The Witches of Eastwick

and banes and palliatives—had materi­alized in the low damp spots of this neglected lawn during this moist summer. Even now, the mantle of clouds in the distance had developed those downward tails, travelling wisps, which mean rain is falling some­where. The wild area beyond the tumbled stone wall was itself a wall of weeds and wild raspberry canes. Alexandra knew about the briars and had put on rug­ged men's jeans; Sukie however was wearing under her raincoat a russet seersucker skirt and frilly maroon blouse, and on her feet open-toed heels oxblood in color.

'You're too pretty,' Alexandra said. 'Go back to the potting shed and put on those muddy Wellingtons somewhere around where the pitchfork is. That'll save your shoes and ankles at least. And bring the long-handled clippers, the one with the extra hinge in the jaw. In fact, why don't you just fetch the clippers and stay here in the yard? You've never been that much into nature and your sweet seersucker skin will get torn.'

'No, no,' Sukie said loyally. 'I'm curious now. It's like an Easter-egg hunt.'

When Sukie returned, Alexandra stood on the exact spot of grass, as best she remembered, and demon­strated how she had thrown the evil charm to be rid of it forever. The two friends then waded, clipping and wincing as they went, out into this little wilderness where a hundred species of plants were competing for sunlight and water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The area seemed limited and homogeneous—a smear of green—from the vantage of the back yard, but once they were immersed in it, it became a variegated jungle, a feverish clash of styles of leaf and stem, an implacable festering of protein chains as nature sought not only to thrust itself outward with root and runner and shoot but to attract insects and birds to its pollen and seeds. Some footsteps sank into mud; others tripped over hummocks that grass had over time built up of its own accumulated roots. Thorns threatened eyes and hands; a thatch of dead leaves and stalks masked the earth. Reaching the area where Alexan­dra guessed the tinfoil-wrapped poppet had landed, she and Sukie stooped low into a strange vegetable heat. The space low to the ground swarmed with a prickliness, an air of congestion, as twigs and tendrils probed the shadows for crumbs of sun and space.

Sukie cried out with the pleasure of discovery; but what she gouged up from where it had long rested embedded in the earth was an ancient golf ball, stip­pled in an obsolete checkered pattern. Some chemical it had absorbed had turned the lower half rust color.

'Shit,' Sukie said. 'I wonder how it ever got out here, we're miles from any golf course.' Monty Rougemont, of course, had been a devoted golfer, who had resented the presence of women, with their spontaneous laughter and pastel outfits, on the fair­way in front of him or indeed anywhere in his clubby paradise; it was as if in discovering this ball Sukie had come upon a small segment of her former husband, a message from the other world. She slipped the remembrance into a pocket of her rain coat.

'Maybe dropped from an airplane,' Alexandra suggested.

Gnats had discovered them, and pattered and nipped at their faces. Sukie flapped a hand back and forth in front of her mouth and protested, 'Even if we do find it, baby, what makes you think we can undo anything?'

'There must be a form. I've been doing some read­ing. You do everything backwards. We'd take the pins out and remelt the wax and turn Jenny back into a candle. We'd try to remember what we said that night and say it backwards.'

'All those sacred names, impossible. I can't remem­ber half of what we said.'

'At the crucial moment Jane said 'Die' and you said 'Take that' and giggled.'

'Did we really? We must have got carried away.'

Crouching low, guarding their eyes, they explored the tangle step by step, looking for a glitter of alu­minum foil. Sukie was getting her legs scratched above the Wellingtons and her handsome new London Fog was being tugged and its tiny waterproofed threads torn. She said, 'I bet it's caught halfway up some one of these fucking damn prickerbushes.'

The more querulous Sukie sounded, the more maternal Alexandra became. 'It could well be,' she said. 'It felt eerily light when I threw it. It sailed.'

'Why'd you ever chuck it out here anyway? What a hysterical thing to do.'

'I told you, I'd just had a phone conversation with Jenny in which she'd asked me to save her. I felt guilty. I was afraid.'

'Afraid of what, honey?'

'You know. Death.'

'But it isn't your death.'

'Any death is your death, in a way. These last weeks I've been getting the same symptoms Jenny had.'

'You've always been that way about cancer.' In exasperation Sukie flailed with the long-handled clip­pers at the thorny round-leafed canes importuning her, pulling at her raincoat, raking her wrists. 'Fuck. Here's a dead squirrel all shrivelled up. This is a real dump out here. Couldn't you have found the damn thing with second sight? Couldn't you have made it, what's the word, levitate?'

'I tried but couldn't get a signal. Maybe the alu­minum foil bottled up the emanations.'

'Maybe your powers aren't what they used to be.'

'That could be. Several times lately I tried to will some sun, I was feeling like such a maggot with all this dampness; but it rained anyway.'

Sukie's thrashing grew more and more irritable. 'Jane levitated her whole self.'

'That's Jane. She's getting very strong. But you heard her, she doesn't want any part of reversing this spell, she likes the way things are going.'

'I wonder if you've overestimated how far you can throw. Monty used to complain about golfers looking for their balls, how they'd always walk miles past where it could possibly be.'

'To me it feels like we've underestimated. As I said, it really flew.'

'You work out that way then, and I'll retrace a little. God, these fucking prickers. They're hateful. What good are they, anyway?'

'They feed the birds. And rodents and skunks.'