The Witches of Eastwick

as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so notoriously tolerant of corpulence.

Alexandra's lovers in the handful of years since her divorce had tended to be odd husbands let stray by the women who owned them. Her own former hus­band, Oswald Spofford, rested on a high kitchen shelf in a jar, reduced to multi-colored dust, the cap screwed on tight. Thus she had reduced him as her powers unfolded after their move to Eastwick from Norwich, Connecticut. Ozzie had known all about chrome and had transferred from a Fixture factory in that hilly city with its too many peeling white churches to a rival manufacturer in a half-mile-long cinder-block plant south of Providence, amid the strange industrial vastness of this small state. They had moved seven years ago. Here in Rhode Island her powers had expanded like gas in a vacuum and she had reduced dear Ozzie as he made his daily trek to work and back along Route 4 first to the size of a mere man, the armor of patriar­chal protector falling from him in the corrosive salt air of Eastwick's maternal beauty, and then to the size of a child as his chronic needs and equally chronic acceptance of her solutions to them made him appear pitiful, manipulable. He quite lost touch with the expanding universe within her. He had become much involved with their sons' Little League activities, and with the Fixture company's bowling team. As Alex­andra accepted first one and then several lovers, her cuckolded husband shrank to the dimensions and dry­ness of a doll, lying beside her in her great wide recep­tive bed at night like a painted log picked up at a roadside stand, or a stuffed baby alligator. By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become mere dirt—matter in the wrong place, as her mother bad briskly defined it long ago—some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir.

The other witches had experienced similar trans­formations in their marriages; Jane Smart's ex, Sam, hung in the cellar of her ranch house among the dried herbs and simples and was occasionally sprinkled, a pinch at a time, into a philtre, for piquancy; and Sukie Rougemont had permanized hers in plastic and used him as a place mat. This last had happened rather recently; Alexandra could still picture Monty standing at cocktail parties in his Madras jacket and parsley-green slacks, braying out the details of the day's golf round and inveighing against the slow feminine four­some that had held them up all day and never invited them to play through. He had hated uppity women— female governors, hysterical war protesters, 'lady' doctors, Lady Bird Johnson, even Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. He had thought them all butch. Monty had had wonderful teeth when he brayed, long and very even but not false, and, undressed, rather touch­ing, thin bluish legs, much less muscular than his brown golfer's forearms. And with that puckered droop to his buttocks common to the softening flesh of middle-aged women. He had been one of Alexandra's first lovers. Now, it felt queer and queerly satisfying to set a mug of Sukie's tarry coffee upon a glossy plastic Madras, leaving a gritty ring.

This air of Eastwick empowered women. Alexan­dra had never tasted anything like it, except perhaps a corner of Wyoming she had driven through with her parents when she was about eleven. They had let her out of the car to pee beside some sagebrush and she had thought, seeing the altitudinous dry earth for the moment dampened in a dark splotch, It doesn't matter. It will evaporate. Nature absorbs all. This girl­hood perception had stayed forever with her, along with the sweet sage taste of thai roadside moment. Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street, its trendy shops with their per­fumed candles and stained-glass shade-pulls aimed at the summer tourists and its old-style aluminum diner next to a bakery and its barber's next to a framer's and its little clattering newspaper office and long dark hardware store run by Armenians, was intertwined with saltwater as it slipped and slapped and slopped against the culverts and pilings the street in part was built upon, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-wheat bread and fil­tered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette. The real supermarket, where one did a week's shopping, lay inland, in the part of Eastwick that had been farm­land; here, in the eighteenth century, aristocratic planters, rich in slaves and cattle, had paid social calls on horseback, a slave galloping ahead of them to open the fence gates one after the other. Now, above the asphalted acres of the shopping-mall parking lot, exhaust fumes dyed with leaden vapors air within memory oxygenated by fields of cabbages and pota­toes. Where corn, that remarkable agricultural artifact of the Indians, had flourished for generations, windowless little plants with names like Dataprobe and Computech manufactured mysteries, components so fine the workers wore plastic caps to keep dandruff from falling into the tiny electro-mechanical works.

Rhode Island, though famously the smallest of the fifty stales, yet contains odd American vastnesses, tracts scarcely explored amid industrial sprawl, abandoned homesteads and forsaken mansions, vacant hinter­lands hastily traversed by straight black roads, heath­like marshes and desolate shores on either side of the Bay, that great wedge of water driven like a stake clean to the state's heart, its trustfully named capital. 'The fag end of creation' and 'the sewer of New England,' Cotton Mather called the region. Never meant to be a separate polity, settled by outcasts like the bewitch­ing, soon-to-die Anne Hutchinson, this land holds manifold warps and wrinkles. Its favorite road sign is a pair of arrows pointing either way. Swampy poor in spots, elsewhere it became a playground of the exceedingly rich. Refuge of Quakers and antinomians, those final distillates of Puritanism, it is run by Catholics, whose ruddy Victorian churches loom like freighters in the sea of bastard architecture. There is a kind of metallic green stain, bitten deep into Depression-era shingles, that exists nowhere else. Once you cross the state line, whether at Pawtucket or Westerly, a subtle change occurs, a cheerful di-shevelment, a contempt for appearances, a chimerical uncaring. Beyond the clapboard slums yawn lunar stretches where only an abandoned roadside stand offering the ghost of last summer's Cukes betrays the yearning, disruptive presence of man.

Through such a stretch Alexandra now drove to steal a new look at the old Lenox mansion. She took with her, in her pumpkin-colored Subaru station wagon, her black Labrador, Coal. She had left the last of the sterilized jars of sauce to cool on the kitchen counter and with a magnet shaped like Snoopy had pinned a note to the refrigerator door for her four children to find: milk in frig, oreos in breadbox.

back in one hour. love.

The Lenox family in the days when Roger Williams was still alive had cozened the sachems of the Narragansett tribe out of land enough to form a European barony, and though a certain Major Lenox had he­roically fallen in the Great Swamp Fight in King Philip's War, and his great-great-great-grandson Emory had eloquently urged New England's secession from the Union at the Hartford Convention of 1815, the family had taken a generally downward trend. By the time of Alexandra's arrival in Eastwick there was not a Lenox left in South County save one old widow, Abi­gail, in the stagnant quaint village of Old Wick; she went about the lanes muttering and cringing from the pebbles thrown at her by children who, called to account by the local constable, claimed they were defending themselves against her evil eye. The vast Lenox lands had long been broken up. The last of the effective male Lenoxes had caused to be built on an island the family still owned, in the tracts of salt marsh behind East Beach, a brick mansion in dimin­ished but locally striking imitation of the palatial sum­mer 'cottages' being erected in Newport during this gilded age. Though a causeway had been constructed and repeatedly raised by fresh importation of gravel, the mansion always suffered the inconvenience of being cut off when the tide was high, and had been occupied fitfully by a succession of owners since 1920, and had been allowed by them to slide into disrepair. The great roof slates, some reddish and some a bluish gray, came crashing unobserved in the winter storms and lay like nameless tombstones in summer's lank tangle of uncut grass; the cunningly fashioned copper gutters and flashing turned green and rotten; the ornate octagonal cupola with a view to all points of the compass developed a list to the west; the massive end chimneys, articulated like bundles of organ pipes or thickly muscled throats, needed mortar and were dropping bricks. Yet the silhouette the mansion pre­sented from afar was still rather chasteningly grand, Alexandra thought. She had parked on the shoulder of the beach road to gaze across the quarter-mile of marsh.

This was September, season of full tides; the marsh between here and the island this afternoon was a sheet of skyey water flecked by the tips of salt hay turning golden. It would be an hour or two before the cause­way in and out became passable. The time now was after four; there was a stillness, and a clothy weight to the sky that hid the sun. Once the mansion would have been masked by an allee