The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

Alexandra appeared miraculously dry, not a hair of her massive braid out of place, not a patch of her brocaded green jacket damp. It was such unverifiable impressions that spread among us in Eastwick the rumor of witchcraft.

Irritation, psychic as well as physical, was the source of cancer. Those get it who leave themselves open to the idea of it; all it takes is one single cell gone crazy. Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch.

Like most good schoolteachers he was a tyrant, unctuous and insistent; in his dank way he wanted to sleep with everybody.

Being a divorcée in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

“We never talk about it, even at our most intimate,” Jane prissily said. “All he ever confided on the subject was that she had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.” “A poltergeist,” Sukie said, delighted. “A polterfrau.”

With some relief Alexandra decided she quite disliked this man.

He was pushy, coarse, and a blabbermouth. His buying her out at the Hungry Sheep felt like a rape, and she would have to run another batch through the kiln now earlier than she had planned.

The pressure his personality set up had intensi...

These butchers you call workmen up here wouldn’t last one day on a union job in Manhattan. No offense, I can see you’re thinking, ‘What a snob,’ and I guess the hicks don’t get much practice, putting up chicken coops; but no wonder it’s such a weird-looking state.

precision is where passion begins.

“Beethoven,” the big man said with bored authority, “sold his soul to write those last quartets; he was stone deaf. All those nineteenth-century types sold their souls. Liszt. Paganini. What they did wasn’t human.”

“The interface between solar energy and electrical energy,” Van Horne told Sukie. “There has to be one, and once we find the combination you can run every appliance in your house right off the roof and have enough left over to recharge your electric car in the night. Clean, abundant, and free. It’s coming, honeybunch, it’s coming!”

“You’re bewitched. It’s easy. I tore your picture out of the Eastwick Word when you’d been to a Planning Board meeting and smeared my menstrual fluid all over it.” “Jesus, you can be disgusting.” “You like that, don’t you? Gina is never disgusting. Gina is as sweet as Our Lady. If you were any kind of a gentleman you’d finish me off with your tongue. There isn’t much blood, it’s the tag end.”

that magazine. What did I just say?”

“People don’t terrifically mind,” Darryl said sagely, “being ripped off, is something I’ve discovered over the years.”

“People have these fantasies about redheads, we’re supposed to be hot I suppose, like those little cinnamony candy hearts, but really we’re just people,

Think of Thomas Edison, deaf because as a boy he had been lifted into a cart by his ears.

The point is, all this stacked end to end multiplied by a zillion doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared with the cruelty natural organic friendly Creation has inflicted on its creatures since the first poor befuddled set of amino acids struggled up out of the galvanized slime.