Weekend Short: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.

Welcome to the weekend!

Introduction and Excerpt

The death of a girl’s innocence is a story as old as Eden and has been repeated billions of times since. Published in 1966, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, and dedicated to Bob Dylan, reckons with this phenomenon in the context of the Sexual Revolution — the atomization of the family unit and American dechristianization. It’s an uncomfortable story, starting with the awkwardness and bigotries of youth and culminating with the terror of the fledgling captured in the eyed cape of the cobra.

Oates writes:

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of oaning 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’~ much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it.

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Rumination (Avast! Spoilers to the fore)

Before broader analysis, one ought to appreciate the line: “She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.” For those of us who enjoyed childhoods of safety and comfort, can you not recall the same moment that you stepped from those sun-drenched lands for the last time? For me, it was when the recruiter came to collect the kid that was due him, the 19-year-old whose name and social security number happened to be mine. That peculiar scronch of release that the seal on the glass front door has when forced from its state of rest as adulthood’s contracts and strictures forced themself through will never depart my mind’s ear. What about you?

For the story as a whole, one can understand it as a cautionary tale of the secular age. After all, Connie shouldn’t be at home listening to the radio — she should be at church. But her family doesn’t do that. Rather, each member pursues his or her interests and thinks little of what the other might need. The family’s importance, represented by the barbecue at Connie’s aunt’s house, is a voluntary diversion — the nuclear unit’s cohesion is a fraying relic. Connie’s parents exist to occasionally suggest social mores — the dangers of premarital sex, a semblance of modesty, and proper social etiquette — but neither does more than pay lip service. Rather, Connie’s mother is a small, jealous creature and her father is  no man at all, described as “quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out.” That said, we see these characters through adolescent Connie’s vanity, just as we see her frumpy older sister.

The first half of the story is the world according to Connie, while the second half is her involuntary coming out party — a situation she was never prepared for due to her parents’ passivity and the self-indulgent naïevete that accompanies the unfortunate pairing of absent moral instruction (that the wickedness of men must be guarded against) and unguided egotism.

Arnold Friend, based upon serial-killer Charles Schmid, is the antithesis of everyone else in Connie’s life. Friend is fascinated by Connie, to her eternal detriment. A man older than he pretends to be, who surrounds himself with ostentation to distract from scrutiny, Friend can be read as either a man or a devil or both. Personally, I think him a man because, as we see with Matthew McConaughey’s sleezy David Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, the drive-in predator was common enough to become a Hollywood fixture. Connie’s reflection in Friend’s glasses is telling, the “glasses were metallic and mirrored everything in miniature.” For the first time, Connie understands she’s not as much as she thought she was, while we also understand that through Friend’s eyes, she’s prey — small, elusive, and tinted in some way we cannot fully understand (morally? sexually? in the colors of lust?).

The story ends suggestively — Oates treats sex and murder with the same obliqueness (one can understand this to be feminist commentary or simply capable storytelling with no need to lean on pornographic detail to make its point). Connie fails to save herself, her family fails to return, and we never get the impression that the police are ever a real threat — God is gone or never was. Instead, the future is the realm of men who pretend to be something other than they are and take what they want from those weaker than themselves. A modernity that pretends away the reaver or rapist is one that will soon become too familiar with each.

Thank you to Jacob for the suggestion.

Wisconsin Postcard

Snow! Snow and more snow!

My cousins are in town — we are as brothers — so the week was filled with snowmobiling, ascending grandiloquence applied to stories each can recite (with remarkable variation), and the joy that comes with being surrounded by those who’ve known you since time began for all. Today will comprise snow removal, a party, and football (To add to Charlie’s, Phil’s, Dominic’s, and Andy’s picks: Cleveland over Houston; Miami over Kansas City; Buffalo over Pittsburgh; Green Bay over Dallas; Detroit over LA; Tampa over Philadelphia).

Also, I’m now a full-time NR guy. Thank you, readers, for liking my stuff enough that the bosses figured I’d better stick around permanently.

Music for Reading

There are few things that pair better than jazz and a snowed-in day — it brings to mind an outline of a fighter-ace beagle staring at the sky while the snow mounds over him. Here’s the Bill Evans Trio with Portrait in Jazz:

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Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.