by John Updike
“Buddha says,” Debbie was saying today, “ ‘Forget the self and its craving, its craving for attention, for praise, for love, for worldly goods, for recreational vehicles and flattering clothes.’ My husband and I used to own a Hummer, so we could take it up mountain trails, though we almost never got to any mountains. When I think of the time I used to spend posing in front of dress-shop mirrors, trying to decide—perky, but too perky for my age, or too staid for my age?— bringing things home and then sending them back, I blush in embarrassment. Buddha says, ‘Forget self-aggrandizement, self-deception, self-importance, self-regard. Our goal is non-self, anatman.’ The selflessness of Nirvana is the Buddhist’s goal, the release from exertion and pain, from selfishness. Non-attachment, atrishna, is the path out of dukhka, suffering, and samsara, the endless cycle of incarnations. And what does Jesus say? Jesus says, ‘Forget the law. Let the dead bury the dead. Forsake your families. Give all that you have to the poor. Possess no treasure, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be. No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God. Consider the lilies: they toil not, neither do they spin.’ Jesus and Buddha, and Brahma and Allah, say ‘Empty yourselves out.’ For only when we have given up everything—our fine cars, our spic-and-span homes, our well-dressed children and their excellent grades in school, which do such credit to us, and our memberships, our sexual conquests, our bank balances, everything that we permit to define our selves—when we have given all that up, or it has been torn from us, is our self then gone? Has it disappeared, leaving only emptiness? No: the self turns out—and here is the miracle—to be still there, transformed. A new self emerges from the utter emptiness. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we bloom!” She flung wide her arms in their loose white sleeves; her hair surrounded her tipped-back head like a black halo, an electricity having entered the high space of the nave with her sudden gesture. “We are free,” she confided in a dramatically lowered voice to the sparse crowd of congregants in the summer-torpid sanctuary, “free in self-forgetfulness. The world pours into the vacuum, the world of others, the beauty and power of Nature, of all that is not our selves. The self-forgetful self is no more empty than was the universe in the instant before the unimaginable Singularity that has produced a billion billion stars with all their planets. In that instant the empty universe was full, full of potential; so with us, if we but relax into the serene vast Other that surrounds the pinched, fearful, jealous, murderous self. Infinite energy and infinite peace await us at the boundary of our selves, if we can but reach that too-well-defended frontier and trust ourselves to pass over, to let go, to surrender ourselves to that divine otherness that passeth all human understanding. Shantih, shantih, shantih. Amen.”
Sukie, sitting in the back, hastened to leave. Other Sundays, she had sneaked away during the last hymn, but today she wanted to be greeted by the minister, to be touched by her. As she rose she saw Greta Neff, her pasty profile and stocky mannish form, standing up in one of the front pews, with some companions, adult children or roomers. A heavy white-haired man was with them. In the Unitarian narthex, decorated with two drab potted palms and a bulletin board tacked full of notices and pleas for virtuous causes, Sukie grasped again, as some weeks ago, the younger woman’s sinewy cool hand; being clad in a loose clerical gown brought the Reverend Mrs. Larcom closer to the nakedness that had flashed into Sukie’s mind on that first occasion.
“That was wonderful,” she said. “I love hearing you.” She felt dazed after an hour of focusing on the figure in the pulpit, her white gown and smile, her black hair and brows winking in overlapping afterimages.
“Thank you,” Deborah Larcom said, still a touch tense and self-absorbed from the effort of the service. Her lovely, intelligent eyes darted toward the next in line. Since Sukie in her bewitched daze didn’t move, the minister briskly added, in a joking voice, “So bring your two friends next time.”
Sukie laughed, one incredulous syllable. “They’d be shocked to know I’m here. It’s just that . . .” She trailed off, having begun to try to explain why she was here. Under her gown, under her clergy shirt and bra, this young woman’s breasts would be as firm and smooth as her diction, as round as the orbs of her gray-green irises, the nipples as tender a pink as the little bits of sunburn on her straight small nose, on the exquisite cartilage of her narrow nostril wings. “I wonder whether sometime . . .”
“Yes?” With a touch of impatience, as the line behind Sukie was bunching up.
“I could visit you.”
All business: “Of course. Call the fellowship secretary, Mrs. Neff, for an appointment. Until Labor Day the office is on summer hours, every weekday nine to noon.” She gave one last, uncertain look into Sukie’s face, trying to puzzle out her need.
Two children, a boy and a girl about five and seven, had come up behind their mother in her ecclesiastical gown. The little boy shyly took Deborah Larcom’s idle, left hand; the girl, more understanding and respectful of her mother’s role, stood patiently at her side. Her features were less precise than Deborah’s, blurred by the father’s—that saint’s—coarser genes. This woman was claimed. Sukie was being a nuisance. It was her turn to say, “Thank you.” She moved out the high double doors, onto the columned porch, down the worn wide wooden steps, blushing, spurned, vowing never to return.
The three accursed women agreed to attempt resurrection of their supernatural skills on the day when Jane’s tell-all X-ray was scheduled. Her anxiety about it might have otherwise projected a dark spot on the transparent cone of power. Propitiously, this day was Lammas, the second of August and the first of the three harvest celebrations on which a sabbat was most appropriate. The moon, Alexandra saw on the kitchen calendar from Perley Realty, would be three days on the waning side of full, which did not strike her as unlucky although, in the event, it proved to be so. It fell to her to prepare the arrangements. The other two deferred to what they insisted were her profounder powers—her deeper reach into Nature and the mysteries of the Goddess. “I’ll set it up,” she promised them, “only if we agree this will be a hundred percent white magic. I don’t consider our presence in Eastwick to have been a success so far. In July it was mostly discordant; people don’t know what to make of us and they’re hostile. I’d like August to be a month of harmony, of healing. Years ago we grabbed what we wanted from the town and then left. Now we’ve returned to give something back.”
Sukie protested: “I think I gave plenty back. I made some discontented husbands less so, and brought a little style to this dowdy boondocks.”
“Not to sound sself-centered,” Jane said crossly, “but I had imagined the focus of the cone would be my healing, not Eastwick’s. I feel terrible most of the time—headachy, nauseated and dizzy when I stand up suddenly, with a sort of gnawing under my breastbone.” She put her fingers there, between her skimpy breasts. “I don’t mention these things all the time because I know you both think I’m being a terrible drag. I’m sssorry, but if I don’t feel better soon I’ll have to go back to Brookline and get some decent medical attention. Doc Pat is a good example of why hospitals have compulsory retirement. He’s ssenile. It’s been cute to be with the two of you, but I must get real help.”
“Don’t go before the X-ray,” Alexandra begged her. “Go that far at least with Doc Pat.”
“I dread it,” Jane blurted. “It has to upset your insides, to have those rays beamed through them. The air has all these rays and particles in it, we all know that, but I can feel them. Radio, radon, neutrinos, now dark energy, that’s the latest they’ve discovered. They say it’s pushing the universe apart faster and faster, till soon there won’t be anything, just a kind of super-thin gruel, cooling down to absolute zero. All the nice harmless things people used to believe in—ghosts, goblins, fairies, unicorns—and now these horrible forces are all we have instead. They don’t care about us, they don’t even know we’re here.”
“Jane,” Alexandra told her, with maternal f
irmness, “you must calm down. You must get yourself in better alignment or the cone will shatter as soon as you step into it.”
“I’ll go with her up to Providence for the X-ray,” Sukie volunteered. Jane had become so estranged from them that she could be discussed in her presence in the third person. “I’ll get her some ice cream on the way back.”
“I’ll have this place ready,” Alexandra promised, aware of a gnawing within her, too, a worry that her faith, so long untested, would be insufficient, and the cone would not materialize.
The merchants of Eastwick yearned to make it a tourist trap, and several shops along Dock Street stocked aromatic candles the size and shape of Sterno cans, and crystals like transparent rock candies, and bracelets of cheap metal bearing the hammered impress of sigils and runes. At the formerly Armenian hardware store, Alexandra bought a putty knife, with the requisite black handle, that could do for a ceremonial athame, and one of those two-sided travel mirrors on a folding wire stand, to serve as a window into the astral world. Back in the condo, as the shadows of August’s noticeably shorter days gathered in the corners like cobwebs, Alexandra, who in her prime took pride in her physical strength, pulled the coffee table and the plaid recliner and, one end at a time, the sofa back from the center of the living room. The furniture’s feet left deep dents in the carpet. She vacuumed the exposed carpet, a burgundy color that when they first entered these rented rooms greeted them with what seemed a pleasantly earthy ground note; it invisibly absorbed dirt, not just red-wine stains but beach sand and bits of grit carried on shoe soles, dead flies, live dust mites, shed skin, negative energy, fingernail clippings, and the tiny screws that hold spectacle frames together. Such particles faintly rattled and tingled in the vacuum cleaner’s hose and aluminum extender tube.
When the ceremony was over, she would vacuum up the magic circle she now drew on the carpet with a line of detergent granules of Cascade, straight from the spout of the box. She drew four-fifths of a circle the size of a queen-size bed, or of a fairy ring of mushrooms found in a forest. She had bought five aromatic candles—rose, peach, raspberry, lavender, and aqua in color, and spaced them evenly around the circle she had drawn, forming the ghost of a pentacle. A cheap broom, its shaft a rod of plastic instead of wood—honest wood whose grain recollects the annual cycle of growth—had been provided in the closet of the suite’s back room along with a defective vacuum cleaner and a rickety ironing board. Alexandra placed this broom as a chord on the arc of the vacant fifth segment, making a symbolic door into the circle, for initiates only.
In the center there must be an altar. For this Alexandra laid on the wine-colored carpet an oak breadboard that had come with the kitchen, and on top of that an old brass brazier, beautifully weathered and charred, that she had spotted in a roadside flea market on the back road to Old Wick. She collected cushions from all the rooms, arranged them in three comfy heaps within the circle, and waited.
Jane and Sukie were late. It was nearing six. Alexandra nibbled at the crackers and cheese—pumpkin-colored Gouda and moon-white Münster—that she had driven all the way, in Nat Tinker’s antique Jaguar, to the Stop & Shop to buy, along with some ready-made chicken curry and chopped broccoli salad for them to eat afterwards, if they weren’t too exhausted or transported to eat. Sabbats classically occurred at midnight, but, with so many young Wiccans in the workforce filling nine-to-five jobs, that tradition had been adjusted, and surely didn’t apply to women over a certain age. For wine, Alexandra had chosen Carlo Rossi Chianti in a two-liter screw-top glass jug, to be poured into mock-copper chalices, encrusted with embossed and painted jewels, which she had spotted on a back shelf of one of the town’s candle shops. They were made of foil-covered paper and weighed almost nothing in her fingers. Her hands, she thought as she toyed with an empty chalice, had held up pretty well under time’s battering. A little plumpness helps keep the skin taut as we get older. Jane’s hands, she had noticed, were repulsively emaciated and veined, their arthritic joints shiny with painful swelling, and even Sukie’s—dear Sukie, who carried herself as if still a contender in the lists of love—looked ropey in a decent light. She decided that uncorking the Chianti and sampling some might ease her wait. The Goddess wouldn’t mind. Alexandra cut herself another small slice of the Münster.
She had worked so hard, making everything shipshape for their ritual, that by the time the other two returned, not much before seven, gabbling and giggling over their shared adventures, Alexandra found herself vexed. “You might have at least called,” she said.
“They kept telling us it would be only ten more minutes,” Sukie explained, scarcely repentant. “And neither of us could remember our phone number here!” She and Jane laughed all the harder together, realizing there was nothing much to laugh at; the joke was all in their attitude and in Alexandra’s annoyance. By way of apology, Sukie exclaimed, “Oh, how cute everything looks! Lexa, you’ve been so dutiful!”
“Yes,” she answered simply, sternly.
Jane would not be rebuked. “They were sstupidly inefficient,” she said, of the radiological staff in the Providence hospital. “Doc Pat’s sson looks just like he does, only six inches taller, and with no panache at all. Really. Nat used to say nobody with brains goes into medicine any more—there’s too much easy money to be made in finance, all the good minds go to business school. And even the ice-cream place we stopped at on Route One—they didn’t have multicolored jimmies, just the brown kind, that looks like mouse turds.”
“Stop saying that!” Sukie cried. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind, licking my cone!” And they both broke down into hilarity again. Looking back, they wondered if it wasn’t laughing this way that broke something inside Jane; she had laughed so little lately.
“The cone of caca,” she said, laughing.
Alexandra was offended, but determined not to give the other two any more pleasure by showing it. They set her up as a mother-figure so they could be naughty children. “I’m not sure,” she did say, stiffly, “we’re in any mood to generate a unified elevation of energy.”
“Put on my elevation shoes,” Jane said. “Beam me up, Sscottie.”
Alexandra asked, “Did you two have anything to drink on the way back from Kingston?”
“Kingston-size martinis,” Jane said.
“Just one margarita each,” Sukie confessed, “at that sports bar that used to be the Bronze Barrel. Remember Fidel and his margaritas? And his marinated capybara balls? Darryl would wolf them down.”
“He was a capybara cat,” Jane said. “Uh-oh. Lexa’s getting cross.”
Jane looked like such a waif saying this, such a withered little old-lady waif, with her hair undyed for a month and showing an inch of snowy roots, that Alexandra relented, asking her, “Did it hurt? You were afraid it would.”
“The X-ray? Of course not. Though they make such a pretentious fuss about it, running into their little lead-lined safe rooms and throwing the switch while you stand there without even a bra and take the full blast. They’re electro-cutioners. All these doctors—they watch us die, and expect to get paid for it.”
“Mammograms are the worst,” Sukie contributed. “The way the nurses stretch your tits this way and that against this icy glass. They only hire sadistic bull dykes.”
“And after all that,” Jane continued, “when I asked what the X-rays showed they said Doc Pat’s son had gone home and would read them and be in touch with his father. Anyway, it’s all foolish—whoever heard of an aneurysm on your abdominal aorta? The whole process left me a griping pain in my solar plexus. In my dolor hexus.”
“You poor dear,” said Alexandra, reassuming her role as mistress of the ceremony. “Should we have something to eat before we begin? There’s cheese, Gouda and Münster, and those nice seaweed-flavored rice crackers the Japanese make that I found in that tiny gourmet section they have now at the Stop and Shop. And there’s chicken curry and broccoli salad if you’re starving, but I don’t think we should try
to raise the cone of power on full stomachs. Everything about us should be clean.We should all take showers. Jane, you use yours, and Sukie and I will share.”
“Suppose I want to share with Sukie,” Jane said with a dark look. “Or with you.”
“We’ll share the cone of power, that’s enough,” Alexandra stated, testing her authority. “Don’t give us a hard time, Jane. You’re overexcited from being the center of so much attention. We need to hurry. The moon is a waning one. We have to be at a hundred percent to draw it down.”
“How shall we dress afterwards?” Sukie asked. “I brought nothing black, and nothing with big sleeves.”
“In nothing,” Lexa decreed. She had had more Chianti than she had realized. “We’ll go sky-clad. Like I said, we must give a hundred percent.”
