The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  But by now the Mets have stopped playing—Chris is a baseball freak, who would have thought it?—and the perfect fall weather must be arrived in Taos, and your health will be blooming again. You needed to gain weight, dear heart. I’ve never seen you look so peakèd as when we finished up with the condo. (Sorry to stick you with so many of the last-minute details; the bank was a real stinker not to give us our deposit back until the ceiling was repainted, I never noticed any smoke stains, it was kind of yellowy anyway.)

  You had your bodily complaints, but then we all do. Women’s bladders get moody, for another thing. Sometimes not a drop though you know you have to go, and other times you laugh or sneeze and there go the underpants. It’s all on television, if you watch the news and peg yourself as a pathetic ancient. Moi, my skin is sun-allergic, my lungs are too smooth inside, my gums recede to the point of periodontia. You were simply depressed, is my diagnosis. Maybe about Jane’s death—she was a pill, a bitter one, but ours to swallow—and maybe just about you being the oldest of us three, and our leader always: the big sister, who is supposed to be wise—the oldest and the most magical, even though Jane could fly, a bit, like a flying squirrel. But I think what the Goddess did to Jane that time made you (you, Lexa) wonder if it wasn’t all nonsense. OK, maybe it is. I live now in the national headquarters of nonsense distribution and don’t let it get to me. I take life as it comes, day by day. If you look straight up, past all the new construction (these fucking double-parked Dumpsters everywhere!) there’s still a slice of blue sky. Somewhere in all this there has to be a reason for existence, there’s so much of it. I mean, all that exists, the billions of light-years’ worth of it.

  I wormed out of Chris how he was giving us shocks, I say us though he was saving me for last, I guess. It was based on Darryl’s experiments and what was left of his equipment. In quantum theory, which isn’t so much a theory as a kind of helpless description of the crazy way things really are, it’s been proved time and again—if you split a particle, a photon, say, one half will have clockwise spin and the other counterclockwise, and when you measure the spin of one, even if they’ve travelled a long way from each other, and it spins clockwise, the other will be counterclockwise even though there’s no way they could have communicated. This is called cooperation between separated systems. It’s one of the many ghostly things about particles; they’re not only particles but waves at the same time, and a single photon passing through two slots makes interference patterns with itself, and electrons and their antimatter mates, positrons, appear out of nothingness all the time in space, though only for a billionth of a trillionth of a second, roughly. Honestly. That’s how scientists think the universe got started—some antimatter forgot to cancel out matter. Or some virtual particle slipped over into being non-virtual. Darryl’s idea, when he was still hoping to be a great inventor and make a lot of money, which he needed for his travels and extravagant life-style—he had hoped to sell it to the U.S. Army but it really would kill only one person at a time, and slowly at that—was to combine this cooperation-between-separated-systems principle with electrons. It was like the sympathetic magic we used to do. One of the things about witchcraft was that it only worked for people around you, people you knew, in the village. For electron transfer at a distance you needed the victim to be fairly close, in the same small town at least. Even lightning can’t jump more than a mile or two. And you had to have something with the person’s electronic essence rubbed off. The reason you walk across a room and get a shock when you touch a doorknob is that the friction of your shoes has taken electrons from the carpet and the excess is attracted to the protons in the doorknob. You feel the charge coming into you when in fact it is leaving. The way your slip used to cling to your butt when women still wore slips—you remembered how infuriating that was, though it didn’t make a spark like brushing your hair in the dark does. Those were excess electrons seeking what they call electrostatic equilibrium.

  Now—I know, this is exhausting me too—the strange (creepy even, but then he was creepy, but so funny) thing about Darryl is that he had kept from the old tennis-and-hot-tub days up at the Lenox mansion bits of our clothing that we had been too stoned or relaxed or guilty to remember to take with us when we’d at last go home to those poor saintly deserted children of ours. Tennis shorts and shirts, peds, sweatbands, hair bands, combs, underpants and bras even, left I guess in the changing room or on the edge of the hot tub, and he kept them along with other souvenirs of other souls he’d tried to captivate, and when Christopher figured out whose things they were and when Greta Neff, who had been very sympathetic to him when he became an orphan (unlike us, I guess), tipped him off that at long last we’d come back to Eastwick, he dug up this electron gun Darryl had in his lab (they’re almost a dime a dozen, every television set has one, it produces the little dot that moves across the cathode-ray screen, from the back of the cathode-ray tube, shot out by thermionic emission and passed through a hole in the anode —I just looked this up, I’ve never been one of these writers so lazy she gets some lackey to do research for her) and would blast Jane’s and then your little unmentionables, the sweat on them dried for thirty years, shoot them full of electrons and, by extension, in a version of cooperation between separated systems, you. The excess of charge would build up in your body and not only generate shocks but mess up your insides and your general morale. It was diabolical. Chris was really angry about his sister. The method wasn’t precise, but then the quantum world isn’t either, it’s all probabilities, nothing exactly exists, everything’s a ghost until it’s measured, and then the measuring instrument is somehow so intrusive it makes the next measurement impossible. Anyway. Don’t worry about a thing, old love. Christopher swears Darryl’s electron gun is broken—it began to go haywire after popping Jane’s aneurysm—and he has no idea how to repair it and can’t afford to pay a repairman. Money between us is sort of a touchy business, but that’s another topic.

  The city as I say is a constant pain and hassle and yet looking back at Eastwick it had its negative side too. (Tommy Gorton sent me some clippings from the cheap Xeroxed sheet that is no substitute for the Word and they did sell Nemo’s, finally, but Dunkin’ Donuts has promised to preserve some of its historical features in their renovation. And the Unitarians put off their anti-Iraq rally until after Labor Day and it pretty much fizzled anyway, there’s not the fury Vietnam aroused, volunteer soldiers and National Guard call-ups are doing the dying and people are more worried about the economy.) But I began to tell you: one night after roaming around with Christopher—I know, I abandoned you those last ten days or so but I was fighting to save your life, seducing a man with a very weak voltage for the fair sex and a cold-hearted murderer to boot—he had to get back to the Neffs’, Greta was always pulling a huge poisonous sulk after twigging that he was seeing me, and all alone in that section between Hemlock and Vane—I was trying to get back to where the BMW was parked on upper Dock Street—I stepped into the most awful darkness, like stepping into a bottomless puddle, I can’t describe it, up near the land next to the Union Church, that used to be Congregational and before that the Puritan meetinghouse with these three-hour sermons and nothing but dying coals in footwarmers to keep you from freezing. There were no streetlights or houselights on, though I was near a house, that of somebody I didn’t know—and how many houses, when you think about it, in Eastwick did belong to people we didn’t know, though we thought we knew everybody—and I was in this antique darkness, just a pocket of it left over from the forest when the forest was everywhere and people would go to bed in these miserable villages terrified of Indians when the sun went down. Suddenly I couldn’t see anything, just the shapes of trees and bushes—tall ones, arborvitae probably—against the slightly paler sky, no stars in it, no moon, and me utterly lost and blind just a few blocks from the Superette pouring light onto the sidewalk and the late sailboats motoring back into the harbor and the drop-out kids hanging out noisily at the Ben & Jerry’s where the ba
rbershop used to be. I could hear the traffic swishing but was as alone as in a desert, it was like being locked into a closet as a child, which is something I can remember my Neanderthal parents threatening to do but I don’t think they ever actually did. I felt then how lightly civilization sits on this continent. There is this darkness waiting to sweep in again.

  Chris morbidly liked to visit the graves of Jenny and his parents out in the new section of the Cocumscussoc Cemetery, and there in daylight you could see how the granite markers had aged, darkened with mold and lichen so the names and dates were hard to read. But a lot were recent graves, the edges of the markers still sharp, people I used to know those years in Eastwick, rotting in their long boxes underground but still alive in my head, bright cartoons in my mind down to the way an individual person squinted or laughed or said certain things, their live expressions still in me as if my brain were another sort of cemetery, a floating cemetery, all sparks that will glimmer out like fireflies, like the little volunteer daisies you see on the graves. That was terrifying in another, sunlit kind of way.

  But let’s not be terrified, you and I. We’re survivors. So is Chris. He’s been in the apartment and out and in again while I’ve been writing this. I’ve checked a few of the technical terms with him, not that you would care. Among the things he’s taught me is the amazing reason we see anything is that the shell of zipping-around electrons around every atomic nucleus bounces photons back into our eyes. And that electrons are always looking for a gap to fill so it is like love as you all poked fun of me for saying. He says to say hi to you and tell you he’s sorry if you have any lasting discomfort, he was crazy to blame witchcraft for anything real.

  Mucho amor (everybody speaks Spanish here),

  “Sukie” was scrawled in red, with that inflated twitchiness of twenty-first-century people unaccustomed to wielding a pen. Beneath it she had written a 212-area telephone number, and an East Side address. Alexandra had skimmed the dense pages of computer type and set the letter down on the glass table, glass that in its horizontal reflection imaged the vertical panes that held her view of tawny, grassy land, high dry prairie from the same dull but beloved Western palette as her spacious living room’s adornments—clay pots, Navajo, Zuni, Isleta Pueblo, and less heavy, less spiritually decorated pots by Jim Farlander, displaying his tactful hands as they caressed spinning clay. Small Navajo rugs played little brother to the bigger one nailed to the adobe wall away from the sun. Chairs covered in leather and deep sofas covered in fabric duplicated the same color or lack of it as the cattle country outside.

  Alexandra had returned to absence: the absence of massy green Eastern foliage, and, as vivid each morning as a cock’s crow, Jim’s. She had somehow thought that his absence would repair itself—a wound that would heal, a plant that would rejuvenate. But no, with that tight-lipped manly consistency she had loved, he stayed away, and granted her a silence in which her thoughts could revolve as they would.

  There was much to do. His shop, which could afford to languish during the hot months, had to be reopened, and stocked. She must return to the potter’s wheel, offering up her own, more tentative Farlander pots. And she could return to sculpting her little bubbies, her little feminist fetishes, and not have to compete with a husband for space in the kiln. Business had accumulated in her absence, though she had paid her cleaning woman, Maria Graywolf, to check on her house and forward bills and letters that looked important. Among the communications that did not look, to Maria’s far-sighted, Native American sense of priority, important enough to forward were a number of notices of meetings of the Mabel Dodge Luhan Property advisory board, several tax bills now woefully overdue, a letter from Ward Linklater bemoaning her absence and inviting her to dinner as soon as she returned and ominously advising her in a postscript that neither one of them was getting any younger. Another came from a gallery owner in Santa Fe who wanted to talk to her about a retrospective exhibit of Jim Farlander’s “neo-Native” ceramics—she didn’t like that “neo-Native,” but maybe it was like “post-modern.” She would be pleased to see Jim honored, she responded.

  She liked having her very own vehicle to drive again, though the hard-used Ford pickup needed transmission work. It was good to be surrounded again by bright yellow-on-red license plates saying LAND OF ENCHANTMENT, rather than Rhode Island’s cool blue-on-white OCEAN STATE. Her resuscitated telephone rang with demands and invitations from her Taos crowd of grousing, hard-drinking artists. Alexandra felt better, more herself. The possibly cancerous unease in her body, the faint seesawing nausea, subsided. Her lack of appetite vanished with her first dip of hot salsa with a dry tortilla, and her first Mexican meal of quesadillas, black beans, and rice. Her feet seemed less numb, though she still stumbled on uneven ground, and struggled to get up from her sofa. She was an old lady, all right; there was no dodging that. Death was around the corner, along with Ward Linklater demanding to share dinner. But back in the West she didn’t feel old. She felt like one of those burstingly white thunderheads that don’t collapse into rain no matter how high they climb above the mountains. Her old black Lab, Cinder, had survived the two months in a kennel, and he and she resumed their walks in the tawny high country, dog and woman alike hobbled by arthritis and tender feet.

  What perfidious delusions, you might say, these Godforsaken women permit themselves! Forgiving themselves the unforgivable, shedding guilt as casually as when younger they shed their clothes. One of them forming with her dirty hands plump small idols of clay, the other forming a brittle liaison with one of the Devil’s own party, the third gone to a warranted doom, her last utterance obscene. The Lord keeps strict accounts; He knows to the penny the debts death calls in. There is no revision of the last accounting—no reconstitution, no revisiting, no assuagement. There is at best for the non-elect blessed oblivion, which ends desire and fear and their tormenting agitation. We thanked Heaven to see the unholy wantons flee our abiding seaside hamlet the second time.

  Absorbed in the daily happiness of a real life resumed, Alexandra left Sukie’s letter unanswered for months. Christmas season had been coolly sunny and crammed with visiting grandchildren and adult children; all four of them, Marcy, Ben, Linda, and even Eric, had managed to come, in shifts. Marcy, using e-mail and her big-sister prerogatives, had organized it. Alexandra resisted so much conventional attention. Was she really so near to dying, that they all insisted on gathering? She had no Christmas tree but had set up a Peruvian crèche of clay dolls amid her windowsill display of miniature cacti. It fascinated the younger of her grandchildren, who kept pricking their fingers. One of them, Linda’s baby, little Beauregard, dropped and broke the baby Jesus lying in His manger of painted clay. The toddler sobbed in terror, conscious of having committed a blasphemy, until Alexandra, employing the deft touch developed in sculpting bubbies, painstakingly glued the several fragments back together. “Better than new,” she assured the wide-eyed child.

  Afterwards, as the new year unfolded around her, Sukie’s letter nagged the lonely matriarch. There had been cheer in it, a reaching out, widow to widow. She could picture her friend’s pert and avid face, its faded freckles and the plump upper lip that gave her expression in rare repose a tentative, bruised vulnerability.

  One bleak January day, with a dusting of overnight snow on the oleander and the prickly pear outside her picture window, and with the fresh fall radiant on the Sangre de Cristo Range far in the east, she impulsively telephoned the number that Sukie had penned in red. The distant instrument rang so often that she expected the answering machine to pick up; but the voice was suddenly Sukie’s. It said, “Hello?” Alexandra knew from just the chastened, hollow tone of this one word that Christopher had left her; he had melted back into his half-world, the half he had inherited from Darryl Van Horne. “Lexa?” the wary voice asked, with witchy intuition.

  “Well,” Alexandra answered, pleased. “Where shall we go together this year?”