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

broken Coke machine, where the overhead fluorescent light was flickering. Her eager small body molded itself to his; he remembered hearing how Carol Wisniewski had let herself be fucked by Marty Naftzinger standing up in the narrow space between the Rec Hall and the hosiery mill, and saw that it could be done.

Not that he and Elsie ever—in a word they never used between them—fucked. He was too smart for that, too anxious to avoid wasting his one life. He knew that fucking led to marriage and he was not ready for that. In the heat and urgency of that first kiss he recognized that she had had her eye on him, as the phrase went—he had been an exotic, aloof arrival at the school, and somehow the idea of him had wormed its way excitingly into Elsie’s head. So between them there was always this tilt, this unbalance: she had desired him before he knew what was up. Nevertheless, he responded; he loved her, as far as he could shake the embarrassment of her not being a Willow girl. She was only, in her swinging skirts and white bobby socks, an imitation, a feed merchant’s daughter.

He would afterwards associate Elsie with the inside of a car—its stale velour, its little dim dashboard lights, its rubber floormats and chill metallic surfaces. Chill to begin with: after an evening of driving around, the heater made a cozy nook in the dark. On dates, they took his parents’ stuffy pre-war Chevy, the second-hand car the Mackenzies had bought as part of their move to the country house. His father was generally back from Norristown by six, and Owen was granted the car for the gasoline-powered roaming that is, in common American wisdom, a teen-ager’s right.

Before Elsie, he would sometimes drive back to Willow, looking for the action among his old friends and rarely finding it. He saw Willow now, having left at twelve, with an exile’s eyes, as a small provincial place where life—the social life of his own classmates, the bunch at the playground half grown-up—went on without him, out of sight: a deserted village. His grandfather’s chicken house was losing some of its asbestos shingles, he could see as he cruised by in the alley that bent around their old house. Not that he was certain to have been happy had his family stayed. Adolescence reshuffles the cards. As a child he had been more spectator than actor, valued primarily as a loyal follower, an admirer—of Buddy Rourke, of the girls he scarcely dared imagine naked.

Now, with Elsie in the car, he had real nakedness to deal with. At first, just kissing, on and on, eyes closed to admit behind sealed lids a flood of other sensations, an expansion of consciousness into a salty, perfumed space quite unlike the hushed and headlong vault of masturbation. In the dark seclusion between cool tight sheets, his parents’ muttering having died away, he would seem for some seconds to stand on his head, having discovered with his left hand a faithful mechanism impossibly sweet, an astonishing release, a clench that took him back to infancy, its tight knit of newness before memories overlaid the bliss of being. Into this private darkness had come another, another seeker, and what was being found, clumsily yet unstoppably, was a core self explored by another consciousness. Elsie was both witness and witnessed. Her eyes were the wet, honey-tinged brown of horehound drops. By the particles of light that entered through the windshield he saw the dark dents of her dimples when she smiled, and the side of one eyeball gleam as she studied him across a gap that closed in a few seconds. Huddled beside him on the front seat, a bench seat in that era, with her back gouged by the knob of the window crank and her calves and ankles roasted by the heater, she seemed cupped to receive him, a nest of growing permissions. With each date she gave him an inch or two more of herself that he could claim as his henceforth; there was no taking back these small warm territories. Beyond kissing there was so much to touch, so many hooks and tricks among the catches and aromatic coverings, there in the shelter of the car, which sometimes became her car, for, though a year younger than he, she also had a driver’s license, and when his poor old family Chevy was under overnight repair or commandeered for some adult evening errand, she would bring a car of her family’s, her mother’s green Dodge or even her father’s new deep-blue Chrysler with its V-8 engine, to pick him up, at the farmhouse where his mother had not without a struggle accepted that Elsie had become his “girl,” whatever that meant as the world embarked on a new half-century.

Some of those evenings when Elsie did the driving, pulling up in an impressive machine, she would be invited in, into the little house’s front parlor, where the bulky Rausch furniture from the Willow house had suddenly gone shabby and was covered with hairs from the two collies his mother had acquired as part of her vision of rural life. Smartly dressed in this setting of declining gentility, at whose edges Owen’s two grandparents made a shuffling, murmuring retreat, Elsie spoke to Owen’s mother with a lively courtesy. Her honey-brown eyes flashed; her scarlet lips smiled. Uneasily standing by, in a flannel shirt whose sleeves were too short, in scuffed laced shoes that looked oafish compared with Elsie’s polished penny loafers (much on view as she smartly crossed and recrossed her legs), Owen felt like a baton being passed. He felt he was present, as one pleasantry followed another, at a duel. His mother too had once been the smartly turned-out daughter of a successful rural entrepreneur; she knew a certain code, she knew “how to behave.” She also knew how people did behave, and couldn’t do much about it.

When the young people, these