Sukie- The Last To Leave Eastwick
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Sukie was the last to leave Eastwick; the afterimage of her in her nappy suede skirt and orange hair, swinging her long legs and arms past the glinting shopfronts, lingered on Dock Street like the cool-colored ghost the eye retains after staring at something bright. This was years ago. The young harbormaster with whom she had her last affair has a paunch now, and three children, but he still remembers how she used to bite his shoulder and say she loved to taste the salt of the sea-mist condensed on his skin. Dock Street has been repaved and widened to accept more traffic, and from the old horse trough to Landing Square, as it tends to be called, all the slight zigzags in the line of the curb have been straightened. New people move to town; some of them live in the old Lennox mansion, which has indeed been turned into condominiums. The tennis court has been kept up, though the perilous experiment with the air-supported canvas canopy has not been repeated. An area has been dredged and a dock and small marina built, as tenant inducement. The egrets nest elsewhere. The causeway has been elevated, with culverts every fifty yards, so it never floods — or has only so far, in the great February blizzard of ‘78. The weather seems generally tamer in these times; there are rarely any thunderstorms.
The Witches of Eastwick — John Updike
