"My oldest, it's incredible, nothing but crinkle chips and Pecan Santhes since he was twelve and still he's six foot two, and not a cavity. The dentist says he's never seen such a beautiful mouth."
"It's the fluoride."
"I like Schubert. He isn't always after you like Beethoven is." "Or Mahler." "Oh my God, Mahler." "He really is monstrously too much." "My turn." "My turn."
"Ooh, lovely. You've found the spot." "What does it mean when your neck always hurts, and up near your armpits?" "That's lymph. Cancer." "Please, don't even joke." "Try menopause." "I wouldn't care about that." "I look forward to it."
"You do wonder, sometimes, if being fertile isn't overrated."
"You hear terrible things about IUDs now."
"The best subs, funnily enough, are from that supertacky-looking pizza shack at East Beach. But they close October to August. I hear the man and his wife
go to Florida and live with the millionaires in Fort Lauderdale, that's how well they do."
"That one-eyed man who cooks in a tie-dyed undershirt?"
"I've never been sure if it's really one eye or is he always winking?"
"It's his wife does the pizzas. I wish I knew how she keeps the crusts from getting soggy."
"I have all this tomato sauce and my children have gone on strike against spaghetti."
"Give it to Joe to take home."
"He takes enough home."
"Well, he leaves you something, too."
"Don't be coarse."
"What does he take home?"
"Smells."
"Memories."
"Oh. My goodness."
"Just let yourself float."
"We're all here."
"We're right with you."
"I feel that, "Jenny said in a voice even smaller and softer than her usual one.
"How very lovely you are."
"Wouldn't it be funny to be that young again?"
"I can't believe I ever was. It must have been somebody else."
"Close your eyes. One last nasty piece of grit right here in the corner. There."
"Wet hair is really the problem, this time of year."
"The other day my breath froze my scarf right to my face."
"I'm thinking of getting mine layered. They say the new barber on the other side of Landing Square, in that little long building where they used to sharpen saws, does a wonderful job."
"On women?"
"They have to, men have stopped getting them. They've upped the price, though. Seven fifty, that's without any wave or wash or anything."
"The last thing I did for my father was wheel him into the barber for a haircut. He knew it was his last, too. He announced it to everybody, all these men sitting around. 'This is my daughter, who's bringing me in for the last haircut I'll have in my life.'"
"Kazmierczak Square. Have you seen the new sign?"
"Horrible. 1 can't believe it'll last."
"People forget. The schoolchildren now, World War Two to them is just a myth."
"Don't you wish you still had skin like this? Not a scar, not a mole."
"Actually, there is a little pink thing I noticed the other day, up high. Higher."
"Oh yess. That hurt?"
"No."
"Good."
"Did you ever notice, once you start investigating yourself for lumps like they say you should, they seem to be everywhere? The body is just terribly complicated."
"Please don't even make me think about it."
"In the new dictionary they got at the paper there are these transparencies bound in with regular pages at the entry 'Man,' only a woman's body is there too. Veins, muscles, bones, each on a sheet of their own, it's incredible. How it all fits."
"I don't think it's really complicated, it's just our thinking about it makes it complicated. Like a lot of things."
"How wonderfully round they are. Perfect semicircles."
"Hemispheres."
"That sounds so political."
"Hemispheres of influence."
"That is one of the unjoys. Erogenous-zone sag. I looked at my bottom in the mirror the other day and here were these definite undeniable puckers. Maybe that's why I have a stiff neck."
"Nemo's makes a pretty good sausage sub."
"Too many hot red peppers. Fidel is getting to Rebecca. He's flavoring her."
"What color do you think their babies would be?"
"Beige."
"Mocha."
"Does that feel too intrusive?"
"Not exactly."
"How well she speaks!"
"Oh God: the trouble with being young and beautiful is nobody helps you really appreciate it. When 1 was twenty-two and at my peak I guess all I did was worry about pleasing my mother-in-law and if I was as good in bed as these whores Monty knew in college."
"It's like being rich. You know you have something and you get uptight about being taken advantage of."
"Darryl doesn't seem to let it worry him."
"How rich is he, really?"
"He still hasn't paid Joe's bill, I know."
"That's how the rich are. They hold their money and collect the interest."
"Pay attention, love."
"How can I not?"
"My fingertips are all shrivelled."
"Maybe it's time we see if amphibians can lay their eggs on land."
"Okey-dokey."
"Here we go."
Splashing, they emerged cumbersomely: silver born
in a chemical tumult from lead. They groped for towels.
"Where is he?"
"Asleep? I gave him a pretty strenuous game, if I do say so."
"They say, unless you use oil afterwards, water isn't good for your skin past a certain age." "We have ointments." "We have buckets of ointments." "Just stretch out. Are you still relaxed?" "Oh yes. I really am."
"Here's another, just under your pretty little boob. Like a tiny pink snout." Dark as the room was, it did not seem strange that this could be seen, for the pupils of the four of them had expanded as if to overflow their gray, hazel, brown, and blue irises. One witch pinched Jennifer's false teat and asked, "Feel anything?"
"No."
"Good."
"Feel any shame?" another asked. "No."
"Good," pronounced the third. "Isn't she good?" "She is."
"Just think, 'Float.'" "I feel I'm flying." "So do we." "All the time." "We're right with you." "It's killing."
"I love being a woman, really," Sukie said. "You might as well," Jane Smart said dryly. "I mean, it's not just propaganda," Sukie insisted. "My baby," Alexandra was saying. "Oh" escaped Jenny's lips.
"Gently. Gentler." "This is paradise."
"Well, I thought," Jane Smart said over the phone emphatically, as if certain of being contradicted, "she was a bit too ingratiating. Too demure and Alice-in-Wonderlandish. I think she's up to something."
"But what would that be? We're all poor as church mice and a town scandal besides." Alexandra's mind was still in her workroom, with the half-fleshed-out armatures of two floating, lightly interlocked women, wondering, as she patted handfuls of paste-impregnated shredded paper here and there, why she couldn't muster the confidence she used to bring to her little clay figurines, her little hefty bubbies meant to rest so securely on end tables and rumpus-room mantels.
"Think of the situation," Jane directed. "Suddenly she's an orphan. Obviously she was making a mess of things out in Chicago. The house is too big to heat and pay taxes on. But she has nowhere else to go."
Lately Jane seemed intent on poisoning every pot. Outside the window, the sparrow-brown twigs of an as yet snowless winter moved in a cold breeze, and the swaying birdfeeder needed refilling. The Spofford children were home for Christmas vacation but had gone ice-skating, giving Alexandra an hour to work in; it shouldn't be wasted. "I thought Jennifer was a nice addition," she said to Jane. "We mustn't get ingrown."
"We mustn't ever leave Eastwick either," Jane surprisingly said. "Isn't it horrible about Ed Parsley?"
"What about him? Has he come back to Brenda?"
"In pieces he'll come back" was the cruel reply. "He and Dawn Polanski blew themselves up in a row house in New Jersey trying to make bombs." Alexandra remembered his ghostly face the night of the concert, her last glimpse of Ed, his aura tinged with sickly green and the tip of his long vain nose seeming to be pulled so that his face was slipping sideways like a rubber mask. She could have said then that he was doomed. Jane's harsh image of coming back in pieces sliced Alexandra, her crooked arm and hand floating away with the telephone and Jane's voice in it, while her eyes and body let the window mullions pass through them like the parallel wires of an egg slicer. "He was identified by the fingerprints of a hand they found in the rubble," Jane was saying. "Just this hand by itself. It was all over television this morning, I'm surprised Sukie hasn't called you."