John Updike - A & P

This story was quite interesting. The narrator was a 19 year old grocery store clerk, and this story was probably set in summer, because three girls walk in wearing just bathing suits and no shoes. Usually, If you walk in to a grocery store in just a bikini, someone will ask you to leave, or at least put a shirt on, but no one does until the very end of the short story. I find this surprising, because both of the clerks (including the narrator) didn't say anything. The narrator, being a teenage boy, notices their bodies and quickly distinguishes the "Leader" of the girls. The narrator also calls the other people in the grocery store "sheep" or "scared pigs in a chute". I wondered why the author chose to do this. It made it seem like the boy didn't care about anyone but the girls, which is probably true. The boy seemed to be fascinated by the girls, almost like he had never seen one before. He watched them the entire time, which was kinda creepy. One thing I didn't understand was why he quit his job at the end. The girls were stupid to try and buy stuff from a grocery store with only bikinis on. I think that the boy was overreacting a bit because he quit just because the girls got embarrassed. 

My favorite passage was this one: 

"I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wan'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 grey and his back stiff, as if he'd just got an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be for me hereafter. 

I like this passage because we finally see some emotion from the boy, instead of his judgments about the girls, the grocery store and the other people inside it. This was the first time he realized the consequences of quitting, and he quit for a stupid reason. he wanted the girls to think he was on their side, but they didn't even give him a second look and they were already gone by the time he walked out. The boy also saw how his actions were affecting the other people in the grocery store. the manager had to take over his cashier position, and he could see that he was angry by the way he stood.

I think the purpose of this paragraph was to show that rash decisions just to impress other people don't always work the way you want them to. In this case, the boy quit his source of income, just to impress some girls who obviously could't give a damn about him. Another purpose this paragraph serves is to show how even though the boy was constantly calling the other customers "sheep" and "pigs", he had become attached to the girls enough to call them "my girls". What made them "his girls"? Besides the bikinis, what made them so different from any other customers? I'm sure he had helped other girls in the grocery store, and I don't understand why these girls are so different.