The Witches of Eastwick

getting her to leave. Maybe there's a course or something you can take by mail.'

'But can she preach? You do have to preach.'

'Oh I don't think that would be any real problem. Brenda has wonderful posture. She was studying to be a modern dancer when she met Ed at an Adlai Stevenson rally; she was in one of the warm-up acts and he was to ask the blessing. He told me about it more than once, I used to wonder if he wasn't still in love with her after all.'

'She is a ridiculous vapid woman,' Jane said.

'Oh Jane, don't.'

'Don't what?'

'Don't sound like that. That's the way we used to talk about Felicia, and look what happened.'

Sukie had become very small and curled over at her end of the line, like a lettuce leaf wilting. 'Are you blaming us?' Jane asked her briskly. 'Her sad sot of a husband I would think instead should be blamed.'

'On the surface, sure, but we did cast that spell, and put those things in the cookie jar when we got tiddly, and things did keep coming out of her mouth, Clyde mentioned it to me so innocently, he tried to get her to go to a doctor but she said medicine ought to be entirely nationalized in this country the way it is in England and Sweden. She hated the drug com­panies, too.'

'She was full of hate, darling. It was the hate coming out of her mouth that did her in, not a few harmless feathers and pins. She had lost touch with her womanhood. She needed pain to remind her she was a woman. She needed to get down on her knees and drink some horrible man's nice cold come. She needed to be beaten, Clyde was right about that, he just went at it too hard.'

'Please, Jane. You frighten me when you talk like that, the things you say.'

'Why not say them? Really, Sukie, you sound infan­tile.' Sukie was a weak sister, Jane thought. They put up with her for the gossip she gathered and that kid-sister shine she used to bring to their Thursdays but she really was just a conceited immature girl, she couldn't please Van Home the way that Jane did, that burning stretching; even Greta Neff, washed-out old bag as she was with her granny glasses and pathetic pedantic accent, was more of a woman in this sense, a woman who could hold whole kingdoms of night within her, burning. 'Words are just words,' she added.

'They're not: they make things happen!' Sukie wailed, her voice shrivelled to a padietic wheedle. 'Now two people are dead and two children are orphans because of us!'

'I don't think you can be an orphan after a certain age,' Jane said. 'Stop talking nonsense.' Her ‘s's hissed like spit on a stove top. 'People stew in their own juice.'

'If I hadn't slept with Clyde he wouldn't have gone so crazy, I'm sure of it. He loved me so, Jane. He used to just hold my foot in his two hands and kiss between each pair of toes.'

'Of course he did. That's the kind of thing men arc supposed to do. They're supposed to adore us. They're shits, try to keep that in mind. Men are abso­lutely shits, but we get them in the end because we can suffer better. A woman can outsuffer a man every time.' Jane felt huge in her impatience; the black notes she had swallowed that morning bristled within her, alive. Who would have thought the old Lutheran had so much jism? 'There will always be men for you, sweetie,' she told Sukie. 'Don't bother your head about

Clyde any more. You gave him what he asked for, it's not your fault he couldn't handle it. Listen, truly. I must run.' Jane Smart lied, 'I have a lesson coming in at eleven.'

In fact her lesson was not until four. She would rush back from the old Lenox place aching and steamy-clean and the sight of those grubby little hands on her pure ivory keys mangling some priceless simpli­fied melody of Mozart's or Mendelssohn's would make her want to take the metronome and with its heavy base mash those chubby fingers as if she were grinding beans in a pestle. Since Van Home had come into her life Jane was more passionate than she had ever been about music, that golden high-arched exit from this pit of pain and ignominy.

'She sounded so harsh and strange,' Sukie said to Alexandra over the phone a few days later. 'It's as if she thinks she has the inside track with Darryl and is fighting to protect it.'

'That's one of his diabolical arts, to give each of us that impression. I'm really quite sure it's me he loves,' said Alexandra, laughing with cheerful hopelessness. 'He has me doing these bigger pieces of sculpture now, varnished papier-machd is what this Saint-Phalle woman uses, I don't know how she does it, the glue gets all over your fingers, into your hair, yukk. I get one side of a figure looking right and then the other side has no shape at all, just a bunch of loose ends and lumps.'

'Yes he was saying to me when 1 lose my job at the Word I should try a novel. I can't imagine sitting down day after day to the same story. And the people's names—people just don't exist without their real names.'

'Well,' Alexandra sighed, 'he's challenging us. He's stretching us.'

Over the phone she did sound stretched—more diffuse and distant every second, sinking into a trans­lucent quicksand of estrangement. Sukie had come back to her house after the Gabriels' funeral, and no child was home from school yet, yet the little old house was sighing and muttering to itself, full of memories and mice. There were no nuts or munchies in the kitchen and as the next best consolation she had reached for the phone. 'I miss our Thursdays,' she abruptly confessed, childlike.

'I know, baby, but we have our tennis parties instead. Our baths.'

'They frighten me sometimes. They're not as cozy as we used to be by ourselves.'

'Are you going to lose your job? What's happening with that?'

'Oh I don't know, there are so many rumors. They say the owner rather than find a new editor is going to sell out to a chain of small-town weeklies the gang­sters operate out of Providence. Everything is printed in Pawtucket and the only local news is what a cor­respondent phones in from her home and the rest is statewide feature articles and things they buy from a syndicate and they give them away to everybody like supermarket fliers.'

'Nothing is as cozy as it used to be, is it?'