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, Alexandra had been at sculpture for five years – since before the divorce, to which it, like most manifestations of her blossoming selfhood, had contributed.

Jane Smart, too, was an artistic person – a musician. She gave piano lessons to make ends meet, and substituted as choir director in local churches sometimes, but her love was the cello; its vibratory melancholy tones would at some moonlit hours on warm nights come out of the windows of her low little ranch house where it stood amid many like it on the curved roads of the Fifties development called Cove Homes. Her neighbors on their quarter-acre lots, husband and wife, child and dog, would move about, awakened, and discuss whether or not to call the police. They seldom did, confused and, it may be, frightened by something naked, a splendor and sadness, in Jane's playing. It seemed easier to fall back to sleep, lulled by the sad sounds of the cello.

Sukie had nothing of what Alexandra would call an artistic talent but she loved social existence and had been made by the financial difficulties that follow divorce to write for the local weekly newspaper, the Eastwick Word. She loved her two friends, and they her. Today, after typing up her account of last night's meetings at Town Hall, Sukie looked forward hungrily to Alexandra's and Jane's coming over to her house for a drink. They usually gathered on Thursdays, in one of their three houses. Sukie lived in the middle of town, which was convenient for her work, though her small house was a great step down from the farmhouse – six bedrooms, thirty acres, a station wagon, a sports car, a Jeep, four dogs – that she and Monty had shared. But her girlfriends made it seem fun; they usually chose some colorful bit of costume for their gatherings. In a gold-threaded shawl Alexandra entered, stooping, at the side door to the kitchen; in her hands were two jars of her tomato sauce.

The witches kissed, cheek to cheek. “Here sweetie, I know you like nutty dry things best but,” Alexandra said, in her thrilling contralto. Sukie took the twin gifts into her own, more slender hands. “The tomatoes came on like a plague this year for some reason,” Alexandra continued. “I put about a hundred jars of this up and then the other night I went out in the garden in the dark and shouted, 'Fuck you, the rest of you can all rot!'”

“I remember one year with the zucchini,” Sukie responded, putting the jars dutifully on a cupboard shelf from which she would never take them down. As Alexandra said, Sukie loved dry nutty things – celery, cashews, pilaf, pretzel sticks. When alone, she never sat down to eat,just dipped into some yoghurt with a Wheat Thin while standing at the kitchen sink or carrying a bag of onion-flavored chips into her TV den with a stiff bourbon. “I did everything,” she said to Alexandra, “Zucchini bread, zucchini soup, salad, zucchini stuffed with hamburger and baked, cut into slices and fried, cut into sticks to use with a dip, it was wild. I even threw a lot into the blender and told the children to put it on their bread instead of peanut butter. Monty was desperate; he said even his shit smelled of zucchini.”

Alexandra almost laughed at this pleasurable reminiscence of Sukie's married days and prosperity, but mention of an old husband stopped her. Sukie was the most recently divorced and the youngest of the three. She was a slender redhead, her hair down her back trimmed straight across and her long arms covered with freckles. She wore copper bracelets and a pentagram on a cheap thin chain around her throat. What Alexandra, with her heavily Hellenic, twice-dimpled features, loved about Sukie's looks was the cheerful simian thrust: Sukie's big teeth pushed her profile below the short nose out in a curve, a protrusion especially of her upper lip, which was longer and more complex in shape than her lower, with a plumpness on either side of the center that made even her silences seem puckish. Her eyes were hazel and round and rather close together. Sukie moved easily in her miniature kitchen, everything crowded together. With one hand, she pulled a can of Planter's Beer Nuts from a cupboard shelf and with the other took from the drainer on the sink a little dish to hold them. She strewed crackers on a platter around a wedge of red-coated Gouda cheese. The pattern on the platter resembled a crab. Cancer. Alexandra feared it, and saw its emblem everywhere in nature. “Your usual?” Sukie asked tenderly, for Alexandra, as if older than she was, had with a sigh dropped her body, without removing her shawl, into an old blue easy chair.

“I guess it's still tonic time,” Alexandra decided. ”How's your vodka supply?” Someone had once told her that vodka was less fattening and irritated the lining of your stomach less than gin. Irritation, psychic as well as physical, was the source of cancer. Those get it who leave themselves open to the idea of it; all it takes is one single cell gone crazy. Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch.

Sukie smiled, broader. “I knew you were coming.” She produced a bottle.

The tonic bottle fizzed in Sukie's fingers as if scolding. Perhaps cancer cells were more like bubbles of carbonation, penetrating through the bloodstream, Alexandra thought. She must stop thinking about it. “Where's Jane?” she asked.

“She said she'd be a little late. She's rehearsing for that concert at the church'.”

“With that awful Neff,” Alexandra said.

Raymond Neff taught music at the high school, a roly-poly womanish man who however had fathered five children upon his untidy, sallow, steel-bespectacled, German-born wife. He wanted to sleep with everybody. Jane was sleeping with him these days. Alexandra had slept with him a few times in the past but the episode had moved her so little – Sukie was perhaps unaware of its afterimage. Sukie herself seemed to be chaste vis-a-vis Neff, but then she had been available least long. Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly: sooner or later you land on all the properties. The two friends wanted to save Jane because they disapproved of Neff's hideous wife Greta. When you sleep with a married man, you in a sense sleep with the wife as well, so she should not be an absolute shame.

Laughingly discussing Greta Neff's various imperfections, the women took their drinks into the “den,” a little room with peeling wallpaper and a sharply slanting ceiling because the room was half tucked under the stairs that went up to the attic-like second floor.

“She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?” Alexandra asked.

“And those granny glasses!” Sukie agreed. “She looks like John Lennon.” She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face.

“A cabbagy smell,” Alexandra continued. “He carries it on his clothes,” she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that this intimate detail would show Sukie that she had slept with Neff. Well, she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One interesting aspect of sleeping with husbands was the viewpoint they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of a sweet bit of edelweiss he had brought from a dangerous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty… Alexandra tried to remember what Monty had said about Sukie. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and his words had been: “She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself.” And it was true, Monty had lost a lot of his family's money while married to Suki, though everyone had blamed his own calm stupidity for this.

“Greta must be great in the sack,” Sukie was saying. “All those Kinder.”

“We must be nice to her,” Alexandra said, back to the subject of Jane. “Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up.”

Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man.

“Angrier than anybody else?” Sukie asked, meaning themselves.

“Oh yes. We're in lovely shape,” the older woman answered, her mind drifting from this irony toward the subject of that conversation with Jane – the new man in town, in the Lenox mansion.

“Oh I know about him!” Sukie exclaimed, having read Alexandra's mind. “I have such tons to tell, but I wanted to wait until Jane got here.”

The kitchen doorbell rang, and Jane let herself in. She was not physically radiant like Sukie, yet an appeal shone from her as light from a filament lamp.

“That Neff is so awful,” Jane said. “He had us do the Haydn over and over. He said my intonation was prissy. Prissy. I burst into tears and told him he was a disgusting male chauvinist.”

“They can't help it,” Sukie said lightly. “It's just their way of asking for more love.”

“Hi there, you gorgeous creature,” Jane addressed Alexandra. “Tell me, though – was that thunderstorm the other day yours?”

Alexandra confessed that she had driven to the beach and seen smoke from the chimney.

“Greta came into the church,” Jane said, “right after he called my Haydn prissy, and laughed.”

Sukie did a German laugh: “Ho hoho.”

“Do they still have sex, I wonder?” asked Alexandra. “How could he stand it? It must be like excited sauerkraut.”

“No,” Jane said firmly. “It's like – what's that pale white stuff they like so? – sauerbraten.”

“They marinate it,” Alexandra said. “In vinegar, with garlic, onions, and bay leaves. And I think peppercorns.”

“Is that what he tells you?” Sukie asked Jane mischievously.

“We never talk about it, even at our most intimate,” Jane prissily said. “All he ever confessed on the subject was that she had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.”

“A poltergeist,” Sukie said, delighted. “A polter-frau.”

“Really,” Jane said, not seeing the humor of it, “you're right. She is an impossibly awful woman. So pedantic; so smug; such a Nazi. Ray is the only one who doesn't see it, poor soul.”

“I wonder how much she guesses,” Alexandra mused.

“She doesn't want to guess,” Jane said. “If she guessed she might have to do something about it.”

“Like turn him loose,” Sukie suggested.

“Then we'd all have to cope with him,” Alexandra said, visualizing this plump dank man as a tornado, an insatiable natural reservoir, of desire.

“Hang on, Greta!” Jane chimed in, seeing the humor at last.

All three giggled.

“Doesn't anybody want to hear about this new man?” Sukie asked still laughing.

“Not especially,” Alexandra said. “Men aren't the answer, isn't that what we've decided?”

“They're not the answer,” Jane Smart said. “But maybe they're the question.”

Sukie stood to make her announcement. “He's rich,” she said, “and forty-two. Never married, and from New York, one of the old Dutch families. He was evidently a child prodigy at the piano, and invents things besides. The whole big room in the east wing and the laundry area under it are to be his laboratory, and on the west side, he wants to install a big sunken tub, with the walls wired for stereo.” Her round eyes, quite green in the late light, shone with the madness of it. “Joe Marino has the plumbing contract: no estimate asked for, everything the best, price be damned. A teak tub eight feet in diameter, and the man doesn't like the feel of tile under his feet so the whole floor is going to be some special fine-grained slate you have to order from Tennessee.”

“He sounds pompous,” Jane told them.

“Does this big spender have a name?” Alexandra asked. She was jealous of this man because he so excited her two friends. On other Thursdays they were excited by her powers. On those Thursdays, in the right mood and into their third drinks, the three friends could erect a cone of power above them like a tent and know who of the Eastwick's inhabitants was sick, who was falling into debt, who was loved, who was frenzied, who was vehement, who was asleep in a respite from life's bad luck; but this wouldn't happen today. They were disturbed, and the curious thing was that they couldn't remember the man's name. The three witches realized that they were themselves under a spell, of a greater sorcerer.

Darryl Van Horne came to the chamber-music concert in the Unitarian Church on Sunday night, a bearish dark man with greasy curly hair half-hiding his ears and gathered at the back so that his head from the side looked like a beer mug with a monstrously thick handle. He wore gray flannels bagged at the backs of his knees somehow and an elbow-patched jacket of Harris Tweed in a curious pattern of green and black. A pink Oxford button-down shirt of the type fashionable in the Fifties and, on his feet, absurdly small and pointy black loafers completed the costume. He was out to make an impression.