The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old?

Rhode Island, though famously the smallest of the fifty states, yet contains odd American vastnesses, tracts scarcely explored amid industrial sprawl, abandoned homesteads and forsaken mansions, vacant hinterlands hastily traversed by straight black roads, heathlike marshes and desolate shores on either side of the Bay, that great wedge of water driven like a stake clean to the state’s heart, its trustfully named capital.

One’s inner weather always bore a relation to the outer; it was simply a question of reversing the current, which occurred rather easily once power had been assigned to the primary pole, oneself as a woman.

Not until midlife did she truly believe that she had a right to exist,

Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong.

Irritation, psychic as well as physical, was the source of cancer.

Like most good schoolteachers he was a tyrant, unctuous and insistent;

There was a quality men’s voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather.

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

It was fundamental and instinctive, it was womanly, to want to heal—to apply the poultice of acquiescent flesh to the wound of a man’s desire, to give his closeted spirit the exaltation of seeing a witch slip out of her clothes and go skyclad in a room of tawdry motel furniture.

Alexandra battled depression, moving beneath its weight like a fish sluggish and misshapen at the bottom of the sea.

somehow she was feeding the world but no longer fed by it.

Now the world poured through her, wasted, down the drain. 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.

Alexandra lay on her bed helpless, weighed down by all the incessant uselessness there is in the world.

Alexandra stared at the ceiling, waiting for something to happen. The watery skins of her eyes felt hot, and dry as cactus skins. Her pupils were two black thorns turned inwards.

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.

Still, Sukie’s nipples had gone erect beneath her sweater in awareness of her healing powers, of being for any man a garden stocked with antidotes and palliatives.

The manner of a man who wants to sleep with you is slicing and aggressive, testing, foreshadowing his eventual anger if he succeeds,

He was like a house with too many rooms, and the rooms with too many doors.

The spirit needs folly as the body needs food; she felt healthier for this.

We must lighten ourselves to survive. We must not cling. Safety lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new to enter. Only folly dares those leaps that give life.

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.

Sukie wondered about her own strength, how long she could hold these grieving, doubting men on her own chest and not be contaminated.

sometimes after being fucked she felt a desperate sliding, a devaluation too steep.

Felicia had a considerable love for the underprivileged in the abstract but when actual cases got close to her she tended to hold her nose.

Marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.

She must get hold of herself, Alexandra told herself. She must find a new center to her life.

One credited to Jane Smart’s angry dark brow, as she slammed herself into her old moss-green Plymouth Valiant, with its worn door latch, a certain distinction, an inner boiling such as had in other cloistral towns produced Emily Dickinson’s verses and Emily Brontë’s inspired novel.

We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. Into the nether world.

The hope that the dark stranger would eventually claim her cowered in its corner of her imagining; could it be that her queenly patience would earn itself no more reward than being used and discarded?

How short life is, how quickly its signs exhaust their meaning.

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.

The outside of things was sunshine and scatter; the inside of everything was death.

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.

Jane rose from her chair. She had a killing pain between her shoulder blades and her face streamed with tears.