The Witches of Eastwick

transparent brown thicket floored, between tummocks of matted grass, with bubbled bluish ice; in summer it became a solid tangle of green leaf and black stalk, fern and burdock and wild raspberry, that the eye could not (ravel into for more than a few feet, and where no one would ever step, the thorns and the dampness underfoot being too forbidding. As a girl, until that age at about the sixth grade when boys become self-conscious about your playing games with them, she had been good at Softball; now she reared back and threw the charm— mere wax and pins, so light it sailed as if she had flung a rock on the moon—as deep into this flourishing opacity as she could. Perhaps it would find a patch of slimy water and sink. Perhaps red-winged blackbirds would peck its tinfoil apart to adorn their nests. Alex­andra willed it to be gone, swallowed up, dissolved, forgiven by nature's seethe.

The three at last arranged a Thursday when they could face one another again, at Sukie's tiny house on Hemlock Lane. 'Isn't this cozy!' Jane Smart cried, coming in late, wearing almost nothing: plastic sandals and a gingham mini with the shoulder straps tied at the back of the neck so as not to mar her tan. She turned a smooth mocha color, but the aged skin under her eyes remained crepey and white and her left leg showed a livid ripple of varicose vein, a little train of half-submerged bumps, like those murky photo­graphs with which people try to demonstrate the exis­tence of the Loch Ness monster. Still, Jane was vital, a thick-skinned sun hag in her element. 'God, she looks terrible!' she crowed, and settled in one of Sukie's ratty armchairs with a martini. The martini was the slippery color of mercury and the green olive hung within it like a red-irised reptile eye.

'Who?' Alexandra asked, knowing full well who.

'The darling Mrs. Van Horne, of course,' Jane answered. 'Even in bright sunlight she looks like she's indoors, right there on Dock Street in the middle of July. She had the gall to come up to me, though I was trying to duck discreetly into the Yapping Fox.'

'Poor thing,' Sukie said, stuffing some salted pecan halves into her mouth and chewing with a smile. She wore a cooler shade of lipstick in the summer and the bridge of her little amorphous nose bore flakes of an old sunburn.

'Her hair I guess has fallen out with the chemo­therapy so she wears a kerchief now,' Jane said. 'Rather dashing, actually.'

'What did she say to you?' Alexandra asked.

'Oh, she was all isn't-this-nice and Darryl-and-I-never-see-you-any-more and do-come-over-we're-swimming- in-the-salt-marsh-these-days. I gave her back as good as I got. Really. What hypocrisy. She hates our guts, she must.'

'Did she mention her disease?' Alexandra asked.

'Not a word. All smiles. 'What lovely weather!' 'Have you heard Arthur Hallybread has bought himself a darling little Herreshoff daysailer?' That's how she's decided to play it with us.'

Alexandra thought of telling them about Jenny's call a month ago but hesitated to expose Jenny's plea to mockery. But then she thought that her true loyalty was to her sisters, to the coven. 'She called me a month ago,' she said, 'about swollen glands she was imag­ining everywhere. She wanted to come see me. As if I could heal her.'

'How very quaint,' Jane said. 'What did you tell her?'

'I told her no. I really don't want to see her, it would be too conflicting. What I did do, though, I confess, was take the damn charm and chuck it into that messy bog behind my place.'

Sukie sat up, nearly nudging the dish of pecans off the arm of her chair but deftly catching it as it slipped. 'Why, sugar, what an extraordinary thing to do, after working so hard on the wax and all! You're losing your witchiness!'

'I don't know, am I? Chucking it doesn't seem to have made any difference, not if she's gone on chemotherapy.'

'Bob Osgood,' Jane said smugly, 'is good friends with Doc Pat, and Doc Pat says she's really riddled with it— liver, pancreas, bone marrow, earlobes, you name it. Entre nous and all that, Bob said Doc Pat said if she lives two more months it'll be a miracle. She knows it, too. The chemotherapy is just to placate Darryl; he's frantic, evidently.'

Now that Jane had taken this bald little banker Bob Osgood as her lover, two vertical dents between her eyebrows had smoothed a little and there was a cheer­ful surge to her utterances, as though she were bowing them upon her own vibrant vocal cords. Alexandra had never met Jane's Brahmin mother but supposed this was how voices were pushed into the air above the teacups of the Back Bay.

'There are remissions,' Alexandra protested, with­out conviction; strength had flowed out of her and now was diffused into nature and moving on the astral currents beyond this room.

'You great big huggable sweet thing you,' Jane Smart said, leaning toward her so the line where the tan on her breasts ended showed within the neck of loose gingham, 'whatever has come over our Alex­andra? If it weren't for this creature you'd be over there now; you'd be the mistress of Toad Hall. He came to Eastwick looking for a wife and it should have been you.'

'We wanted it to be you,' Sukie said.

'Piffle,' Alexandra said. 'I think either one of you would have grabbed at the chance. Especially you, Jane. You did an awful lot of cocksucking in some noble cause or other.'

'Babies, let's not bicker,' Sukie pleaded. 'Let's have our cozy time. Speaking of seeing people downtown, you'll never guess who I saw last night hanging around in front of the Superette!'

'Andy Warhol,' Alexandra idly guessed.

'Dawn Polanski!'

'Ed's little slut?' Jane asked. 'She was blown up by that explosion in New Jersey.'

'They never found any parts of her, just some clothes,' Sukie reminded the others. 'Evidently she had moved out of this pad they all shared in Hoboken to Manhattan, where the real cell was. The revolu­tionaries never really trusted Ed, he was too old and loo square, and that's why they put him on this bomb detail, to test his sincerity.'

Jane laughed unkindly, but with that toney vibrato to her cackle now. 'The one quality I never doubted in Ed. He was sincerely an ass.'