Odd Jobs by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

her nakedness must confront and pass through, as through a sieve. Farnham was alive simultaneously to the erotic appeal of her nudity and to the social embarrassment of it. She was not quite naked; a thin gold ring glinted on the third finger of onehand. He conferred urgently with her, pouring down advice from above, from within the armor of his clothes, while still revolving within himself the puzzle of how to get her, so vulnerable and luminous, through that gathering. The problem being insoluble, he awoke, with an erection of metallic adamancy.
    Mournfully the palms outside his window rattled. Southern California was soaked in moonlight. The woman asleep beside him was pale and, like a ghost, transparent. Everything was black and white. Only his dream had been in color.
    In those far days before suburban shopping malls and inner-city decay, the more enterprising people of Wenrich’s Corner took the trolley car into Alton to shop, to be entertained, to seek refinement. Farnham’s mother enrolled him in a futile series of lessons there—piano, clarinet, and, worst of all, tap dancing. Such metropolitan skills were thought to be a possible way out of the region; the assumption was in the air, like the hazy high humidity, that one would want to get out. But instead of being taught how to fly in white tie and tails across a heavenly sound stage with an effortless clatter of taps, the child was set in a line with others and put through a paramilitary exercise whose refrain was “Shuffle
one
, shuffle
two
, kick, kick, kick.” His mother amused herself in the stores, rarely buying anything, during this hour of torture. When they were reunited, his noon reward and weekly treat was a sandwich—bacon, lettuce, and tomato, cut into quarters, with each triangular fourth held together by a tasselled toothpick—and a pistachio ice-cream soda in a drugstore with a green marble counter that seemed, with its many chrome faucets, the epitome of luxury. It was in such Forties drugstores, redolent of beauty aids, that Hollywood stars were discovered. Farnham was surprised to learn, years later, at about the same time that the trolley cars were replaced by buses, that this drugstore, Alton’s finest, had closed and been replaced by a gloomy outlet that sold name-brand clothes at factory prices.
    On the trolley ride home, the car clanged and bucked its way through the dense blocks of Alton’s south side and up over a big bridge whose concrete had the texture of burned coconut cookies. Tough local boys swaggered and hooted from the broad wall of this bridge; unlike Farnham, they would never get out. The ill-tempered motorman pounded the warning bell with the heel of his black shoe, and there was a smell of something, like oily rags burning, that Farnham years later was toldmust have been ozone. Cumbersomely the car halted and started, bunching auto traffic behind it, and swung its bulky long body into the double-track turnouts, where one car waited for another, coming in the opposite direction, to pass. The row houses with their turrets and fish-scale slates slid by, mixed with used-car lots and funeral parlors and florist’s greenhouses and depressing brick buildings that manufactured Farnham didn’t know what. He felt sorry for these factories; they looked empty and shabby and hopeless.
    The return trip sloped slightly uphill, which made it seem longer and more obstructed. The distance to the stop in Wenrich’s Corner where he and his mother could most conveniently alight was now two miles away, less than fifteen minutes; but minutes and miles can seem infinite to a child, and nausea was creeping up from underneath the grooved and blackened and throbbing floorboards, the ozone mixing with the tastes of bacon and pistachio and the oppressive monotony of shuffle
one
, shuffle
two
.
    His mother was watching his face grow paler. She squeezed his hand, so he felt how damp his palm was. “Only seven more stops,” she promised