by John Updike
This was September, season of full tides; the marsh between here and the island this afternoon was a sheet of skyey water flecked by the tips of salt hay turning golden. It would be an hour or two before the causeway in and out became passable. The time now was after four; there was a stillness, and a clothy weight to the sky that hid the sun. Once the mansion would have been masked by an allée of elms continuing the causeway upward toward the front entrance, but the elms had died of Dutch elm disease and remained as tall stumps lopped of their wide-arching branches, standing like men in shrouds, leaning like that armless statue of Balzac by Rodin. The house had a forbidding, symmetrical face, with many windows that seemed slightly small—especially the third-story row, which went straight across beneath the roof without variation: the servants' floor, Alexandra had been in the building years ago, when, still trying to do the right wifely things, she had gone with Ozzie to a benefit concert held in its ballroom. She could remember little but room after room, scantly furnished and smelling of salt air and mildew and vanished pleasures. The slates of its neglected roof merged in tint with a darkness gathering in the north—no, more than clouds troubled the atmosphere. Thin white smoke was lifting from the left-hand chimney. Someone was inside.
That man with hairy backs to his hands. Alexandra's future lover.
More likely, she decided, a workman or watchman he had hired. Her eyes smarted from trying to see so far, so intensely. Her insides like the sky had gathered to a certain darkness, 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, callow unshaven guitarists from the slums of Liverpool or Memphis 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 shut her eyes tight, trying to snap out of it. She got back into the car with Coal and drove the half-mile of straight black road to the beach.
After season, if no one was about, you could walk with a dog unleashed. But the day was warm, and old cars and VW vans with curtained windows and psychedelic stripes filled the narrow parking lot; beyond the bathhouses and the pizza shack many young people wearing bathing suits lay supine on the sand with their radios as if summer and youth would never end. Alexandra kept a length of clothesline on the backseat floor in deference to beach regulations. Coal shivered in distaste as she passed the loop through his studded collar. All muscle and eagerness, he pulled her along through the resisting sand. She halted to tug off her beige espadrilles and the dog gagged; she dropped the shoes behind a tuft of beach grass near the end of the boardwalk. The boardwalk had been scattered into its six-foot segments by a recent high tide, which had also left above the flat sand beside the sea a wrack of Clorox bottles and tampon sleeves and beer cans so long afloat their painted labels had been eaten away; these unlabelled cans looked frightening—blank like the bombs terrorists make and then leave in public places to bring the system down and thus halt the war. Coal pulled her on, past a heap of barnacled 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. The rocks were a black-freckled pale granite and one of the largest held a bolted bracket rusted by the years to the fragility of a Giacometii. The emissions of the young people's radios, rock of an airier sort, washed around her as she walked along, conscious of her heaviness, of the witchy figure she must cut 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. Her mother had recited to her the superstition about changing your initial when you marry, but Alexandra had been a scoffer at magic then and on fire to make babies. Marcy had been conceived in Paris, on an iron bed.
Alexandra wore her hair in a single thick braid down her back; sometimes she pinned the braid up like a kind of spine to the back of her head. Her hair had never been a true clarion Viking blond but of a muddy pallor now further dirtied by gray. Most of the gray hair had sprouted in front; the nape was still as finespun as those of the girls that lay here basking. The smooth young legs she walked past were caramel in color, with white fuzz, and aligned as if in solidarity. One girl's bikini bottom gleamed, taut and simple as a drum in the flat light.
Coal plunged on, snorting, imagining some scent, some dissolving animal vein within the kelpy scent of the oceanside. The beach population thinned. A young couple lay intertwined in a space they had hollowed in the pocked sand; the boy murmured into the base of the girl's throat as if into a microphone. An over-muscled male trio, their long hair flinging as they grunted and lunged, were playing Frisbee, and only when Alexandra purposefully let the powerful black Labrador pull her through this game's wide triangle did they halt their insolent tossing and yelping. She thought she heard the word "hag" or "bag" at her back after she had passed through, but it might have been an acoustic trick, a mistaken syllable of sea-slap. She was drawing near to where a wall of eroded concrete topped by a helix of rusted barbed wire marked the end of public beach; still there were knots of youth and seekers of youth and she did not feel free to set loose poor Coal, though he repeatedly gagged at the restraint of his collar. His desire to run burned the rope in her hand. The sea seemed unnaturally still— tranced, marked by milky streaks far out, where a single small launch buzzed on the sounding board of its level surface. On Alexandra's other side, nearer to hand, beach pea and woolly hudsonia crept down from the dunes; the beach narrowed here and became intimate, as you could see from the nests of cans and bottles and burnt driftwood and the bits of shattered Styrofoam cooler 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 eased away by the ocean.
The dunes at one point were low enough to permit a glimpse of the Lenox mansion, from another angle and farther away; its two end chimneys stuck up like hunched buzzard's wings on either side of the cupola, Alexandra felt irritated and vengeful. Her insides felt bruised; she resented the overheard insult "hag" and the general vast insult of all this heedless youth prohibiting her from letting her dog, her friend and familiar, run free. She decided to clear the beach for herself and Coal by willing a thunderstorm. 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. So many of Alexandra's remarkable powers had flowed from this mere reappropriation of her assigned self, achieved not until midlife. 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 closed her eyes while Coal shivered and whimpered in fright and she willed this vast interior of herself—this continuum reaching back through the generations of humanity and the parenting primates and beyond them through the lizards and the fish to the algae that cooked up the raw planet's first DNA in their microscopic tepid innards, a continuum that in the other direction arched to the end of all life, through form after form, pulsing, bleeding, adapting to the cold, to the ultraviolet rays, to the bloating, weakening sun—she willed these so pregnant 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 stiffened and swi
velled, their roots in his scalp come alive. Mertalia, Musalia, Dophatia: in loud unspoken syllables she invoked the forbidden names. Onemalia, Zitanseia, Goldaphaira, Dedulsaira. Invisibly Alexandra grew huge, in a kind of maternal wrath gathering all the sheaves of this becalmed September world to herself, and the lids of her eyes flew open as if at a command. A blast of cold air hit from the north, the approach of a front that whipped the desultory pennants on the distant bathhouse straight out from their staffs. Down at that end, where the youthful naked crowd was thickest, a collective sigh of surprise arose, and then titters of excitement as the wind stiffened, and the sky toward Providence stood revealed as possessing the density of some translucent, empurpled rock. Gheminaiea, Gegroplieira, Cedani, Gilthar, Godieb. At the base of this cliff of atmosphere cumulus clouds, moments ago as innocuous as flowers afloat in a pond, had begun to boil, their edges brilliant as marble against the blackening air. The very medium of seeing was altered, so that the seaside grasses and creeping glassworts near Alexandra's fat bare toes, corned and bent by years in shoes shaped by men's desires and cruel notions of beauty, seemed traced in negative upon the sand, whose tracked and pitted surface, suddenly tinted lavender, appeared to rise like the skin of a bladder being inflated under the stress of the atmospheric change. 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 de-dyed tank tops. Of the couple who had made a hollow for themselves, the girl could not be comforted; she was sobbing while the boy with fumbling haste tried to relatch the hooks of her loosened bikini bra. Coal barked at nothing, in one direction and then the other, as the drop in barometric pressure maddened his ears.
Now the immense and impervious ocean, so recently tranquil all the way to Block Island, sensed the change. Its surface rippled and corrugated where sweeping cloud shadows touched it—these patches shrivelling, almost, like something burned. The motor of the launch buzzed more sharply. The sails at sea had melted and the air vibrated with the merged roar of auxiliary engines churning toward harbor. A hush caught in the throat of the wind, and 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, at the top of the cliff of dark air, along whose face small scuds of paler gray, in the shape of geese, of gesticulating orators, of unravelling skeins of yarn, were travelling rapidly. The large hurtful drops broke up into a finer, thicker rain, which whitened in streaks where the wind like a harpist's fingers strummed it. Alexandra stood still while cold water glazed her; she recited in her inner spaces, Ezoill, Musil, Puri, Tamen. Coal at her feet whimpered; he had wrapped her legs around with clothesline. His body, its hair licked flat against the muscles, glistened and trembled. Through veils of rain she saw that the beach was empty. She undid the rope leash and set the dog free.
But Coal stayed huddled by her ankles, alarmed as lightning flashed once, and then again, double. Alexandra counted the seconds until thunder: five. By rough rule this made the storm she had conjured up two miles in diameter, if these strokes were at the heart. Blunderingly thunder rumbled and cursed. Tiny speckled sand crabs were emerging now from their holes by the dozen and scurrying sideways toward the frothing sea. The color of their shells was so sandy they appeared transparent. 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. 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 smaller, scarcely perceptible one in the tip of her nose; her handsomeness derived from the candor of her broad brow beneath the gray-edged wings of hair swept symmetrically back to form her braid, and from the clairvoyance of her slightly protuberant eyes, the gun-metal gray of whose irises was pushed to the rims as if each utterly black pupil were an anti-magnet. Her mouth had a grave plumpness and deep corners that lent 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 ceased 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 concord. The sky over the sea had now composed itself into horizontal fuzzy strips; the thunder was subsiding to a mutter and the rain to a warm drizzle. This downpour would never make the weather maps. The crab she had first crushed was still moving its claws, like tiny pale feathers touched by a breeze. Coal, his terror slipped at last, ran in circles, wider and wider, adding the quadruple gouges of his claws to the triangular designs of gull feet, the daintier scratches of the sandpipers, and the dotted lines of crab scrabble. These clues to other realms of being—to be a crab, moving sideways on tiptoe with eyes on stems! to be a barnacle, standing on your head in a little folding bucket kicking food toward your mouth!—had been cratered over by raindrops. The sand was soaked to the color of cement. Her clothes even to her underwear had been plastered against her skin so that she felt to herself like a statue by Segal, pure white, all the sinuous tubes and bones of her licked by a kind of mist. 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 sodden espadrilles where she had left them, behind a tuft of Ammophila breviligulata. Its long arrowlike blades glistened, having relaxed their edges in the rain.
She opened the door of her Subaru and turned to call loudly for Coal, who had vanished into the dunes. "Come, doggie!" this stately plump woman sang out. "Come, baby! Come, angel!" To the eyes of the young people huddled with their sodden gritty towels and ignominious goosebumps inside the gray-shingled bathhouse and underneath the pizza shack's awning (striped the colors of tomato and cheese), Alexandra appeared miraculously dry, not a hair of her massive braid out of place, not a patch of her brocaded green jacket damp. It was such unverifiable impressions that spread among us in Eastwick the rumor of witchcraft.
Alexandra was an artist. Using few tools other than toothpicks and a stainless-steel butter knife, she pinched and pressed into shape little lying or sitting figurines, always of women in gaudy 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 gift of sculpture had descended 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 done. That first morning, she had used one of her children's Play-Doh, but she came to depend for clay upon an extraordinarily pure kaolin she dug herself from a little pit near Coventry, a slippery exposed bank of greasy white earth in an old widow's back yard, behind the mossy wreck of an outhouse and the chassis of a prewar Buick just like, by uncanny coincidence, one that Alexandra's father used to drive, to Salt Lake City and Denver and Albuquerque and the lonely towns between. He had sold work clothes, overalls and blue jeans before they became fashionable— before they became the world's garb, the costume that sheds the past. You took your own burlap sacks to Coventry, and you paid the widow twelve dollars a bag. If the sacks were too heavy she helped you lift them; like Alexandra she was strong. Though at least sixty-five, she dyed her hair a glittering brass color and wore pants suits of turquoise or magenta so tight the flesh below her belt was bunched in sausagey rolls. This was nice. Alexandra read a message for herself here: Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong. The widow sported a high horselaugh and big gold loo
p earrings her brassy hair was always pulled back to display. A rooster or two performed its hesitant, preening walk in the tall grass of this unkempt yard; the back of the woman's lean clapboard house had peeled down to the bare gray wood, though the front was painted white. Alexandra, with the back of her Subaru sagging under the weight of the widow's clay, always returned from these trips heartened and exhilarated, full of the belief that a conspiracy of women upholds the world.