Villages by John Updike (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📗

repairs demanded not just hammers and screwdrivers but a table saw, for diagonal cuts that fit perfectly, and an electric drill with a case of bits of which the smallest was thread-thin and the biggest thick as a pencil, and socket wrenches measuring from three-sixteenths to three-quarters of an inch, and a blue staple gun. Owen’s basement became as formidably equipped as the ones he used to envy in Willow, with their panelled, linoleum-floored dens and Christmas yards on trestle-supported plywood.

The village seemed to him an educational toy—its gingerbread town hall, its tall flagpole, its downtown of two-story false-fronted shops, the quaint kink in River Street as it left the river and climbed the hill toward the churches and the burial grounds and the fading brick mansions of the old rich, the Yankee mill rich. The downtown had a pre-mall adequacy of supplies and services: two hardware stores, a lumber yard, two banks, three barbershops, a jeweller’s, a Woolworth’s, a narrow-aisled old-fashioned Acme, a clothing store for rough-and-ready and children’s wear, a news store that sold tobacco and candy and magazines and paperback books, even a furniture store, up near the disused railroad station, next to a place that sold bicycles and sports equipment—there was little you had to leave town for, and Owen left it less and less. He would emerge, with smarting eyes and nicotine nausea, from the factory holding E-O Data’s bright, buzzing rooms; everything, every brick angle and tilted street-sign shadow, looked like a problem to be reduced to programming code. He felt himself, stepping onto the squares of glinting sidewalk, as youthful and potent, the modest success of DigitEyes safely behind him and other, even more triumphant follow-ups certain to come. He turned the corner, walked along River Street, and had lunch in one of three possible eateries, greeting on the way, in summer sunshine or winter slush, more and more familiar faces. On the sidewalks of Middle Falls he enjoyed a buoying sense of being known, of being upheld by watching eyes, as when he was a child in Willow, rattling along on roller skates or a scooter, pulling a wagon full of horse chestnuts, or pedalling his rusty Schwinn to the quarry: not exactly a celebrity but somebody, in the way that small enough towns make everybody somebody. When he spotted, on those sidewalks, a woman he and Phyllis knew, a woman of their little set, taking a child to the barbershop or clothing store or the toy-and-trinket nook called Knacks, he felt as if her smile of greeting were a flower she had pinned to his chest. A pressure of happiness from deep in his being added to his height and the fluidity of his movements; he felt seen, without knowing by whom, or how seriously he was, indeed, being watched. He had ripened without quite knowing it, though others sensed it. Another step in his education was due.

The Dunhams liked to give a big party in May, to celebrate the demise of winter. The weather was still chancy, but their house—a rambling Queen Anne behind a tall palisade-style fence—could hold, with its long veranda, a hundred if need be; parties were their element. Jock liked to drink, and Faye liked to dress up, in outfits of her own invention. She had a high penetrating laugh, nappy copper-colored hair, and bony red-nailed hands that seemed always in motion. She lit up a room.

That May Saturday turned out as sunny and warm—the tufty lawn a garish virgin green, the oaks overhead not yet fully leafed, the blooming azaleas already shedding a few pink petals. Late in the preceding year, President Kennedy had been shot and Phyllis had produced a fourth child, bright-eyed, sweet-natured Eve; both events left Owen a little shaky, feeling his mortality. Eve had come a week before predicted, and he had been in California, at Fairchild Semiconductor, to keep abreast of what the new integrated circuits might mean for the art of programming, when the contractions came, and Ed had been the one to drive her to the hospital in Hartford. The nurses had kept mistaking him for the father.

Faye Dunham, when the shadows had thickened under the oaks and the drinks had gone to everyone’s head, came up to Owen and said, “Owen, you seem rather down lately.”

“Down? I do?”

As if to steady her stance on the soft lawn, in her rope-soled espadrilles, Faye rested the fingertips of her right hand on Owen’s forearm in its plaid sleeve. The madras jacket was new this spring; in fact he had put it on for the first time to wear to the Dunhams’ party. He was still learning about clothes. “You’re usually so exuberant,” she said. “So glad to be here.” She was wearing a sparkly brown bodice, sleeveless, with a long skirt she had made from a piece of pool-table felt. Her frizzy thick hair, its coppery glints sharp in the slanting golden sun, was bundled up loosely and held in place by a high Spanish comb, of tortoiseshell engraved with silver arabesques. She sparkled, Faye did; she was the woman you noticed in a room, with that sudden piercing girlish laugh. Owen had been struck by her from their first weeks in Middle Falls, though she and Jock moved, he felt, in a slightly different orbit, at a superior height of travel, consumption, and self-indulgence.

“Here in Middle Falls, or here chez Dunham?”

“Both?”

“That comb,” he said, to divert her disconcertingly intent, somewhat glazed stare. “Did you and Jock pick that up in Spain?”

She laughed, a laugh quickly crimped shut as if by a wry second thought, with a look to one side, putting her sharp nose in profile. “Jock hates Spain, he says they’re all Gypsies and Fascists. He really only likes England, where they speak his language, though he says the pub hours are ridiculous.” As she talked and looked at Owen, her eyes widened as if to say that Jock wasn’t really what they wanted to talk about.