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

couple, escaping from a house that wasn’t theirs. But he, their child, was theirs, and they dragged him along, though the very prospect made his legs heavy, and he would lag behind more and more until his father would eventually double back and lift him up onto his shoulders. It felt weirdly high up there, and his father’s head seemed so strangely large and hairy that after a while he was happy to return to the earth on his own legs.

There were several routes the walk could take. One way was to turn left down the nameless alley beyond their hedge and walk across Alton Avenue and through the newer section of Willow to Shale Hill and climb it. There were Victory Gardens along the base, but at the summit paths wandered between pines and flat rocks that reminded him of sliding stacks of newspapers getting dark and wrinkled in the rain. From up here the whole town was open to view: the newest section was closest, composed of curved streets planted with buttonwoods and poplars, and then an older, rectilinear section in darker-leafed, denser Norway maples, and, beyond the Alton Pike, the oldest, southernmost part. Mifflin Avenue was conspicuous, lined on both sides with tall horse chestnuts. He saw his own house—his grandfather’s house—the bricks painted custard-yellow and the wood trim parsley-green, and Mifflin Avenue becoming in the haze a road winding through the Blake farm and heading toward Philadelphia as the river ran and glinted beside it. The view always interested his mother, but for Owen it was worth about two seconds of looking. What could you do with a view? He would rather find a dead stick and try to hit pebbles like a baseball.

Or, emerging from under the grape arbor by the side porch and walking out the brick walk, past the pansy bed, to the gap in the hedge, they could turn the other way, right, and walk up Mifflin Avenue, past the spooky Hoffman house and Buddy Rourke’s sad apartment building, past where the Bakers’ barn had burned down, past the smelly pigpens and the fenced pastures for cows, past the creek, in slow spots solid green with watercress that Grammy sometimes gathered, to a road that led up to Cedar Top, opposite Shale Hill, across the valley that held Willow.

Beyond the town bounds, the road climbed. Unpainted houses held rusting cars in their slanted yards, and mangy dogs barked and barked as the three Mackenzies trudged past. Then came a stretch of pure woods, and a hilltop intersection where a Dairy Queen ice-cream stand had been abandoned. He never learned where the other two roads, the one straight ahead and the one to the left, went. His parents would turn right and head back downhill, through more woods, past the spiky sandstone wall of the Pomeroy estate. Once or twice Owen heard the sound of tennis balls back and forth, and the splashing of a swimming pool, but usually nobody seemed to be home. The lives of the rich were hard to imagine; they involved a lot of not being home. On the other side of the road, on the upper edge of Willow, the cemetery appeared, its granite stones, pale pink and pale gray, sharp-cornered and bald in the sunlight. The road, heading farther downward, became Washington Street, a street of houses with narrow side yards and terraced front lawns, which after three blocks gave way to the commerce at the center of Willow: the movie theatre, the savings bank, a bicycle shop, and, at the five corners where the street met the Alton Pike, Eberly’s Drug Store, the Lutheran church, the Hess Funeral Home, Borough Hall with its little park, and Leinbach’s Oyster House, a restaurant on the first floor of the old sandstone building that had once been the inn called The Willow. Owen’s heart always lifted, and the weight fell off his legs, when he and his parents would come into this downtown, which he walked through every school day, and which he could reconstruct store by store, house by house, in his mind’s eye sixty years afterwards.

It was on this Cedar Top walk, one day, just after the forsaken ice-cream stand, that Owen had noticed in the grit at the side of the road a milky-white thing like a collapsed balloon; it had the glossy look of a toy. He bent down to look closer and his mother, behind and above him, said, in the voice she reserved for extreme urgency, “Don’t touch it!”

What could be the danger? It was not alive but her voice suggested it somehow was. “What is it?” he asked.

“Something batsy,” she said.

“Batsy” was a pretend word, a private word, which Owen had coined when he could not yet pronounce everything and made words up without meaning to, like “odduce” for “orange juice” and “nana” for “banana.” “Batsy” had to do with food that he didn’t like, that he thought too runny or mixed-up or too much like guts to eat. He must have meant “bad” mixed with “nasty”; the word had stuck, as if describing a reality that couldn’t be touched by the tongue with an actual word. Fresh bird doo-doo on the rim of the stone birdbath and earthworms that had dried out crossing the hot sidewalk were also batsy.

“What was it for?” he asked, his past tense showing an awareness of something discarded, of something whose mysterious moment of use was past.

Both his parents were silent as the three of them walked onward, leaving the fascinating rubbery thing behind in the roadside grit. They were the kind of parents, unlike some, who thought it wrong not to answer a child’s questions. He could feel guilt nagging at them.

“It was for tidiness’ sake, Owen,” his father at last said. “Like a Kleenex.”

“It was a stork-stopper,” his mother added, her voice better-humored now, laced with a girlish complicity. He could feel his parents, behind him, drawn closer in their secret knowledge. Usually it