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

through the other, imperfectly. This freakishness was part of their magnetism and the overall comedy in the round of parties, meetings, games, picnics, pickup lunches, gourmet dinners, amateur theatricals, choral-society rehearsals, bird walks, canoe trips, ski excursions, and sleepy, gently boozy Sunday-afternoon get-togethers that compensated for the town’s isolation from metropolitan entertainments. The children were the ostensible point of much of it—the skiing, the skating, the April kite-flying, the August clambakes—and yet much of it was an escape from the children, even while they were present, jostling and quarrelling underfoot, sitting blearily on the edge of the lawn while their parents leaped and dived in the heat, say, of a volleyball game. The wives played along with the husbands, and their easily bruised flesh was elbowed and bumped, yet they continued—barefoot, lightly clad—to take their places, as in a village chain dance. Such rites were strange to Owen and enchanted him.

He was really, he learned in Middle Falls, a remarkably ignorant and incomplete human being. His socialization had scarcely progressed beyond the Willow playground. MIT and IBM had been soldier brotherhoods, each man absorbed by his own survival, his own sheet of paper or computer screen, his log table or slide rule. New York had narrowed him further, crowding him tighter against a woman who was under social constraint to love him but not to see him, in the way that his mother had seen him, somehow fiercely, as a treasure of infinite value—herself projected into maleness and wider opportunity. Even Grammy with her dim eyes and cockeyed silver spectacles had seen him and loved him beyond reason. Once, coming up through the back yard in his shorts, he had felt his bowels begin to move and was unable to keep the call of nature back and ran crying toward the house, and it was Grammy who, wordlessly clucking, wiped the yellow diarrhea from his legs. In his dreams, repeatedly, his excrement overflowed the bowl, flooded the floor, caked all over his body, stunk up the room in which others, inches away, were having a dinner party. For all his good grades and test scores, he had been so ignorant of basic processes that in his freshman year at MIT he went for weeks without changing the case on his pillow, stupidly wondering why it was turning gray. Grammy and his mother had done his laundry; he had never thought about how his socks got back to his bureau, clean and balled, from where he had dropped them on the floor. Learning to cook never crossed his mind. He let Phyllis do it all, baby Floyd on her hip and the two toddlers squabbling at her knees. His family hadn’t had money for liquor; he didn’t understand the appeal of it, or the portions and customs of it. He let Phyllis mix the drinks on the rare occasions when they entertained another couple, in New York or, more stiltedly still, in the military in Germany—people they knew their lives would shed forever.

Now there was constant entertaining, and games all weekend. The only games he knew he had learned at the Willow playground—box hockey, Chinese checkers, and Twenty-one and Horse, games of elimination a few idlers could play around a basketball backboard. In those first years in Middle Falls, as he turned thirty, Owen learned the basics of tennis and golf, of paddle tennis, of skiing, both cross-country and downhill. He learned to swim in water over his head without panicking, and to ride the Berkshires ski lifts calmly even when the chairs bounced a great distance above cliffs of ice and granite. Ice hockey and equestrian sports he willingly forwent, though the men of their new acquaintance had emerged from childhood proficient in the former, and the women the latter. He learned how to play bridge, and up to a point how to dance, though he never felt quite easy with a woman in his arms, having to thrust his feet boldly toward hers. He was rescued from contact dancing by the fashion of the Twist and then the Frug, which suited his loose joints and solitary habits.

Middle Falls was for Owen an institute of middle-class know-how. Chunky, red-faced Jock Dunham, who had a lovely lithe hard-laughing wife, taught him how to make a martini, a brandy stinger, a white-wine spritzer, and an old-fashioned (you dissolve the sugar in a little water before the ice and bourbon). Ruminative, pipe-puffing Henry Slade, who shuffled paper in Connecticut’s Department of Revenue, was methodically handy at husbandry, and explained to Owen how he stacked fresh-cut wood for a year outdoors and then in a special dry room in his cellar another twelve months to assure a clean blaze in his fireplace. His wife, Vanessa, was plain and civically active, with wide shoulders, thick eyebrows, and a disconcertingly direct, appraising gaze; she instructed the new couple how to vote, locally, and when to set out their trash, and how it should be sorted. Ian Morrissey, a free-lance illustrator, owned an aging Thunderbird convertible and a new green Jaguar and shared automotive expertise; the Mackenzies had never owned a car before acquiring a Studebaker Lark station wagon that handled poorly in the snow and didn’t always start in the rain. After the initial two-year rental of the clapboarded semi-detached just off run-down, well-trafficked Common Lane, they felt able to buy a house, less central, out on bucolic Partridgeberry Road, with a big yard for the kids as they grew and a patch of woods beyond a pond choked with water-lilies and adorned with a collapsing wooden bridge. Roscoe Bisbee, once a country boy from Vermont, undertook to lead Owen through the rebuilding of the bridge, and explained about liming a lawn and applying dandelion killer, and where to buy the best riding mower. Riding mower, fertilizer spreader, posthole digger, shovels and rakes—they were acquired one by one. With the woods and yard trees came a chain saw, a pole saw, a Swedish band saw. Home