots, brought from Napoli on the ship, have come up from the cellar to replace copper and stainless steel. Pasta cooked in copper and steel never tasted quite so good as it had in those blue enamel pots. Aware of her daughter still standing there awaiting illumination, Gina told her, “I never knew myself what all happened.”
“Did Papa know?”
Gina was quick to answer. “He didn’t bring home tales of those he worked for, he thought it wasn’t good business.” She added, stepping heavily around her daughter while drying her hands on a dish towel, “I don’t think I’d know any of those women if I saw them on the street, we’re all such old streghe by now.”
But when she did, early in July, meet up with Alexandra, they knew each other instantly. The encounter occurred not downtown on Dock Street, but outside at the new Stop & Shop on the edge of town, a half mile past Alexandra’s former house on Orchard Road. The midsummer sun made waves of heat rise trembling from the tar of the parking lot, and struck sparks of horizontal reflection off the wire grids of the shopping carts in the stall where people were supposed to park them after unloading the shopping bags into their cars. “I heard you were back in Eastwick,” Gina admitted, with a grunt. Just pronouncing the town’s name signalled her territorial possession. She felt that, as the permanent resident and (though she did not say so to her children) the wronged wife, she was behooved to speak first.
Both ample women, Gina in a dark dress and Alexandra in white jeans and a splashy cotton camise with three-quarter-length sleeves, were sweating in the sun. “Just as an experiment, Gina,” Alexandra assured her old rival. “Through August, if we last. I live in New Mexico now, and though it gets hot I’m not used to this humidity.”
“It’s dull enough around here,” Gina told her, “since you left.”
“That’s what we’re hoping. We’re all widows now, Jane and Sukie and I. Dullness is all we’re up to. I’m sorry, may I say, about Joe. Six years ago, was it?”
“Yes,” Gina said, her breath to say more snatched from her by this fat old harlot’s boldness in mentioning his name.
“I know what it’s like,” Alexandra said, daring touch the other on her bare forearm. Gina flinched, superstitiously. The noontime slant of sun was such that the two women stood on the knife-edge between blazing sun and the shade of the Stop & Shop. Alexandra stepped backwards, having dared the touch, into the relative cool there, by the moistened trays of supermarket petunias and marigolds set out for sale. This retreat drew Gina after her, with a limping step. “He was a good man,” Alexandra said, her voice lowered in the shadow.
Gina had regained enough breath to respond, “A good family man.” Her black eyes flashed, boring into Alexandra’s face as if daring her to contradict.
Alexandra agreed, in a voice still softer, laying claim to insider knowledge, “He loved you. And his children.” It had been she, in her memory of the affair, who had always scoffed at Joe’s offers to leave Gina and marry her.
“And his job,” Gina continued the sequence, deflecting their exchange from these unacknowledged depths. “Your furnace go out at two in the morning, he’d get out of bed and be there. Now for a plumber you must phone to a slick company with its office over at the Coddington Junction Mall, and they never send the same man twice.” She felt, to judge by the way her lips clamped together, a certain triumph in uttering a sentence so aggressively long. “Who can you trust?”
Poor soul, Alexandra thought, seeing how neither walking nor talking was easy for Gina. She herself was enjoying this encounter, in that it brought Joe back to her. The bulk and warmth of his body, the fur on his back and the glaze of sweat on his belly, the exciting strength his hands had gained from wrestling with many a corroded joint and frozen shutoff valve. She also had loved Joe’s male sheepishness, sneaking in and out of her little yellow divorcée’s house on Orchard Road a half mile from where she and Joe’s widow stood now—his sheepishness at being driven by so base a need to betray his sacred vows, to risk his domestic peace, his brood of children, his in-laws, his significant portion of local prestige. “He was a good workman,” she told Gina in docile agreement. Rapturous in lovemaking, he would call her his white cow, mia vacca bianca, taking her from behind. He held regions of fastidious shame—ashamed of his bald head, with its faint bony ripples, and of his imperious genitals, which had fathered five children and pounded away in guilt and impurity at the safe fortress of her womb, with its sterilizing IUD. For in that era enlightened women went to some trouble to make themselves always available for sex. She had relished that, the gift of sin and sacrilegious birth control with which she enriched Joe’s dull, hard-working, stuck-valve life by crouching passively on her knees and elbows on her creaking bed and letting herself be battered and pumped full from behind.
Gina seemed to squint into her mind, closing one eye malevolently. The remaining eye glittered, boring in. “Remember Veronica?” she asked.
Fearing Gina had read her mind, seeing the obscene pictures in it, Alexandra blurted gratefully, “Of course. Your youngest.” Joe had been dismayed and furious when Gina had announced this last pregnancy, at her age of forty-one, claiming that he had hardly touched the superstitious bitch. No IUD for pious Gina. Alexandra told her, “I understand she still lives with you.”
“With her husband,” Gina said, still keeping one eye closed. “They don’t have children yet. After six years trying.”
Alexandra concealed her surprise. For years she and this woman had shared a man; perhaps the unspoken secret spurred Gina to share her intimate information. “I’m sorry, if a child is what she wants.”
“She wants, who doesn’t?” The question came so bluntly, out of this squinting, black-clad woman, that Alexandra felt menace in it and fell self-protectively silent. Gina kept on: “Can you do something about it?”
“Me? Gina, what could I do?”
Both eyes glittered open again. “You know what.”
“I do? I don’t even know Veronica.” Except what Joe used to confide during their trysts on Orchard Road. Once the unwanted baby had been born, he doted on her—spunky as a boy, brighter than all her sisters.
Gina was irritated by the stupidity that forced her to spell things out. She explained, “Some say she can’t because of—I don’t know the English—un fascino. Magia.”
“Oh. You mean a spell?”
“Yes. Some say. When she is still a girl and you live here. Because of the jealousy.”
The bright sunshine beating down on the parking lot mocked the shadowiness of this exchange, wherein the two women’s tongues were locked on what lay between them. “Why would I be jealous of a tiny girl?”
Gina’s mouth clamped tight rather than dignify such a prevaricating question with an answer. She backed a step into the sun; the black hairs on the old woman’s upper lip were vivid in the raw light. Alexandra stumbled toward answer
ing her own question: “You mean could I lift a spell because—? But I never could do the things people said I could. I was just a housewife. An unhappy one, until Ozzie and I got a divorce.”
Gina resumed her squint against the glare; the lid of the closed eye began to tremble with the strain, but still she let the other woman, the bane of her marriage, do the talking. That was her revenge.
“I’ll do what I can,” Alexandra promised. “I have nothing against Veronica, or you. As I say, Joe loved you both.”
And this may have been too much to say, too close to mutual exposure. As if fearing where further talk might take them, Gina turned her back and melted in her baggy dark short-sleeved dress into the furious sun, leaving Alexandra in her summery outfit to repress a shiver there in the Stop & Shop’s flower-fragrant margin of shade.
When they all lived here, Sukie was the one who inhabited the downtown, working as a reporter for the Eastwick Word, eating lunch at Nemo’s, sticking her head into Paul LaRue’s barbershop with the chirpy query “What’s up, guys?” (they could hardly wait to tell her), and walking with her lithe lean stride, in one of those tawny, tweedy outfits slightly too smart for Eastwick, past the display window of the Hungry Sheep, with its sensible cashmere sweaters and boxy wool skirts, and the Yapping Fox, which offered high-school girls somewhat trendier wear; past the wide-windowed dark hardware store run by Armenians, and the Bay Superette, staffed by acneous high-school boys and stocked with overpriced staples like milk and cranberry juice and puffed-up bags of deleterious nibbles; past the Bakery Coffee Nook and Christian Science Reading Room and the Eastwick branch of the Old Stone Bank and Perley Realty with its window of curling, bleaching snapshots of unsold homes. She would inhale the town, its salt air and tipping, cracked sidewalks and clapboarded shop fronts in need of fresh paint, gathering gossip and impressions for the weekly Word, whose editor, weary, worried, wiry Clyde Gabriel, was fatally to fall in love with her. Now, more than three decades later, she walked the same sidewalk savoring memories. Not the same sidewalk, in truth—its cracks had been filled, its squares levelled, its shade trees wrapped in all-year Christmas lights. Dock Street had been broadened and straightened, and high granite curbs had been installed where once the concrete pavement had blended into the asphalt with hardly a drop; bad boys used to hop their bicycle wheels from street to sidewalk and swerve back again, blithely terrorizing pedestrians. The blue marble horse trough where Dock met Oak Street at right angles was still there, but instead of brimming with seasonal flowers it was planted with juniper and a dwarf Alberta spruce that had grown so tall and bushy automobile drivers could not see around it.
