The Witches of Eastwick

Sukie's upper lip crinkled in unspoken reproval; she went on, 'Apparently there was no sincerity prob­lem with Dawn and she was taken right in with the bigwigs, tripping out every night somewhere in the East Village while Ed was blowing himself up in Hoboken. Her guess is, his hands trembled connect­ing two wires; the diet and funny hours underground had been getting to him. He wasn't so hot in bed either, I guess she realized.'

'It dawned on her,' Jane said, and improved this to, 'Uncame the Dawn.'

'Who told you all this?' Alexandra asked Sukie, irritated by Jane's manner. 'Did you go up and talk to the girl at the Superette?'

'Oh no, that bunch scares me, they even have some blacks in it now, I don't know where they come from, the south Providence ghetto I guess. I walk on the other side of the street usually. The Hallybreads told me. The girl is back in town and doesn't want to stay with her stepfather in the trailer in Coddington Junc­tion any more, so she's living over the Armenians' store and cleaning houses for cigarette or whatever money, and the Hallybreads use her twice a week. I guess she's made Rose into a mother confessor. Rose has this awful back and can't even pick up a broom without wanting to scream.'

'How come,' Alexandra asked, 'you know so much about the Hallybreads?'

'Oh,' said Sukie, gazing upward toward the ceiling, which was tinkling and rumbling with the muffled sounds of television, 'I go over there now and then for R and R since Toby and I broke up. The Hally­breads are quite amusing, when she's not in one of her moods.'

'What happened between you and Toby?' Jane asked. 'You seemed so...satisfied.'

'He got fired. This Providence syndicate that owns the Word thought the paper wasn't sexy enough under his management. And I must say, he did do a lack­adaisical job; these Jewish mothers, they really spoil their boys. I'm thinking of applying for editor. If peo­ple like Brenda Parsley can take over these men's jobs I don't see why I can't.'

'Your boyfriends,' Alexandra observed, 'don't have very good luck.'

'I wouldn't call Arthur a boyfriend,' Sukie said. 'To me being with him is just like reading a book, he knows so much.'

'I wasn't thinking of Arthur. Is he a boyfriend?'

'Is he having any bad luck?' Jane asked.

Sukie's eyes went round; she had assumed every­body knew. 'Oh nothing, just these fibrillations. Doc Pat tells him people can live with them years and years, if they keep the digitalis handy. But he hates the fibrillating; like a bird is caught in his chest, he says.'

Both her friends, with their veiled boasting of new lovers, were in Alexandra's eyes pictures of health— sleek and tan, growing strong on Jenny's death, pull­ing strength from it as from a man's body. Jane svelte and brown in her sandals and mini, and Sukie too wearing that summer glow Eastwick women got: terrycloth shorts that made her bottom look high and puffbally, and a peacocky shimmering dashiki her breasts twitched in a way that indicated no bra. Imag­ine being Sukie's age, thirty-three, and daring wear no bra! Ever since she was thirteen Alexandra had envied these pert-chested naturally slender girls, blithely eating and eating while her own spirit was saddled with stacks of flesh ready to topple into fat any time she took a second helping. Envious tears rose itching in her sinuses. Why was she mired so in life when a witch should dance, should skim? 'We can't go on with it,' she blurted out through the vodka as it tugged at the odd angles of the spindly little room. 'We must undo the spell.'

'But how, dear?' Jane asked, flicking an ash from a red-filtered cigarette into the paisley-patterned dish from which Sukie had eaten all the pecans and then (Jane) sighing smokily, impatiently, through her nose, as if, having read Alexandra's mind, she had foreseen this tiresome outburst.

'We can't just kill her like this,' Alexandra went on, rather enjoying now the impression she must be making, of a blubbery troublesome big sister.

'Why not?' Jane dryly asked. 'We kill people in our minds all the time. We erase mistakes. We re­arrange priorities.'

'Maybe it's not our spell at all,' Sukie offered. 'Maybe we're being conceited. After all, she's in the hands of hospitals and doctors and they have all these instruments and counters and whatnot that don't lie.'

'They do lie,' Alexandra said. 'All those scientific things lie. There must be a form we can follow to undo it,' she pleaded. 'If we all three concentrated.'

'Count me out,' Jane said. 'Ceremonial magic really bores me, I've decided. It's too much like kindergar­ten. My whisk is still a mess from all that wax. And my children keep asking me what that thing in tinfoil was; they picked right up on it and I'm afraid are telling their friends. Don't forget, you two, I'm still hoping to get a church of my own, and a lot of gossip does not impress the good folk in a position to hire choirmasters.'

'How can you be so callous?' Alexandra cried, deliciously feeling her emotions wash up against Sukie's slender antiques—the oval tilt-top table, the rush-seat three-legged Shaker chair—like a tidal wave carrying sticks of debris to the beach. 'Don't you see how hor­rible it is? All she ever did was he asked her and she said yes, what else could she say?'

'I think it's rather amusing,' Jane said, shaping her cigarette ash to a sharp point on the paisley sau­cer's brass edge. ''Jenny died the other day,'' she added, as if quoting.

'Honey,' Sukie said to Alexandra, 'I'm honestly afraid it's out of our hands.'

''Never was there such a lay,'' Jane was going on.

'You didn't do it, at worst you were the conduit. We all were.'

''Youths and maidens, let us pray.'' quoted Jane, evidently concluding.

'We were just being used by the universe.'

A certain pride of craft infected Alexandra. 'You two couldn't have done it without me; I was so ener­getic, such a good organizer! It felt wonderful, admin­istering that horrible power!' Now it felt wonderful, her grief battering these walls and faces and things— the sea chest, the needlepoint stool, the thick lozenge panes—as if with massive pillows, the clouds of her agitation and remorse.