“A&P” and “Where are you going, Where have you been?”

There are many similarities between the short stories “A&P” and “Where are you going, Where have you been?” most notably their characters. Both stories contain a female protagonist, and a male antagonist, whose confrontations start out relatively normal, and progress to more and more surreal and twisted endings. Their main characters, Sammy and Connie, are shockingly similar, and yet strangely different, one a 15 year old wishing to be older and beautiful, the other An eighteen year old boy from a small suburb outside Boston who works at an A & P Supermarket. These stories tell the tales of impressionable young women who are tempted by the delights of strange men, only to prove to themselves in the end how naive they really are.

In “Where are you going, Where have you been?”, Connie starts out as most teenage girls seemingly would – she wants to be more daring, to appear older, to experience more of the world. She sneaks away from childish pursuits, to the teenage or adult world, to drink and kiss boys rather than shop for school clothes, to see movies in a steamy car instead of in a theater. She talks of being beautiful as if it were her only good grace – beauty, to her, is the ultimate goal. She wants to be older, and more beautiful, and this is her downfall. Her foolishness and her naivety is what appeals to Arnold Friend in the first place. Arnold Friend, a stranger, appeals to her early on in the story. He is older, more powerful, and smarter.

She is frightened, of course, but intrigued, and it is her yearning for the adult world, and the adult life, that, in the end, causes her downfall. She is suckered in by the convincing conman who uses his words to appeal to her weaknesses. She is tricked into being what Arnold wants her to be by his smooth words and his façade of confidence. She’s toyed with, played for the naive fool she is, who is far too young for the world she wants to be a part of. Only at the very end of the story does she begin to realize what she has gotten herself into. She shows her true colors once she is confronted. These women are seemingly innocent, random bystanders picked by older smarter conmen. However, one could easily hold them responsible for their own fates.

Not that the victim in a crime is to blame, but, honestly, if you leave your car door open, with the keys inside, and the motor running, while you go inside a store for a few hours, how can you possibly seem shocked when it gets stolen? Women whether they believe it or not, are waving hundreds of flags at these conmen – “Please target me!”… “Take my leg!”… By openly flaunting their insecurities and by allowing themselves to be charmed to the point of trusting the conmen, they are, if not wholly, then at least partially responsible for their own fates. They reached their own conclusions, and they got what they wanted.

In “A&P” Sammy is working as a cashier at A&P when he spots her, the girl who he labels “Queenie”. She is leading a parade around the store with her two fiends following. The three of them are in nothing more than a bathing suit. Sammy longs to be like her and to be with her. “She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron….”(126). Sammy is quite taken with “Queenie” he desires her to pay attention to him. Sammy is absolutely thrilled when the three girls approach his check out line. At this time the manager of the A&P enters the picture and tells the girls that bathing suits are not proper attire for a supermarket. Then Sammy embarks upon the ultimate form of play that, although immature, is sometimes used by adults to make an impression on others.

He ultimately sacrifices his job, saying, “I quit”(129). His motivation for quitting is the hope that “Queenie” would stop and thank him, her unsuspected hero. Sammy’s gesture does not have the results for which he hopes. Upon exiting the A&P, he realizes that the girls are gone, and he looks back to see the store manager taking control of the abandoned register. It suddenly occurs to Sammy that he is on his own now, that his parents, who got him the job at the A&P, will not support his decision and will surely not do him any more favors. In his epiphany, Sammy realizes that it is responsible behavior, not playing “adult- like” games that will make him a true adult. The transition from childhood to adulthood is provoked by this incident at the A&P, which he will probably never forget.

Connie and Sammy is the same person, essentially – a woman with different problems wishes to be something that they are not, and wiser and smoother conmen see this, and take advantage of them. In the end, they are proven to be the phonies that they really are, and are left more

Vulnerable and more open, than they were before they tried to infiltrate the world in which they didn’t belong. If there were a shared moral to these stories, and there is most definitely not an obvious one, they’d both be somewhere along the lines of “Be happy with what you have, because you might not belong anywhere else”, and in the cases of Connie and Sammy, this moral fits perfectly. They are the same person with different circumstances, and they are so easily preyed on by the wiser smoother conman. As these stories blatantly state, be happy with what you have. You might not fit anywhere else, and one day, someone might just call you on your bluff, to disastrous consequences.

These two women are seemingly innocent, random bystanders picked by older smarter conmen. However, one could easily hold them responsible for their own fates. Not that the victim in a crime is to blame, but, honestly, if you leave your car door open, with the keys inside, and the motor running, while you go inside a store for a few hours, how can you possibly seem shocked when it gets stolen? These two women, whether they believe it or not, are waving hundreds of flags at these conmen – “Please target me!”… “Take my leg!”… By openly flaunting their insecurities and by allowing themselves to be charmed to the point of trusting the conmen, they are, if not wholly, then at least partially responsible for their own fates. They reached their own conclusions, and they got what they deserved.