The Witches of Eastwick

'Don't be so defensive, darling. I didn't know you cared.'

'I don't care, really,' Alexandra said, 'what Jenny does with her money. Except she is another woman. How did she react when you said this to her?'

'Oh, you know. Her eyes got bigger and stared and her chin turned a little more pointy and it was as if she hadn't heard me. She has this stubborn streak underneath all the docility. She's too good for this world.'

'Yes, that is the message she gives off, I suppose,' Alexandra said slowly, sorry to feel that they were turning on her, their own fair creature, their ingenue.

Jane Smart called a week or so later, furious. 'Couldn't you have guessed? Alexandra, you do seem abstracted these days.' Her s's hurt, stinging like match tips. 'She's moving in! He's invited her and that foul little brother to move in!'

'Into Toad Hall?'

'Into the old Lenox place,' Jane said, discarding the pet name they had once given it as if Alexandra were stupidly babbling. 'It's what she's been angling for all along, if we'd just opened our foolish eyes. We were so nice to that vapid girl, taking her in, doing our thing, though she always did hold back as if really she were above it all and time would tell, like some smug little Cinderella squatting in the ashes knowing there was this glass slipper in her future—oh, the prissiness of her now is what gets me, swishing about in her cute little white lab coat and getting paid for it, when he owes everybody in town and the bank is thinking of foreclosing but it doesn't want to get stuck with the property, the upkeep is a nightmare. Do you know what a new slate roof for that pile would run to?'

'Baby,' Alexandra said, 'you sound so financial. Where did you learn all this?'

The fat yellow lilac buds had released their first small bursts of heart-shaped leaves and the arched wands of forsythia, past bloom, had turned chartreuse like miniature willows. The gray squirrels had stopped coming to the feeder, too busy mating to eat, and the grapevines, which look so dead all winter, were begin­ning to shade the arbor again. Alexandra felt less sodden this week, as spring muddiness dried to green; she had returned to making her little clay bubbies, getting ready for the summer trade, and they were slightly bigger, with subtler anatomies and a delib­erately Pop intensity to their coloring: she had learned something over the winter, by her artistic misadven­ture. So in this mood of rejuvenation she had trouble quickly sharing Jane's outrage; the pain of the Gabriel children's moving into a house that had felt fraction­ally hers sank in slowly. She had always held to the conceited fantasy that in spite of Sukie's superior beauty and liveliness and Jane's greater intensity and commitment to witchiness, she, Alexandra, was Darryl's favorite—in size and in a certain psychic breadth most nearly his match, and destined, somehow, to reign with him. It had been a lazy assumption.

Jane was saying, 'Bob Osgood told me.' He was the president of the Old Stone Bank downtown: stocky, the same physical type as Raymond Neff, but without a teacher's softness and that perspiring bullying man­ner teachers get; solid and confident, rather, from association with money Bob Osgood was, and utterly, beautifully bald, with a freshly minted shine to his skull and a skinned pinkness catching at his ears and his eyelids and nostrils, even his tapering quick fin­gers, as if he had stepped fresh from a steam room.

'You see Bob Osgood?'

Jane paused, registering distaste at the direct ques­tion as much as uncertainty how to answer. 'His daughter Deborah is the last lesson on Tuesdays, and picking her up he's stayed once or twice for a beer. You know what an impossible bore Harriet Osgood is; poor Bob can't get it up to go home to her.'

'Get it up' was one of those phrases the young had made current; it sounded a bit false and harsh in Jane's mouth. But then Jane was harsh, as people from Massachusetts tend to be. Puritanism had landed smack on that rock and after regaining its strength at the expense of the soft-hearted Indians had thrown its steeples and stone walls all across Connecticut, leaving Rhode Island to the Quakers and Jews and antinomians and women.

'Whatever happened to you and those nice Neffs?' Alexandra asked maliciously.

Harshly Jane laughed, as it were hawked into the mouthpiece of the telephone. 'He can't get it up at all these days; Greta has reached the point where she tells anybody in town who'll listen, and she practically asked the boy doing checkout at the Superette to come back to the house and fuck her.'

The aiguillette had been tied; but who had tied it? Witchcraft, once engendered in a community, has a way of running wild, out of control of those who have called it into being, running so freely as to confound victim and victimize!’.

'Poor Greta,' Alexandra heard herself mumble. Little devils were gnawing at her stomach; she felt uneasy, she wanted to get back to her bubbies and then, once they were snug in the Swedish kiln, to raking the winter-fallen twigs out of her lawn, and attacking the thatch with a pitchfork.

But Jane was on her own attack. 'Don't give me that pitying earth-mother crap,' she said, shockingly. 'What are we going to do about Jennifer's moving in?'

'But sweetest, what can we do? Except show how hurt we are and have everybody laughing at us. Don't you think the town won't be amused enough anyway? Joe tells me some of the things people whisper. Gina calls us the streghe and is afraid we're going to turn the baby in her tummy into a little pig or a thalidomide case or something.'

'Now you're talking,' Jane Smart said.

Alexandra read her mind. 'Some sort of spell. But what difference would it make? Jenny's there, you say. She has his protection.'

'Oh it will make a difference believe you me,' Jane Smart pronounced in one long shaking utterance of warning like a tremulous phrase drawn from a single swoop of her bow.

'What does Sukie think?'

'Sukie thinks just as I do. That it's an outrage. That we've been betrayed. We've nursed a viper, my dear, in our bosooms. And I don't mean the vindow viper.'

This allusion did make Alexandra nostalgic for the nights, which in truth had become rarer as winter wore on,