The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy fiction, General, Literary, Fantasy, Women - Rhode Island, Witches, Widows, Rhode Island, Women
ISBN: 9780345506979
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

Alexandra loved whipping along in Nat’s antique Jaguar with its top down. She could feel herself, in the eyes that watched her drive through town, flash by, an apparition of breezy womanhood, a kerchief snug beneath her chin. Tree branches and electric cables and house gables streamed overhead, and sunshine spattered on the windshield. Marcy lived out where Cocumscussoc Way became seedy, leaving the town center behind and trailing into a no-man’s land of abandoned saltwater farms and derelict vegetable stands and failed riding schools and shuttered, overambitious restaurants. The mailbox, one of those new squat plastic ones molded in one piece with its post and therefore impervious to the roaming vandals who batter metal detachable ones, proclaimed in white stick-on letters THE LITTLE-FIELD’S. The ignorant apostrophe annoyed Alexandra. Howard had originally had his electrician’s shop in the house, in a basement section next to a one-car garage, with its own door and a modest sign. But success bred of default—nobody wants to dirty his hands at a trade any more, while local gentrification ups the demand for services—had given him an office on the upper reach of Dock Street, an answering service, and a young assistant from one of those Central American countries where the poor are still eager to work. Alexandra did not see many signs of prosperity in their scruffy yard, with its scattered toys and drum-shaped aboveground pool, or in the peeling exterior of their split-level ranch, a stranded-looking leftover from the Levittown era.

Marcy came to the front door, in sluggish response to its three-note chime. She looked her age, which was close to that of the house. Kissed, her cheek seemed clammy. Alexandra said to her, “Darling, you don’t make a plural name by adding an apostrophe ‘s.’ That forms a possessive.”

Marcy was slow to understand; her wits had thickened along with her legs. “Oh. The mailbox. Howard did the lettering, with a little kit, and when I saw it it was too late to change. Does it matter?”

“I don’t know why it annoys me so. Like people saying they could care less, when they don’t care, and that somebody graduated Brown, when they graduated from Brown.”

“Language changes, Mother. It’s a growing, living thing.”

“Growing in all the wrong directions, it seems to me. In the direction of dumber and dumber.” Only her children, especially this oldest one, made her sound like such a scold. “How are the boys?” she asked, to change the subject, before realizing that “dumber and dumber” would have appeared to serve as the transition, as in fact the phrase had. “Is little Howard still enjoying the computer game?”

“He says the blood looks too fake and there aren’t enough what they call ‘ho’s being butchered. I know, it’s deplorable, but they all go through this phase. He hates, by the way, being called ‘little Howard.’ ”

“ ‘Howard Junior’ to me seems even worse. Your father and I didn’t agree on everything, as you know, but we did agree not to saddle any male child with being a junior, as if his identity is preëmpted from the start.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.