Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Annotated Bibliography Read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (PDF Attachment ) write annotations, quot

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Annotated Bibliography Read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (PDF Attachment ) write annotations, quote interpretations,
and identification of story structures. Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates (1966)
for Bob Dylan
Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or
checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and
who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. “Stop gawking at yourself. Who are
you? You think you’re so pretty?” she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right
through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was
everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were
gone and that was why she was always after Connie.
“Why don’t you keep your room clean like your sister? How’ve you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don’t
see your sister using that junk.”
Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t
bad enough—with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time
by her mother and her mother’s sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and
Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when
he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn’t bother talking
much to them, but around his bent head Connie’s mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she
herself was dead and it was all over. “She makes me want to throw up sometimes,” she complained to her friends. She had a high,
breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.
There was one good thing: June went places with girl friends of hers, girls who were just as plain and steady as she, and so when
Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections. The father of Connie’s best girl friend drove the girls the three miles to town
and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again
at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.
They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always
scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if
someone passed who amused or interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that drew anyone’s eye to it, and she wore part
of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked
one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for
home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone
think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these
evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—”Ha, ha, very funny,”—but highpitched and nervous anywhere
else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.
Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to
a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and
on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless
with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they
didn’t like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the brightlit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the
night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin
shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background,
like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards on his stool, turning himself jerkily around in semicircles and then
stopping and turning back again, and after a while he asked Connie if she would like something to eat. She said she would and so
she tapped her friend’s arm on her way out—her friend pulled her face up into a brave, droll look—and Connie said she would meet
her at eleven, across the way. “I just hate to leave her like that,” Connie said earnestly, but the boy said that she wouldn’t be alone
for long. So they went out to his car, and on the way Connie couldn’t help but let her eyes wander over the windshields and faces all
around her, her face gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music. She
drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to
glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her
and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn’t help glancing back and there he
was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, “Gonna get you, baby,” and Connie turned away again without
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Eddie noticing anything.
She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always
sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at
the plaza. Her girl friend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls smiled at each other and Connie said,
“How was the movie?” and the girl said, ‘You should know.” They rode off with the girl’s father, sleepy and pleased, and Connie
couldn’t help but look back at the darkened shopping plaza with its big empty parking lot and its signs that were faded and ghostly
now, and over at the drive-in restaurant where cars were still circling tirelessly. She couldn’t hear the music at this distance.
Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, “So-so.”
She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the
house—it was summer vacation—getting in her mother s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell
back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of
the music and the humid night air of July. Connie’s mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or
saying suddenly, ‘What’s this about the Pettinger girl?”
And Connie would say nervously, “Oh, her. That dope.” She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her
mother was simple and kind enough to believe it. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so
much. Her mother went scuffling around the house in old bedroom slippers and complained over the telephone to one sister about
the other, then the other called up and the two of them complained about the third one. If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s
tone was approving, and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and
actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense
of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them. Sometimes, over
coffee, they were almost friends, but something would come up—some vexation that was like a fly buzzing suddenly around their
heads—and their faces went hard with contempt.
One Sunday Connie got up at eleven—none of them bothered with church—and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in
the sun. Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt’s house and Connie said no, she wasn’t interested, rolling her
eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it. “Stay home alone then,” her mother said sharply. Connie sat out back in a
lawn chair and watched them drive away, her father quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out, her mother
with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through the windshield, and in the back seat poor old June, all dressed up as
if she didn’t know what a barbecue was, with all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun,
dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto
thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone
like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she
hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue
and still. The asbestos ranch house that was now three years old startled her—it looked small. She shook her head as if to get
awake.
It was too hot. She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot,
and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs
she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from “Bobby King”: “An’ look here, you girls at Napoleon’s—Son and Charley
want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!”
And Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself
and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.
After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. She sat up at once, startled, because it couldn’t be her father so soon. The gravel
kept crunching all the way in from the road—the driveway was long—and Connie ran to the window. It was a car she didn’t know. It
was an open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely. Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at
her hair, checking it, and she whispered, “Christ. Christ,” wondering how bad she looked. The car came to a stop at the side door
and the horn sounded four short taps, as if this were a signal Connie knew.
She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step.
There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig
and he was grinning at her.
“I ain’t late, am I?” he said.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Connie said.
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“Toldja I’d be out, didn’t I?”
“I don’t even know who you are.”
She spoke sullenly, careful to show no interest or pleasure, and he spoke in a fast, bright monotone. Connie looked past him to the
other boy, taking her time. He had fair brown hair, with a lock that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce,
embarrassed look, but so far he hadn’t even bothered to glance at her. Both boys wore sunglasses. The driver’s glasses were
metallic and mirrored everything in miniature.
“You wanta come for a ride?” he said.
Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder.
“Don’tcha like my car? New paint job,” he said. “Hey.”
“What?”
“You’re cute.”
She pretended to fidget, chasing flies away from the door.
“Don’tcha believe me, or what?” he said.
“Look, I don’t even know who you are,” Connie said in disgust.
“Hey, Ellie’s got a radio, see. Mine broke down.” He lifted his friend’s arm and showed her the little transistor radio the boy was
holding, and now Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house.
“Bobby King?” she said.
“I listen to him all the time. I think he’s great.”
“He’s kind of great,” Connie said reluctantly.
“Listen, that guy’s great. He knows where the action is.”
Connie blushed a little, because the glasses made it impossible for her to see just what this boy was looking at. She couldn’t decide
if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn’t come down or go back inside. She said,
“What’s all that stuff painted on your car?”
“Can’tcha read it?” He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his
feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatine hardening, and in the midst of it Connie’s
bright green blouse. “This here is my name, to begin with, he said. ARNOLD FRIEND was written in tarlike black letters on the side,
with a drawing of a round, grinning face that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore sunglasses. “I wanta introduce myself,
I’m Arnold Friend and that’s my real name and I’m gonna be your friend, honey, and inside the car’s Ellie Oscar, he’s kinda shy.”
Ellie brought his transistor radio up to his shoulder and balanced it there. “Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,” Arnold
Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn’t
think much of it. The left rear fender had been smashed and around it was written, on the gleaming gold background: DONE BY
CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. Connie had to laugh at that. Arnold Friend was pleased at her laughter and looked up at her. “Around
the other side’s a lot more —you wanta come and see them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why should I?”
“Don’tcha wanta see what’s on the car? Don’tcha wanta go for a ride?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
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“I got things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Things.”
He laughed as if she had said something funny. He slapped his thighs. He was standing in a strange way, leaning back against the
car as if he were balancing himself. He wasn’t tall, only an inch or so taller than she would be if she came down to him. Connie liked
the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them dressed: tight faded jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that
pulled his waist in and showed how lean he was, and a white pull-over shirt that was a little soiled and showed the hard small
muscles of his arms and shoulders. He looked as if he probably did hard work, lifting and carrying things. Even his neck looked
muscular. And his face was a familiar face, somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn’t shaved for
a day or two, and the nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke.
“Connie, you ain’t telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and you know it,” he said, still laughing. The way he
straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been all fake.
“How do you know what my name is?” she said suspiciously.
“It’s Connie.”
“Maybe and maybe not.”
“I know my Connie,” he said, wagging his finger. Now she remembered him even better, back at the restaurant, and her cheeks
warmed at the thought of how she had sucked in her breath just at the moment she passed him—how she must have looked to him.
And he had remembered her. “Ellie and I come out here especially for you,” he said. “Ellie can sit in back. How about it?”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where’re we going?”
He looked at her. He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in
shadow but instead in light. His eyes were like chips of broken glass that catch the light in an amiable way. He smiled. It was as if
the idea of going for a ride somewhere, to someplace, was a new idea to him.
“Just for a ride, Connie sweetheart.”
“I never said my name was Connie,” she said.
“But I know what it is. I know your name and all about you, lots of things,” Arnold Friend said. He had not moved yet but stood still
leaning back against the side of his jalopy. “I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl, and found out all about you—like I know
your parents and sister are gone somewheres and I know where and how long they’re going to be gone, and I know who you were
with last night, and your best girl friend’s name is Betty. Right?”
He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song. His smile assured her that everything was fine.
In the car Ellie turned up the volume on his radio and did not bother to look around at them.
“Ellie can sit in the back seat,” Arnold Friend said. He indicated his friend with a casual jerk of his chin, as if Ellie did not count and
she should not bother with him.
“How’d you find out all that stuff?” Connie said.
“Listen: Betty Schultz and Tony Fitch and Jimmy Pettinger and Nancy Pettinger,” he said in a chant. “Raymond Stanley and Bob
Hutter—”
“Do you know all those kids?”
“I know everybody.”
“Look, you’re kidding. You’re not from around here.”
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“Sure.”
“But—how come we never saw you before?”
“Sure you saw me before,” he said. He looked down at his boots, as if he were a little offended. “You just don’t remember.”
“I guess I’d remember you,” Connie said.
“Yeah?” He looked up at this, beaming. He was pleased. He began to mark time with the music from Ellie’s radio, tapping his fists
lightly together. Connie looked away from his smile to the car, which was painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. She
looked at that name, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front fender was an expression that was familiar—MAN THE FLYING
SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the year before but didn’t use this year. She looked at it for a while as if the words
meant something to her that she did not yet know.
“What’re you thinking about? Huh?” Arnold Friend demanded. “Not worried about your hair blowing around in the car, are you?”
“No.”
“Think I maybe can’t drive good?”
“How do I know?”
“You’re a hard girl to handle. How come?” he said. “Don’t you know I’m your friend? Didn’t you see me put my sign in the air when
you walked by?”
“What sign?”
“My sign.” And he drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her. They were maybe ten feet apart. After his hand fell back to his side
the X was still in the air, almost visible. Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it, listening to the music from
her radio and the boy’s blend together. She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be re…
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