Villages

by John Updike

  viii. Village Sex—IV

  Middle Falls lay equidistant from Hartford and Norwich but not very near anything, with the Rhode Island border an endless drive away, those successive Main Streets with their peeling clapboard houses and the glaring franchise strips falling away under the headlights, the old state highway rising and sinking with the former farmland’s hilly roll. The hilltops were blue half the year, naked trees purplish against the snow, and then green. The town had been named after the second of three noisy, turbulent drops in the rocky, fast-running river, the Chunkaunkabaug, which had turned millstones grinding meal of wheat in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth the power chains of an arms factory supplying revolvers and rifles to the burgeoning West and the Union armies; the rambling brick structure later became a light-bulb factory, in turn abandoned, as Eisenhower gave way to Kennedy, to a swarm of small businesses that, segregating themselves behind partitions of roller-painted plasterboard, rented some fractions of the vast scarred floors, splintered oak perforated by bolt-holes and darkened by the rubber-soled work-shoes of men long buried. Ed and Owen’s start-up occupied first a few cubicles and eventually the second floor and finally the whole thing. Hartford’s insurance companies added themselves to the manufacturers and retailers, banks and investment firms in need of customized computer programming, and E-O gradually prospered. Ed and Owen joined the local middle class.

  Most of the people that the Mackenzies came to know were from somewhere else. Some were refugees from New York, half-failed artists licking their wounds and working in their homes; some commuted to Hartford, serving the state government or the insurance industry; a few were professionals, lawyers and contractors and pediatricians, content with the relatively thin local pickings in exchange for the old town’s tonic air of freedom, a freedom bred of long neglect, of being bypassed and as yet little spoiled, of being no place special and triumphantly American in that. These immigrant citizens all shared the assumption that their village was ineffably special and superior, rakish yet stylish; by comparison, Lower Falls was a virtual ghost town—a gas station, a convenience mart, and a little brick post office amid a scattering of run-down barns and sheds and vegetable stands and rusting mechanical remnants from a viable rural past—and Upper Falls a dreary bedroom community on the far edge of Hartford’s sprawl, with flat tracts of ’fifties ranch houses, gimcrack “starter homes” built on a slab. In Middle Falls, Federalist mansions, waiting for a coat of paint, safer wiring, and a new furnace, stood around the triangular green, once a common pasture and still called the Common. Farther out, charmingly Spartan farmhouses from later in the nineteenth century, with acreage for horses or a tennis court, also could be picked up reasonably, in the low five figures. There were a few surviving pre-1725 structures, with massive central chimneys, small windows, and saltbox profiles; they had been turned, by and large, into antique shops or candlelit, low-ceilinged restaurants. There was a minimal country club, with a nine-hole golf course and four clay tennis courts, and a lake, called Heron Pond, with imported sand, a shallow section roped off for toddlers, and a tall white lifeguard-chair occupied, when it was occupied at all, by the seal-shaped, mahogany-brown teen-age daughter of the local high-school principal. The key to her chest of medical supplies was worn on a red elastic circlet around her ankle, and her long black hair, as straight and as matte a black as a Native American’s, was caught back in another such utilitarian elastic. She had not only a seal’s adipose shape but a seal’s style of basking as she lazed, with half-closed eyes, above the mothers and children and the adolescent boys whose roughhousing and splashy horseplay over by the rope swing occasionally brought her upright, the whistle shrill in her zinc-oxided lips.

  Here on this lightly lapped crescent of trucked-in beach the town’s vivid young matrons burnished themselves in bikinis or, as the lakewater autumnally cooled but still kept small children entertained, gossipped at the picnic tables, smoking cigarettes and nibbling bits of the children’s lunches they had packed: “I swore I’d never eat Marshmallow Fluff again and yet here I am, an absolute addict! Peanut butter and jelly, don’t talk to me about it—it’s making me fat! But it’s so much easier, when you’re throwing sandwiches together for their lunch anyway, to make one extra for Mommy!” This was Alissa Morrissey, talking to, say, Faye Dunham and Imogene Bisbee. Newcomers to motherhood and one another, the women had quickly grown into a familiarity that allowed them to utter whatever floated to the tops of their heads. They seemed to Owen to have a collective loveliness, like that, in his threadbare childhood, of Ginger Bitting and her brown-legged satellites. But now he was more closely among them, as if he had moved up from Mifflin Avenue to Second Street. His wife, with her fondness for sunbathing, and her trio of small children—the infant, Floyd, had been named after his paternal grandfather—joined them. She reported back, “They’re like Army wives, but not so coarse and vapid. They’re nice, if a little superficial. All they seem to think about is other people—their children and their husbands. And each other. When one of us doesn’t show up, she gets it. In the nicest possible way.”

  In Middle Falls, all personalities were studied, cherished, and glamorized. Women reigned; the wives lent fascination to their husbands. Husbands and wives were biform creatures, semi-transparent so that each could be seen 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 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. Her face, bony and narrow, seemed slightly too small for her features—the large hazel eyes, the mobile mouth, the arched brows pencilled darker than the hair on her head. But her hips were wide in the pool-table felt and her upper arms bare and white and dotted with freckles like small pin-pricks; she was real enough, not a dream he was having.

  He dared confess, to stop her from walking away, “I have been down, I guess. I missed my daughter’s birth, and really she must be the last child.”

  Faye nodded. “You and Phyllis,” she dryly pointed out, “don’t seem to have a fertility problem.”

  Did she and Jock? They had two pale children, frail-looking and shy compared with their animated, hard-living parents. Owen told her, “It’s not as if we screw all the time, either. I hardly know how it happens.” This was too much to confide, probably. He felt he was leaning out over a little abyss—the fresh soft grass at his feet, the gleam of his third gin-and-tonic. But Faye, as wide-eyed as infant Eve, took it in gravely, her lips parted in suspense. Owen went on, “And then, when I was out in California, I saw how these new companies are feeding off of one another, swapping people back and forth. They call it Silicon Valley. I came away thinking that that’s where Ed and I should be, and wondering if hardware instead of software isn’t where it’s at, at least until the Japanese move in.”

  “How fascinating,” Faye said, in a tone that seemed to come from another conversation; Phyllis had appeared at his side.