Odd Jobs by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

him.
    “Seven,” he repeated. The number had no end to it, it had curves and plateaus within it, which doubled and redoubled.
    Amid his discomforts was a wish not to spoil this outing for his mother. He felt her life had few pleasures, and a Saturday excursion to Alton was one of them. He was eight, nine. She was, he realized now, herself young. The hand of hers not holding his rested gracefully in her lap, wearing its thin gold wedding ring. It was sad, he thought, the way she never bought anything in the stores. There was a poverty in her life that pained him.
    (Years later, Farnham’s first wife was told by a doctor that she suffered from depression. This, too, pained Farnham. They were not poor, and he could not imagine any other reason for depression.)
    The trolley car struggled and swayed. Shapeless nameless trees, houses with drawn front curtains, front yards he would never play in crawled past in fitful starts that he timed with held breath, willing the contents of his stomach to stay down. The air on the outside of the window grate seemed a precious clear fluid, the transparent essence of freedom. The things to see inside the car—the sun-faded curved advertisements and the old faces of the other passengers and the pale-green pamphlets the trolley company gave out free from a little tin box behind the motorman’shead—had all become a kind of poison; if he rested his eyes on them even a second, he grew sicker.
    (Years later, the idea very slowly grew upon him that
he
might be the reason for his wife’s depression.)
    There was a long wait at a turnout while the motor throbbed like a trapped thing. The woman beside him kept glancing down at the side of his face, and her concern joined the other pressures afflicting him. The worn straw seats repeated and repeated their pattern of tiny, L-shaped shadows in the sunlight that slanted in through the dust; her wedding ring glinted in her lap.
    (Yet when he first suggested the possibility of separation her reaction had been fear and tears.)
    His trolley-car stomach now was riding high in his chest, and swallowing only made it bob lower for an instant, like a hollow ball in water. His whole skin under his clothes was sweating like his palms.
    “Just four more stops,” his mother said brightly. “See—there’s the poorhouse lane.”
    Four: the number multiplied within him, enormous, full of twos. The idling motor throbbed. Farnham stared rigidly at the motionless world outside, a kind of paradise that could be attained only through dishonor. Beyond the poorhouse lane, the grassy open acres of the school grounds began, and it was possible to get off here and walk diagonally across them the half-mile to his home. Each trip, each Saturday, the boy vowed not to make his mother get off the trolley car early.
    The motorman, the back of his neck in thick folds above the sweat-blackened collar of his uniform, pounded the floor gong and swung a burnished brass handle back and forth in a fury. The long inside of the car lurched, and the other passengers lost their faces. The smell and the throbbing and the vow to hold on had rubbed them out.
    Her voice tugged at him gently. “Willy, let’s get off here. We can walk across the school grounds.”
    “No. I can make it.”
    But she had decided. She had become girlish and animated, insisting, “Come on, I
want
to. It’ll be
good
for us.” She pushed the bell. The old trolleys did not have pull cords; instead there were porcelain buttons like doorbells above each seat.
    The double-hinged door flapped open. The little step magically flopped down. His feet firm on the concrete road, Farnham inhaled realair. His relief overwhelmed his guilt. The trudge across the fields, with their cinder track and wooden bleachers and the bucking sled for the football players, was long enough for his stomach to settle and his color to return. He put away his mother’s hand as something he no longer needed, and raced ahead. When, having reached