The Witches of Eastwick

'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 too 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 Spofford 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 with its pale phallic shadow. 'Brenda 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