JR: In this wafer-thin missive, Updike brings us through the working class suburb of Olinger. Johnny shows up at his neighbor’s house with an interesting proposition: he’d like for the Lutz family to go down the street to buy him a bottle of wine. Johnny isn’t any older than sixteen and when he approaches the apartment screen door, he spies the bare leg of Thelma, a girl he knows from around the neighborhood. This refreshingly honest approach to the story makes me think that there is nothing wrong with Johnny, except he just wants a bottle of booze to help him waste away the day. I remember when I was that age, booze seemed like a good idea more times than not. The strange feeling I get is that Johnny is up to something, he might be playing a trick on his neighbors, and we don’t really know if he is or not until the very last sentence of the story, and even then, it seems unlikely, to me anyway, that he hasn’t just bullshitted his way into a bottle of booze.
Thelma’s mother is the kind of barnacle housewife who is tied to the stove and waiting for her husband to come home, where she insists he take Johnny and her daughter Thelma down to the liquor store to buy a bottle. Mr. Lutz is a brush-cut brute who seems more likely to beat Johnny than he is to offer a ride to the liquor store. Thelma and Johnny are left in the car for a moment while Mr. Lutz disappears, and the two start talking to each other like a married couple just past their honeymoon phase.
There is a kind of rural vernacular that runs through this piece; Thelma talks to Johnny in a sing-song voice, and it even sounds a little bit condescending, but in return, he nags on her. It’s great to read an adult man write from a teenager’s perspective. In this story Thelma has recently visited New York and talks in a kind of slang that makes Johnny’s first name sound like a combination of John and Ann, Johnny. It sticks out just a little bit, but in the end it’s John that has the last laugh, at least that’s what it seems like to me. He keeps telling everyone that his mother is home working in the house, and by the time his father gets home there will be no one to go to the liquor store, and they won’t have wine to offer their friends from Philadelphia that are arriving for dinner. Mothers of those long lost years sending their kids down the block to ask the nearest adult for a favor like that, it seems suspect, and at the same time like something that Harry Angstrom would do. -JR
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