by John Updike
“I can’t,” Jane announced. The refusal stretched the tendons of her throat; they stood out alarmingly. “I’ve become an old bag. So have you two. Ancient bag-hags. I won’t.”
“Speak for yourself, Jane,” Sukie said haughtily. “Do some exercises if you don’t like your body. Yoga, qi gong. Just twenty minutes a day does wonders. It tightens you up all over.”
“It’s the spirit that matters,” Alexandra assured her. “To me, you’re beautiful. I see through the physical envelope.”
“Then why do you want to take a shower with Sukie?”
“I said we’d share, not both get in together. We need space, Jane, to release your chakra energy. Being sky-clad releases us. It unties the aiguillette of inhibition intrinsic to Western man. Our healing powers, self-healing and other-healing, need to be free; they need to be cleansed of such impurities as jealousy. Come, dear. Take my hand. Put it on your belly with mine. Can you feel it? I can feel your pain kicking. There. And there. It wants out. Let it out, darling. Let your self be free. Freee,” Alexandra repeated. “Kuh-leeen.”
Skin and water, warmth and flesh, the widows submitted to the cleansing—Jane wearing a plastic shower cap that made her look, if anybody had been with her to see, like a Victorian maid; Sukie with her long cedar-colored hair bundled and pinned and held by hand as best she could out of the torrent; Alexandra alone fearless of getting her head wet, thrusting it into the thick of the forceful element, her clutching fingers working up an oozy lather on her scalp and then letting it be belted and drummed upon by the scalding liquid rods. Playfully Sukie, not yet towelled dry, sensed the rapture of her sister in witchery through the steamed-up shower door and re-entered the stall, giggling and getting all wet again, the other body not unwelcoming, the bulbous nubs and bulges of the two of them rubbing and bumping, beslimed with soap, their skin feeling to their shut eyes as if shining and burnished. Then Sukie, all rosy in her buttocks and heated face, fled the other’s wet caresses out the glass door, and Alexandra followed at her more stately pace, bowing into her vigorous towelling, already from her scrubbed scalp to the thin-skinned tops of her feet tingling with the power the three beldames were about to put on.
In their summer quarters’ big room, on the freshly vacuumed burgundy carpet, they gathered self-consciously, their nakedness an airy shared sensation. The hair on their forearms stood erect as if electrified; their eyes helplessly fed on the wrinkles, the warts and scars, the keratoses and liver spots, the slack muscles and patches of crêpey skin crinkled like smooth water touched by a breath of wind, the varicose veins and arthritic deformations with which time had overlaid their old beauty. This beauty from Nature’s standpoint had been serviceable, merely—enough to attract a member of the opposite sex for insemination. That achieved, they had naturally, like the females of many species, regarded their mates as disgusting leftovers, fellow-dupes of procreative madness. Their eyes—gun-metal gray, tortoiseshell brown, gold-flecked hazel—could not stop moving in unaccustomed survey of one another, with minute ocular motions that twitched their lips into ironic, reflective smiles.
“Well, the invitation said, Come as you are,” Jane broke the silence by saying.
“I think we’ve done pretty well, considering,” Alexandra responded.
“You have,” Jane accused. “Fat smoothes everything out.”
“It’s the ass, isn’t it?” Sukie said thoughtfully, trying to look behind her and down. “Luckily,” she decided, “you can’t see it. And the tits. The damn things droop.” She cupped her hands around her own and lifted them an inch or two, to where they had been thirty years ago. When her hands came away you could see that her nipples were erect. Sweetnips.
“To me, you both look gorgeous,” Alexandra loyally maintained. “Not exactly Botticelli any more, but not Grüne-wald, either.”
“Shouldn’t we be getting going with this?” asked Sukie, of all people to be uncomfortable in her skin. “Lexa, tell me again what to do. What the point is.”
“Healing, sweetness. Healing whatever is wrong with Jane, and undoing whatever wrong we did here.”
“What wrong?” Jane asked angrily. “Who are you, if I may ask, to say what was wrong and what was right? None of us liked Felicia, but none of us told Clyde to hammer her to death with a poker, either.”
Alexandra answered, “She was spitting feathers and pins that we had put into her mouth. By way of the cookie jar, remember?”
“Who sssays sso? They both died that night, with nobody else there.”
“The police,” Sukie intervened. “They found the pins and feathers on the floor, next to the body. They didn’t know how they got there, but I did. As a reporter, I saw them. The things were still wet with spit.”
“Who says it was her sspit?” Jane argued. “They didn’t have DNA testing then.”
“There was still a pin and a feather in her mouth,” Sukie said. “A guy I knew on the force then told me. I don’t suppose either of you remember him—Ronnie Kazmierczak, the brother of the boy killed in Vietnam they renamed Landing Square after. He didn’t stay a cop long. He said his job was mainly to keep the have-nots from robbing the haves; he became a hippie and moved to Alaska. He used to write me a little. He said he didn’t mind the cold, he’d stopped feeling it. He never came back.”
“Boo hoo,” Jane said. “I suppose we’re to blame for that, too. Even if Clyde was annoyed by her sspitting feathers, most men wouldn’t have beaten their wives’ heads in because of it.”
“It was the way she talked all the time that he minded,” Sukie said.
Alexandra begged, “For Heaven’s sake, let’s forget Clyde and Felicia! It was Jenny we definitely killed. In your kitchen, Jane. We made a wax doll—”
“You made it,” Jane interrupted.
“I made it with you advising and with elements you had gathered. We all stuck pins in it and said the words. The evil words. She was dead by the end of the summer.”
“More boo hoo. She died of cancer of the ovaries, metastasized. She was riddled with it, it had been in her for years.”
“Please,” Alexandra involuntarily breathed. The thought, the image of intimate cells gone wild, took the wind out of her.
“It happens to people all the time,” Jane went relentlessly on. “Our spell might have had nothing to do with it. It might have been somebody else’s sspell. Brenda Parsley and Greta and Rose Hallybread—they were just as witchy. There was a lot of malevolence in town in those years.”
“A lot of woman power,” Sukie agreed, seeing that Alexandra had been stricken into silence, lost in fears and qualms.
“Wait!” Jane cried, having seen something in space. “All this talk, it just came to me. The man who said hello to me on Vane Street, outside of Doc Pat’s, who we thought might be staying with Greta Neff a few steps away on Oak. I know who he was. He was Chrisstopher Gabriel. Jenny’s brother.
Remember what a handsome boy he was? Darryl whisked him off to New York and they disappeared. It was him.”
“It was he,” Alexandra corrected. She had recovered her focus and was impatient to get the ritual of healing, of undoing evil, under way. Jane was being obstructionist and negative-minded as always.
“Why is he here?” Jane asked. “Why is he back?”
“Only you think he’s back,” Sukie pointed out. “Only you saw him, or think you did, on that dark street, in the rain.” But in the Unitarian church, come to think of it, in the front pews, Greta had been with at least one full-size man, a stranger, an accomplice. Greta had enlisted Deborah Lar-com’s beautiful goodness in the murderous conspiracy.
“But I did,” Jane was insisting. “That was him. He. Older, fatter, faggier, but him. Beautiful little Christopher. His curly angelic silvery hair. He’s the one doing it to me.”
“Doing what?” Sukie asked. “Jane, please.” Like Alexandra, she was exasperated now with Jane’s egocentric distraction from the business at hand. She had catered to her all day to Providence and back and was hungry,
and they shouldn’t eat until after the ritual.
“Killing me!” Jane answered. “The shocks! The way my stomach hurts all the time! Not my stomach exactly, but in the vicinity, like something is rubbing thin. Right under here.” She touched her breastbone, between her deflated little breasts; in her nakedness the gesture repulsively roused an image of the lightless world within her—the purplish organs asymmetrically interlocked, the slippery black interior suffused with blood being endlessly pumped around. No, not endlessly. We all have ends. The heart beats time. Time beats us.
“That’s interesting, Jane,” Alexandra rather loftily interposed. “We can look into it, beginning with Greta, though I must say dealing with her is not my idea of a pleasant time. But—”
“And not just me,” Jane continued in her agitation. “Don’t think, you two, you’re just bysstanders. He must be after you as well. He blames us all for his sister’s death, he’s come after all of us. Darryl must have shared some of his powers with him, and now he’s come after us. He’s out there. I can feel it.”
“Please, baby,” Alexandra urged. “If everything you feel is true, all the more reason, then, to erect the cone of power. We’ll do white magic. We’ll petition the Goddess on your behalf. We’ll tell her we’re sorry about Jenny.”
“It’s too late,” Jane said. “I’m not ssorry.”
Alexandra appealed to Sukie: “What do you think?”
“I think we should do whatever idiotic thing you’ve set up for, so we can eat. All I’ve had since noon was an ice-cream cone with the wrong kind of jimmies on it.”
“I’d love a martini,” Jane said. “It’s a real craving. Easy on the vermouth, Lexa, thank you very much.” When Alexandra was slow to move, Jane said impatiently, “Never mind, Lazybones. I’ll make it myself.”
“Well, I would hope so,” Alexandra told her. “I’m not sure there is any vermouth.”
“Sscrew the vermouth, then. I need to put some clothes on or have the heat turned up.”
Sukie in her hunger had discovered the cheese and crackers; her lips sparkled with salt and crumbs. Her big teeth curved slightly outward, giving her plump mouth its provocative, subtly thrusting shape. To Alexandra she pronounced, “The Münster is delicious. The Gouda seems dry. Where did you get it? You said the Stop and Shop? There’s a better place for cheese in Jamestown.”
She was spilling crumbs into the magic circle; her bare feet unconsciously nudged the carefully drawn line of Cascade. Sukie’s ankles, though still slender, bore little spider veins, like purple threads in a pair of white socks.
“Please,” Alexandra said, exasperated nearly to tears by her little coven’s unruliness. “Let’s come to order. The Goddess hates confusion. She hates bad housekeeping.”
“She does housekeeping?” Sukie asked.
“I’m in too much agony for this,” Jane announced, coming from the kitchen. “I did find the vermouth, Lexa, right where I thought it was. But somebody’d been drinking it. Who? Or do we have alcoholic mice?” She sipped and made an acid face.
Alexandra ignored her, explaining, “Before we ask anything of the Goddess, we must enter the circle. The broom is the portal. I’ll move it aside. But before we enter, we must circle it on the outside, deosil.”
“Deosil?” Sukie asked. “What’s deosil?”
“How can you have forgotten, baby? Clockwise. The good direction. To do evil, you circle widdershins, counterclockwise.”
“All this formalism,” Sukie complained. “It seems to me we used to do it all naturally—being witchy was just a stage of life, like menopause.”
“It was what came before menopause,” Jane said. “Just before, before we gave up. Oh, that beautiful sang de men-struës. Who would ever think we’d misss it? The cramps I’m having right now are worse. There’s no egg involved, to egg us on.”
“You need ease. We all need ease,” Alexandra told them in a voice pitched to be lulling, her mother-voice. And the other two did not protest when she led them around the circle, three times deosil. The night outside was black enough to make the windows mirrors in which their pale wobbling bodies were reflected. Unsteady illumination came from underneath, from the tinted squat candles on the floor, placed on the five points of an invisible pentacle. Fearful, as she bent over, of releasing a gust of rectal smell, Alexandra moved aside the plastic-handled broom, and entered the opened circle. Sukie followed, then Jane. Their three shadows noiselessly wheeled on the low ceiling, overlapping, enlarging, multiplying in the fivefold candlelight. They stood there, close enough to seem—if some goggle-eyed spectral presence were looking in the window—one flesh.
Jane gracelessly, hoarsely broke the silence: “What’s that old breadboard doing in the middle?”
“It’s the altar,” Alexandra explained, her voice pointedly soft, befitting a mystery. “I found it in the kitchen, under the sink, with the tea trays.”
“And the bronze bowl?” Sukie asked, trying to achieve the same low, respectful pitch.
“Brass. From a flea market in Old Wick. The little bell came from another—somebody’s dinner bell when everybody over in Newport had maids and butlers. These chalices”—she passed out two—“I bought right on Dock Street. Eastwick is oddly well equipped for the Craft.”
“The Craft,” Sukie said. “I haven’t heard it called that for years.” She fiddled the chalice, lighter in weight than a bird, in her slender hand. “It’s tinfoil,” she said with mild surprise.
“Hold it still, please. I’m pouring.” Alexandra, with a reach that gave her a whiff of her own armpit, produced from outside the circle the heavy glass jug of Carlo Rossi Chianti.
“What rotgut,” Jane said, but held out her chalice nevertheless, for her share, on top of the Martini and the Margarita. In the shuddering dim light the red wine looked black. The three forsaken souls held out their faux chalices—the fragile gilded cardboard, the jewels that were mere blobs of paint—and touched them in mid-air.
“To us,” Alexandra said.
“To us.”
“Yesss. To uss.”
Sukie wiped a mist of wine from the fine hairs on her upper lip, and contemplated the arcane arrangement assembled on the carpet. Her voice came out patronizing yet sympathetic: “Lexa, sweetheart, you’ve worked so hard to get us in touch with the Goddess.”
Jane wisecracked, “Doesn’t she have a cell phone yet?” Her blasphemy grated on the others, a symptom of her unhealth.
“Her number is un-list-ed,” said Sukie, in the voice of an automated electronic menu. No one laughed.
The solemn black windows—thermopane Andersens, on cranks that when new worked like charms but that over time had accumulated dirt and rust and become balky and stiff—rebuked the prattle with their silence. The windows witnessed the shadowy witcheries in the room like a row of square-shouldered widows in speechless mourning.
“And the deck of cards?” Sukie asked, her voice, the lightest and youngest of the three, straining under the weight of the powers about to be invoked. “Are we going to play Old Maid?”
Again, there was no responsive laughter. The universe holds vast volumes of nothingness, yet these colossal gaps between the stars are cumbersome doors that can be opened, admitting sudden winds and the groans of sluggishly awakening presences. “A tarot deck,” Alexandra explained. “I bought it downtown. Let’s sit.” Her voice had become level, gentle, casually firm. “Is everybody comfy on their cushions? Is there enough space for all our legs?” In truth it was awkward, at first, to arrange themselves, in the bed-size space, without feet and hands getting in another body’s way, and without exposing, by putting their knees up or spread apart, their nether parts, hairy and odorous and for many Christian centuries unspeakable.
Alexandra picked up the little silver bell, a tinkling remnant of a bygone class system, and as if to summon servants lightly shook it. The questioning peal glimmered outward from their circle, in wider and wider circles.
“Do we still remember,”
Alexandra gently asked, “the names of Her retinue?” She began the litany: “Aurai, Hanlii, Thamcii, Tilinos, Athamas, Zianor, Auonail.”
Jane took it up with the vehemence of a sufferer tormented into sacrilege: “Tzabaoth, Messsiach, Emanuel, Elchim, Eibor, Yod, He, Vou, He! I’m amazed I still remember!”
Sukie began haltingly: “It’s been so long. Astachoth, Adonai, Agla—there are those three ‘a’s—then On, El, Tetragammaton, Shema, Ariston, Anaphaxeton . . . surely that’s enough retinue for Her, Lexa.”
Silence. The black windows. The little fluttering candle flames dug down into the drums of colored wax, bringing up a sickly perfume that concealed and forgave whatever odors drifted from between the unholy wantons’ legs, their nests of once thick and springy curls turned gauzy and gray, pubic clocks ticking unseen, decade after decade, in their underpants.
“Goddess, are You there?” Alexandra asked the silence in an elevated voice. She tinkled the small bell, and after some seconds softly asked the other two, “Do you feel a vibration?”
“Not really,” Sukie admitted.
Jane, hopeful for herself, ventured, “I’m not sure.”
“We mustn’t hurry Her.” Alexandra, so daintily it sounded like an apology, rang the bell again, and then once more.
“I definitely feel it. Her,” Jane said greedily. “I have this gushing warm sensation that everything will be all right. I’m in Her arms!”
“Good,” Alexandra crooned, nursing her along. “Good.” She closed her eyes, to better receive the sensations of alignment. It was like on a radio, the station between two other stations: faint music, melody, straining through the static. “Inside each of us,” she intoned, “there are obstacles and inhibitions that tie us down, that prevent us from being free. Goddess, untie these aiguillettes.”
Silence. A car’s tires crunched the gravel in the parking lot below. Whose? Some revenant’s, from prior time.
“So what now?” Sukie asked with asperity. “How long do we have to wait, and for what?”
Why was Sukie the source of discord, of doubt? Alexandra guessed that she was jealous of the Goddess. She still wanted to be a goddess herself.