The Witches of Eastwick

himself from prison and his family from disgrace, had pledged his spirit after death to the dark powers. The little cat could assume at will the form of a panther, a ferret, or a hippogriff.

'A dab of Ivory detergent in the ointment quite kills the scent, I find,' Jane said, displeased by the interruption.

'Go on, go on,' Sukie begged. 'You opened the window—do you think they sleep in the same bed? How can she stand it? That body so cold and clammy under the fur. He was like opening the door of a refrigerator with something spoiling in it.'

'Let Jane tell her story,' Alexandra said, a mother to them both. The last time she had attempted flight, her astral body had lifted off and her material body had been left behind in the bed, looking so small and pathetic she had felt a terrible rush of shame in mid­air, and had fled back into her heavy shell.

'I could hear the party downstairs,' Jane said. 'I think I heard Ray Neff's voice, trying to lead some singing. I found a bathroom, the one that she uses.'

'How could you be sure?' Sukie asked.

'I know her style by now. Prim on the outside, messy on the inside. Lipsticky Kleenexes everywhere, one of those cardboard circles that hold the Pill so you don't forget the right day lying around all punched out, combs full of long hair. She dyes it, by the way. A whole bottle of pale Clairol right there on the sink. And pancake make-up and blusher, things I'd die before ever using. I'm a hag and I know it and a hag is what I want to look like.'

'Baby, you're beautiful,' Sukie told her. 'You have raven hair. And naturally tortoiseshell eyes. And you take a tan. I wish I did. Nobody can take a freckled person quite seriously, for some reason. People think I'm being funny even when I feel lousy.'

'What did you bring back in that sweetly folded towel?' Alexandra asked Jane.

'That's his towel. I stole it,' Jane told them. Yet the delicate script monogram seemed to be a P or a Q. 'Look. I went through the wastebasket under the bathroom sink.' Carefully Jane unfolded the rose-colored hand towel upon a spidery jumble of dis­carded intimate matter: long hairs pulled in billowing snarls from a comb, a Kleenex bearing a tawny stain in its crumpled center, a square of toilet paper holding the vulval image of freshly lipsticked lips being blot­ted, a tail of cotton from a pill bottle, the scarlet pull thread of a Band-Aid, strands of used dental floss. 'Best of all,' Jane said, 'these little specks—can you see them? Look close. Those were in the bathtub, on the bottom and stuck in the ring—she doesn't even have the decency to wash out a tub when she uses it. I dampened the towel and wiped them up. They're leg hairs. She shaved her legs in the bath.'

'Oh that's nice,' Sukie said. 'You're scary, Jane. You've taught me now to always wash out the tub.'

'Do you think this is enough?' Jane asked Alex­andra. The eyes that Sukie had called tortoiseshell in truth looked paler, with the unsteady glow of embers.

'Enough for what?' But Alexandra already knew, she had read Jane's mind; knowing chafed that sore place in Alexandra's abdomen, the sore place that had begun the other night, with too much reality to digest.

'Enough to make the charm,' Jane answered.

'Why ask me? Make the charm yourself and see how it goes.'

'Oh no, dearie. I've already said. We don't have your—how can I put it?—access. To the deep cur­rents. Sukie and I are like pins and needles, we can prick and scratch and that's about it.'

Alexandra turned to Sukie. 'Where do you stand on this?'

Sukie tried, high on whiskey as she was, to make a thoughtful mouth; her upper lip bunched adorably over her slightly protruding teeth. 'Jane and I have talked about it on the phone, a little. We do want you to do it with us. We do. It should be unanimous, like a vote. You know, by myself last fall I cast a little spell to bring you and Darryl together, and it worked up to a point. But only up to a point. To be honest, honey, I think my powers are lessening all the lime. Every­thing seems drab. I looked at Darryl the other night and he looked all slapped together somehow—I think he's running scared.'

'Then why not let Jenny have him?'

'No,' Jane interposed. 'She mustn't. She stole him.

She made fools of us.' Her s's lingered like a smoky odor in the long ugly scarred room. Beyond the little flights of stairs that went down to the kitchen area and up to the bedrooms, a distant, sizzling, murmur­ing sound signified that Jane's children were engrossed in television. There had been another assassination, somewhere. The President was giving speeches only at military installations. The body count was up but so was enemy infiltration.

Alexandra still turned to Sukie, hoping to be relieved of this looming necessity. 'You cast a spell to bring me and Darryl together that day of the high tide? He wasn't attracted to me by himself?'

'Oh I'm sure he was, baby,' Sukie said, but shrug-gingly. 'Anyway who can tell? I used that green gar­dener's twine to tie the two of you together and I checked under the bed the other day and rats or some­thing had nibbled it through, maybe for the salt that rubbed off from my hands.'

'That wasn't very nice,' Jane told Sukie, 'when you knew I wanted him myself.'

This was the moment for Sukie to tell Jane that she liked Alexandra better; instead she said, 'We all wanted him, but I figured you could get what you wanted by yourself. And you did. You were over there all the time, fiddling away, if that's what you want to call it.'

Alexandra's vanity had been stung. She said, 'Oh hell. Let's do it.' It seemed simplest, a way of cleaning up another tiny pocket of the world's endless dirt.

Taking care not to touch any of it with their hands, lest their own essences—the salt and oil from their skins, their multitudinous personal bacteria—become involved, the three of them shook the Kleenexes and the long blond hairs and the red Band-Aid thread and, most important, the fine specks of leg bristle, that jumped in the weave of the towel like live mites, into a ceramic ashtray Jane had stolen from the Bronze Barrel in the days when she would go there after rehearsal with the Neffs. She added the staring sugar head she had saved in her mouth and lit the little pyre with a paper match. The Kleenexes blazed orange, the hairs crackled blue and emitted the stink of singe­ ing, the marzipan reduced itself to a bubbling black curdle. The smoke lifted to the ceiling and hung like a cobweb on the artificial surface, papery plasterboard roughed with a coat of sand-impregnated paint to feign real