"No I don't know," said Jennifer, but softly. "But then I guess I don't know much about that sort of thing altogether."
Meaning what? That she was a virgin? It was hard to know if the girl was empty or if her strange stillness manifested an exceptionally complete inner poise. "Tell me about you," Sukie said. "You're going to become a doctor? Clyde was so proud of that."
"Oh, but it's a fraud. I keep running out of money and flunking anatomy. It was the chemistry I liked. The technician job is really as far as I'm ever going to go. I'm stuck."
Sukie told her, "You should meet Darryl Van Home. He's trying to get us all unstuck."
Jennifer unexpectedly smiled, her little flat nose whitening with the tension. Her front teeth were round as a child's. "What a grand name," she said. "It sounds made up. Who is he?"
But she must, Sukie thought, have heard about our sabbats. The girl was difficult to see through; patches of an unnatural innocence, as though she had been skipped by life, blocked telepathy as lead blocks X-rays. "Oh, a sort of eccentric youngish middle-aged man who's bought the old Lenox place. You know, the big brick mansion toward the beach."
"The haunted plantation, we used to call that. I was fifteen when my parents moved here and really never got to know the area terribly well. There's an enormous amount to it, though it looks like nothing on the map."
Insolent tropical Rebecca brought their coffee in Nemo's heavy white mugs, and the golden johnny-cakes; along with the pronounced warm fragrances of these there carried across the glazed table a spicy sour smell that Sukie linked to the waitress herself, her broad pelvis and heavy coffee-colored breasts, as she leaned over to set the mugs and plates in place. "Is there anything wanting now of you ladies' happiness?" the waitress asked, looking down upon them from the great slopes of herself. Her head looked rather small and sinewy—her black hair done in corn rows of tight braids—upon the mass of her flesh.
"Is there any cream, Becca?" Sukie asked.
"I get you de one." Putting down the little aluminum pitcher, she told them, "You can say 'cream' if you likes, milk is what dc boss puts in every mornin'."
"Thank you, darling, I meant milk." But for a little joke Sukie quickly said to herself the white spell Sator arepo tenet opera rotas, and the milk poured thick and yellow, cream. Curdled flecks rotated on the circular surface of her coffee. Johnnycake turned to buttery fragments in her mouth. Indian ghosts of cornmeal slipped through the forest of her tastebuds. She swallowed and said, of Van Home, "He's nice. You'd like him, once you got over his manner."
"What's wrong with his manner?"
Sukie wiped crumbs from her smiling lips. "He comes on rough, but it's a put-on really. He's really no threat, anybody can manage Darryl. A couple of my girlfriends and I play tennis with him in this fantastic big canvas bubble he's put up. Do you play?"
Jennifer's round shoulders shrugged. "A little. Mosdy at summer camp. And a bunch of us used to go use the U. of C. courts occasionally."
"How long are you going to be around, before you go back to Chicago?"
Jennifer was watching the curds swirl in her own coffee. "A while. It may take until summer to sell the house, and Chris has nothing much to do as it turns out and we get along easily; we always have. Maybe I won't go back. As I said, it wasn't working out that great at Michael Reese."
"Were you having man trouble?"
"Oh no." Her eyes lifted, displaying below her pale irises arcs of pure youthful white. "Men don't seem all that interested in me."
"But why not? If I may say so, you're lovely."
The girl lowered her eyes. "Isn't this funny milk? So thick and sweet. I wonder if it's gone bad."
"No, I think you'll find it very fresh. You haven't eaten your johnnycake."
"I nibbled at it. I never was that crazy about them, they're just fried dough."
"That's why we Rhode Islanders like them. They come as they are. I'll finish yours if you don't want it."
"I must do something wrong that men sense. I used to talk about it with my friends sometimes. My girlfriends."
"A woman needs woman friends," Sukie said complacently.
"I didn't have that many of those either. Chicago is a tough town. These birdlike little ethnic women studying all night and full of all the answers. If you ask them anything personal, though, like what you're doing wrong with these men you have to meet, they clam right up."
"It's hard to be right with men, actually," Sukie told her. "They're very angry with us because we can have babies and they can't. They're terribly jealous, poor dears: Darryl tells us that. I don't really know whether or not to believe him; as I say, a lot of him is pure put-on. At lunch the other day he was trying to describe his theories to me, they all have to do with some chemical whose name begins with 'silly.'"
"Selenium. It's a magical element. It's the secret of those doors in airports that open automatically in front of you. Also it takes the green color out of glass that iron gives it. Selenic acid can dissolve gold."
"Well, my goodness, you do know a thing or two. If you're that into chemistry, maybe you could be Darryl's assistant."
"Chris keeps saying I should just hang out in our house with him a while, at least until we sell it. He's fed up with New York, it's too tough. He says the gays control all the fields he's interested in—window dressing, stage design."
"I think you should."
"Should what?"
"Hang around. Eastwick's amusing." Rather impatiently—the morning was wasting—Sukie brushed all thejohnnycake crumbs from the front of her sweater. "This is not a tough town. This is a sweetie-pie town." She washed down the crumbs in her mouth with a last sip of coffee and stood.
"I feel that," the other woman said, getting the signal and beginning to gather up her scarf, her pathetic patched parka. Dressed and on her feet, Jenny performed a surprising, thrilling mannish action: she took Sukie's hand in a firm grip. "Thank you," she said, "for talking to me. The only other person who has taken any interest in us, except for the lawyers of course, is that nice lady minister, Brenda Parsley."
"She's a minister's wife, not a minister, and I'm not sure she's so nice either."
"Her husband behaved horribly to her, everybody tells me."
"Or she to him."
"I knew you'd say something like that," Jennifer said, and smiled, not unpleasantly; but it made Sukie feel naked, she could be seen right through, with no lead vest of innocence to protect her. Her life was lived in full view of the town; even this little stranger knew a thing or two.
Before Jennifer flicked the scarf into place Sukie noticed that around her neck hung a thin gold chain of the type that for some people supports a cross. But at the base of the girl's slender soft white throat hung the Egyptian tau cross, its loop at the top like the head of a tiny man—an ankh, symbol of life and death both, an ancient sign of mysteries come newly into vogue.
Seeing Sukie's eyes linger there, Jennifer looked oppositely at the other's necklace of copper moons and said, "My mother was wearing copper. A broad plain bracelet I'd never seen before. As if—"
"As if what, dear?"
"As if she were trying to ward something off." "Aren't we all?" said Sukie cheerily. "I'll be in touch about tennis."
The space inside Van Home's great bubble was acoustically and atmospherically weird: the sounds of shouts and of balls being hit seemed smothered even as they rang out, and a faint prickly sensation of pressure weighed on Sukie's freckled brow and forearms. The amber hair of these forearms stood up as if electrified. Beneath the overarching firmament of dun canvas everything seemed in slightly slow motion; the players moved through an aura of compression, though in fact the limp dome stayed inflated because the air within it, pumped by a tireless fan through a boxy plastic mouth sealed by duct tape low in one corner, was warmer than the winter air outside. Today was the shortest day of the year. An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. Thin powdery lines appeared next to brick edges and exposed tree roots but melted in the wan noon sun; there was no accumulation, though every shop and bank with its seasonal pealing and cotton mimicry was inviting Christmas to be white. Dock Street, as early darkness overtook the muffled shoppers, looked harried, its gala lights a forestallment of sleep, a desperate hollow-eyed attempt to live up to some promise in the bitter black air. Playing tennis in their tights and leg warmers and ski sweaters and double pairs of socks stuffed into their sneakers, the young divorced mothers of Eastwick were taking a holiday from the holiday.