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.

He quite lost touch with the expanding universe within her.

Not until midlife did she truly believe that she had a right to exist, that the forces of nature had created her not as an afterthought and companion—a bent rib, as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum had it—but as the mainstay of the continuing Creation, as the daughter of a daughter and a woman whose daughters in turn would bear daughters.

Alexandra steeled herself and crunched one beneath the sole of her bare foot. Sacrifice. There must always be sacrifice. It was one of nature’s rules.

Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong.

No two were quite alike, though all were sisters.

her love was the cello; its vibratory melancholy tones, pregnant with the sadness of wood grain and the shadowy largeness of trees, would at odd moonlit hours on warm nights come sweeping out of the screened windows of her low little ranch house

Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch.

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

I burst into tears and told him he was a disgusting male chauv.” She heard herself and couldn’t resist a pun. “I should have told him to chauv it.”

she searched her heart for an honest but polite response. Dealing with men was work, a chore she had become lazy at.

Hey, Alexandra, between us: I’m crazy about that huffy frozen look you get on your face when you get defensive and can’t think what to say. And the tip of your nose is cute.” Astonishingly, he reached out and touched it, the little cleft tip she was sensitive about, a touch so quick and improper she wouldn’t have believed it happened but for the chilly tingle it left.

Alexandra noticed now gave her, already slightly dizzy, the sensation of looking down a deep hole. His aura was gone. He had absolutely none, like a dead man or a wooden idol,

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

These unhappy or unlucky men it was her fate to be attracted to were not above pulling you down with them if you allowed it and didn’t stand tall.

Often she was cast, it seemed to her, in this role of peacemaking parent, of maiden aunt devoid of passion, when in fact she was seething.

America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.

Alexandra used to love her, Sukie knew. That first night at Darryl’s, dancing to Joplin, they had clung together and wept at the curse of heterosexuality that held them apart as if each were a rose in a plastic tube. Now there was a detachment in Alexandra’s voice.

I didn’t mean to mess anybody up, I just wanted to give him something, and I’m all I have.

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.

So this was what men had been murmuring about, monopolizing, all these centuries, death; no wonder they had kept it to themselves, no wonder they had kept it from women, let the women do their nursing and hatching, keeping a bad thing going while they, they, men, distributed among themselves the true treasure, onyx and ebony and unalloyed gold, the substance of glory and release.