The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

shop and the Woolworth's and the barbershop scattered over the space like creosote bushes that poison the earth around them. She had been the life of her family, a marvel of amusing grace flanked by dull brothers, boys yoked to the clattering cart of maleness, their lives one team after another. Her father, returning from his trips selling Levi's, had looked upon the growing Alexandra as upon a plant that grew in little leaps, displaying new petals and shoots at each reunion. As she grew, little Sandy stole health and power from her fading mother, as she had once sucked milk from her breasts. She rode horses and broke her hymen. She learned to ride on the long saddle-shaped seats of motorcycles, clinging so tightly her cheek took the imprint of the studs on the back of the boy's jacket. Her mother died and her father sent her east to college; her high-school guidance counselor had fastened on something with the safe-sounding name of Connecticut College for Women. There in New London, as field-hockey captain and fine-arts major, she moved through the many brisk costumes of the East's four picture-postcard seasons and in the June of her junior year found herself one day all in white and the next with the many uniforms of wife lined up limp in her wardrobe. She had met Oz on a sailing day on Long Island that others had arranged; holding drink after drink steady in a fragile plastic glass, he had seemed neither sick nor alarmed, when she had been both, and this had impressed her. Ozzie had delighted in her too—her full figure and her western, mannish way of walking. The wind shifted, the sail flapped, the boat yawed, his grin flashed reassuringly in the sun-scorched gin-fed pink of his face; he had a onesided sheepish smile a little like her father's. It was a fall into his arms, but by such fallings she dimly understood life to rise, from strength to strength. She shouldered motherhood, the garden club, car pools, and cocktail parties. She shared morning coffee with the cleaning lady and midnight cognac with her husband, mistaking drunken lust for reconciliation. Around her the world was growing—child after child leaped from between her legs, they built an addition onto the house, Oz's raises kept pace with inflation—and somehow she was feeding the world but no longer fed by it. Her depressions grew worse. Her doctor prescribed Tofranil, her psychotherapist analysis, her clergyman Either/Or. She and Oz lived at that time, in Norwich, within sound of church bells and as winter afternoon darkened and before school returned her children to her Alexandra would lie in her bed beaten flatter by every stroke, feeling as shapeless and ill-smelling as an old galosh or the pelt of a squirrel killed days before on the highway. As a girl she would lie on the bed in their innocent mountain town excited by her body, a visitor of sons who had come out of nowhere to enclose her spirit; she had studied herself in the mirror, saw the cleft in her chin and the curious dent at the end of her nose, stood back to appraise the sloping wide shoulders and gourdlike breasts and the belly like a shallow inverted bowl glowing above the demure triangular bush and solid oval thighs, and decided to be friends with her body; she could have been dealt a worse. Lying on the bed, she would marvel at her own ankle, turning it in the window light— the taut glimmer of its bones and sinews, the veins of palest blue with their magical traffic of oxygen—or stroke her own forearms, downy and plump and tapered. Then in mid-marriage her own body disgusted her, and Ozzie's attempts to make love to it seemed an unkind gibe. It was the body outside, beyond the windows, that light-struck, water-riddled, foliate flesh of that other self the world to which beauty still clung; when divorce came it was as if she had flown through that window. The morning after the decree, she was up at four, pulling up dead pea plants and singing by moonlight, singing by the light of