"Oh that's nice," Sukie said. "You're scary, Jane. You've taught me now to always wash out the tub."
"Do you think this is enough?" Jane asked Alexandra. The eyes that Sukie had called tortoiseshell in truth looked paler, with the unsteady glow of embers.
"Enough for what?" But Alexandra already knew, she had read Jane's mind; knowing chafed that sore place in Alexandra's abdomen, the sore place that had begun the other night, with too much reality to digest.
"Enough to make the charm," Jane answered.
"Why ask me? Make the charm yourself and see how it goes."
"Oh no, dearie. I've already said. We don't have your—how can I put it?—access. To the deep currents. Sukie and I are like pins and needles, we can prick and scratch and that's about it."
Alexandra turned to Sukie. "Where do you stand on this?"
Sukie tried, high on whiskey as she was, to make a thoughtful mouth; her upper lip bunched adorably over her slightly protruding teeth. "Jane and I have talked about it on the phone, a little. We do want you to do it with us. We do. It should be unanimous, like a vote. You know, by myself last fall I cast a little spell to bring you and Darryl together, and it worked up to a point. But only up to a point. To be honest, honey, I think my powers are lessening all the lime. Everything seems drab. I looked at Darryl the other night and he looked all slapped together somehow—I think he's running scared."
"Then why not let Jenny have him?"
"No," Jane interposed. "She mustn't. She stole him.
She made fools of us." Her s's lingered like a smoky odor in the long ugly scarred room. Beyond the little flights of stairs that went down to the kitchen area and up to the bedrooms, a distant, sizzling, murmuring sound signified that Jane's children were engrossed in television. There had been another assassination, somewhere. The President was giving speeches only at military installations. The body count was up but so was enemy infiltration.
Alexandra still turned to Sukie, hoping to be relieved of this looming necessity. "You cast a spell to bring me and Darryl together that day of the high tide? He wasn't attracted to me by himself?"
"Oh I'm sure he was, baby," Sukie said, but shrug-gingly. "Anyway who can tell? I used that green gardener's twine to tie the two of you together and I checked under the bed the other day and rats or something had nibbled it through, maybe for the salt that rubbed off from my hands."
"That wasn't very nice," Jane told Sukie, "when you knew I wanted him myself."
This was the moment for Sukie to tell Jane that she liked Alexandra better; instead she said, "We all wanted him, but I figured you could get what you wanted by yourself. And you did. You were over there all the time, fiddling away, if that's what you want to call it."
Alexandra's vanity had been stung. She said, "Oh hell. Let's do it." It seemed simplest, a way of cleaning up another tiny pocket of the world's endless dirt.
Taking care not to touch any of it with their hands, lest their own essences—the salt and oil from their skins, their multitudinous personal bacteria—become involved, the three of them shook the Kleenexes and the long blond hairs and the red Band-Aid thread and, most important, the fine specks of leg bristle, that jumped in the weave of the towel like live mites, into a ceramic ashtray Jane had stolen from the Bronze Barrel in the days when she would go there after rehearsal with the Neffs. She added the staring sugar head she had saved in her mouth and lit the little pyre with a paper match. The Kleenexes blazed orange, the hairs crackled blue and emitted the stink of singeing, the marzipan reduced itself to a bubbling black curdle. The smoke lifted to the ceiling and hung like a cobweb on the artificial surface, papery plasterboard roughed with a coat of sand-impregnated paint to feign real plaster.
"Now," Alexandra said to Jane Smart. "Do you have an old candle stump? Or some birthday candles in a drawer? The ashes must be crushed and mixed into about a half-cup of melted wax. Use a saucepan and butter it thoroughly first, bottom and sides; if any wax sticks, the spell is flawed."
While Jane carried out this order in the kitchen, Sukie laid a hand on the other woman's forearm. "Sweetie, I know you don't want to do this," she said.
Caressing the delicate tendony offered hand, Alexandra noticed how the freckles, thickly strewn on the back and the first knuckles, thinned toward the fingernails, as if this mixture had been insufficiently stirred. "Oh but I do," she said. "It gives me a lot of pleasure. It's artistry. And I love the way you two believe in me so." And without forethought she leaned and kissed Sukie on the complicated cushions of her lips.
Sukie stared. Her pupils contracted as the shadow of Alexandra's head moved off her green irises. "But you had liked Jenny."
"Only her body. The way I liked my children's bodies. Remember how they smelled as babies?"
"Oh Lexa: do you think any of us will ever have any more babies?"
It was Alexandra's turn to shrug. The question seemed sentimental, unhelpful. She asked Sukie, "You know what witches used to make candles out of? Baby fat!" She stood, not altogether steadily. She had been drinking vodka, which does not stain the breath or transport too many calories but which also does not pass like a stream of neutrinos through the system altogether without effect. "We must go help Jane in the kitchen."
Jane had found an old box of birthday candles at the back of a drawer, pink and blue mixed. Melted together in the buttered saucepan, and the ashes from their tiny pyre stirred in with an egg whisk, the wax came out a pearly, flecked lavender-gray.
"Now what do you have for a mold?" Alexandra asked. They rummaged for cookie cutters, rejected a pate mold as much too big, considered demitasse cups and liqueur glasses, and settled on the underside of an old-fashioned heavy glass orange-juice squeezer, the kind shaped like a sombrero with a spout on the rim. Alexandra turned it upside down and deftly poured; the hot wax sizzled within the ridged cone but the glass didn't crack. She held the top side under running cold water and tapped on the edge of the sink until the convex cone of wax, still warm, fell into her hand. She gave it a squeeze to make it oblong. The incipient human form gazed up at her from her palm, dented four times by her fingers. "Damn," she said. "We should have saved out a few strands of her hair."
Jane said, "I'll check to see if any is still clinging to the towel."
"And do you have any orangesticks by any chance?" Alexandra asked her. "Or a long nail file. To carve with. I could even make do with a hairpin." Off Jane flew. She was used to taking orders—from Bach, from Popper, from a host of dead men. In her absence Alexandra explained to Sukie, "The trick is not to take away more than you must. Every crumb has some magic in it now."
She selected from the knives hanging on a magnetic bar a dull paring knife with a wooden handle bleached and softened by many trips through the dishwasher. She whittled in to make a neck, a waist. The crumbs fell on a ScotTowel spread on the Formica countertop. Balancing the crumbs on the tip of the knife, and with the other hand holding a lighted match under this tip, she dripped the wax back onto the emerging Figurine to form breasts. The subtler convexities of belly and thighs Alexandra also built up in this way. The legs she pared down to tiny feet in her style. The crumbs left over from this became—heated, dripped, and smoothed—the buttocks. All the time she held in her mind the image of the girl, how she had glowed at their baths. The arms were unimportant and were sculpted in low relief at the sides. The sex she firmly indicated with the tip of the knife held inverted and vertical. Other creases and contours she refined with the bevelled oval edge of the orange-stick Jane had fetched. Jane had found one more long hair clinging to the threads of the towel. She held it up to the window light and, though a single hair scarcely has color, it appeared neither black nor red in the tint of its filament, and paler, finer, purer than a strand from Alexandra's head would have been. "I'm quite certain it's Jenny's," she said.