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

by, an older, more knowing hand had incised in a pencil that gouged its lines deep into the yellow-painted wood what looked like a swollen letter M but, on examination, was a naked woman, legs bent at the knee and spread to reveal between them a slit, a pumpkin-seed shape, curls of hair around and above it, and below it a dot that Owen could not name even to himself, in the silence of his head, it was so shameful. Refining his idea, the artist showed between the thighs two breasts with blackened, erect nipples and, between them, what Owen deciphered as the underside of a nose with its two nostrils. The woman was opening herself to be (as older boys said) fucked: that was clear. Why would she do this? That was not clear. Yet it was certain that a woman somewhere had allowed herself to be viewed this way and drawn so that this image could be reproduced here. She had no arms or head and her ankles trailed off without feet; the artist felt that these were inessential. The essential parts of her were depicted, and something stirred below Owen’s belly in acknowledgment that this was true: what mattered most was shown. The slit, the hair, the little dot, and nipples aimed upward like stubby anti-aircraft guns.

Yet the girls all around him seemed remote from these essentials. They had brown legs from being at the playground all summer, and could run as fast as he. They liked to win at all the games—roof ball and box hockey and Chinese checkers. Ginger Bitting, a girl in his class from Second Street, would hang upside down from the jungle gym, hanging on with only her bent legs while her arms, thin and freckled and with a whitish fuzz, reached down toward the dust, and her long hair, clay-red and fine like the dust, hung down between her arms. If her legs let go she would drop and might break her neck, as did the boy at camp under poor Danny Hoffman’s care. But she never did. Ginger, with her freckles, and her eyes like green glass a light was shining through, was the most daring, the most wiry girl in his class at grade school, the fastest on her feet, the best singer, and the captain of the girls’ team when the boys played them at soccer at recess. If she stole his cap or plaid book bag on the way home from school he could never catch her until she let him. On the playground swing she would kick out and soar; the swing chains would snap and tug and shake the pipe frame, pulling her back from falling as she reached horizontal; still she kicked higher, her brown legs stiff. He watched her feet reach for the sky, in their creased and scuffed leather shoes. Back then, he could wear ankle-high sneakers in summer but girls wore real shoes, with laces and smooth soles.

The playground was approached from the alley behind Owen’s house, on a path between two cornfields, and then along a kind of grassy road between the baseball bleachers and a row of cherry trees gone wild. Ginger would climb these trees in her slippery shoes, higher than Owen would ever dare. He would watch her as she ascended, but he never saw up her shorts anything like the complicated business drawn on the back of the equipment shed. In the quiet, long-shadowed hour after the playground supervisor and the other children had gone home, and the equipment—the hockey sticks and Ping-Pong paddles and checkerboards—was all locked up, Owen would experiment on the jungle gym, hanging by his arms and bent knees and daring himself to let go with his hands. But he never could. If he fell and broke his neck he would lie there all night, darkness and dew covering him, and be found only in the morning, when the supervisor, bossy, fussy Miss Mull, arrived at nine o’clock to run up the flag on the pole and lead the assembled children in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ginger had satellites, though the girls around her perhaps did not think of themselves that way. Each person probably thought of herself, though it was hard to believe, as the center of the universe, just as Owen did. There were a lot of Barbaras—Barbara Emerich, Barbara Jane Gross, Barbara Dolinski—and Alice Stottlemeyer and Georgene King and Carolyn McManus and Grace Bickta, all from Owen’s street or the streets above, who collected on the sidewalks and walked together to elementary school and back. It was Alice Stottlemeyer, shorter than the others and, like Owen, saddled with glasses on her nose, who first kissed him with a secret meaning, a sort of push with her mouth, tight but soft, at a game of spin-the-bottle they were playing at somebody’s birthday party, not Owen’s. His own birthday parties, when his mother gave them, were usually disasters that sent him up the stairs to his room crying, because his guests were having more fun than he, the birthday boy, who had not received exactly the presents he had hoped for. His mother would never allow the game of spin-the-bottle. Their glasses clicked, his and Alice’s, in the little kiss while the other children crowed and jeered and then fell silent, seeing they were kissing seriously, all in a second. Then the bottle spun on, in the center of the ring they made, on the linoleum floor or painted concrete floor of the basement they were in, converted to a den or rumpus room.

That was one of the many social distinctions that crisscrossed Willow, the one between people who had basements converted into recreation rooms, with panelling and carpeting and easy chairs, and those who, like Owen’s family, the Rausch-Mackenzies, still had cellars, with a sinister bin of filthy coal and cobwebbed shelves of preserves in Mason jars and a spatter-painted old washing machine, tub-shaped and fitted with a wringer of rubber.