The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  “It warps you,” Sukie said. Her plump upper lip clamped onto the lower as a snail’s broad foot clamps onto a leaf, the adhesion indicating that she found the topic distasteful and had nothing more to say upon it.

  It was a signal to go; but as the three routed interlopers moved toward the double exit doors, someone in the crowd did approach them, hurrying to do so, and wryly smiling, as if to disavow the haste that implied a previous neglect. This person spoke with the rapid ease of a practiced speaker. “I see you’re going,” she said, “but I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Debbie Larcom, the parson, I guess you’d have to say, of the Unitarian Fellowship. It’s lovely to see some fresh faces at these concerts; they’re supposed to attract summer people but the same loyal regulars tend to show up. Just like church.” She was a shapely small brunette with pleasingly precise features. Her straight nose held a pink bit of flaking sunburn. There was nothing clerical about her except a certain reserve in the long-sleeved gray dress whose hem came below her knees, here at the height of summer. But her abashed grin was endearing, and the intelligent complexity of her gray-green eyes. As if flashingly possessed by a male devil, Sukie entertained a vision of this gracious woman naked, that compact, precise body bared as as white as virtue itself, even as Sukie politely gave her own name and returned with her own grip the other’s cool, narrow, sinewy hand.

  “We could be regulars ourselves,” Alexandra was telling Deborah Larcom. “We’re here for the summer.”

  “We lived in Eastwick ages ago,” Sukie said, a bit breathlessly. “We knew one of your predecessors, Brenda Parsley. She was the Unitarians’ first woman minister.”

  “We were very proud of her,” Jane drawled with Bostonian irony. In truth the three villainesses had ruthlessly bewitched Brenda, so that feathers and pins came out of her mouth when she preached.

  The young clergywoman’s face, professionally alert and responsive, showed no special spark of recognition. “I’ve heard the name,” she admitted, “but that was way back, in the Sixties or early Seventies.”

  “Exactly,” Jane snapped. Alexandra could tell that Jane had taken one of her dislikes. And Alexandra jealously felt Sukie’s arousal, burdening her fragile breathing.

  “Water over the dam,” Deborah Larcom lilted with an anxious gaiety. “Before I was even born.” The triple dose of intense female scrutiny was tripping her into self-doubt; her impulsive spurt of welcome was running down. “Well, I just wanted to say hello. Needless to say, we’d be delighted to see you at the Fellowship some Sunday.” There was that awkward moment, with clergypersons, when they’ve made their pitch and wait for a clue to what no external evidence declares, the status of God in the consciousness of another. “It’s not just services,” she gamely pursued in the face of their silence, “we do Tuesday suppers, singles welcome as well as families, and are planning an anti-Iraq rally for later in the summer.”

  Before their non-responsive silence became painfully prolonged, Alexandra said, “We really don’t know exactly what our plans are.”

  “Come if you can,” Debbie Larcom sang in relieved farewell, her duty done. With the middle fingers of both shapely quick hands she tucked her long and glossy dark-brown hair behind her ears—slightly cupped, like Sukie’s—before, flashing one more appealing, wryly qualified smile, she whisked herself away, leaving behind like a whiff of perfume the contrast between a virtuous and elastic young woman and the three old ladies, gone brittle and dry in their corruption. Her appearance before them had been a chastisement; they had once been such as she, here in this very town.

  Above the dark of the sleeping town a bulky woman hunched at her little battered drop-front desk on the third floor of her ill-kept house. Her shadow agitated the wall behind her, and the sagging ceiling. They are here, she wrote, gouging the lined yellow paper with her ballpoint. All three of them, bold as you please. She had often heard the phrase, in the mouths of these New Englanders, but hesitated. Shouldn’t it be bold as they please? In her fury she ignored the nicety and wrote on, in her blocky, upright European hand, They have taken quarters in the Lenox Seaview Apartments, which should make access easy for you where you know it so well. They showed no shame in coming to a concert the group founded by my dear husband was giving. The fat sympathetic one, the dark unsympathetic one, the sexy pretty one rendered nervous by being so. All old and shameless and useless, vermin under-foot. Kill them. Kill them as once they did your innocent sister kill. This was probably faulty English grammar, but, possessed, she pushed on with her methodical upright handwriting: I advise the dark one to be first—there is already in her aura an unhealthy, rotten look. You will know most better. She pictured him, the radiant one, eternally young, his fair hair curly as in some painting from the Catholic religion of her youth. She added, in a more tentative hand, emotion imparting a tremor, Come, stay with me. The house is big, a sad expense on Raymond’s piffling school pension. The children are forever away. Come be my strength. Evil must not unpunished go. This is—is this the phrase?— your chance of gold.

  . . .

  Nat Tinker’s estate entailed a mare’s nest of trusts and codicils to his will, and long-term bonds that to avoid fines and penalties shouldn’t be cashed for years. His mother, still alive upstairs in the huge Brookline house, wasn’t too senile to be obstructionist when you least expected it. At home in her own rooms Jane had a fax and e-mail but in these reduced conditions—like a summer camp but without canoeing lessons and ghost stories around the campfire—she had to receive and dispatch documents to the lawyers and bankers by mail. Express and registered mail involved going to the post office, and parking on Dock Street in summer was a much worse hassle than it used to be; when you did find a space it was blocks away and involved a long walk in the sickening sun. She didn’t understand it, she used to be a great beachgoer, with her dark complexion taking a tan on the first day and needing no lotion thereafter, except on an all-day sail; but now the overhead sun hit her with a somehow radioactive force, so that she felt poisoned—nauseated and faint. She had taken to wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, but the small holes in the weave seemed to be pelting her face with a buckshot of photons. Her wrists, her knees in shorts, her elbows when she wore short sleeves all protruded into an insidious hail from the vibrantly blank blue sky. Even as self-consciously quaint and retro a downtown as Eastwick’s surrounded Jane with debilitating emanations: carbon monoxide from car exhaust, radon from the granite beneath the asphalt, electrons leaking from the taped-up neon tubing advertising Milwaukee beer at the Happy Hours Liquor Mart and the Rhode Island lottery at the Bay Superette, gamma rays from the little camera that took her picture when she used the ATM at the Old Stone Bank, a mist of voltage falling from the drooping cables and condenser cans on the poles overhead. In front of the post office, three paces from the two flap-mouthed collection boxes, an especially sinister pole, splintered by the cleats of climbing troubleshooters and soaked in faded creosote, held a boxy gray transformer whose hum was deafening, once you stood and listened to it. One July mid-afternoon Jane was standing near it, hearkening to the hum, wondering if she might just faint right on the sparkling sidewalk, when something leaped across a gap and jabbed her in the side—what they call in boxing a kidney punch. “It quite took my breath away,” she told Alexandra, once she was back in the rented condo. “It still tingles.”

  “Maybe we should complain to the selectmen, or the electric company,” Alexandra said lazily. “It sounds like a short circuit.” She had been lying stretched out on her queen-size bed, immobilized there while Jane and Sukie had been off in their respective cars. Sukie had taken the BMW in the direction of Exeter and the South County Museum; she was doing some research for her next romance, which was to deal with a ravishing plantation mistress and a black slave. Rhode Island had begun as Providence Plantations and supported a Southern-style economy and a large slave population well into the eighteenth century; there were still some barn ruins—tumbled walls of stones bigger than bales o
f hay—from that benighted, idyllic era.

  “Wood doesn’t conduct,” Jane snapped. “That’s why they use it for poles.”

  “Make a cup of tea,” Alexandra suggested. Then she asked, overcoming her humiliating dependency, “Can I use your car for an hour? I really must go see Marcy and her boys. It’s shocking—it’s been two weeks since we first got here and she helped us settle in, and I’ve not managed to visit. We’ve talked on the phone about it, but then one of us, maybe me, wanders away. I just haven’t got the energy to be a mother again.”

  “Energy,” Jane said. “I can’t remember what it was like to have any. The thought of opening up the microwave sickens me.” There was an electric stove in the kitchen, but the widows, having done with catering to husbands, were averse to elaborate cooking and used the microwave oven to warm leftovers, thaw ice cream, and bring a cup of water to a simmer. In spite of her avowal, Jane went to the microwave with a mug of faucet water and opened the microwave door, that door of tinted thick glass through which food could be watched undergoing transformation—steaming, melting, spitting. A malevolent stench seemed to gust out at her; she may have imagined it—a chill as if she had opened a refrigerator and quickly shut the door on an odor of spoiled food. Another of her disagreeable sensations was that she was the closed container, and the spoiling was within. Her insides did not feel right, and hadn’t since Nat had died. Up until his death, his complaining, ungrateful boyish ego had monopolized Jane’s attention. There, she reflected, was the good that utterly selfish people do: they drive those around them into self-forgetfulness.

  Alexandra loved whipping along in Nat’s antique Jaguar with its top down. She could feel herself, in the eyes that watched her drive through town, flash by, an apparition of breezy womanhood, a kerchief snug beneath her chin. Tree branches and electric cables and house gables streamed overhead, and sunshine spattered on the windshield. Marcy lived out where Cocumscussoc Way became seedy, leaving the town center behind and trailing into a no-man’s land of abandoned saltwater farms and derelict vegetable stands and failed riding schools and shuttered, overambitious restaurants. The mailbox, one of those new squat plastic ones molded in one piece with its post and therefore impervious to the roaming vandals who batter metal detachable ones, proclaimed in white stick-on letters THE LITTLE-FIELD’S. The ignorant apostrophe annoyed Alexandra. Howard had originally had his electrician’s shop in the house, in a basement section next to a one-car garage, with its own door and a modest sign. But success bred of default—nobody wants to dirty his hands at a trade any more, while local gentrification ups the demand for services—had given him an office on the upper reach of Dock Street, an answering service, and a young assistant from one of those Central American countries where the poor are still eager to work. Alexandra did not see many signs of prosperity in their scruffy yard, with its scattered toys and drum-shaped aboveground pool, or in the peeling exterior of their split-level ranch, a stranded-looking leftover from the Levittown era.

  Marcy came to the front door, in sluggish response to its three-note chime. She looked her age, which was close to that of the house. Kissed, her cheek seemed clammy. Alexandra said to her, “Darling, you don’t make a plural name by adding an apostrophe ‘s.’ That forms a possessive.”

  Marcy was slow to understand; her wits had thickened along with her legs. “Oh. The mailbox. Howard did the lettering, with a little kit, and when I saw it it was too late to change. Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know why it annoys me so. Like people saying they could care less, when they don’t care, and that somebody graduated Brown, when they graduated from Brown.”

  “Language changes, Mother. It’s a growing, living thing.”

  “Growing in all the wrong directions, it seems to me. In the direction of dumber and dumber.” Only her children, especially this oldest one, made her sound like such a scold. “How are the boys?” she asked, to change the subject, before realizing that “dumber and dumber” would have appeared to serve as the transition, as in fact the phrase had. “Is little Howard still enjoying the computer game?”

  “He says the blood looks too fake and there aren’t enough what they call ‘ho’s being butchered. I know, it’s deplorable, but they all go through this phase. He hates, by the way, being called ‘little Howard.’ ”

  “ ‘Howard Junior’ to me seems even worse. Your father and I didn’t agree on everything, as you know, but we did agree not to saddle any male child with being a junior, as if his identity is preëmpted from the start.” Her words echoing in her ears, she said to Marcy, “Forgive me, dear. I don’t know what gets into me when I talk this way.”

  “Guilt,” Marcy answered readily. “You feel guilty toward me for my having to act the mother to my three siblings when you skipped out on us emotionally.” Her face, bare of any makeup, had an aggressively waxy pallor; her hair didn’t even look washed, let alone tinted, and why didn’t she do something about that translucent wart on the side of her nose? Didn’t Rhode Island have any plastic surgeons? New Mexico crawled with them. The child kept on unleashing her grievances: “I used to pray you’d stay home instead of going over to that man’s awful place. I’d be awake until one or two in the morning until I heard you stagger in. That house used to seem so vulnerable, out there all by itself on Orchard Road. Owls would whistle right outside the windows. I’d keep hearing creaking footsteps.”

  “Well,” Alexandra said, her face hot as she looked around her. The living room bespoke a gauche prosperity, with its white shag carpet and a huge flat black television screen facing a pair of bulbous fake-leather, buff-colored armchairs, lopsided, creased, and stained from hard use by two male adolescents. “This house I dare say holds no such sinister mysteries. Congratulations.”

  “And then,” Marcy continued, not bothering to hide her trembling lips, her watery eyes, “you say snobby mean things like that to me to defend yourself against criticisms of you you’re afraid I might make. Talk about preëmptive.”

  “Thank God, so to speak, for daughters that double as amateur psychoanalysts. Linda drawls out over the phone what an uptight Yankee I am. If the North had lost the war like we did, she says, we’d all be less achievement-oriented. We’d be able to taste the sugar in the whiskey sour. God knows who feeds her these sayings; I hope not her husband. But I am sorry about the owls. I was learning how to be a witch, and they only offered night courses.”

  “You joke, Mother, but I am interested in psychology, and’ve been thinking of going into counselling, when the boys are a little older. The trouble is, Howie and I—”

  ;“Must you call him ‘Howie’?”

  “—he and I are so set on moving to Venice when the boys are in college or maybe even when and if Howie Junior goes to boarding school—”

  “Venice, Florida, I assume you’re talking about. You’ll have to learn Italian for the other one.”

  “—that there’s no sense in getting the license in Rhode Island when I’d be practicing in Florida.”

  “Such a depressing state, Florida. Alligators and old people. And they keep it so flat, so people can get about pushing walkers.”

  “Howie loves to fish.” Seeing that her mother would not interrupt this wifely assertion, Marcy smoothed the lap of her shorts, in which she had, evidently, been tending the fenced garden out back, where the Littlefields grew easy, surface vegetables. Her bare knees were dirty, which made her seem all the more touchingly a child, chunky and thick-legged and stubborn and yet winsome. “Mother, I haven’t offered you anything. Some coffee. Or tea? I don’t know what your diet is these days.”

  “Diet, you’re right, I should be on one, but no, thank you. It’s before four, too late for the one and too early for the other. I’m the poor mouse of the three of us over there, so I can get out only when one of the others doesn’t want her car. I’m not complaining; it puts me in my place.”

  “Have you enjoyed being back, so far?”

  “Yes, I have, oddly, thoug
h all the few people still alive that we knew seem to bear grudges. I’m amazed at how green and wet everything is. Being back here reminds me how I felt when after my mother died my father sent me east to Connecticut College for Women, everything so lush and old. I won’t stay forever, dear, I won’t hold you up. I’ll just sit and chat with you for five minutes. Where are the boys?”

  “I told you, Mother, when we talked over the phone. The boys are at camp for three weeks. In Maine.”

  “My goodness—you and Howard do throw your money around! Do the boys like camp?”

  “Roger adored it. He went last year and next year will qualify for white-watering and rock-climbing. He could get killed! Howie Junior is a little timid still—he needs to have his big brother there.”

  “He’ll be fine. Eric was the same with Ben. Now he’s the adventurous one. The kid-brother complex—the kid brothers turn out tough as nails. Did you know that a saguaro cactus needs to have what they call a nurse tree, a palo verde usually, so this tiny thing—this little tiny pin cushion, you can hardly see them at first—can live and grow in the shade?”

  Marcy was looking at her meltingly, and said with tears returned to her eyes, “Oh, Mother, it’s so nice to hear you talk this way!”

  “What way? It’s the way I always talk.”

  “About Nature!”

  “Don’t go teary on me, please. I have a practical question, for you to ask Howard. Could standing near a telephone pole give a person a shock? A sensation of being punched in the side?”

  Marcy straightened up in the armchair she had chosen, her eyes drying. This generation, Alexandra thought. They grew up watching us rebel against our pious upbringings and in reaction have reverted to all the old sentimentalities, family and home and such other tyrannies. “Why, no,” Marcy said, “I wouldn’t think so. Everybody would be suing towns and companies if it did.”

  “It happened to one of my friends, she just told me.”