The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

If Alexandra was the

large, drifting style of witch, always spreading herself thin to invite impressions and merge with the landscape, and in her heart rather lazy and entropically cool, Jane was hot, short, concentrated like a pencil point, and Sukie Rougemont, busy downtown all day long gathering news and smiling hello, had an oscillating essence. So Alexandra reflected, hanging up. Things fall into threes. 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.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order.

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.

One of the liberations of becoming a witch had been that she had ceased constantly weighing herself.