The Witches of Eastwick

'Really, Alexandra,' Jane said. 'You don't seem yourself.'

'I know I don't. I've felt terrible for days. I don't know what it is. My left ovary, before every other period, it really hurts. And at night, the small of my back, such pain I wake up and have to lie curled on my side.'

'Oh you poor big sad yummy thing,' Sukie said, getting up and taking a step so the tips of her breasts jiggled the shimmering dashiki. 'You need a back rub.'

'Yes I do,' Alexandra pouted.

'Come on. Stretch out on the sofa. Jane, move over.'

'I'm so scared.' Sniffles spiced Alexandra's words, stinging high in her nostrils. 'Why would it be just the ovary, unless...'

'You need a new lover,' Jane told her, dropping the r in her curt fashion. How did she know? Alex­andra had told Joe she didn't want to see him any more but this time he had not called back, and the days of his silence had become weeks.

'Hitch up your pretty blouse,' Sukie said, though it was not a pretty blouse but one of Oz's old shirts, with collar points that refused to lie down, because the plastic stays were lost, and an indelible food stain near the second button. Sukie bared the bra strap, the snaps were undone, a pang of expansion flooded Alexandra's chest cavity. Sukie's narrow fingers began to work in circles. The rough cushion Alexandra's nose was against smelled comfortingly of damp dog. She closed her eyes.

'And maybe a nice thigh rub,' Jane's voice declared. Clinks and a rustle described how she set down her glass and crushed out her cigarette. 'Our lumbar ten­sion builds up at the backs of our thighs and needs to be released.' Her fingers with their hardened tips tried to release it, pinching, caressing, trailing the nails back and forth for a pianissimo effect.

'Jenny—' Alexandra began, remembering that girl's silky massages.

'We're not hurting Jenny,' Sukie crooned.

'DNA is hurting Jenny,' Jane said. 'D'naughty DNA.'

In a few minutes Alexandra had been tranced nearly to sleep. Sukie's awful-looking Weimaraner, Hank, trotted into the room with his lolling lilac-colored tongue and they played this game: Jane set a row of Wheat Thins along the backs of Alexandra's legs and Hank licked them off. Then they placed some on Alexandra's back, where her shirt had been tugged up. His tongue was rough and wet and warm and slightly adhesive, like a huge snail's foot; back and forth it flip-flopped on the repeatedly set table of Alex­andra's skin. The dog, like his mistress, loved starchy snacks but, surfeited at last, he looked at the women wonderingly and begged them with his eyes—balls of topaz, with a violet cloud at each center—to desist.

Though the other churches in Eastwick suffered a decided falling-off in attendance during the summer rebirth of sun worship, Unitarian services, never crowded, held their own; indeed they were aug­mented by vacationers from the metropolises, com­fortably fixed religious liberals in red slacks and linen jackets, splashy-patterned cotton smocks and beribboned garden hats. These and the regulars—the Neffs, the Richard Smiths, Herbie Prinz, Alma Sifton, Homer and Franny Lovecraft, the young Mrs. Van Home, and a relative newcomer in town, Rose Hal­lybread, without her agnostic husband but with her protegee, Dawn Polanski—were surprised, once 'Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow' had been wanly sung (Darryl Van Home's baritone contribut­ing scratchy harmony in the balcony choir), to hear the word 'evil' emerge from Brenda Parsley's mouth. It was not a word often heard in this chaste nave.

Brenda looked splendid in her open black robe and pleated jabot and white silk cravat, her sun-bleached hair pulled tightly back from her high and shining forehead. 'There is evil in the world and there is evil in this town,' she pronounced ringingly, then dropped her voice to a lower, confiding register that yet carried to every corner of the neoclassic old sanctuary. Pink hollyhocks nodded in the lower panes of the tall clear windows; in the higher panes a cloudless July day called to those penned in the white box pews to get out, out into their boats, onto the beach and the golf courses and tennis courts, to go have a Bloody Mary on someone's new redwood deck with a view of the Bay and Conanicut Island. The Bay would be crack­ling with sunshine, the island would appear as purely verdant as when the Narragansett Indians lived there. 'It is not a word we like to use,' Brenda explained, in the diffident tone of a psychiatrist who after years of mute listening has begun to be directive at last. 'We prefer to say 'unfortunate' or 'lacking' or 'misguided' or 'disadvantaged.' We prefer to think of evil as the absence of good, a momentary relenting of its sun­shine, a shadow, a weakening. For the world of good: Emerson and Whitman, Buddha and Jesus have taught us that. Our own dear valiant Anne Hutchinson believed in a covenant of grace, as opposed to a cov­ enant of works, and defied—this mother of fifteen and gentle midwife to sisters uncounted and uncount­able—the sexist world-hating clergy of Boston in behalf of her belief, a belief for which she was even­tually to die.'

For the last time, thought Jenny Van Home, the exact blue of such a July day falls into my eyes. My lids lift, my corneas admit the light, my lenses focus it, my retinas and optic nerve report it to the brain. Tomorrow the Earth's poles will tilt a day more toward August and autumn, and a slightly different tincture of light and vapor will be distilled. All year, without knowing it, she had been saying good-bye to each season, each sub-season and turn of weather, each graduated moment of fall's blaze and shedding, of winter's freeze, of daylight gaining on the hardening ice, and of that vernal moment when the snowdrops and croci are warmed into bloom out of matted brown grass in that intimate area on the sunward side of stone walls, as when lovers cup their breath against the beloved's neck; she had been saying good-bye, for the seasons would not wheel around again for her. Days one spends so freely in haste and preoccupation, in adolescent self-concern and in childhood's joyous boredom, there really is an end to them, a closing of the sky like the shutter of a vast camera. These thoughts made Jenny giddy where she sat; Greta Neff, sensing her thoughts, reached into her lap and squeezed her hand.

'As we have turned outward to the evil in the world at large,' Brenda was splendidly saying, gazing upward toward the back balcony with its disused pipe organ, its tiny choir, 'turned our indignation outward toward evil wrought in Southeast Asia by fascist politicians and an oppressive capitalism seeking to secure and enlarge its markets for anti-ecological luxuries, while we have been so turned we have been guilty—yes, guilty, for guilt attaches to omissions as well as com­missions—guilty of overlooking evil brewing in these very homes of Eastwick, our tranquil, solid-appearing homes. Private discontent and personal frustration have brewed mischief out of superstitions which our ancestors pronounced heinous and which indeed'— Brenda's voice dropped beautifully, into a kind of calm soft surprise, a teacher soothing a pair of parents without gainsaying a dreadful report card, a female efficiency-expert apologetically threatening a bluster­ing executive with dismissal—'are heinous.'

Yet behind that shutter must be an eye, the eye of a great Being, and in a premonition not unlike her father's some months before Jenny had come to repose a faith in that Being's custody of her even while her new friends, and those humanoid machines at the Westwick Hospital, fought for her life. Having herself worked in a hospital those years, Jenny knew how bleakly statistical in the end were the results obtained by all that so amiably and expensively administered mercy. What she minded most was the nausea, the nausea that