The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

And magic occurs all around us as nature seeks and finds the inevitable forms, things crystalline and organic falling together at angles of sixty degrees, the equilateral triangle being the mother of structure.

Mrs. Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls of which the centerpiece was an antique mother-of-pearl egg in which a tiny gold cross had been tediously inlaid.

“Go on,” said Alexandra, touching the chill windowpane with her forehead as if to let her thirsty brain drink the fresh wide light.

A woman is a hole, Alexandra had once read in the memoirs of a prostitute. In truth it felt less like being a hole than being a sponge, a heavy squishy thing on this bed soaking out of the air all the futility and misery there is: wars nobody wins, diseases conquered so we can all die of cancer.

The watery skins of her eyes felt hot, and dry as cactus skins. Her pupils were two black thorns turned inwards.

Alexandra began to cry, thinking of her lost babies, babies swallowed by the children they had become, babies sliced into bits and fed to the days, the years.

“Of course he did. That’s the kind of thing men are supposed to do. They’re supposed to adore us. They’re shits, try to keep that in mind. Men are absolutely shits, but we get them in the end because we can suffer better. A woman can outsuffer a man every time.” Jane felt huge in her impatience; the black notes she had swallowed that morning bristled within her, alive.

She would rush back from the old Lenox place aching and steamy-clean and the sight of those grubby little hands on her pure ivory keys mangling some priceless simplified melody of Mozart’s or Mendelssohn’s would make her want to take the metronome and with its heavy base mash those chubby fingers as if she were grinding beans in a pestle.

Small comfort it must bring to his bones.

There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person’s time—all of a woman’s time, at any rate—was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place.

“Poor little soul,” Alexandra said. “I guess she was one of those perfectly lovely people the world for some reason never finds any use for.” Nature in her wisdom puts them to sleep.

What is of interest is what our minds retain, what our lives have given to the air. The witches are gone, vanished; we were just an interval in their lives, and they in ours. But as Sukie’s blue-green ghost continues to haunt the sunstruck pavement, and Jane’s black shape to flit past the moon, so the rumors of the days when they were solid among us, gorgeous and doing evil, have flavored the name of the town in the mouths of others, and for those of us who live here have left something oblong and invisible and exciting we do not understand. We meet it turning the corner where Hemlock meets Oak; it is there when we walk the beach in off-season and the Atlantic in its blackness mirrors the dense packed gray of the clouds: a scandal, life like smoke rising twisted into legend.