The Early Stories by John Updike Page A

bottle. “Better let me drive. You drive like a veteran, but I know the short cuts.”
    â€œI can walk from your house, Mr. Lutz,” John said, knowing Mr. Lutz wouldn’t make him walk. “Thanks an awful lot for all you’ve done.”
    â€œI’ll drive you up. People from Philadelphia can’t be kept waiting. We can’t make this young man walk a mile, now can we, Tessie?” Nobody knew what to say to this last remark, so they kept quiet all the way, although several things were bothering John.
    When the car stopped in front of his house, a country house but close to the road, he forced himself to ask, “Say, Mr. Lutz. I wonder if there was any change?”
    â€œWhat? Oh. Goodness. I nearly forgot. You’ll have your daddy thinking I’m a crook.” He reached into his pocket and without looking handed John a dollar, a quarter, and a penny.
    â€œThis seems like a lot,” John said. The wine must be cheap. Maybe he should have let his mother call his father at school to pick it up, like she had wanted to.
    â€œIt’s your change,” Mr. Lutz said.
    â€œWell, thanks an awful lot.”
    â€œGoodbye, now, my friend,” Mr. Lutz said.
    â€œSo long.” John slammed the door. “Goodbye, Thelma. Don’t forget what I told you.” He winked.
    The car pulled out, and John walked up the path. “Don’t forget what I told you,” he repeated to himself, winking. The bottle was cool and heavy in his hands. He glanced at the label; it read
Château Mouton-Rothschild 1937
.

A Sense of Shelter

 
    Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flaked snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two
V
’s. The snow, though at moments it whirled opaquely, could not quite bleach these scars away. The temperature must be exactly freezing. The window was open a crack, and a canted pane of glass lifted outdoor air into his face, coating the cedar-wood scent of pencil shavings with the transparent odor of the wet windowsill. With each revolution of the handle his knuckles came within a fraction of an inch of the tilted glass, and the faint chill this proximity breathed on them sharpened William’s already acute sense of shelter.
    The sky behind the shreds of snow was stone-colored. The murk inside the high classroom gave the air a solidity that limited the overhead radiance to its own vessels: six globes of dull incandescence floated on the top of a thin sea. The feeling the gloom gave him was not gloomy but joyous; he felt they were all sealed in, safe; the colors of cloth were dyed deeper, the sound of whispers was made more distinct, the smells of tablet paper and wet shoes and varnish and face powder pierced him with a sharp sense of possession. These were his classmates sealed in, his, the stupid as well as the clever, the plain as well as the lovely, his enemies as well as his friends, his. He felt like a king and seemed to move to his seat between the bowed heads of subjects that loved him less than he loved them. His seat was sanctioned by tradition; for twelve years he had sat at the rear of classrooms, William Young, flanked by Marsha Wyckoff and Andy Zimmerman. Once there had been two Zimmermans, but one went to work in his father’s greenhouse, and in some classes—Latin and trig—there were none, and William sat at the edge of the class as if on the lip ofa cliff, and Marsha Wyckoff became Marvin Wolf or Sandra Wade. It was always a desk, though; its surface altered from hour to hour but from the blue-stained ink well his mind could extract, like a chain of magicians’ handkerchiefs, memories from the first grade on.
    As a senior he was a kind of king, and as a teacher’s pet