The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы. Джон Апдайк
the time now was after four; it would be an hour or two before the causeway in and out became passable. Thin white smoke was lifting from one of the chimneys of the mansion. Someone was inside.
That man with hairy backs to his hands. Alexandra's future lover.
She decided it might be a workman or watchman he had hired. Her eyes smarted from trying to see so far, so intensely. She felt dark inside, a sense of herself as a pathetic onlooker. Female yearning was in all the papers and magazines now; the sexual equation had become reversed as girls of good family flung themselves toward brutish rock stars, green unshaven guitarists from the slums of Liverpool or Memphis who were somehow granted indecent power, dark suns turning these children of sheltered upbringing into suicidal orgiasts. Alexandra thought of her tomatoes, the juice of violence beneath the plump complacent skin. She thought of her own older daughter, alone in her room with those Monkees and Beatles… one thing for Marcy, another for her mother to be mooning so, straining her eyes. She got back into the car with Coal and drove the half-mile of straight black road to the beach.
In September, if no one was on the beach, you could walk with a dog unleashed. But it was unusually warm, and the narrow parking lot was filled by cars; many young people wearing bathing suits lay on the sand with their radios as if summer and youth would never end. Acting according to beach regulations, Alexandra fixed a length of clothesline she kept on the backseat floor to Coal studded collar. He pulled her along through the resisting sand. She tugged off her beige espadrilles and dropped the shoes behind a tuft of beach grass near the end of the boardwalk. Coal pulled her on, past a heap of square-cut rocks that had been part of a jetty built when this beach was the toy of rich men and not an overused public playground. Rock from the young people's radios washed around her as she walked along aware of her heaviness, of the witchy figure she must present with her bare feet and men's baggy denims and worn-out green brocaded jacket, something from Algeria she and Ozzie had bought in Paris on their honeymoon seventeen years ago. Though she turned a gypsyish olive in summer, Alexandra was of northern blood; her maiden name had been Sorensen. She wore her hair in a single thick braid down her back; sometimes she pinned the braid up to the back of her head. Her hair had never been a true Viking blond but of a muddy pallor now further dirtied by gray. Most of the gray hair had appeared in front; the nape was still as fine as those of the girls that lay here basking in the sun.
Coal ran on, snorting, imagining some animal scent in the ocean air. His desire to run burned the rope in her hand. She was drawing near to where a concrete wall topped by rusted barbed wire marked the end of public beach; still there were groups of youth and seekers of youth and she did not feel free to set loose poor Coal. Three young men were playing Frisbee, and as she passed through their triangle it seemed to her she heard the word “hag”. The beach narrowed here and became intimate, as you could see from cans and bottles and burnt driftwood and the condoms like small dried jellyfish corpses. The cement wall had been spray-painted with linked names. Everywhere, desecration had set its hand and only footsteps were washed away by the ocean.
Alexandra felt irritated and revengeful. She resented the overheard insult “hag” and the general vast insult of all this youth preventing her from letting her dog, her friend, run free. She decided to clear the beach for herself and Coal by willing a thunderstorm. One's inner weather was always related to the outer; it was simply a question of reversing the current, which occurred rather easily if power had been given to the primary pole, that is, to oneself as a woman. So many of Alexandra's remarkable powers had flowed from this mere return to herself. Only in her 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 rib, as the notorious 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 closed her eyes and willed this vast interior of herself – this continuum reaching back through the generations of humanity and primates and beyond them through the lizards and the fish to the algae that produced the planet's first DNA, a continuum that in the other direction led to the end of all life – she willed these depths of herself to darken, to condense, to generate an interface of lightning between tall walls of air. And the sky in the north did rumble, so faintly only Coal could hear. His ears came alive. Mertalia, Musalia, Dophatia: silently she spoke the forbidden names. Onemalia, Zitanseia, Goldaphaira, Dedulsaira. A blast of cold air hit from the north. A collective sigh of surprise arose from the youthful naked crowd at the other end of the beach. The air blackened. The offending youths had seen their Frisbee sail away from their hands like a kite and were hurrying to gather up their portable radios and their six-packs, their sneakers and jeans and tops. Coal barked at nothing, in one direction and then the other, as the drop in barometric pressure maddened his ears.
Now the ocean, so recently calm all the way to Block Island, sensed the change. Its surface rippled, the waves grew higher. The sails hurried toward harbor. Then the rain began, great icy drops that hurt like hailstones. Footsteps pounded past Alexandra as honey-colored lovers raced toward cars parked at the far end, by the bathhouses. Thunder rumbled, the large hurtful drops broke up into a finer, thicker rain. Alexandra stood still; through veils of rain she saw that the beach was empty. She undid the rope leash and set the dog free.
But Coal was frightened by the storm and stayed at her feet. Tiny speckled sand crabs were emerging now from their holes and scurrying sideways toward the frothing sea. The color of their shells was so sandy they seemed transparent. Alexandra steeled herself and crushed one with her bare foot. Sacrifice. There must always be sacrifice. It was one of nature's rules. She danced from crab to crab, crushing them. Her face from hairline to chin streamed and all the colors of the rainbow were in this liquid film, because of the agitation of her aura. Lightning kept taking her photograph. She had a cleft in her chin and a tiny one in the tip of her nose; her handsomeness derived from the candor of her broad forehead beneath the gray-edged wings of hair swept symmetrically back to form her braid, and from the clairvoyance of her eyes. The form of her mouth had the appearance of a smile. She had attained her height of five-eight by the age of fourteen and had weighed one-twenty at the age of twenty; she was somewhere around one hundred sixty pounds now. One of the liberations of becoming a witch had been that she had stopped constantly weighing herself.
As the little sand crabs were transparent on the speckled sand, so Alexandra, wet through and through, felt transparent to the rain, one with it, its temperature and that of her blood brought into harmony. The short storm was coming to an end. Coal, his terror passed at last, ran in circles, wider and wider. Alexandra strode to the end of the purged public beach, to the wire-topped wall, and back. She reached the parking lot and picked up her espadrilles where she had left them.
She opened the door of her Subaru and called loudly for Coal, who had disappeared into the dunes. “Come, doggie!” this stately plump woman sang out. “Come, baby! Come, angel!” To the eyes of the young people hiding with their wet towels and goose bumps inside the bathhouse and underneath the pizza shack's striped awning, Alexandra seemed miraculously dry, not a hair of her massive braid out of place, not a patch of her brocaded green jacket damp. It was these unverifiable impressions that spread among us in Eastwick the rumor of witchcraft.
Alexandra was an artist. Using simple tools like toothpicks and a stainless-steel butter knife, she made little lying or sitting figurines, always of women in colorful costumes painted over naked contours; they sold for fifteen or twenty dollars in two local boutiques called the Yapping Fox and the Hungry Sheep. Alexandra had no clear idea of who bought them, or why, or exactly why she made them, or who was directing her hand. The power of sculpture had appeared with her other powers, in the period when Ozzie turned into colored dust. The impulse had visited her one morning as she sat at the kitchen table, the children off at school, the dishes washed up. That first morning, she had used one of her children's Play-Doh, but later she began to buy extraordinarily pure kaolin clay she dug herself in an old widow's back yard. She paid the widow twelve dollars a sack. If the sacks were too heavy she helped her lift them; like Alexandra she was strong. The widow was at least sixty-five, but she dyed her hair a glittering brass color and wore very tight pants suits of turquoise or magenta. This was nice. Alexandra read a message for herself here: Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong. She always returned from these trips heartened and joyful, full of the belief that a league of women upholds the world.
Self-taught,