Sample: "The Widows of Eastwick" by John Updike
THE NEWLY FORGED HEX RING
Those of us who knew the dirty, scandalous pursuits of the three were not surprised when rumors came to us from the various areas where the witches had settled after fleeing our righteous little town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the spouses, who had invented the three godforsaken women with the help of their black art, were not very durable. Nefarious methods lead to susceptible results. Satan imitates creation, yes, but with inferior ingredients. Alexandra, the oldest in years, the most full-bodied in the flesh, and the closest to a normal, generous-minded humanity, was the first to become a widow. Her first impulse - like that of some suddenly abashed wife - was to travel as if to force the world to do so, by means of lax boarding cards, annoying flight delays, and the slight but undeniable risk Time of rising fuel prices, rampant / multiplying airline bankruptcies, suicidal terrorists and increasing metal fatigue to fly, to bring the fruitful annoyance one has with a partner.
Jim Farlander, the husband she had conjured out of a hollowed out pumpkin, a cowboy hat and a pinch of Westerner scratched from the inside of the back bumper of a Colorado-flagged pick-up truck parked on Oak Street back then In the early seventies, ominously out of place, as it turned out, when her marriage had settled and settled, it had been hard to get out of his ceramics workshop and the sparsely visited pottery store on a side street in Taos, New Mexico.
Jim liked being where he was, and Alexandra liked that about him
Jim's idea of a trip had been the one-hour drive south to Santa Fe; his idea of vacations had been to spend a day in one of the Indian Reserves - Navajo, Zuni, Apache, Acoma, Isleta Pueblo - and spy out what the American-American potters were offering in the reserve's souvenir shops, and hoping for it in some dusty Indian agency shop cheap to get hold of an authentic old geometric black and white patterned pueblo pitcher or a Hohokam storage box, red to tawny, with spiral and labyrinth patterns, objects that he would like for a small fortune in a freshly endowed museum in one of the flourishing Cities of the Southwest could turn on. Jim liked to be where he was, and Alexandra liked it because, as his wife, she was part of where he was. She had liked his slender body (flat stomach until his last day, though he had never done sit-ups in life), the saddle smell of his sweat, and the smell of clay clinging to his strong, skilled hands like a sepia aura , They had met each other - on a natural level - when Alexandra, divorced for some time, had taken a class at the Rhode Island School of Design, the leadership of which had been entrusted to Jim. The four stepchildren she gave him - Marcy, Ben, Linda, Eric - could not have asked for a calmer substitute father, not one so agreeably silent. Her children - almost fledging anyway, Marcy soon to be eighteen - were more easily treated with him than with her own father, Oswald Spofford, a small manufacturer of kitchen fittings from Norwich, Connecticut. Poor Ozzie was so dedicated to offspring baseball and company bowling that nobody could take him seriously, not even his kids.
That his death was near, she had first felt in bed
Jim Farlander, on the other hand, had taken the people seriously, especially women and children, who showed him his own laid-back silence. His motionless gray eyes in the shadow of the broad-brimmed hat with the darkened spot where he pinched it with his thumb and fingers, flashed like a faded blue cloth around his head, around his long hair-gray, but still with strands of the original one sun-bleached walnut and backed into an eight-inch long ponytail - keep away from the wet clay on the foot-driven disc. As a teenager, Jim had fallen off his horse once, limping, and the disc he did not want to electric powered limped with him, while his masculine hands lifted lumps of clay out of the barrel and into graceful, slender vessels Waists and swelling bottoms formed. That his death was near, she had first felt in bed.His erections began to wither, if only he had come through; instead, in his lying on her body, in his tendon and muscle structure, a slackening was felt. The accuracy with which Jim was dressed had had something challenging coquettes-tapering vanilla-colored boots, tight jeans taut over the buttocks, riveted pockets, and fresh plaid shirts with two buttons on the cuffs. He, who used to be a dandy in his own way, began putting on the same shirt for two or even three days in a row. On the underside of his chin were white stubble, signs of careless shaving or bad eyes. When the disquieting blood reports arrived from the hospital and the shadows on the x-rays were visible even to Alexandra's inexperienced eyes, he took the news with stoic exhaustion; Alexandra struggled to peel him out of his crusted work clothes and persuade him to wear something decent.
They had lived by their own rules
They had lined up in the army of elderly couples filling the waiting rooms in hospitals, as nervous as parents and children were just before a performance in the auditorium. She felt the other couples idly gliding over her with their eyes and trying to find out who was the sick of them, the condemned man; she did not want it to be obvious. She wanted to show Jim how a mother presents a child who is going to school for the first time, she wanted to honor him. They had lived by their own rules in these more than thirty years since leaving Eastwick, up in Taos; There the free spirits of D.H. Lawrence and his wife and Mabel Dodge Luhan still sheltered a tent over the miserable remnant of the tribe of would-be artists, a heavily drunk, New-Agéberglische arts and crafts clique, who wistfully turned to window-dressing, nutty tourists instead of well-heeled Collector of Western Art. Alexandra had resumed for a while her production of small ceramic "Duttelchen" - facial and footless little female characters, pleasant to hold in her hand in her chubby shapelessness, with gaudily painted clothes, close up like tattoos; but Jim, jealous and dictatorial in his art, as true artists are, had not been generous when it came to sharing his furnace. Anyway, the miniature women, to whom she had boldly carved a labia in the burned clay with a toothpick or sideways knitting needle, belonged to an unpleasant earlier phase of her life when she had practiced a half-baked suburban witchcraft with two other Rhode Island divorces.
Jim's illness drove her and Jim out of the safe and crafty Taos, down into the broader society, into the valleys of the dying - a huge herd that charged like a bison's stamina on the deadly cliff. The social behavior forced on her - conversations with doctors, most disturbingly young; Conversations with sisters of compassionate favors for asking that the hospitalized patient was too man and too depressed for himself; Compassion for others who, like herself, would be widows and widowers in the foreseeable future, and for whom she would have made a bow on the street, but embraced her with tears now in these germ-free corridors-all this had made her travel prepared in the company of strangers.
