The Witches of Eastwick

plaster.

'Now,' Alexandra said to Jane Smart. 'Do you have an old candle stump? Or some birthday candles in a drawer? The ashes must be crushed and mixed into about a half-cup of melted wax. Use a saucepan and butter it thoroughly first, bottom and sides; if any wax sticks, the spell is flawed.'

While Jane carried out this order in the kitchen, Sukie laid a hand on the other woman's forearm. 'Sweetie, I know you don't want to do this,' she said.

Caressing the delicate tendony offered hand, Alex­andra noticed how the freckles, thickly strewn on the back and the first knuckles, thinned toward the fin­gernails, as if this mixture had been insufficiently stirred. 'Oh but I do,' she said. 'It gives me a lot of pleasure. It's artistry. And I love the way you two believe in me so.' And without forethought she leaned and kissed Sukie on the complicated cushions of her lips.

Sukie stared. Her pupils contracted as the shadow of Alexandra's head moved off her green irises. 'But you had liked Jenny.'

'Only her body. The way I liked my children's bod­ies. Remember how they smelled as babies?'

'Oh Lexa: do you think any of us will ever have any more babies?'

It was Alexandra's turn to shrug. The question seemed sentimental, unhelpful. She asked Sukie, 'You know what witches used to make candles out of? Baby fat!' She stood, not altogether steadily. She had been drinking vodka, which does not stain the breath or transport too many calories but which also does not pass like a stream of neutrinos through the system altogether without effect. 'We must go help Jane in the kitchen.'

Jane had found an old box of birthday candles at the back of a drawer, pink and blue mixed. Melted together in the buttered saucepan, and the ashes from their tiny pyre stirred in with an egg whisk, the wax came out a pearly, flecked lavender-gray.

'Now what do you have for a mold?' Alexandra asked. They rummaged for cookie cutters, rejected a pate mold as much too big, considered demitasse cups and liqueur glasses, and settled on the underside of an old-fashioned heavy glass orange-juice squeezer, the kind shaped like a sombrero with a spout on the rim. Alexandra turned it upside down and deftly poured; the hot wax sizzled within the ridged cone but the glass didn't crack. She held the top side under running cold water and tapped on the edge of the sink until the convex cone of wax, still warm, fell into her hand. She gave it a squeeze to make it oblong. The incipient human form gazed up at her from her palm, dented four times by her fingers. 'Damn,' she said. 'We should have saved out a few strands of her hair.'

Jane said, 'I'll check to see if any is still clinging to the towel.'

'And do you have any orangesticks by any chance?' Alexandra asked her. 'Or a long nail file. To carve with. I could even make do with a hairpin.' Off Jane flew. She was used to taking orders—from Bach, from Popper, from a host of dead men. In her absence Alexandra explained to Sukie, 'The trick is not to take away more than you must. Every crumb has some magic in it now.'

She selected from the knives hanging on a magnetic bar a dull paring knife with a wooden handle bleached and softened by many trips through the dishwasher. She whittled in to make a neck, a waist. The crumbs fell on a ScotTowel spread on the Formica countertop. Balancing the crumbs on the tip of the knife, and with the other hand holding a lighted match under this tip, she dripped the wax back onto the emerging Fig­urine to form breasts. The subtler convexities of belly and thighs Alexandra also built up in this way. The legs she pared down to tiny feet in her style. The crumbs left over from this became—heated, dripped, and smoothed—the buttocks. All the time she held in her mind the image of the girl, how she had glowed at their baths. The arms were unimportant and were sculpted in low relief at the sides. The sex she firmly indicated with the tip of the knife held inverted and vertical. Other creases and contours she refined with the bevelled oval edge of the orange-stick Jane had fetched. Jane had found one more long hair clinging to the threads of the towel. She held it up to the window light and, though a single hair scarcely has color, it appeared neither black nor red in the tint of its filament, and paler, finer, purer than a strand from Alexandra's head would have been. 'I'm quite certain it's Jenny's,' she said.

'It better be,' Alexandra said, her voice grown husky through concentration upon the figure she was making. With the edge of the soft fragrant stick that pushed cuticles she pressed the single hair into the yielding lavender scalp.

'She has a head but no face,' Jane complained over her shoulder. Her voice jarred the sacred cone of concentration.

'We provide the face' was Alexandra's whispered answer. 'We know who it is and project it.'

'It feels like Jenny to me already,' said Sukie, who had attended so closely to the manufacture that Alex­andra had felt the other woman's breath flitting across her hands.

'Smoother,' Alexandra crooned to herself, using the rounded underside of a teaspoon. 'Jenny is smooooth.'

Jane criticized again: 'It won't stand up.'

'Her little women never do,' Sukie intervened.

'Shhh,' Alexandra said, protecting her incantatory tone. 'She must take this lying down. That's how we ladies do it. We take our medicine lying down.'

With the magic knife, the Athame, she incised grooves in imitation of Jenny's prim new Eva Peron hairdo on the litde simulacrum's head. Jane's com­plaint about the face nagged, so with the edge of the orange-stick she attempted the curved dents of eye sockets. The effect, of sudden sight out of the gray lump, was alarming. The hollow in Alexandra's abdo­men turned leaden. In attempting creation we take on creation's burden of guilt, of murder and irre­versibility. With the tine of a fork she pricked a navel into the figure's glossy abdomen: born, not made; tied like all of us to mother Eve. 'Enough,' Alexandra announced, dropping her tools with a clatter into the sink. 'Quickly, while the wax has a little warmth in it still. Sukie. Do you believe this is Jenny?'

'Why... sure, Alexandra, if you say so.'

'It's important that you believe. Hold her in your hands. Both hands.'

She did. Her thin freckled hands were trembling.

'Say to it—don't smile—say to it, 'You are Jenny. You must die.''

'You are Jenny. You must die.'