Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

MIT was a male world, its administrators and instructors all but exclusively male, and a number of them military men. Though the great post-war tide of veterans was receding, uniforms were still common on campus. Of six thousand students, no more than one hundred twenty were women, and half of these were graduate students. Phyllis Goodhue stood out, then, as one of a decided minority, outnumbered fifty to one in the endless corridors—floors of tan terrazzo and doors of frosted glass strictly numbered in black, even the women’s lavatory: 3-101-WOMEN. She was yet more noticeable among the springtime sunbathers in the Great Court, a large sheltered lawn, between Buildings 3 and 4, that overlooked the new segment of Memorial Drive, its double row of sycamores, and, in their gaps, the sparkling, playful Charles and the rosy low profile of Back Bay. Most of the female undergraduates were not lovely—driven grinds with neglected figures and complexions, heads down in the hallways as they bucked the tide, trying to blend in with the boys—and Owen had to look twice at Phyllis to verify that she was. Was lovely.

True or false? Was twice necessary? No: from the start, through that river-chilled, sleepless, and miserable first year in which his head was being stuffed with, among other rafts of basic data, introductory circuit theory (Kirchhoff’s law and Thévenin’s and Norton’s theorems, step function and impulse response, resonance phenomena and conjugate impedances), whenever Owen passed Phyllis in one of the thronged corridors, his own electromagnetic field changed, by an amount as subtle but as crucial as the difference between d and dt. There was a numbness only she inflicted. Her presence transformed the odd-shaped cement-paved spaces scattered among the buildings west of the Kendall Square subway stop, where bleary students loitered over gossip and cigarettes; like Ginger Bitting, this apparition had satellites, a few other girls but, inevitably in this environment, mostly boys. Owen’s eyes placed her at the center of this set, though in truth she never appeared to dominate. In a boisterous cluster she stood at the edge and appeared diffidently amused; she never laughed the loudest. She had a light but clear, carrying voice—he could overhear her long before seeing her—and careful gestures, restrained by a reluctance to impose herself that moved him and emboldened him. At his watchful distance, her pallor was a beacon, a broadcast resonance.

She held her head, with its slightly outthrust chin, erect on a long neck. Her straight hair, the mixed blond of half-damp sand, was gathered into a pony tail in back with a rubber band. In the front, bangs came down to her pale eyebrows, which blended with her skin; her brows and eyelashes were almost invisible. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and smoked poutingly, her cheeks deeply hollowed on the inhale and her exhale delivered with a certain dismissive vehemence, upward from the side of her mouth. In her offhand, underclad (the same dove-gray cloth coat and dirty tennis sneakers all winter) glamour she came to represent Cambridge for him—aloof, stoic, abstracted, pure. And he discovered that indeed she was a professor’s daughter; her father was Eustace Goodhue, biographer of the clergyman-poet George Herbert and editor of variorum editions of the Metaphysicals and lecturer in English at that other place, the university up the river, where the humanities, descended from Puritan theological studies, still ruled, leaving science to the world’s worker-bees.

Her distinguished daughterly status was part of the effect she made—made deliberately, he felt. She was like him, he sensed: shy, but with the caution of someone guarding a proud ego. Taller than average, she slouched as if to minimize her bosom, the fullness of which her dowdy winter wraps did not quite conceal. It was even less concealed when, on hot fall days, and again in the sunny breaks of April and May, she took off the long gray coat that made her look like a slender doorman or military attaché and lay stretched on a blanket in the middle of the Great Court with her skirt hiked to the middle of her thighs and her sweater and blouse down to (he could not be sure at his distance) a bathing-suit top or a bra.

She looked like no girl from Pennsylvania, not even the fancy ones from the Main Line. Elsie Seidel, his high-school girlfriend, the daughter of a country feed-and-hardware merchant, was always smartly turned out, with polished penny loafers and ribbed knee socks and sweeping skirts and broad belts in the New Look style, and tortoiseshell barrettes gleaming in the bouncy waves of her light-brown hair. And plenty of lipstick, maroon lipstick that looked black in photographs and rubbed off on his mouth so that, afterwards, it stung to wipe it away with spit on a handkerchief. He didn’t want his mother to see; his mother didn’t want him to go with Elsie at all, though the girl was respectable, more respectable locally than were the Mackenzies, newcomers to this end of the county and to the school district. The district encompassed several valleys and included families whose first language was still Pennsylvania Dutch. Elsie herself spoke with a “Dutchy” care, slower than girls in Willow talked—her voice seemed older than she was.

There was a country simplicity to her, a well-fed glossiness. The first time they kissed, in the intermission of a dance that Owen had attended because his mother urged him to be less scornful of the region’s high school even though it wasn’t Willow High, Elsie didn’t make the anxious pushing mouth that Alice Stottlemeyer had during spin-the-bottle but somehow let her lips melt into his, at this warm moist spot where their bodies joined. She was a short girl, in her sweated-up taffeta dance dress, and he, six feet tall at seventeen, the recent beneficiary of the Mackenzie ranginess. She had to tug down at him to keep his face tight to hers; she wanted to kiss more, there behind a