The Witches of Eastwick

when they would all listen, nude and soaking and languid with pot and California Chablis, to Tiny Tim's many voices surrounding them in the stereo­phonic darkness, warbling and booming and massag­ing their interiors; the stereophonic vibrations brought into relief their hearts and lungs and livers, slippery fatty presences within that purple inner space for which the dim-lit tub room with its asymmetrical cush­ions was a kind of amplification. 'I would think things will go on much as before,' she reassured Jane. 'He loves us, after all. And it's not as if Jenny does half the things we do for him; it was us she liked to cater to. The way that upstairs rambles, it's not as if they'll all be sharing quarters or anything.'

'Oh Lexa,' Jane sighed, fond in despair. 'It's really you who're the innocent.'

Having hung-up, Alexandra found herself less than reassured. The hope that the dark stranger would eventually claim her cowered in its corner of her imag­ining; could it be that her queenly patience would earn itself no more reward than being used and dis­carded? The October day when he had driven her up to the front door as to something they mutually pos­sessed, and when she had to wade away through the tide as if the very elements were begging her to stay: could such treasured auguries be empty? How short life is, how quickly its signs exhaust their meaning. She caressed the underside of her left breast and seemed to detect a small lump there. Vexed, fright­ened, she met the bright beady gaze of a gray squirrel that had stolen into the feeder to rummage amid the sunflower-seed husks. He was a plump little gentle­man in a gray suit with white shirtfront, come bright-eyed to dine. The effrontery, the greed. His tiny gray hands, mindless and dry as bird feet, were arrested halfway to his chest by sudden awareness of her gaze, her psyche's impingement; his eyes were set sideways in the oval skull so as to seem in their convexity opaque turrets, slanted and gleaming. The spark of life inside the tiny skull wanted to flee, to twitch away to safety, but Alexandra's sudden focus froze the spark even through glass. A dim little spirit, programmed for feeding and evasion and seasonal copulation, was meeting a greater. Morte, morte, morte, Alexandra said firmly in her mind, and the squirrel dropped like an instantly emptied sack. One last spasm of his limbs flipped a few husks over the edge of the plastic feeder tray, and the luxuriant frosty plume of a tail flickered back and forth a few more seconds; then the animal was still, the dead weight making the feeder with its conical green plastic roof swing on the wire strung between two posts of an arbor. The program was can­ celled.

Alexandra felt no remorse; it was a delicious power she had. But now she would have to put on her Wel­ lingtons and go outside and with her own hand lift the verminous body by its tail and walk to the edge of her yard and throw it into the bushes over the stone wall, where the bog began. There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person's time—all of a woman's time, at any rate—was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place.

Comfortingly, that very night, while the children were lurking around Alexandra demanding, depend­ing upon their ages, the car, help with their home­work, or to be put to bed, Van Home called her, which was unusual, since his sabbats usually arose as if spon­taneously, without the deigning of his personal invi­tation, but through a telepathic, or telephonic, merge of the desires of his devotees. They would find them­selves there without quite knowing how they came to be there. Their cars—Alexandra's pumpkin-colored Subaru, Sukie's gray Corvair, Jane's moss-green Val­iant—would take them, pulled by a tide of psychic forces. 'Come on over Sunday night,' Darryl growled, in that New York taxi-driver rasp of his. 'It's a helluva depressing day, and I got some stuff I want to try out on the gang.'

'It's not easy,' Alexandra said, 'to get a sitter on a Sunday night. They've got to get up for school in the morning and want to stay home and watch Archie Bunker.' In her unprecedented resistance she heard resentment, an anger that Jane Smart had planted but whose growth was being fed now with her own veins.

'Ah come on. Those kids of yours are ancient, how come they still need sitters?'

'I can't saddle Marcy with the three younger, they don't accept her discipline. Also she may want to drive over to a friend's house and I don't want her not to be able to; it's not fair to burden a child with your own responsibilities.'

'What gender friend the kid seeing?'

'It's none of your business. A girlfriend, as it hap­pens.'

'Christ, don't snap at me, it wasn't me conned you into having those little twerps.'

'They're not twerps, Darryl. And I do neglect them.'

Interestingly, he did not seem to mind being talked back to, which she had not done before: perhaps it was the way to his heart. 'Who's to say,' he responded mildly, 'what's neglect? If my mother had neglected me a little more I might be a better all-round guy.'

'You're an O.K. guy.' It felt forced from her, but she liked it that he had bothered to seek reassurance.

'Thanks a fuck of a lot,' he answered with a jolting coarseness. 'We'll see you when you get here.'

'Don't be huffy.'

'Who's huffy? Take it or leave it. Sunday around seven. Dress informal.'

She wondered why next Sunday should be depress­ing to him. She looked at the kitchen calendar. The numerals were interlaced with lilies.

Easter evening turned out to be a warm spring night with a south wind pulling the moon backwards through wild, blanched clouds. The tide had left silver puddles on the causeway. New green marsh grass was starting up in the spaces between the rocks; Alexan­dra's headlights swung shadows among the boulders and across the tree- intertwined entrance gate. The driveway curved past where the egrets used to nest and now the collapsed tennis- court bubble lay creased and hardened like a lava flow; then her car climbed, circling the mall lined by noseless statues. As the stately silhouette of the house loomed, the grid of its windows all alight, her heart lifted into its holiday flutter; always, coming here, night or day, she expected to meet the momentous someone who was, she realized, herself, herself unadorned and untrammelled, forgiven and nude, erect and perfect in weight and open to any courteous offer: the beautiful stranger, her secret self. Not all the next day's weariness could cure her of the exalted expectation that the Lenox place aroused. Your cares evaporated in the entry hall, where the sulphurous scents greeted you, and an apparent elephant's-foot umbrella stand holding a cluster of old-fashioned knobs and handles on second glance turned out to be a single painted casting, even to the little strap and snap button holding the umbrella furled—one more mocking work of art.

Fidel took her jacket, a man's zippered wind-breaker. More and more Alexandra found men's clothes comfortable; First she began to buy their shoes and gloves, then corduroy and chino trousers that weren't so nipped at the waist as women's slacks were, and lately the nice, roomy, efficient jackets men hunt and work in. Why should they have all the comfort while we martyr ourselves with spike heels and all the rest of the slave-fashions sadistic fags wish upon us?