The Witches of Eastwick

lump of putty, she felt something lighter than a sparrow fly from her strings; it disappeared into the shadowy vault of the dome, beyond the ring of clear plastic portholes that admitted light, and fell far out of bounds in the form of an optic-yellow Wilson.

'Play fair, you two fiends,' Sukie shouted across the net.

Jane Smart called back flutingly, 'Keep your eye on the ball, sugar, and bad things won't happen.'

'The hell you say, Jane Pain. I put perfect swings into both those shots.' Sukie was angry because it wasn't fair, when her partner was an innocent. Jen­nifer, who had been poised on the half-court line, had seen only the outcome of these shots and turned now to show Sukie a forgiving, encouraging face, heart- shaped and flushed a bright pink. On the next exchange, the girl darted to the net after a weak return from Jane, and Sukie willed Alexandra to freeze; Jen­ny's sharp volley thudded against the big woman's immobilized flesh. Released from the spell in a twin­kling, Alexandra rubbed the stung spot on her thigh.

Reproachfully she told Sukie, 'That would have really hurt if I weren't wearing woolies under my tights.'

A welt would arise there, though, and Sukie apol­ogetically pleaded, 'Come on, let's just play real ten­nis.' But both opponents were sore now. A grinding pain seized Sukie's joints as she stretched to volley an easy shot coming over the center of the net; pulled up short, she helplessly watched the blurred ball bounce on the center stripe. But she heard Jenny's feet drum behind her and saw the ball, miraculously returned, drop between Jane and Alexandra, who had thought they had the point won. This brought the game back to deuce, and Sukie, still staggered by that sudden ache injected into her joints but deter­mined to protect her partner from all this malefica, said the blasphemous backwards words Retson Retap three times rapidly to herself and created an air pocket, a fault in the crystal of space, above their opponents' forecourt, so that Jane double-faulted twice, the ball diving in mid-trajectory as from a table edge.

That made the game score five to one and brought the serve to Jenny. When she tossed the ball up, it became an egg and spattered all over her upturned face, through the gut strings. Sukie threw down her racket in disgust and it became a snake, that then had nowhere to slither to, the great bubble being sealed all along the edge; frantically the creature, damned at the dawn of creation, whipped its S's and zetas of motion back and forth across the blood-colored AsPhlex that framed the green court, its diagrammed baselines and boundaries. 'All right,' Sukie an­nounced. 'That does it. The game's over.' little Jenny with an inadequate feminine handkerchief was trying to wipe away from around her eyes the webby watery albumen and the yolk with its fleck of blood. The egg had been fertilized. Sukie took the hanky from her and dabbed. 'I'm sorry, so sorry,' she said. 'They just can't stand to lose, they are terrible women.'

'At least,' Alexandra called across the net apolo­getically, 'it wasn't a rotten egg.'

'It's all right,' Jennifer said, a little breathless but her voice still level. 'I knew you all have these powers. Brenda Parsley told me.'

'That idiotic blabbermouth,' Jane Smart said. The other two witches had come around the net to help wipe Jennifer's face. 'We don't have any powers she doesn't, now that she's been left.'

'Is that what does it, being left?' Jenny asked.

'Or doing the leaving,' Alexandra said. 'The strange thing is it doesn't make any difference. You'd think it would. Anyway, I'm sorry about the egg. But my thigh's going to be black and blue tomorrow because Sukie wouldn't let me move; it wasn't really playing the game.'

Sukie said, 'It was as much playing the game as what you were doing to me.'

'You mishit those shots plain and simple,' Jane Smart called over; she had gone to the edge of the court to look for something.

'I thought too,' said Jennifer softly, courting the others, 'your head came up, at least on the backhand.'

'You weren't watching.'

'I was. And you have a tendency to straighten your knees at impact.'

'I don't. You're supposed to be my partner. You're supposed to encourage me.'

'You were wonderful,' the girl said obediently.

Jane returned holding in her cupped palm a little heap of black sand she had scraped up with her fin­gernails at the side of the court. 'Close your eyes,' she ordered Jennifer, and threw the sand directly into her face. Magically, the glutinous remains of egg evap­orated, leaving, however, the grit, which gave the smooth upturned features a startled barbaric look, as if wearing a speckled mask.

'Maybe it's time for our bath,' Alexandra remarked, gazing maternally at Jennifer's gritty face.

Sukie wondered how they could have their usual bath with these strangers among them and blamed herself, for having been too forthcoming in inviting them. It was her mother's fault; back home in New York State there had always been extra people at the dinner table, people in off the street, possible angels in disguise to her mother's way of thinking. Aloud Sukie protested, 'But Darryl hasn't played yet! Or Christopher,' she added, though the boy had been lackadaisical and arrogantly inept.

'They don't seem to be coming back,' Jane Smart observed.

'Well we better go do something or we'll all catch cold,' Alexandra said. She had borrowed Jenny's damp handkerchief (monogrammed J) and with an intri­cately folded corner of it was removing, grain by grain, the sand from the girl's docile round face, tilted up toward this attention like a pink flower to the sun.

Sukie felt a pang of jealousy. She swung her arms and said, 'Let's go up to the house,' though her mus­cles still had lots of tennis in them. 'Unless somebody wants to play singles.'

Jane said, 'Maybe Darryl.'

'Oh he's too marvellous, he'd slaughter me.'

'I don't think so,' Jenny said softly, having observed their host warm up and as yet unable to see, fully, the wonder of him. 'You have much better form. He's quite wild, isn't he?'

Jane Smart said coldly, 'Darryl Van Home is quite the most civilized person I know. And the most tol­erant.' Irritably she went on, 'Lexa dear, do stop fussing with that. It'll all come off in the bath.'