The Witches of Eastwick

egg. Anyway. You're doing fine.'

'But I'm not, Lexa. Something's very wrong.'

Her voice in the older woman's mind's eye lifted toward her like a face holding itself up to be scrubbed, a grit of hoarseness upon its cheeks. 'What's very wrong?' Her own voice was like a tarpaulin or great dropcloth which in being spread out on the earth catches some air under it and lifts in a bubble, a soft wave of hollowness.

'I'm tired all the time,' Jenny said, 'and not much appetite. I'm subconsciously so hungry I keep having these dreams of food, but when I sit down to the reality I can't make myself eat. And other things. Pains in the night that come and go. My nose runs all the time. It's embarrassing; Darryl says I snore at night, which I never did before in my whole life. Remember those lumps I tried to show you and you couldn't find?'

'Yes. Vaguely.' The sensations of that casual hunt rushed horribly into her fingertips.

'Well, there are more. In the, in the groin, and up under my ears. Isn't that where the lymph nodes are?'

Jenny's ears had never been pierced, and she was always losing little childish clip-on earrings in the tub room, on the black slates, among the cushions. 'I really don't know, honey. You should see a doctor if you're worried.'

'Oh I did. Doc Pat. He sent me to the Westwick Hospital to have tests.'

'And did the tests show anything?'

'They said not really; but then they want me to have more tests. They're all so cagey and grave and talk in this funny voice, as though I'm a naughty child who might pee on their shoes if they don't keep me at a distance. They're scared of me. By being sick at all I'm showing them up somehow. They say things like my white-cell count is 'just a bit out of the high normal range.' They know I worked at a big city hos­pital and that puts them on the defensive, but I don't know anything about systemic disorders, I saw frac­tures and gallstones mostly. It would all be silly except at night when I lie down I can feel something's not right, something's working at me. They keep asking me if I'd been exposed to much radiation. Well of course I'd worked with it at Michael Reese but they're so careful, draping you in lead and putting you in this thick glass booth when you throw the switch, all I could think of was, in my early teens just before we moved to Eastwick and were still in Warwick, I had an awful lot of dental X-rays when they were straight­ening my teeth; my mouth was a mess as a girl.'

'Your teeth look lovely now.'

'Thank you. It cost Daddy money he didn't really have, but he was determined to have me beautiful. He loved me, Lexa.'

'I'm sure he did, darling,' Alexandra said, pressing down on her voice; the air caught under the tarpaulin was growing, struggling like a wild animal made of wind.

'He loved me so much,' Jenny was blurting. 'How could he do that to me, hang himself? How could he leave me and Chris so alone? Even if he were in jail for murder, it would be better than this. They wouldn't have given him too much, the awful way he did it couldn't have been premeditated.'

'You have Darryl,' Alexandra told her.

'I do and I don't. You know how he is. You know him better than I do; I should have talked to you before I went ahead with it. You might have been better for him, I don't know. He's courteous and attentive and all that but he's not there for me some­how. His mind is always elsewhere, with his projects I guess. Alexandra, please let me come and see you. I won't stay long, I really won't. I just need to be... touched,' she concluded, her voice retracted, curling under almost sardonically while voicing this last, naked plea.

'My dear, I don't know what you want from me,'

Alexandra lied flatly, needing to flatten all this, to erase the smeared face rising in her mind's eye, rising so close she could see flecks of grit, 'but I don't have it to give. Honestly. You made your choice and I wasn't part of it. That's fine. No reason I should have been part of it. But I can't be part of your life now. I just can't. There isn't that much of me.'

'Sukie and Jane wouldn't like it, your seeing me,' Jenny suggested, to give Alexandra's hard-heartedness a rationale.

'I'm speaking for myself. I don't want to get re-involved with you and Darryl now. I wish you both well but for my sake I don't want to see you. It would just be too painful, frankly. As to this illness, it sounds to me as if you're letting your imagination torment you. At any rate you're in the hands of doctors who can do more for you than I can.'

'Oh.' The distant voice had shrunk itself to the size of a dot, to something mechanical like a dial tone. 'I'm not sure that's true.'

When she hung up, Alexandra's hands were trem­bling. All the familiar angles and furniture of her house looked askew, as if wrenched by the disparity between their moral distance from her—things, immune from sin—and their physical closeness. She went into her workroom and took one of the chairs there, an old arrow-back Windsor whose seat was spat­tered with paint and dried plaster and paste, and brought it into the kitchen. She set it below the high kitchen shelf and stood on it and reached up to retrieve the foil-wrapped object she had hidden up there on returning from Jane's house this April. The thing startled her by feeling warm to her fingers: warm air collects up near a ceiling, she thought to herself in vague explanation. Hearing her stirring about, Coal padded out from his nap corner, and she had to lock him in the kitchen behind her, lest he follow her out­doors and think what she was about to do was a game of toss and fetch.

Passing through her workroom, Alexandra stepped around an overweening armature of pine two-by-fours and one-by-twos and twisted coathangers and chicken wire, for she had taken it into her head to attempt a giant sculpture, big enough for a public space like Kazmierczak Square. Past the workroom lay, in the rambling layout of this house lived in by eight gen­erations of farmers, a dirt-floored transitional area used formerly as a potting shed and by Alexandra as a storage place, its walls thick with the handles of shovels and hoes and rakes, its stepping- space nar­rowed by tumbled stacks of old clay pots and by opened bags of peat moss and bone meal, its jerrybuilt shelves littered with rusted hand trowels and brown bottles of stale pesticide. She unlatched the crude door— parallel beaded boards held together by a Z of bracing lumber—and stepped into hot sunlight; she carried her little package, glittering and warm, across the lawn.

The frenzy of June growth was upon all the earth: the lawn needed mowing, the border beds of button mums needed weeding, the tomato plants and peonies needed propping. Insects chewed at the silence; sun­light pressed on Alexandra's face and she could feel the hair of her single thick braid heat up like an elec­tric coil. The bog at the back of her property, beyond the tumbled fieldstone wall clothed in poison ivy and Virginia creeper, was in winter a