Length: 2 pages.

Format: MLA. Add a Works Cited section or page at the end. Use one primary source (the story) and one secondary source (about the story).

Primary and secondary sources: In this essay, you will write about one of the stories we read and discussed in the class. Use only the fictional stories, not the TedTalk. Do not use an outside story. For example, write an analytical and argumentative essay on “A&P”. The story is your primary source. In addition, you need to use a minimum of one secondary source, such as a critique or literary analysis about the story, that you find on Google Scholar, JStore, or CCM Library Online Databases. Make sure your source is credible. You can use the supplemental videos I posted in the lecture in your essay: the Ted Talk on feminism by Adichie or the YouTube video on fiction by Nafisi. Make sure you document your primary and secondary sources properly. Use both in-text parenthetical citation and a full citation at the end of the essay. ***Avoid such websites as Cliffnotes.com, Shmoop.com, Sparknotes.com, Enotes.com, Litchart.com, … that come up in Google search! They usually give a summary and some opinions but not analysis or interpretation.***

In your introduction: Mention the title of the story and the name of the writer. Provide a context or background for your argument. Provide a thesis statement or pose a question. Provide a plan of ideas. Avoid biographical information.

In body paragraphs: Develop each idea per one paragraph. In every paragraph, you should have a topic sentence that introduces the main idea of the paragraph. You need to use one or two short quotations from the story as evidence of your argument. You should provide an interpretation for every quotation, and support it with extra details and examples. You should have an in-text citation for every quote and also give the full citation at the end of the paper on the Works Cited page.

In your conclusion: You can use one or more of the techniques: rephrase your thesis statement, summarize your essay, look into the future, make some recommendations, etc.

Avoid biographical information about the writer. Avoid summarizing what the story is about.

Oates,”Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates (1966)

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 bright- lit, 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
for Bob Dylan

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
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.

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
“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?”

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
“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.”

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
“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 relaxed, with one hand idly
on the door handle as if he were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving
again. She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and
the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy
dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn’t want to put into words. She
recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little
melancholy, and she recognized the way he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the
perpetual music behind him. But all these things did not come together.
She said suddenly, “Hey, how old are you?”
His smiled faded. She could see then that he wasn’t a kid, he was much older—thirty, maybe more. At
this knowledge her heart began to pound faster.
“That’s a crazy thing to ask. Can’tcha see I’m your own age?” “Like hell you are.”
“Or maybe a couple years older. I’m eighteen.”
“Eighteen?” she said doubtfully.
He grinned to reassure her and lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were big and white.
He grinned so broadly his eyes became slits and she saw how thick the lashes were, thick and black as if
painted with a black tarlike material. Then, abruptly, he seemed to become embarrassed and looked
over his shoulder at Ellie. “Him, he’s crazy,” he said. “Ain’t he a riot? He’s a nut, a real character.” Ellie
was still listening to the music. His sunglasses told nothing about what he was thinking. He wore a bright
orange shirt unbuttoned halfway to show his chest, which was a pale, bluish chest and not muscular like
Arnold Friend’s. His shirt collar was turned up all around and the very tips of the collar pointed out past
his chin as if they were protecting him. He was pressing the transistor radio up against his ear and sat
there in a kind of daze, right in the sun.
“He’s kinda strange,” Connie said.
“Hey, she says you’re kinda strange! Kinda strange!” Arnold Friend cried. He pounded on the car to get
Ellie’s attention. Ellie turned for the first time and Connie saw with shock that he wasn’t a kid either—he
had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as if the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin,
the face of a forty-year-old baby. Connie felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at
file:///Macintosh%20HD/Desktop%20Folder/oates_going.html (5 of 9) [3/10/2003 9:13:55 AM]

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it
all right again. Ellie’s lips kept shaping words, mumbling along with the words blasting in his ear.
“Maybe you two better go away,” Connie said faintly.
“What? How come?” Arnold Friend cried. “We come out here to take you for a ride. It’s Sunday.” He had
the voice of the man on the radio now. It was the same voice, Connie thought. “Don’tcha know it’s
Sunday all day? And honey, no matter who you were with last night, today you’re with Arnold Friend
and don’t you forget it! Maybe you better step out here,” he said, and this last was in a different voice. It
was a little flatter, as if the heat was finally getting to him.
“No. I got things to do.”
“Hey.”
“You two better leave.”
“We ain’t leaving until you come with us.” “Like hell I am—”
“Connie, don’t fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don’t fool around,” he said, shaking his head. He
laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed
wearing a wig, and brought the stems down behind his ears. Connie stared at him, another wave of
dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a moment he wasn’t even in focus but was just a blur standing

there against his gold car, and she had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had
come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even about
the music that was so familiar to her was only half real.
“If my father comes and sees you—” “He ain’t coming. He’s at a barbecue.” “How do you know that?”
“Aunt Tillie’s. Right now they’re uh—they’re drinking. Sitting around,” he said vaguely, squinting as if he
were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie’s back yard. Then the vision seemed to get clear
and he nodded energetically. “Yeah. Sitting around. There’s your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high
heels, the poor sad bitch—nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother’s helping some fat woman
with the corn, they’re cleaning the corn—husking the corn—”
“What fat woman?” Connie cried.
“How do I know what fat woman, I don’t know every goddamn fat woman in the world!” Arnold Friend
laughed.
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Hornsby . . . . Who invited her?” Connie said. She felt a little lightheaded. Her breath
was coming quickly.
“She’s too fat. I don’t like them fat. I like them the way you are, honey,” he said, smiling sleepily at her.
They stared at each other for a while through the screen door. He said softly, “Now, what you’re going
to do is this: you’re going to come out that door. You re going to sit up front with me and Ellie’s going to
sit in the back, the hell with Ellie, right? This isn’t Ellie’s date. You’re my date. I’m your lover, honey.”
“What? You’re crazy—”
“Yes, I’m your lover. You don’t know what that is but you will,” he said. “I know that too. I know all about
you. But look: it’s real nice and you couldn’t ask for nobody better than me, or more polite. I always
keep my word. I’ll tell you how it is, I’m always nice at first, the first time. I’ll hold you so tight you won’t
think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t. And I’ll come inside
you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me ”
“Shut up! You’re crazy!” Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her hands up against her
ears as if she’d heard something terrible, something not meant for her. “People don’t talk like that,
you’re crazy,” she muttered. Her heart was almost too big now for her chest and its pumping made
sweat break out all over her. She looked out to see Arnold Friend pause and then take a step toward the
porch, lurching. He almost fell. But, like a clever drunken man, he managed to catch his balance. He
wobbled in his high boots and grabbed hold of one of the porch posts.
“Honey?” he said. “You still listening?”

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
“Get the hell out of here!” “Be nice, honey. Listen.” “I’m going to call the police—”
He wobbled again and out of the side of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an aside not meant for her to
hear. But even this “Christ!” sounded forced. Then he began to smile again. She watched this smile
come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly,
tanned down to his throat but then running out as if he had plastered make- up on his face but had
forgotten about his throat.
“Honey—? Listen, here’s how it is. I always tell the truth and I promise you this: I ain’t coming in that
house after you.”
“You better not! I’m going to call the police if you—if you don’t—”
“Honey,” he said, talking right through her voice, “honey, I m not coming in there but you are coming
out here. You know why?”
She was panting. The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before, some room she had run
inside but that wasn’t good enough, wasn’t going to help her. The kitchen window had never had a

curtain, after three years, and there were dishes in the sink for her to do—probably—and if you ran your
hand across the table you’d probably feel something sticky there.
“You listening, honey? Hey?” “—going to call the police—”
“Soon as you touch the phone I don’t need to keep my promise and can come inside. You won’t want
that.”
She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. “But why lock it,” Arnold Friend
said gently, talking right into her face. “It’s just a screen door. It’s just nothing.” One of his boots was at a
strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. “I mean, anybody can
break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all,
and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you’d come runnin’ out into my
arms, right into my arms an’ safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and’d stopped fooling
around. I don’t mind a nice shy girl but I don’t like no fooling around.” Part of those words were spoken
with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized them—the echo of a song from last year,
about a girl rushing into her boy friend’s arms and coming home again—
Connie stood barefoot on the linoleum floor, staring at him. “What do you want?” she whispered. “I
want you,” he said.
“What?”
“Seen you that night and thought, that’s the one, yes sir. I never needed to look anymore.”
“But my father’s coming back. He’s coming to get me. I had to wash my hair first—” She spoke in a dry,
rapid voice, hardly raising it for him to hear.
“No, your daddy is not coming and yes, you had to wash your hair and you washed it for me. It’s nice
and shining and all for me. I thank you sweetheart,” he said with a mock bow, but again he almost lost
his balance. He had to bend and adjust his boots. Evidently his feet did not go all the way down; the
boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller. Connie stared out at him
and behind him at Ellie in the car, who seemed to be looking off toward Connie’s right, into nothing. This
Ellie said, pulling the words out of the air one after another as if he were just discovering them, “You
want me to pull out the phone?”
“Shut your mouth and keep it shut,” Arnold Friend said, his face red from bending over or maybe from
embarrassment because Connie had seen his boots. “This ain’t none of your business.”
“What—what are you doing? What do you want?” Connie said. “If I call the police they’ll get you, they’ll
arrest you—”
“Promise was not to come in unless you touch that phone, and I’ll keep that promise,” he said. He
resumed his erect position and tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded like a hero in a movie,
declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it was as if he were speaking to someone
behind Connie. “I ain’t made plans for coming in that house where I don’t belong but just for you to
come out to me, the way you should. Don’t you know who I am?”
“You’re crazy,” she whispered. She backed away from the door but did not want to go into another part
of the house, as if this would
file:///Macintosh%20HD/Desktop%20Folder/oates_going.html (7 of 9) [3/10/2003 9:13:55 AM]

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
give him permission to come through the door. “What do you . . . you’re crazy, you. . . .”
“Huh? What’re you saying, honey?”
Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room.
“This is how it is, honey: you come out and we’ll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don’t come out
we’re gonna wait till your people come home and then they’re all going to get it.”
“You want that telephone pulled out?” Ellie said. He held the radio away from his ear and grimaced, as if
without the radio the air was too much for him.

“I toldja shut up, Ellie,” Arnold Friend said, “you’re deaf, get a hearing aid, right? Fix yourself up. This
little girl’s no trouble and’s gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to yourself, this ain’t your date right?
Don’t hem in on me, don’t hog, don’t crush, don’t bird dog, don’t trail me,” he said in a rapid,
meaningless voice, as if he were running through all the expressions he’d learned but was no longer sure
which of them was in style, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. “Don’t
crawl under my fence, don’t squeeze in my chipmonk hole, don’t sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep
your own greasy fingers on yourself!” He shaded his eyes and peered in at Connie, who was backed
against the kitchen table. “Don’t mind him, honey, he’s just a creep. He’s a dope. Right? I’m the boy for
you, and like I said, you come out here nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else gets
hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels.
Because listen: why bring them in this?”
“Leave me alone,” Connie whispered.
“Hey, you know that old woman down the road, the one with the chickens and stuff—you know her?”
“She’s dead!”
“Dead? What? You know her?” Arnold Friend said.
“She’s dead—”
“Don’t you like her?”
“She’s dead—she’s—she isn’t here any more—”
But don’t you like her, I mean, you got something against her? Some grudge or something?” Then his
voice dipped as if he were conscious of a rudeness. He touched the sunglasses perched up on top of his
head as if to make sure they were still there. “Now, you be a good girl.”
‘What are you going to do?”
“Just two things, or maybe three,” Arnold Friend said. “But I promise it won’t last long and you’ll like me
the way you get to like people you’re close to. You will. It’s all over for you here, so come on out. You
don’t want your people in any trouble, do you?”
She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into the back room
and picked up the telephone. Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring, and she was so sick with fear
that she could do nothing but listen to it—the telephone was clammy and very heavy and her fingers
groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it. She began to scream into the phone, into the
roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her
lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A
noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this
house.
After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back against the wall.
Arnold Friend was saying from the door, “That’s a good girl. Put the phone back.”
She kicked the phone away from her.
“No, honey. Pick it up. Put it back right.”
She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped. “That’s a good girl. Now, you come outside.”
file:///Macintosh%20HD/Desktop%20Folder/oates_going.html (8 of 9) [3/10/2003 9:13:55 AM]

Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. All that screaming had
blasted it out of her. She sat, one leg cramped under her, and deep inside her brain was something like a
pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her relax. She thought, I’m not going to see my
mother again. She thought, I’m not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet.
Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, “The place where you came from
ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside

your daddy’s house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and
always did know it. You hear me?”
She thought, I have got to think. I have got to know what to do.
“We’ll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it’s sunny,” Arnold Friend
said. “I’ll have my arms tight around you so you won’t need to try to get away and I’ll show you what
love is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It looks solid all right,” he said. He ran a fingernail
down the screen and the noise did not make Connie shiver, as it would have the day before. “Now, put
your hand on your heart, honey. Feel that? That feels solid too but we know better. Be nice to me, be
sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?—
and get away before her people come back?”
She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that
it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that
wasn’t really hers either.
“You don’t want them to get hurt,” Arnold Friend went on. “Now, get up, honey. Get up all by yourself.”
She stood.
“Now, turn this way. That’s right. Come over here to me.— Ellie, put that away, didn’t I tell you? You
dope. You miserable creepy dope,” Arnold Friend said. His words were not angry but only part of an
incantation. The incantation was kindly. “Now come out through the kitchen to me, honey, and let’s see
a smile, try it, you re a brave, sweet little girl and now they’re eating corn and hot dogs cooked to
bursting over an outdoor fire, and they don’t know one thing about you and never did and honey, you’re
better than them because not a one of them would have done this for you.”
Connie felt the linoleum under her feet; it was cool. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes. Arnold
Friend let go of the post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each
other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn’t
want to make her self-conscious.
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.
“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes
but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of
him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she
was going to it.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Literature, An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, by X.J.

Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 8th ed., 2016, pp. 83–94.