The Witches of Eastwick (24 page)

"On women?"

"They have to, men have stopped getting them. They've upped the price, though. Seven fifty, that's without any wave or wash or anything."

"The last thing I did for my father was wheel him into the barber for a haircut. He knew it was his last, too. He announced it to everybody, all these men sitting around. 'This is my daughter, who's bringing me in for the last haircut I'll have in my life.'"

"Kazmierczak Square. Have you seen
the
new sign?"

"Horrible.
1
can't believe it'll last."

"People forget. The schoolchildren now, World War Two to them is just a myth."

"Don't you wish you still had skin like this? Not a scar, not a mole."

"Actually, there is a little pink thing I noticed the other day, up high. Higher."

"Oh yess. That hurt?"

"No."

"Good."

"Did you ever notice, once you start investigating yourself for lumps like they say you should, they seem to be everywhere? The body is just terribly complicated."

"Please don't even make me think about it."

"In the new dictionary they got at the paper there are these transparencies bound in with regular pages at the entry 'Man,' only a woman's body is there too. Veins, muscles, bones, each on a sheet of their own, it's incredible. How it all fits."

"I don't think it's really complicated, it's just our thinking about it makes it complicated. Like a lot of things."

"How wonderfully round they are. Perfect semicircles."

"Hemispheres."

"That sounds so political."

"Hemispheres of influence."

"That
is
one of the unjoys. Erogenous-zone sag. I looked at my bottom in the mirror the other day and here were these definite undeniable puckers. Maybe that's why I have a stiff neck."

"Nemo's makes a pretty good sausage sub."

"Too many hot red peppers. Fidel is getting to Rebecca. He's flavoring her."

"What color do you think their babies would be?"

"Beige."

"Mocha."

"Does that feel too intrusive?"

"Not exactly."

"How well she speaks!"

"Oh God: the trouble with being young and beautiful is nobody helps you really appreciate it. When 1 was twenty-two and at my peak I guess all I did was worry about pleasing my mother-in-law and if I was as good in bed as
these whores Monty knew in col
lege."

"It's like being rich. You know you have something and you get uptight about being taken advantage of."

"Darryl doesn't seem to let it worry him."

"How rich
is
he, really?"

"He still hasn't paid Joe's bill, I know."

"That's how the rich are. They hold their money and collect the interest."

"Pay attention, love."

"How can I not?"

"My fingertips are all shrivelled."

"Maybe it's time we see if amphibians can lay their eggs on land."

"Okey-dokey."

"Here we go."

Splashing, they emerged cumbersomely: silver born

in a chemical tumult from lead. They groped for towels.

"Where
is
he?"

"Asleep? I gave him a pretty strenuous game, if I do say so."

"They say, unless you use oil afterwards, water isn't good for your skin past a certain age." "We have ointments." "We have buckets of ointments." "Just stretch out. Are you still relaxed?" "Oh yes. I really am."

"Here's another, just under your pretty little boob. Like a tiny pink snout." Dark as the room was, it did not seem strange that this could be seen, for the pupils of the four of them had expanded as if to overflow their gray, hazel, brown, and blue irises. One witch pinched Jennifer's false teat and asked, "Feel anything?"

"No."

"Good."

"Feel any shame?" another asked. "No."

"Good," pronounced the third.
"Isn't
she good?" "She is."

"Just think, 'Float.'" "I feel I'm flying." "So do we." "All the time." "We're right with you." "It's killing."

"I love being a woman, really," Sukie said. "You might as well," Jane Smart said dryly. "I mean, it's not just propaganda," Sukie insisted. "My baby," Alexandra was saying. "Oh" escaped Jenny's lips.

"Gently. Gentler." "This is paradise."

"Well, I
thought," Jane Smart said over the phone emphatically, as if certain of being contradicted, "she was a bit
t
oo
ingratiating. Too demure and Alice-in-Wonderlandish. I think she's up to something."

"But what would that be? We're all poor as church mice and a town scandal besides." Alexandra's mind was still in her workroom, with the half-fleshed-out armatures of two floating, lightly interlocked women, wondering, as she patted handfuls of paste-impregnated shredded paper here and there, why she couldn't muster the confidence she used to bring to her little clay figurines, her little hefty bubbies meant to rest so securely on end tables and rumpus-room mantels.

"Think of the situation," Jane directed. "Suddenly she's an orphan. Obviously she was making a mess of things out in Chicago. The house is too big to heat and pay taxes on. But she has nowhere else to go."

Lately Jane seemed intent on poisoning every pot. Outside the window, the sparrow-brown twigs of an as yet snowless winter moved in a cold breeze, and the swaying birdfeeder
needed refilling. The Spof
ford children were home for Christmas vacation but had gone ice-skating, giving Alexandra an hour to work in; it shouldn't be wasted. "I thought Jennifer was a nice addition," she said to Jane. "We mustn't get ingrown."

"We mustn't ever leave Eastwick either," Jane surprisingly said. "Isn't it horrible about Ed Parsley?"

"What about him? Has he come back to Brenda?"

"In pieces he'll come back" was the cruel reply. "He and Dawn Polanski blew themselves up in a row house in New Jersey trying to make bombs." Alexandra remembered his ghostly face the night of the concert,
her last glimpse of Ed, his aura tinged with sickly green and the tip of his long vain nose seeming to be pulled so that his face was slipping sideways like a rubber mask. She could have said then that he was doomed. Jane's harsh image of coming back in pieces sliced Alexandra, her crooked arm and hand floating away with the telephone and Jane's voice in it, while her eyes and body let the window mullions pass through them like the parallel wires of an egg slicer. "He was identified by the fingerprints of a hand they found in the rubble," Jane was saying. "Just this hand by itself. It was all over television this morning, I'm surprised Sukie hasn't called you."

"Sukie's been a little huffy with me, maybe she felt upstaged by Jennifer the other night. Poor Ed," Alexandra said, feeling herself drift away as in a slow explosion. "She must be devastated."

"Not so it showed when I talked to her a half-hour ago. She sounded mostly worried about how much of a story the new management at the
Word
would want; there's this boy in Clyde's office now younger than we are, he's been sent by the owners, who everybody thinks are front men for the Mafia that hangs out, you know, on Federal Hill. He's just out of Brown and knows nothing about editing."

"Does she blame herself?"

"No, why would she? She never urged Ed to leave Brenda and run off with that ridiculous little slut, she was doing what she could to hold the marriage together. Sukie told me she told him to stick with Brenda and the ministry at least until he had looked into public relations. That's what these ministers and priests who leave the church go into, public relations."

"I don't know, general involvement," Alexandra weakly said. "Did they find Dawn's hands too?"

"I don't know what they found of Dawn's but I don't see how she could have escaped unless..."
Unless she were a witch
was the unspoken thought.

"Even that wouldn't do much against cordite, or whatever they call it. Darryl would know."

"Darryl thinks I'm ready for some Hindemith."

"Sweetie, that's wonderful. I wish he'd tell me I'm ready to go back to my hubbies. I miss the money, for one thing."

"Alexandra S. Spofford," Jane Smart chastised. "Darryl's trying to do something wonderful for you. Those New York dealers get ten thousand dollars for just a doodle."

"Not my doodles," she said, and hung up depressed. She didn't want to be a mere ingredient in Jane's poison pot, part of the daily local stew, she wanted to look out of her window and see miles and miles of empty golden land, dotted with sage, and the tips of the distant mountains a white as vaporous as that of clouds, only coming to a point.

Sukie must have forgiven Alexandra for being too taken with Jenny, for she called after Ed's memorial service to give an account. Snow had fallen in the meantime: one does forget that annual marvel, the width of it all, the air given presence, the diagonal strokes of the streaming flakes laid across everything like an etcher's hatching, the tilted big beret the bird-bath wears next morning, the deepening in color of the dry brown oak leaves that have hung on and the hemlocks with their drooping deep green boughs and the clear blue of the sky like a bowl that has been decisively emptied, the excitement that vibrates off the walls within the house, the suddenly supercharged life of the wallpaper, the mysteriously urgent intimacy the potted amaryllis on the window enjoys wi
th its pale phallic shadow. "Bre
nda spoke," Sukie said. "And some sinister fat man from the Revolution, in a beard and ponytail. Said Ed and Dawn were martyrs to pig tyranny, or something. He became quite excited, and there was a gang with him in Castro outfits that I was afraid would start beating us up if anybody muttered or got out of line somehow. But Brenda was quite brave, really. She's gotten rather wonderful."

"She has?" A sheen, was how Alexandra remembered Brenda: a sleekly blond head of hair done up in a tight twist, turning away at the concert party amid the peacock confusion of auras. From other encounters her mind's eye could supply a long, rather chalky face, with complacent lips more brightly painted than one quite expected, with that vehement gloss of a rose about to drop its petals.

"She has her outfit down to a T now—dark suits with padded shoulders, and a silk necktie in front so broad it looks like a napkin she forgot to take out after eating lobster. She spoke for about ten minutes, about what a caring minister Ed had been,
so
interested in Eastwick and its delicate ecology and its conflicted young people and all that, until his conscience— and here, on the word 'conscience,' Brenda got her voice to break, you would have loved it, she dabbed with her hanky at her eyes, just one tear from each eye,
exactly
enough—until his conscience, she said, demanded he take his energies away from the confines of this town, where they were so much appreciated"—Sukie's powers of mimicry were in full gear now; Alexandra could see her upper lip crinkling and protruding drolly—"and devote them, these wonderful energies, to trying to correct the
dreadful,
my dear, malaise that is poisoning the heartblood of our nation. She said our nation is laboring under a malignant spell and looked me right in the eye."

"What did you do?"

"Smiled. It wasn't me who got him down there in New Jersey with the bomb squad, it was Dawn. Very little mention of her, by the way, when the fat man got done. Like none. Apparently they never found any pieces of her, just bits of clothing that could have come out of a closet. She was such a scruffy little thing maybe she sailed out through the roof. The Polanskis or whatever their name is, the stepfather and the mother, showed up, though, dressed like something out of a Thirties movie. I guess they don't get out of their trailer that often. I kept looking at the mother wondering about these acrobatics she does for the circus, I must say she's kept her figure; but her
face.
Frightening. So tough it was growing things all over it like you have on your heel from bad shoes. Nobody knew what to say to them, since the girl wasjust Ed's floozie and not even officially dead at that. Even Brenda didn't quite know how to handle it at the door, since the family was at the root of her troubles in a way, but I must say, she was magnificent— very courteous and
grande dame,
gave them her sympathy with a glistening eye. Brenda's not our sort, I know, but I really do admire the way she's picked herself up and made something of her situation. Speaking of situations..."

"Yes?" Alexandra asked on cue. The pause had been a probe to see if she was still paying attention. Alexandra had been idly making dots with her fingertips on the fogged patches in the lower panes of her kitchen window—semiconscious conjurings of snow, or Sukie's freckles, or the holes in the telephone mouthpiece, or the paint dabs with which Niki de Saint-Phalle decorated her internationally successful "Nanas." Alexandra was glad Sukie was talking to her again; she sometimes feared that if it were not for Sukie she would lose all contact with the world of daily
e
vents and go off sailing into the stratosphere just like little Dawn blown out of that house in New Jersey. "I've been Fired," Sukie said.

"Baby! You haven't! How could they, you're the only undreary thing about that paper now."

"Well, maybe you could say I quit. The boy who's taken Clyde's place, with some Jewish name I can't remember, Bernstein, Birnbaum, I don't even
want
to remember it, cut my obituary of Ed from a column and a half to two little dumb paragraphs; he said they had a space problem this week because another poor local has been killed in Vietnam but I know it's because everybody's told him Ed had been my lover and he's afraid of my going overboard in print and people uttering. A long time ago Ed had given me these poems he wrote in the style of Bob Dylan and I
had
put a couple of them in but wouldn't have complained if they'd come and asked me to cut those; but they even took out how he founded the Fair Housing Group and was in the top third of his class at Harvard Divinity School. I said to the boy, 'You've just come to Eastwick and I don't think you realize what a beloved Figure Reverend Parsley was,' and this brat from Brown smiled and said, 'I've heard about his being beloved,' and I said, 'I quit. I work hard on my copy and Mr. Gabriel almost never cut a word.' That made this insufferable child smile all the more and there was nothing to do but walk out. Actually, before I walked out I took the pencil out of his hand and broke it right in front of his eyes."

Alexandra laughed, grateful to have such a spirited friend, a friend in three dimensions unlike those evil clown faces in her bedroom. "Oh Sukie, you honestly did?"

"Yes, and I even said, 'Go break a leg,' and threw the two pieces on his desk. The smug little kike. But now what do I do? All I have is about seven hundred dollars in the bank."

"Maybe Darryl..." Alexandra's thoughts did fly to Darryl Van Home at all hours: his overeager face with its flecks of spit, and certain dusty corners of his home awaiting a woman's touch, and such moments as the frozen one after he had laughed his harsh brittle bark, when his jaw snapped shut and the world as it were had to come unstuck from a momentary spell. These images did not visit Alexandra's brain by invitation or with a purpose but as one radio station overlaps another as we travel a winding road. Whereas Sukie and Jane seemed to have gathered fresh strength and vehemence from their rites on the island, Alexandra found her independent existence had gone from clay to paper i
n substance and her sustaining ti
es with nature had slackened. She had let her roses head into winter unmulched; she had not composted the leaves as in other Novembers; she kept forgetting to fill the bi
rdfe
eder and no longer bothered to rap on the window to drive the greedy gray squirrels away. She dragged herself about with a lassitude that even Joe Marino noticed, and that discouraged him. Boredom in a wife is part of the social contract, but boredom in a mistress undermines a man. All Alexandra wanted was to soak her bones in the teak hot tub and lean her head on Van Home's hairy matted torso while Tiny Tim warbled over the stereo, "Livin' in the sunl
ight, lovin' in the moonlight, h
avin' a wonderful time!"

"Darryl has his hands full," Sukie told her. "The town is about to shut off his water for nonpayment of his b
ill and he's, at my suggestion I
guess, hired Jenny Gabriel to be his lab assistant."