First-person narrator (Participant)

  1. Major character
  2. Minor character

With a first-person narrator, the I presents the point of view of only one character’s consciousness. The reader is restricted to the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of that single character. This is Baldwin’s technique with the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues.” Everything learned about the characters, action, and plot comes from the unnamed teacher. He knows Sonny well — he is his brother, after all — but the story is largely about the limits of his knowledge. He first reads about Sonny’s arrest in the newspaper, a fact that indicates right away that they do not communicate well. There are huge swaths of Sonny’s life that are unavailable to the narrator, as the two men lead separate lives. The story reveals how our understanding of another person is always limited, yet communication — sometimes through nonverbal means such as music — is essential to our humanity.

The narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” is a major character; indeed, many readers may consider him the protagonist, or the character most in need of positive change. A first-person narrator can, however, also be a minor character (imagine how different the story would be if it were told by, say, the bandleader named Creole or by an observer who had little or nothing to do with the action). Faulkner uses an observer in “A Rose for Emily.” His we, though plural and representative of the town’s view of Emily, is nonetheless a first-person narrator.

One of the primary reasons for identifying the point of view in a story is to determine where the author stands in relation to the story. Behind the narrative voice of any story is the author, manipulating events and providing or withholding information. It is a mistake to assume that the narrative voice of a story is the author. The narrator, whether a first-person participant or a third-person nonparticipant, is a creation of the writer. To return to “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin was the oldest brother in his family, but the similarities between him and the narrator end there: he was not a math teacher, was never married, did not have a child who died of polio, and loved jazz music. A narrator’s perceptions may be accepted, rejected, or modified by an author, depending on how the narrative voice is articulated.

The narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an unreliable narrator, whose interpretation of events is dependent on a subjective perspective that perhaps does not coincide with objective reality. As her mental illness intensifies over the course of the story, we become more sceptical of her version of events. At the story’s beginning we are likely to accept her assessment of the wallpaper as ugly, but later we are not likely to go along with her account of a woman crawling around behind it. She interprets bars on the window, a bed nailed to the floor, metal rings on the wall, and scratch marks all around the room as evidence that children had played there with excitement and vigor, but we begin to understand that the room had been more prison than playroom, and it still is.

Narrators can be unreliable for a variety of reasons: they might lack self-knowledge, like Sonny’s brother, or they might be innocent and inexperienced, like John Updike’s narrator in “A & P.” Youthful innocence frequently characterizes a naive narrator such as Mark Twain’s Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield, J. D. Salinger’s twentieth-century version of Huck in The Catcher in the Rye (1951). These narrators lack the sophistication to interpret accurately what they see; they are unreliable because the reader must go beyond their understanding of events to comprehend the situations described. Huck and Holden describe their respective social environments, but the reader, with more experience, supplies the critical perspective that each boy lacks. In “A & P” the narrator is actually in the process of maturing during the course of the story, leading him to question the consequences of his actions by the end of the story rather than to view them as pure heroism.

Few generalizations can be made about the advantages or disadvantages of using a specific point of view. What can be said with confidence, however, is that writers choose a point of view to achieve particular effects because point of view determines what we know about the characters and events in a story. We should, therefore, be aware of who is telling the story and whether the narrator sees things clearly and reliably.

The next three works warrant a careful examination of their points of view. In John Updike’s “A & P,” the youthful narrator makes a crucial decision that will change his sensibilities. In Manuel Muñoz’s “Zigzagger,” a boy falls ill after a sexual encounter at a local dance. And in Maggie Mitchell’s “It Would Be Different If,” a woman reflects upon an early rejection in her life.

John Updike (1932–2009)

A photo of John Updike.

John Updike grew up in the small town of Shillington, Pennsylvania, and on a family farm nearby. Academic success in school earned him a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied English and graduated in 1954. He soon sold his first story and poem to the New Yorker, to which he contributed regularly through his career. Updike’s second novel Rabbit, Run (1960), about a discontented young father who struggles to find meaning after peaking in high school, solidified his reputation as one of the most important American writers of his time. It was to be the first of a series of novels he published at roughly ten-year intervals which together constitute a chronicle of American history in the latter twentieth century. The prolific Updike — he published more than sixty books — lived in Massachusetts the rest of his life and continued to publish essays, poems, a novel, or a book of stories nearly every year, including The Centaur (1963), winner of the National Book Award; Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), both Pulitzer Prize winners; and The Witches of Eastwick (1984), which was made into a major motion picture (Warner Bros., 1987). He was also a prolific book reviewer, and his astonishing number of essay collections reveal only a fraction of what he managed to read when he was not writing. Updike’s fiction is noted for its exemplary use of storytelling conventions, its unique prose style, and its engaging picture of middle-class American life, although he also ranged considerably into other landscapes (like Brazil, eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa) and other time periods (as in the time-travelling novel Toward the End of Time [1997] and Gertrude and Claudius [2000], a rewritten version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet).

A & P 1961

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag — she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem — by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece — it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) — there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long — you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking” and “attractive” but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much — and then the third one, that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

She had on a kind of dirty-pink — beige maybe, I don’t know — bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn’t tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and then they all three of them went up the cat-and-dogfood-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft-drinks-crackers-and-cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the package back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle — the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) — were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering “Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!” or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few houseslaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.

You know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checker-board green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.

“Oh Daddy,” Stokesie said beside me. “I feel so faint.”

“Darling,” I said. “Hold me tight.” Stokesie’s married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that’s the only difference. He’s twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

“Is it done?” he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he’s going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it’s called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we’re right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we’re right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old freeloaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It’s not as if we’re on the Cape, we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years.

The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it.

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s so sad myself. The store’s pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hands. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice? I’ve often asked myself). So the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money’s coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.

Then everybody’s luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss that much. He comes over and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach.”

Queenie blushes, though maybe it’s just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.” Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks.” All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into the living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big glass plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with “They’ll Do It Every Time” cartoons stenciled on.

“That’s all right,” Lengel said. “But this isn’t the beach.” His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn’t like my smiling — as I say he doesn’t miss much — but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare.

Queenie’s blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back — a really sweet can — pipes up, “We weren’t doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing.”

“That makes no difference,” Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn’t noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. “We want you decently dressed when you come in here.”

“We are decent,” Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy.” He turns his back. That’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, “Sammy, have you rung up their purchase?”

I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC. TOT — it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)!” — the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.

The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.

“Did you say something, Sammy?”

“I said I quit.”

“I thought you did.”

“You didn’t have to embarrass them.”

“It was they who were embarrassing us.”

I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo.” It’s a saying of my grandmother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.

“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.

“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He’s been a friend of my parents for years. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true, I don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made the pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “pee-pul” and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

  1. FIRST RESPONSE. Describe the setting. How accurate do you think Updike’s treatment of the A & P is?
  2. What kind of person is Sammy? How do his actions and speech constitute his own individual style?
  3. Analyze the style of the first paragraph. How does it set the tone for the rest of the story?
  4. What is the story’s central conflict? Does it seem to be a serious or trivial conflict to you?
  5. With what kind of values is Lengel associated? Do you feel any sympathy for him?
  6. What do you think is Stokesie’s function in the story?
  7. Consider Sammy’s treatment of the three girls. Do you think his account of them is sexist? Explain why or why not.
  8. Locate the climax of the story. How does the climax affect your attitude toward Sammy?
  9. How do you think the story would be different if it were told from another character’s point of view instead of Sammy’s?
  10. Discuss the thematic significance of the story’s final paragraph. Would you read the story differently if this last paragraph were eliminated?

Connection to Another Selection

  1. Compare the tone established by the point of view in Maggie Mitchell’s “It Would Be Different If” and in this story.

Manuel Muñoz (b. 1972)

A photo of Manuel Muñoz.

Born and raised in a small farming town in central California, Manuel Muñoz was educated at Harvard and Cornell universities and now teaches at the University of Arizona. He is the author of two collections of short fiction set in the Central Valley of his upbringing and of one novel, What You See in the Dark (2011). This novel begins in the second person to draw the reader in, though much of it is narrated in the more conventional third person. Note the way the point of view shifts in the following story, “Zigzagger,” the title story of Muñoz’s first collection.

Zigzagger 2003

By six in the morning, the boy’s convulsions have stopped. The light is graying in the window, allowing the boy’s bedroom a shadowy calm — they can see without the lamp; and the father rises to turn it out. The boy’s mother moves to stop him and the father realizes that she is still afraid, so he leaves it on. The sun seems slow to rise, and the room cannot brighten as quickly as they would like — it will be cloudy today.

The father is a bold man, but even he could not touch his teenage son several hours ago, when his jerking body was at its worst. The father makes the doorways in their house look narrow and small, his shoulders threatening to brush the jambs, yet even he had trouble controlling the boy and his violent sleep. And it was the father who first noticed how the room had become strangely cold to them, and they put on sweaters in the middle of July — the boy’s body glistening, his legs kicking away the blankets as he moaned. The mother had been afraid to touch him at all and, even as the sun began rising, still made no move toward the boy.

In the morning light, the boy seems to have returned to health. He is sleeping peacefully now; he has not pushed away the quilts. His face has come back to a dark brown, the swelling around the eyes gone.

“I’ll check his temperature,” the father tells the mother, and she does not shake her head at the suggestion. She watches her husband closely as he moves to the bed and reaches for the edge of the quilt. She holds her breath. He pulls the quilt back slowly and reveals their son’s brown legs, his bare feet. He puts out his hand to touch the boy’s calf but doesn’t pull away his fingers once he makes contact with the skin. The father turns to the mother, his fingers moving to the boy’s hands and face. “I think he’s okay now.”

The mother sighs and, for the first time in hours, looks away from the bed. She remembers that today is Sunday and, with the encouragement of the coming morning, she rises from her chair to see for herself.

Saturdays in this town are for dancing. The churchgoers think it is a vile day, and when they drive by the fields on their way to morning services, they sometimes claim to see workers swaying their hips as they pick tomatoes or grapes. They say that nothing gets done on Saturday afternoons because the workers go home too early in order to prepare for a long night of dancing. It is not just evenings, but the stretch of day — a whole cycle of temptation — and the churchgoers feel thwarted in their pleadings to bring back the ones who have strayed. They see them in town at the dry cleaners or waxing their cars. They see them buying food that isn’t necessary.

The churchgoers have war veterans among them, some of whom serve as administrators for the town’s Veterans Hall. They argue with each other about the moral questions of renting out their hall for Saturday’s recklessness. The war veterans tell them that theirs is a public building and that the banquet room, the ballroom, and the wing of tidy classrooms are for all sorts of uses. Sometimes the veterans toss out angry stories about Korea, and the more civil of the lot mention how they converted villagers while fighting. But others claim freedom, including their hall, and to mortify the churchgoers, they tell tales of Korean girls spreading their legs for soldiers and the relief it brought. The churchgoers end the conversation there.

By Saturday afternoon, there is always a bus from Texas or Arizona parked in back of the Veterans Hall, and sometimes workers on their way home will catch a glimpse of the musicians descending from the vehicle with accordions and sequined suits and sombreros in tow. Some days it is simply a chartered bus. But other times, it is a bus with the band’s name painted along the side — CONJUNTO ALVAREZ, BENNIE JIMÉNEZ Y FUEGO — and the rumor of a more popular group coming through town will start the weekend much earlier than usual. It means people from towns on the other side of the Valley will make the trek. It means new and eager faces.

The churchgoers smart at the sight of young girls walking downtown toward the hall, their arms crossed in front of their breasts and holding themselves, as if the July evening breeze were capable of giving them a chill. For some of them, these young girls with arm-crossed breasts remind them of their own daughters who no longer live in town. They have moved away with babies to live alone in Los Angeles. All over town, the churchgoers know, young girls sneak from their homes to visit the friends their parents already dislike. There, they know, the girls put on skirts that twirl and makeup that might glisten against the dull lights of the makeshift dance floor. These girls practice walking on high heels, dance with each other in their bedrooms to get the feel in case a man asks them to do a cumbia.1 The churchgoers remember when they were parents and listening to the closed doors and the girls too silent. Or their teenage boys, just as quiet, then leaving with their pockets full of things hidden craftily in their rooms.

And much of this starts early in the day: the general movement of the town, the activity in the streets and shops — women buying panty hose at the last minute, twisting lipsticks at the pharmacy in search of a plum color. Men carry cases of beer home to drink in their front yards. Pumpkin seeds and beef jerky. Taking showers only minutes before it is time to go.

Saturdays in this town are for dancing, have always been. This town is only slightly bigger than the ones around it, but it is the only one with a Veterans Hall, big enough to hold hundreds. By evening, those other little towns are left with bare streets, their lone gas stations shutting down for the night, a stream of cars heading away to the bigger town. They leave only the churchgoers and the old people already in their beds. They leave parents awake, listening for the slide of a window or too many footsteps. They leave the slow blink atop the height of the water tower, a red glow that dulls and then brightens again as if it were any other day of the week.

For a moment, the mother does not know whether to go to the kitchen herself or to send her husband. She does not want to take her eyes away from her son and yet at the same time is afraid to be alone with him. She says to her husband, “Una crema” 2 but doesn’t move toward getting the items she needs to make a lotion for the boy. She needs crushed mint leaves from the kitchen. She needs oil and water, rose petals from the yard.

“Do you want me to go?” her husband asks her. On the bed, the boy is sound asleep, and the sight of him in such a peaceful state almost makes her say yes. But she resists.

“No,” she tells her husband. “I’ll go.”

She is sore from so much sitting, and the tension of having stayed awake makes movement all the worse. The rest of the house seems strangely pleasant: the living room bright because it faces east, the large clock ticking contentedly. She wishes she could tell her husband what to do, but she knows they cannot call a doctor and have him witness this. She has considered a priest, but her husband does not go to church. In the face of this indecision, the calm rooms in the rest of the house frustrate her. She wants to make noise, even from simple activity. From the kitchen, she takes a large bowl and searches her windowsill for a few sprigs of mint. She sets out a bottle of olive oil and a cup of cold water from the faucet.

In the front yard, where the roses line the skinny walkway to their door, the day is brighter than it appeared through the windows. It is overcast, but not a ceiling of low clouds, only large ones with spaces in between, and she can see how the sun will be able to shine through them. They appear to be fast-racing clouds, and, once the sun is high enough, they will plummet the town into gray before giving way to light again. Though slight, the day erases the fear in her.

She notices the skinny walkway and the open gate where their son stumbled home, the place where he vomited into the grass. She had watched from the living room window, his friends behind him at a far distance, dark forms in the street, and she had waited for them to go away as her son entered the house, cursing terribly. From her rosebushes, she notices a gathering of flies buzzing around the mess, some of it on the gray stone of their walkway. There’s a streak of red in it, she can see. She quickens her pace with the rose petals when the breeze comes up and the smell of the vomit in the grass lifts, reminding her of how ill her son was only hours ago. Dropping the petals into the bowl, she hurries back into the house, trying to get away from that smell.

She is crying in the kitchen, mixing the mint and the oil and the water, and to make it froth, she adds a bit of milk and egg. The concoction doesn’t seem right to her anymore, doesn’t match what she recalls as a young girl, her grandmother taking down everyday bottles from the cabinets and blessing their cuts and coughs. The mother does it without any knowledge, only guessing, but it makes her feel better despite feeling lost in her inability to remember. She takes the bowl into the bathroom and dumps half a bottle of hand lotion into the bowl, and the mix turns softer and creamy.

Back in the bedroom, her husband is still at their son’s bedside, but the boy has not moved. The stale odor of the room reminds her again of outside and the earlier hours and her son’s vile language and her husband’s frantic struggle to keep the boy in bed, wild as he was. The boy tore off his own clothes, his thin hands ripping through his shirt and even his pants, shredding them, and he stalked into his bedroom naked and growling and strong. Her husband came to tower over him, beat him for coming home this way. The fear crept into her when the boy fought back and challenged and then, only by exhaustion, collapsed on the bed. He was quiet. And then the odor came. The smell was of liquor at first, but then a heavy urine. Then of something rotting. Her husband had yelled at her to open the windows. Even now, the smell lingers in the air.

“He’s still sleeping,” her husband whispers. “What do you have there?”

“A cure my grandmother used to give us,” she says, half expecting her husband to ignore her and the bowl.

“You want to put it on him?” he offers, and she knows that her husband is asking whether or not she is still afraid.

She does not answer him but moves to the bed, setting the bowl on the floor. With her fingertips, she dips into the concoction and then, resisting an impulse to hold her breath, rubs it on her son’s bare legs. They are remarkably smooth, and she looks at her husband as if to have him reassure her that what she had seen last night had not been an illusion. Her son’s legs are hairless and cool to the touch. There are no raised veins. They are not reddened with welts. They are not laced with deep scratches made with terrible fingers.

The boy spent the early part of Saturday evening with a group of friends, all of them drinking in the backyard at the house of a girl whose parents were visiting relatives in another town. Even before the sun had set, most of the boy’s friends had already had enough to drink, and they tried to convince some of the older boys to go back out and buy beer. But by then, the girls put a stop to all of it, saying the hall wouldn’t let them in if they smelled beer on them.

The boy liked being with these friends because he did not have to do much. He laughed at other people when the joke was on them, and it made him feel more comfortable about himself. He smoked cigarettes and watched the orange tips get brighter and brighter as the sun went down. He looked at the girls coming in and out of the back door as they got ready for the dance. He did not drink, because he did not like the acrid taste of beer, yet he liked being here with them, knowing that every sip was what their own parents had done at their age. He did not mind seeing the others drunk — after a certain point, he knew that the drunker boys would sit next to him and talk. He would not respond except to smile, because he didn’t know what else to do, what to make of their joking, their arms heavy around his shoulders.

They gathered themselves after the girls were ready and they walked to the hall, twos and threes along the sidewalk, some of them chewing big wads of hard pink gum and then spitting them into the grass. He was not as crass as the other boys, who waited to spit until they saw the dark figures of the churchgoers scowling from their porches. They divided mints between them when the hall came into view: the taillights of cars easing into the parking lot, women sitting in passenger seats waiting for their doors to be opened.

The boy got in line with the rest of them, watching as a pair of older women at the ticket table looked disapprovingly at the girls and motioned with their fingers for each of them to extend their arms. They fastened pink plastic bracelets around their wrists, ignoring the odor of alcohol. When the boy made it to them, he tried to move as close as possible, to show he was not like the rest of them, but one of the women only said, “No beer,” strapping the pink bracelet tightly and taking his dollar bills.

Inside, his friends had already fractured. A flurry of kids their age milled around the edge of the dance floor while the older couples swayed gently to the band’s ballad of horns and bandeneón.3 All he saw were bodies pressed together, light coming through in the spaces cleared for the dance steps of other couples, hips and fake jewelry catching. He saw the smoke blue in the air around the hanging lights; the cigarettes, which he felt contributed to the heat; the men with unbuttoned shirt collars, their hands around the backs of laughing women.

When the song ended, with a long and mournful note on a single horn, the couples separated to applaud, and some of the women went back to their own tables. He saw that people of every situation were there — older, single women sitting at the circular tables, men his father’s age with shiny belt buckles and boots. Of his own age, the boys were pestering some of the older men to buy them beer, hiding the telltale pink bands that showed their age, sneaking sips in the darker shadows of the hall’s great room.

As the next song began — a wild, brash ranchera complete with accordion at full expansion — the milling began again, people alone, people together. He put his hands in his pockets while men removed their hats and cornered women for a dance. Couples with joined hands pushed their way to the floor that had only just settled its dust. Some alone, some together. The music roared its way through the hall, and the boy reasoned that everyone felt the way he did at the moment — lost and unnoticed, standing in place as he was.

The boy’s mother spreads the concoction more vigorously, her son’s legs giving way where the flesh is soft, reminding her that he is not fully grown, not a man yet. She believes her rubbing will wake him, and when he doesn’t respond, she looks at her husband, who does nothing but look back.

She speaks to her son. “Are you awake?” she asks him, her hands grasping his legs quickly to shake him, but he only stirs, his head moving to one side and then stopping. “Are you in pain?”

Her husband stands up to look closely at their son’s face and says to her, “His eyes are open.” He waves his hand slowly in front of the boy, but still he will not speak. “I don’t think he sees me.”

“Are you awake?” she says again, rising to see for herself. His eyes are open, just as her husband said, but they don’t seem to stare back at her. She thinks for a moment that his open eyes will begin to water and she waits for him to blink, but he only closes his eyes once more.

“It’s early still,” the father says. “Don’t worry.”

The boy felt as if he had been the only person to notice the man with the plain silver buckle, a belt that shimmered against the glow of the yellow bulbs strung across the hall’s high rafters. A plain silver buckle that gleamed like a cold eye, open and watching. Even from a distance, the boy knew it was plain, that it had no etchings, no tarnish, no scratches. He watched it tilt at the waist as the man put his boot up on the leg of a stool, leaning down to one of the girls who had come with the boy, whispering to her.

He felt as if he were the only one watching how the girl flicked her hair deliberately with her left wrist, as if to show the pink bracelet in a polite gesture to move on: she was too young.

The boy pictured himself with the same kind of arrogance, the posture that cocked the man’s hips, the offering he suggested to this girl, and he wondered if he would ever grow into that kind of superiority, being capable of seducing and tempting. He watched the silver buckle blink at him, as if it watched back, as if it knew where the boy was looking.

The man finally left the girl alone, but the boy watched him, circling the dance floor, sometimes losing him between songs as the hall dimmed the lighting to invite a slow dance. Or losing him when one of the other boys distracted him with a stolen beer. But he would quickly find him again, the belt buckle gleaming and catching — a circle of silver light moving through the dark tables.

The girl from before came up to the boy and said, “That man kept bugging me,” as if she expected the boy to do something about it. He turned to look at her — she was one of the girls who regularly went to church, didn’t know how to behave at a dance, put up her hair because her girlfriends told her to. And now, with that strange man, she wanted trouble for its own sake, he thought. He could hear in her voice that she wanted the attention in some form — his defense, or that man’s proposal — so no one would look at her as the girl with the straight dark hair, a Sunday girl.

So the boy moved, without looking at the girl, keeping his eye on the silver buckle and followed the man, catching up to him toward the back of the hall, where only the couples who could not wait to get home were kissing, leaning against each other, backing into the wall. The man stood next to a woman, facing her and talking among all the bodies rubbing against each other, his silver buckle the only still thing, and the boy noticed that the man wore nothing but black, down to his boots. The man’s teeth gleamed as he smiled, watching the boy approach. He smiled as if he expected him and ignored the woman, who disappeared into the dark bodies.

Before the boy could say anything about the girl, the man extended his hand, offering a beer. “My apologies,” he said to the boy, his voice clear and strong, and the boy noticed his face — what a handsome man he was, his skin as dark as anyone’s in town — but his voice not anchored by the heaviness of accent. He was not like them, the boy knew instantly.

The mother opens all the doors in the house, though the sky doesn’t look as if it will break one way or the other. She draws more curtains, all the rooms filled with the muted daylight. Even the closet doors are open, flush against the walls, and she pushes the clothes apart to allow the light in the tight spaces. She thinks of the kitchen cabinets and the drawers, the small knobs that pull out of tables and nightstands, the blankets hiding the dust motes under the beds. The husband lets her do this and then says nothing as she sits in the living room all by herself with her head in her hands.

Because the front door is wide open, she hears the footsteps on the sidewalk long before they approach the house, and she looks to the porch to see a group of her son’s friends coming. They walk so close together; they seem afraid and apologetic at the same time. All of them have their heads bowed, the girls and the boys in fresh Sunday church clothes, and she knows they see the mess her son made on the front lawn.

It is odd for her to be sitting on her living room couch and seeing not the television but her own front yard, and she can do nothing but watch as the boys and girls stop at the porch, almost startled that they do not have to knock.

“What do you want?” she hears her husband say, and she turns to see him in the archway to the kitchen, where he must have heard them coming. ‘‘What did you give him last night?”

Her husband’s voice is filled with rage, but she can see that her son’s friends have come out of concern. And she knows they will tell her that her son had not been drinking, that they will deny that he took any drugs, and she will believe them. But she knots her fingers and her hands, trying to build up a false anger, because she is too ashamed and afraid to let them know what she and her husband saw on her boy’s body, the things he said in a voice that was not his, how the house seemed to swell and breathe as if it were living itself, the whole space filling out in the same terrible way that her chest wanted to burst forth.

“We didn’t give him anything,” one of the boys says. “He wouldn’t even take one beer.”

“He’s sick now!” her husband yells at them. “You understand that? ¿Entienden?”

“Let them go home,” the mother says. “They don’t need to know anything.”

The boys and girls still stand on the porch, because they see she has been talking to her husband and not them, waiting for him to order them away. But the husband does not say anything, and then one of the boys speaks up and says, “I brought him home because we found him sick. Outside the hall. He was just sick. We don’t know how.”

No one responds, no one asks questions. Not the husband, not the mother. And just when the mother is about to rise from the couch to point her finger to the street, to show them away from the porch, they all know to look in the hall archway leading to the bedroom. There, clad only in his underwear, his skin pale and the dampness of the day swimming through the house, stands the boy.

He is aware of himself in a way that is unsettling, as if he has escaped his body once and for all and yet, exhausted as he feels, knows that his body is his own again. He is aware that the window to his bedroom is open and the day is overcast; the curtains move in a breeze that is chilly and has made the sheets underneath him cold. He shivers.

He hears the voices in the front of the house, the sound of his father’s anger, the way only his father can sound, and his mother’s hesitations. He hears the sounds of his friends but can’t tell how many.

He feels the cold on his legs and he rises from the bed slowly, putting his feet on the floor, and the act of moving — like water, like the leaves outside his bedroom window today — startles him, the ease of it. Looking at his thin legs, the hollow of his own chest, he does not feel ashamed of himself as he once did.

The boy knows what he has done, what has happened, and yet, deep inside, he believes it could not have been. He thinks back to the man in the black clothes and the silver buckle, the offered beer, and the few words they spoke. The man had asked him if he spoke Spanish and when he had said no, the man had looked almost pleased. He does not remember what else they might have spoken of, only that the hall seemed to tilt and sway, the ranchera amplified to ten times as loud as he has ever heard, so that the man’s voice came from within him. It came from the darkness when he closed his eyes to the hall’s dipping and sinking, and when he opened them, it was still dark and he felt the nip of the outside air, the summer night cool compared to the pushed-together bodies of the dance inside. The cool of the sheets beneath him this morning makes him recall that outside air, how he had felt it not against his face but the bare skin of his chest, then his belly, and the metallic touch of the silver belt buckle pressing close. The music was distant — they were away from the hall, away from the cars in the parking lot, where couples were leaving, the engines starting. He recalls now the rough edges of a tree against his back, the bark and the summer sap, the branches a canopy that hid the stars, because he looked up and saw nothing but the spaces between leaves, small stars peeking through to see him.

He had said nothing to this man, remembers how he allowed the man’s hands to grab his waist, his entire arm wrapped around, lifting the boy’s feet from the ground, the feeling of rising, almost levitating. He felt as if the man rose with him because he felt the hot press of the man’s belly, the rough texture of hair, and now he remembers how he had let his hands run down the man’s back, the knots on his spine, the fine-worked furrow, their feet on air. He kept looking up, searching for the stars between the branches.

The man, his back broad, grunted heavily. The sound frightens the boy now as he recalls it in broad daylight. The man’s sound made him grow, pushing the boy up higher and higher, to where the boy could see himself in the arms of the man who glowed in the darkness of the canopy of branches, his skin a dull red, the pants and boots gone. And though he felt he was in air, he saw a flash of the man’s feet entrenched fast in the ground — long, hard hooves digging into the soil, the height of horses when they charge — it was then that the boy remembers seeing and feeling at the same time — the hooves, then a piercing in the depth of his belly that made his eyes flash a whole battalion of stars, shooting and brilliant, more and more of them, until he had no choice but to scream out.

And now, at midmorning, his father and mother in the front of the house, his skin smelling of mint and roses, he knows enough to go forward and send his friends away. He wonders if he will sound different; he wonders if they will see how he carries himself now; he remembers how feeling the furrow of the man’s back reminded him of the hard work of picking grapes in the summer months — his father will punish him with it. The hard work and the rattlers under the vines, their forked tongues brushing the air, and the boy remembers that the man’s tongue pushed into his with the same vigor, searching him with the same kind of terrible flick.

He rises from the bed and steps, with an unfamiliar grace, to the wide-open door of his bedroom and down the hall.

The mother sees him, the look in his eye, and she wants to say nothing at all. She believes, as she always has, that talking aloud brings moments to light, and she has refused to speak of her mother’s death, of her husband’s cheating, of the hatred of her brothers and sisters. She sees her son at the doorway and wants to tell him not to speak.

They all stand and wait for the boy to talk, the doors and windows open as wide as possible and every last secret of their home ready to make an easy break to the outside. The curtains swell with a passing breeze.

“You’re awake,” the father says, and walks toward the boy, and the mother hopes that he will not speak and reveal his voice. She wonders if her husband knows now, if he can tell how the side-to-side swivel of the dancers at the hall and the zigzag of their steps have invited an ancient trouble, if her husband knows the countless stories of midnight goings-on, of women with broken blood vessels streaming underneath their skin from the touch of every strange man.

She keeps wondering, even when her husband turns to the boy’s friends and tells them, “See? He’s fine. Now go home,” and motions them away from the porch and they leave without asking her son anything at all. She wonders now if her husband has ever awakened at night, dreaming of dances where bags of church-blessed rattlesnakes have been opened in the darkness of the place, the mad slithering between feet and the screams, the rightness of that punishment, the snakes that spoke in human voices, the rushed side-to-side movement of the snakes before they coiled underneath tables to strike at ankles.

When her husband turns his back to walk to the porch, watching the boy’s friends walk off warily, she takes her chance and rushes to her underwear-clad son in the archway and grabs him by his arms — his flesh cold — and says, under her breath, “I know, I know,” and then bravely, without waiting to hear what his voice might sound like, tries to pry open his mouth and check for herself.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

  1. FIRST RESPONSE. No one in this story is named. How does that choice affect your emotional response to the story? Would you feel differently about the story if at least the protagonist (“the boy”) had a name?
  2. There are two basic groups of people in town: the field workers and the churchgoers. How does this division frame the story’s main conflict? What is that conflict?
  3. The point of view in the story shifts not only from the mother to the son, but from the present to the preceding night. How does the author control this movement without confusing the reader?
  4. The boy is fascinated by the man with the silver buckle because he can tell he is somehow different from everyone else in the dance hall. What are some of the factors that indicate the boy’s own difference from his friend group?
  5. In question 1 we identify the boy as the story’s protagonist, but the story’s shifting point of view essentially begins and ends with his mother. Is she actually the story’s protagonist? If so, does the meaning of the story shift?
  6. Leaving aside for a moment the boy’s sexual encounter with the man at the dance, discuss the opposition between his group of friends and his family as a way of articulating his central conflict.
  7. How do you interpret the story’s title?
  8. Discuss the passages in the story that are most abstract, or least realistic. How do these passages interact with the more straightforward or realistic passages?
  9. Consider the way gender roles are reinforced in this town. What is the boy’s reaction to these roles? How does he both uphold and resist them?

Connections to Other Selections

  1. Discuss the treatment of parental expectations in this story and in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” What important similarities and differences do you see?
  2. Consider the relationship between home towns and individual transformations in this story and in Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.”

Maggie Mitchell (b. 1970)

A photo of Maggie Mitchell.

Maggie Mitchell grew up in a small town in the northernmost part of New York State, on the Canadian border. She received an undergraduate degree in English from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, and she now teaches English at the University of West Georgia. Her first novel, Pretty Is (2015), has been widely translated. Mitchell’s short fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including New Ohio Review, American Literary Review, and Green Mountains Review. The stark landscape of her childhood often finds its way into her short stories, as it does in “It Would Be Different If,” which originally appeared in New South.

It Would Be Different If 2011

Here’s what I remember. If I could hate you, this is what I would hate you for. It’s a summer night, humid, starry. It’s already pretty late but we’re all heading over to Canada, to a bar called the Shipyard. She is there, which surprises me, because the Shipyard is the kind of place where people crack beer bottles over each other’s heads, and I wouldn’t have thought it was her scene. But she’s been hanging out with your sister Megan all summer, working down at the restaurant, back when it was still the Riverside. She’s always around. She annoys me, but I don’t suspect anything yet. There are two boats; we’re splitting into groups. I’m standing on the dock, a beer in my hand. I’ve had a little too much to drink already, probably, because everything seems very dark, slightly confused. I’m trying to figure out which boat you’re in so I don’t get stuck in the other one. Just then a car happens to go by on Water Street and its headlights flicker across us. You’re already in the first boat, and you’re reaching your hand up toward the dock, smiling. I move blindly in your direction, thinking you’re reaching for me, when another flash of light shows me that she is grabbing for your hand, you’re swinging her down, the smile is for her, it’s not a mistake. I stand on the dock in a miniskirt and a very skimpy cropped top, my hair sprayed into a sort of stiff gold cloud because it is the 80s. I feel, for the first time in my life, completely ridiculous. There’s no turning back, though. I can’t just announce, like a little kid, that I’m going home, I don’t want to play anymore, though that’s exactly what I feel.

The first boat is full. The headlights veer away: everything is dark again. I tumble somehow into the second boat, wishing I had something to cover myself with: I feel naked, although back then I always dressed like that, we all did. At the Shipyard I mostly stay in the bathroom, drinking and crying. I don’t remember the boat ride home. But that’s it, that’s the end of it. That much I remember.

I’ve heard variations on this story from everyone, over the years. I’m always the victim, the one people feel sorry for. Maybe there are other versions where I get what’s coming to me, where I’ve always needed to be put in my place, something like that, but I doubt it. People have never liked Amber much; they tend to be on my side. Or at least they did: as the years go by, I notice, that’s less true. It’s so long ago that people can’t get too worked up about it anymore. Now they talk as if it was somehow inevitable, and we just didn’t know it yet — you know, isn’t life funny, but look how it all works out in the end. Except when it doesn’t.

It would be different if we lived in the kind of place where people can disappear, never see each other again. It would be different if I could pretend you didn’t exist. But there you are: you are at the post office, peering into your mailbox, pulling out a stack of envelopes and catalogues while I drop my electric bill in the mail slot; I wait till you turn around, to make sure you see me. You would rather not see me. You’re at the table on the other side of the restaurant, bending forward to speak to her, or wiping food off your kid’s face. You’re getting gas, staring off into the distance, forgetting what you are doing. You don’t notice that I’m driving by. What are you thinking of? You’re everywhere. I think you have ruined my life.

And now she’s the one they feel sorry for. Yes, of course I know what you’ve been up to. Everyone knows. I see your truck in the parking lot at Jude’s every night, and they say you don’t tend to leave alone. I see her sometimes: Amber. She looks smaller, paler, less pretty. I could almost feel sorry for her myself, to tell you the truth. I don’t blame you, of course. It’s just because it’s all wrong. I could have told you it would happen.

I wasn’t supposed to be one of those people, the unmarryable ones. I never expected to be. I had you, and we had plans, ever since our junior year: Nikki and Jeff. Nikki Gilbert. It sounded right. We joked about getting old, how you would go bald and I’d go pure white, and we’d go fishing in the summer, cross-country skiing in the winter, with our dog. It was a beagle. I had a bit of a stoop; you had put on some weight. You can’t cancel that out.

It wasn’t fair. She had gone away — to college, the city, whatever. She was the kind of person who goes away, doesn’t come back: that’s what everyone expected. But she did come back and she chose you, of all people. Why you? You’re not like her. You are like us.

Well. Here’s what I imagine. It’s the best I can do. I am working, finishing up someone’s hair. It’s late afternoon — that quiet time when the sun starts to come in sideways. Whose hair? Someone like Deb White, not much of a talker, but lots of hair, complicated hair, ever since Don got his job back and they gave up on that hippie phase. I’m finished with the cut and now I’m styling it, taking my time because I don’t have any more appointments that day, blowing it out section by section, working through the layers. Her eyes are half closed, I hum a little. It’s nice.

Then I hear the door clang as it swings shut behind someone. I glance over and it’s you. I am calm; we say nothing. I just nod, and you pick up a magazine and sit down on the couch to wait. Like anyone else. I don’t rush Deb. If anything I slow down, taking extra time with each wave, making it perfect. You’re just sitting there but somehow you fill the air, you’re everywhere and invisible. I breathe you, I walk on you, I curl you into Deb’s frosted waves. But I don’t shake, or sweat. I’m not nervous. You’re like a birthday, a red X on the calendar. Sooner or later you’ll happen, one way or the other: it doesn’t matter what I do. Eventually Deb rises to her feet, admires herself in the mirror. She writes a check; I don’t take credit cards. It seems to take her forever, like one of those women in line at the grocery store. In the meantime I sweep up the heap of doll-like hair around the chair, straighten up the station. She makes an appointment for the next month. Finally she drifts toward the door and I follow her, because she is chatting about something, telling me a story about one of her daughters; she always does this. I wave as she maneuvers herself into her car, careful not to disturb her hair.

When I return to the shop you have seated yourself in the chair that is probably still warm from its contact with Deb White’s bony behind. I think of this, for some reason. I see myself smile in the mirror and our eyes, for the first time, meet each other’s reflections. I drape a hunter green smock across you, attach it behind your neck with velcro straps.

I cut your hair. I use four different kinds of scissors, a razor, two combs, a touch of mousse. I used to cut your hair in high school, for practice. Now I do it better. Mostly I keep my eyes focused on your head, like an artist putting the final touches on some life-sized sculpture, but every now and then I look up, and there you are in the mirror. We always look at the same moment. We know exactly how long to wait between looks; we know not to overdo it. Your eyes are still the same blue as always but there are crinkles, now, at the corners. I think you are better looking than ever. My work does you justice: this is the best haircut you will ever, ever get.

I remove the smock when it’s over. You do not pay. You don’t speak. You look at me one more time, and you touch my hand — so far, given the circumstances, I have been the one to do all the touching — and then you leave. I wait until your truck has pulled away to sweep up the short brown hairs. I can’t throw them away, so I tilt the contents of the dustpan into one of the nice creamy envelopes I use for gift certificates.

I don’t know what happens after that. Probably you don’t leave her right away. But sooner or later I know you’ll come. I’ll be waiting. For now I’ll settle for the trimmings, glossy and shampoo-scented, and for the traces of your reflection that you seem to have left in the mirror. You flicker endlessly between the stiff curls of middle-aged ladies in pastel pantsuits, the long doomed locks of small terrified boys, the towering, glittery updos of girls on their way to the prom. You remind me to wait, promise that things will be different. I believe you.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

  1. FIRST RESPONSE. What actually happens in this story? What is the status of the present in relation to memory and imagination?
  2. How does the narrator invite the reader’s sympathy? Is it important that we sympathize with her?
  3. How trustworthy is the narrator’s version of events? What specific lines or passages reinforce or undermine her perspective?
  4. What kind of resolution does this story offer? Would you say that the conflict has been resolved, in any sense?
  5. What does the narrator’s way of relating this story — not what she says, but the way she says it — reveal about her world or about her character?
  6. What sense do you get of the town in which this story is set? How important is the setting to your understanding of the story and the characters?
  7. What is the significance of the final line of the story?
  8. CREATIVE RESPONSE. Use what you think you can infer about the narrator from this story to craft a paragraph from a third-person point of view in which Nikki is portrayed unsympathetically.

Connection to Another Selection

  1. Compare the accounts of long-term relationships that have ended in this story and in Grace Paley’s “Wants”: what do both of them tell us and not tell us about the reasons these relationships did not last permanently? What difference does point of view make, if any?