The Witches of Eastwick

'It is scary, sweet,' Sukie said. 'For it to have been so effective. She's back in the hospital.'

'Of course we don't really know that it was it.'

'We do, though,' Sukie said, not smiling and her lips therefore looking strange, bunchy. 'We know. It was it.' She seemed subdued, a girl reporter again in her raincoat. She had been rehired at the Word. Selling real estate, she had told Alexandra more than once over the telephone, was just too chancy, too ulcer-producing, waiting for things to click, wondering if you might have said something more subliminally per­ suasive in that crucial moment when the clients first see the house, or when they're standing around in the basement with the husband trying to look sage about the pipes and the wife terrified of rats. And then when a deal does go through the fee usually has to be split three or four ways. It really was giving her ulcers: a little dry pain just under the ribs, higher than you'd imagine, and worst at night.

'Want a drink?'

'Afterwards. It's early. Arthur says I shouldn't drink a drop until my stomach gets back in shape. Have you ever tried Maalox? God, you taste chalk every time you burp. Anyway'—she smiled, a flash of her old self, the fat upper lip stretched so its unpainted inner side showed above her bright, big, outcurved teeth— 'I'd feel guilty having a drink without Jane here.'

'Poor Jane.'

Sukie knew what she meant, though it had hap­pened a week before. That dreadful Doberman pinscher had chewed Jane's cello to pieces one night when she didn't put it back in its case.

'Do they think it's for good this time?' Alexandra asked.

Sukie intuited that Alexandra meant Jenny in the hospital. 'Oh, you know how they are, they would never say that. More tests is all they ever say. How're your own complaints?'

'I'm trying to stop complaining. They come and go. Maybe it's premenopausal. Or post-Joe. You know about Joe?—he really has given up on me.'

Sukie nodded, letting her smile sink down slowly over her teeth. 'Jane blames them. For all our aches and pains. She even blames them for the cello tragedy. You'd think she could blame herself for that.'

At the mention of them, Alexandra was momentar­ily distracted from the sore of guilt she carried some­times in the left ovary, sometimes in the small of her back, and lately under her armpits, where Jenny had once asked her to investigate. Once it gets to the lymph glands, according to something Alexandra remem­bered reading or seeing on television, it's too late. 'Who of them does she blame specifically?'

'Well for some reason she's fastened on that grubby little Dawn. I don't think myself a kid like that has it in her yet. Greta is pretty potent, and so would Brenda be if she could stop putting on airs. From what Arthur lets slip, for that matter. Rose is no bargain to tangle with: he finds her a very tough cookie, otherwise I guess they'd have been divorced long ago. She doesn't want it.'

'I do hope he doesn't go after her with a poker.'

'Listen, darling. That was never my idea of the way to solve the wife problem. I was once a wife myself, you know.'

'Who wasn't? I wasn't thinking of you at all, dear heart, it was the house I'd blame if it happened again. Certain spiritual grooves get worn into a place, don't you believe?'

'I don't know. Mine needs paint.'

'So does mine.'

'Maybe we should go look for that thing before it rains.'

'You are nice to help me.'

'Well, I feel badly too. In a way. Up to a point. And I spend all my time chasing around in the Corvair on wild- goose chases anyway. It keeps skidding and getting out of control, I wonder if it's the car or me. Ralph Nader hates that model.' They passed through the kitchen into Alexandra's workroom. 'What on earth is that? '

'I wish 1 knew. It began as an enormous something for a public square, visions of Calder and Moore I suppose. I thought if it came out wonderfully I could get it cast in bronze; after all the papier-mache I want to do something permanent. And the carpentry and banging around are good for sexual deprivation. But the arms won't stay up. Pieces keep falling off in the night.'

'They've hexed it.'

'Maybe. I certainly cut myself a lot handling all the wire; don't you just hate the way wire coils and snarls? So I'm trying now to make it more life-size. Don't look so doubtful. It might take off. I'm not totally dis­couraged.'

'How about your little ceramic bathing beauties, the bubbies?'

'I can't do them any more, after that. I get phys­ically nauseated, thinking of her face melting, and the wax, and the tacks.'

'You ought to try an ulcer some time. I never knew where the duodenum was before.'

'Yes, but the bubbies were my bread and butter. I thought some fresh clay might inspire me so I drove over to Coventry last week and this house where I used to buy my lovely kaolin was all in this tacky new aluminum siding. Puke green. The widow who had owned it had died over the winter, of a heart attack hauling wood the woman of the family that has it now said, and her husband doesn't want to be both­ered with selling clay; he wants a swimming pool and a patio in the back yard. So that ends that.'

'You look great, though. I think you're losing weight.'

'Isn't that another of the symptoms?'

They made their way through the old potting shed and stepped into the back yard, which needed a mow­ing. First the dandelions had been rampant, now the crabgrass. Fungi—blobs of brown loaded by nature with simples