The Witches of Eastwick

Sukie asked after a pause, 'What will she get?'

Jane's thin lips clamped shut upon a bad-luck word, the Latin for 'crab.' 'I think it's obvious, from the other night, where her anxieties lie. When a person has a fear like that it takes just the teeniest-weeniest psychokinetic push to make it come true.'

'Oh, the poor child,' Alexandra involuntarily exclaimed, having the same terror herself.

'Poor child nothing,' said Jane. 'She is'—and her thin face put on additional hauteur—'Mrs. Darryl Van Home.'

After another pause Sukie asked, 'How would the hex work?'

'Perfectly straightforwardly. Alexandra makes a wax figure of her and we stick pins in it under our cone of power.'

'Why must I make it?' Alexandra asked.

'Simple, my darling. You're the sculptress, we're not. And you're still in touch with the larger forces. My spells lately tend to go off at about a forty-five degree angle. I tried to kill Greta Neff's pet cat about six months ago when I was still seeing Ray, and from what he let drop I gather I killed all the rodents in the house instead. The walls stank for weeks but the cat stayed disgustingly healthy.'

Alexandra asked, 'Jane, don't you ever get scared?'

'Not since I accepted myself for what I am. A fair cellist, a dreadful mother, and a boring lay.'

Both the other women protested this last, gallantly, but Jane was firm: 'I give good enough head, but when the man is on top and in me something resentful takes over.'

'Just try imagining it's your own hand,' Sukie sug­gested. 'That's what I do sometimes.'

'Or think of it that you're fucking him,' Alexandra said. 'That he's just something you're toying with.'

'It's too late for all that. I like what I am by now.

If I were happier I'd be less effective. Here's what I've done for a start. When Darryl was passing the marzipan figures around I bit off the head of the one representing Jenny but didn't swallow it, and spit it out when I could in my handkerchief. Here.' She went to her piano bench, lifted the lid, and brought out a crumpled handkerchief; gloatingly she unfolded the handkerchief for their eyes.

The little smooth candy head, further smoothed by those solvent seconds in Jane's mouth, did have a relation to Jenny's round face—the washed-out blue eyes with their steady gaze, the blond hair so fine it lay flat on her head like paint, a certain blankness of expression that had something faintly challenging and defiant and, yes, galling about it.

'That's good,' Alexandra said, 'but you also need something more inumate. Blood is best. The old rec­ipes used to call for sang de menstrues. And hair, of course. Fingernail clippings.'

'Belly-button lint,' chimed in Sukie, silly on two bourbons.

'Excrement,' Alexandra solemnly continued, 'though if you're not in Africa or China that's hard to come by.'

'Hold on. Don't go away,' Jane said, and left the room.

Sukie laughed. 'I should write a story for the Prov­idence Journal-Bulletin, 'The Flush Toilet and the Demise of Witchcraft.' They said I could submit fea­tures as a free-lancer to them if I wanted to get back into writing.' She had kicked off her shoes and curled her legs under her as she leaned on one arm of Jane's acid-green sofa. In this era even women well into mid­dle age wore miniskirts, and Sukie's kittenish posture exposed almost all the thigh she had, plus her freck­led, gleaming knees, perfect as eggs. She was in a wool pullover dress scarcely longer than a sweater, sharp orange in color; this color made with the sofa's vile green the arresting clash one finds everywhere in Cezanne's landscapes and that would be ugly were it not so oddly, boldly beautiful. Sukie's face wore that tipsy slurred look—eyes too moist and sparkling, lip­stick rubbed away but for the rims by too much smil­ing and chattering—that Alexandra found sexy. She even found sexy Sukie's least successful feature, her short, fat, and rather unchiselled nose. There was no doubt, Alexandra thought to herself dispassionately, that since Van Home's marriage her heart had slipped its moorings, and that away from the shared unhappiness of these two friends there was little but deso­lation. She could pay no attention to her children; she could see their mouths move but the sounds that came out were jabber in a foreign language.

'Aren't you still doing real estate?' she asked Sukie.

'Oh I am, honey. But it's such thin pickings. There are these hundreds of other divorcees running around in the mud showing houses.'

'You made that sale to the Hallybreads.'

'I know I did, but that just about brought me even with my debts. Now I'm slipping back into the red again and I'm getting desperate.' Sukie smiled broadly, her lips spreading like cushions sat on. She patted the empty place beside her. 'Gorgeous, come over and sit by me. I feel I'm shouting. The acoustics in this hideous little house, I don't know how she can stand hearing herself.'

Jane had gone up the little half-flight of stairs to where the bedrooms were in this split-level, and now returned with a linen hand towel folded to hold some delicate treasure. Her aura was the incandescent pur­ple of Siberian iris, and pulsed in excitement. 'Last night,' she said, 'I was so upset and angry about all this I couldn't sleep and finally got up and rubbed myself all over with aconite and Noxema hand cream, with just a little bit of that fine gray ash you get after you put the oven on automatic cleaner, and flew to the Lenox place. It was wonderful! The spring peep­ers are all out, and the higher you get in the air the better you can hear them for some reason. At Darryl's, they were all still downstairs, though it was after mid­night. There was this kind of Caribbean music that they make on oil drums pouring full blast out of the stereo, and some cars in the driveway I didn't rec­ognize. I found a bedroom window open a couple of inches and slid it up, ever so carefully—'

'Janie, this is so thrilling!' Sukie cried. 'Suppose Needlenose had smelled you! Or Thumbkin!'

For Thumbkin, Van Home had solemnly assured them, beneath her fluffy shape was the incarnate soul of an eighteenth-century Newport barrister who had embezzled from his firm to feed his opium habit (he had been hooked during spells of the terrible tooth­aches and abscesses common to all ages before ours) and, to save