The Witches of Eastwick

wife's care.

'But you promised it wouldn't be!'

'Listen, what the hell do I know? I'm more of a stranger here than you are. Let's walk down and have a gander.'

Whereas the driveway curved around, the grass mall, lined with limestone statues the weather and vandals had robbed of hands and noses, led directly down to where the causeway met the edge of the island. An untidy shore of weeds—seaside goldenrod, beach clotbur with its huge loose leaves—and gravel and a rubble of old asphalt paving spread behind the vine-entangled gate. The weeds trembled in a chill wind off the flooded marsh. The sky had lowered its bacon stripes of gray; the most luminous thing in sight was a great egret, not a snowy, loitering in the direc­tion of the beach road, its yellow bill close to the color of her abandoned Subaru. Between here and there a tarnished glare of water had overswept the causeway. The scratch of tears arose in Alexandra's throat. 'How could this have happened, we haven't been an hour!'

'When you're having fun...' he murmured.

'It wasn't that much fun! I can't get back!'

'Listen,' Van Home said close to her ear, and lightly closed his fingers on her upper arm, so she just felt his touch through the cloth. 'Come on back and phone your kids and we'll have Fidel whip up a light supper. He does a terrific chili.'

'It's not the kids, it's the dog,' she cried. 'Coal will be frantic. How deep is it?'

'I don't know. A foot, maybe two toward the mid­dle. I could try to splash through with the air but get stuck out there it's bye-bye to a lot of fine old German machinery. Get saltwater in your brakes and differ­ential, a car never drives the same. Like having your cherry popped.'

'I'll wade,' Alexandra said, and shook her arm free of his fingers, but not before, as if he had read her mind, he gave her a sharp quick pinch.

'Your pants'll get soaked,' he said. 'That water's brutal this time of year.'

'I'll take my slacks off,' she said, leaning on him to pull off her sneakers and socks. The spot where he had pinched her burned but she refused to acknowledge this presumptuous injury. After he had seemed so boyish and befuddled, spilling his tea and confiding his love of art. He was in truth a monster. Gravel prodded her bare feet. If she was going to do this she mustn't hesitate. 'Here goes,' she said. 'Don't look.'

She undid the side zipper of her slacks and pushed down at the waistband and her thighs joined the egret for brightness in this scene of rust and gray. Afraid she might topple on the unsteady stones, she bent over and pushed the shiny green serge past her pink ankles and blue-veined feet, and stepped out. Startled air lapped her naked legs. She made a bundle of sneakers and slacks and walked away from Van Home down the causeway. Not looking back, she felt his eyes on her, her heavy thighs, their vulnerable ripple and jiggle. No doubt he had been watching with his hot tired eyes when she bent over. Alexandra had for­gotten what underpants she had put on this morning and was relieved, glancing down, to discover them a plain beige, not ridiculously flowered or indecently cut like most you had to buy in the stores these days, designed for slim young hippies or groupies, half your ass hanging out behind and the crotch narrow as a rope. The air, endlessly tall, was cool on her skin. She enjoyed her own nakedness usually, especially in the open, taking a sunbath after lunch in her back yard on a blanket those first warm days of April and May before the bugs come. And under the full moon, gath­ering herbs skyclad.

So little used these years since the Lenoxes left, the causeway had grown grassy; barefoot she trod the center mane like the top of a soft broad wall. Color had drained from its wands of Spartina patens and the stretches of marsh on either side had turned sere. Where water first overcrept the surface of the road the matted grass gently swung in the transparent inches. The tide, infiltrating, made chuckling, hissing noises. Behind her, Darryl Van Home was shouting something, encouragement or warning or apology, but Alexandra was too intent on the shock of her toes' first immersion to hear. How serious, how stark, the cold of this water was! Another element, where her blood was an alien. Brown pebbles stared up at her refracted and meaninglessly vivid, like the letters of an alphabet one doesn't know. The marsh grass had become seaweed, indolent and adrift, streaming left­wards with the rising water. Her own feet looked small, refracted like the pebbles. She must wade through quickly, while still numb. The tide covered her ankles now, and the distance to dry road was great, farther than she could have thrown a pebble. A dozen more shocking strides, and the water was up to her knees, and she could feel the sideways suck of its mindless flow. The coldest thing about this pull was that it would be here whether she was or not. It had been here before she was born and would be here when she was dead. She did not think it could knock her down, but she felt herself leaning against its force. And her ankles had begun to cry out, the numbness eaten through, the ache unendurable except that it must be endured.

Alexandra could no longer see her own feet, and the nodding tips of marsh grass no longer kept her company. She began to try to run, splashing; the splashing drowned out the sound of her host still shouting gibberish at her back. The intensity of her gaze enlarged the Subaru. She could see Coal's hope­ful silhouette in the driver's seat, his ears lifted as high as they would go as he sensed rescue approaching. The icy pull came high on her thighs and her under­pants were getting splashed. Foolish, so foolish, so vain and falsely girlish, she deserved this for leaving her only friend, her true and uncomplicated friend. Dogs perch on the edge of understanding, their bright eyes polished by the yearning to comprehend; an hour no worse than a minute to them, they live in a world without time, without accusation, without acceptance because there was no foresight. The water with its deathgrip rose to her crotch; a noise was forced from her throat. She was close enough to alarm the egret, who with a halt uncertain motion, like that of an old man tentatively reaching to brace himself on the arms of his chair, beat the air with the inverted W of his wings and rose, dragging his black stick feet behind him. Him? Her? Turning her own head with its be­draggled hair, Alexandra did see in the opposite direction, toward the ashen sand-hills of the beach, another white hole in the day's gray, another great egret, this one's mate though acres separated them under this dirty striped sky.

At the first bird's lift-off, the murderous clamps of the ocean had loosened a little on her thighs, sliding down as she waded on upwards, breathless, weeping with the shock and comedy of it, to the dry stretch of causeway that led to her car. Where the tide had been deepest there had been a kind of exultation, and now this ebbed. Alexandra shivered like a dog and laughed at her own folly, in seeking love, in getting stranded. The spirit needs folly as the body needs food; she felt healthier for this. Visions of herself as drowned, tinted greenish and locked stiff in the twist of last agony like those two embracing women in that amazing painting Undertow by Winslow Homer, had not come true. Drying, her feet hurt as if stung by a hundred wasps.

Manners demanded that she turn and wave in deri­sive flirtatious triumph toward Van Home. He, a little black Y between the brick uprights of his crumbling gate, waved back with both arms held straight out. He applauded, beating his hands together to make a noise that arrived across the intervening plane of water a fraction of a second delayed. He shouted something of which she only heard the words 'You can fly!' She dried her beaded, goosebumped legs with the red bandanna and pulled herself into her slacks while Coal woofed and pounded his tail on the vinyl within the Subaru. His happiness was infectious. She smiled to herself, wondering whom she should call first to tell about this, Sukie or Jane. At last she too had been initiated. Where he had pinched, her upper arm still burned.