Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Essay

First published inEpoch, Fall 1966. Included inPrize Stories: O Henry Honour Winners(1968), andThe Best American Short-range Stories (1967).

• Introduction to "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
• Why is "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Dedicated to Bob Dylan?
• "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and Graceful Talk: Short Story into Plastic film
• Criticism on "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
• Golden Anniversary: Where Are You Going, Where Take in You Been?

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Where Are You Passing, Where Have You Been?

By Joyce Carol Oates

for Bob Dylan

Her identify was Connie. She was xv and she had a quick, skittish giggling use of craning her neck to glance into mirrors operating theater checking other people's faces to make a point her have was all the right way. Her mother, who detected everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reasonableness any longer to look for at her personal face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. World Health Organization are you? You recall you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would kindle her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and looking 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 beget had been beautiful at one time too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, merely at present her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

"Why don't you keep up your way clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed—what the hell on earth stinks? Hair spray? You father't see your sister using that junk."

Her sis June was xx-four and tranquil lived at dwelling. She was a secretarial assistant in the high school day Connie attended, and if that wasn't bad plenty—with her in the same building—she was so plain and unshapely and steady that Connie had to get word her praised all the clip by her get and her mother's sisters. June did this, June did that, she redeemed money and helped clean the menage and cookedand Connie couldn't do a affair, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was gone at work most of the time and when atomic number 2 came home helium wanted supper and he read the newspaper publisher at supper and after supper he went to bang. He didn't disoblige talking a great deal to them, but around his bent head Connie's bring fort kept picking at her until Connie wished her get was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me need 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 non.

At that place was one saintly thing: June went places with girl friends of hers, girls who were even as plain and steady as she, and so when Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections. The Father of the Church of Connie's best young lady friend drove the girls the tercet miles to township and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through and through the stores or go to a movie, and when atomic number 2 came to pick them dormie again at eleven atomic number 2 ne'er daunted to expect what they had done.

They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flavorless ballerina slippers that always scuffed the pavement, with charm bracelets jingling connected their thin wrists; they would lean together to susurration and joke secretly if someone passed WHO amused operating room interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that Drew anyone's middle to it, and she wore part of it pulled up connected her guide and turgid out and the residue of it she let fall her in reply. She wore a pull-concluded jersey blouse that looked unity elbow room when she was at home and some other 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 reckon 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 misanthropic and drawling at home—"Ha, ha, really funny,"—but highpitched and unquiet anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms along her bracelet.

Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast crossways the busy road, to a drive out-in eating place where older kids hung tabu. The restaurant was shaped like a big nursing bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning son holding a ground beef aloft. One Nox in midsummer they ran across, breathless with avant-garde, and opportune away soul leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was fair-and-square a son from senior high school they didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to discount him. They went up through the snarl of parked and cruising cars to the blinding-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a heavenly building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the forestall and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the euphony that ready-made everything so good: the music was ever in the background, like music at a church service; IT was something to devolve on.

A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards along his stool, turning himself jerkily roughly in semicircles and then stopping and turn back again, and after a while atomic number 2 asked Connie if she would the like something to eat. She aforesaid she would so she broached her friend's arm on her issue—her friend pulled her face up into a brave, humourous look—and Connie said she would meet her at eleven, across the right smart. "I just hate to leave her equivalent that," Connie said earnestly, simply the boy said that she wouldn't be alone for long. So they went bent on his car, and on the way Connie couldn't help only let her eyes wander over the windshields and faces all just about 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 upwards and sucked in her breather with the perfect pleasance of being alert, and just at that moment she happened to glance at a face sensible a some feet from hers. Information technology was a male child with shaggy soiled hair, in a transmutable jalopy made-up golden. He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and off away, but she couldn't help glancing back and there he was, stock-still watching her. He wagged a fingerbreadth and laughed and said, "Gonna get you, baby," and Connie turned away again without Eddie noticing anything.

She tired three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sudation, and then down an skittle alley a mile or so away, and when he far left her off at five to eleven only the moving picture sign of the zodiac was stillness harsh at the place. Her miss friend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the cardinal girls smiled at each past and Connie aforesaid, "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 bare car park and its signs that were faded and ghostly now, and over at the labor-in eating house where cars were hush up circling tirelessly. She couldn't hear the music at this distance.

Next morning June asked her how the motion picture was and Connie aforementioned, "Ordinary."

She and that young lady and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent more or less the planetary hous—IT was summertime vacation—acquiring in her beget s mode and thinking, dreaming most the boys she met. Merely all the boys fell bet on and dissolved into a lone fount that was not regular a face just an estimation, a feeling, sundry up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July. Connie's mother kept dragging her noncurrent to the daylight by finding things for her to do or saying abruptly, 'What's this about the Pettinger girl?"

And Connie would say nervously, "Oh, her. That dope." She always Drew blockheaded clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kind plenty to think it. Her bring fort was so simple, Connie thought, that it was mayhap cruel to fool her much. Her fuss 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 constitute was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really average she unlikable Connie, and in reality Connie thought that her engender preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them preserved a pretext of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling ended something of little value to either of them. Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends, simply something would come up—some vexation that was same a fly abuzz suddenly close to their heads—and their faces went hard with disdain.

One Sunday Connie got up at eleven—none of them bothered with church service—and washed her hair so that it could dry wholly day retentive in the sunlight. Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt's home and Connie said no, she wasn't interested, pealing her eyes to let her mother know just what she intellection of it. "Stay home alone and then," her mother same sharply. Connie sat out back in a lawn electric chair and watched them drive away, her father quiet and bald, hunched or so thus that he could back the car out, her mother with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through with the windshield, and in the back seat poor old June, all dolled up up A if she didn't know what a barbecue was, with all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes sealed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of make love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night earlier and how nice helium had been, how sweet it forever was, not the right smart person like June would suppose but sugariness, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she yawning her eyes she just knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like job of trees and behindhand it the flip was perfectly blue and still. The asbestos ranch domiciliate that was now three days old startled her—it looked smaller. She shook her head as if to get unsleeping.

It was too hot. She went inside the theater and turned happening 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 tending herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed pleasure that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly around the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with to each one gentle move up and fall of her chest.

After a spell she heard a car coming risen the push. She sat up at once, startled, because IT couldn't be her father so soon. The cacophonous kept crunching every 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 heap, painted a bright gold that caught the sun opaquely. Her heart began to pound off and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking information technology, and she whispered, "Christ. Christ," questioning how bad she looked. The car came to a occlusion at the side entrance and the horn sounded four short taps, American Samoa 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 John L. H. Down dispatch the step. There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black whiske that looked crazy every bit a wigging and he was grinning at her.

"I personal't previous, am I?" he said.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Connie said.

"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, promising monotone. Connie looked past him to the other boy, taking her time. He had reasonable brown hair's-breadth, with a shut up that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce, embarrassed look, but so far he hadn't even bothered to carom at her. Both boys wore sunglasses. The driver's spectacles were metallic and reflected everything in miniature.

"You wanta total for a ride?" he said.

Connie smirked and net ball her tomentum fall unloose over one shoulder.

"Don'tcha like my machine? New paint business," 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 justified know who you are," Connie aforesaid in revolt.

"Hey, Ellie's got a radio, understand. Mine broke down." He lifted his friend's arm and showed her the fiddling transistor radio the boy was keeping, and now Connie began to hear the medicine. It was the assonant computer program that was acting inside the house.

"Bobby King?" she said.

"I listen to him all the time. I think he's slap-up."

"He's rather great," Connie said reluctantly.

"Listen, that cat'snot bad. He knows where the action mechanism is."

Connie blushed a piddling, because the eyeglasses ready-made IT impossible for her to control just what this boy was looking at. She couldn't decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and then she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn't boil down or go rearmost inside. She same, "What's all that overeat artificial on your car?"

"Prat'tcha read it?" He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall away. He slid out just American Samoa carefully, planting his feet securely on the ground, the midget metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatin curing, and in the midst of it Connie's bright green blouse. "This Hera is my key out, to begin with, He said. ARNOLD Quaker was written in tarlike black letters unofficially, with a draftsmanship of a round, grinning face that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore dark glasses. "I wanta infix myself, I'm Arnold Supporter and that's my realistic name and I'm gonna be your friend, dearest, and inside the car's Ellie Oscar, he's kind of shy." Ellie brought his junction transistor radio up to his berm and balanced it at that place. "Right away, these numbers are a cypher, beloved," Matthew Arnold Friend explained. Helium read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and upraised his eyebrows at her to encounter what she thought of that, only she didn't think much of it. The leftover rear wing had been pie-eyed and roughly it was written, on the gleaming gilded backclot: Through Past CRAZY WOMAN Number one wood. Connie had to laugh at that. Arnold Friend was amused at her laugh and looked up at her. "Around the different side's a mickle 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 recognize."

"Why not?"

"I got things to do."

"Like what?"

"Things."

He laughed as if she had said something funny. Helium slapped his thighs. He was standing in a strange way, proclivity back against the car equally if he were balancing himself. He wasn't tall, only an inch or indeed taller than she would be if she came down to him. Connie likable the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them togged up: difficult 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 trifle soiled and showed the hard small muscles of his arms and shoulders. He looked A if he in all probability did hard work, lifting and carrying things. Even his neck looked muscular. And his face was a familiar grimace, in some manner: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn't well-shaven for a day or deuce, and the nose long and animal, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble upfield and it was whol a joke.

"Connie, you own't telling the truth. This is your daytime set aside for a ride with me and you know it," he said, still laughing. The manner he straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been completely counterfeit.

"How do you know what my name is?" she said suspiciously.

"It's Connie."

"Perchance and perchance not."

"I know my Connie," he said, wagging his finger. In real time she remembered him eventide better, plump for at the restaurant, and her cheeks warmed at the view of how she had sucked in her breath righteous at the moment she passed him—how she must have looked to him. And he had remembered her. "Ellie and I show up Here specially for you," he said. "Ellie can model in back. How about it?"

"Where?"

"Where what?"

"Where're we going?"

He looked at her. He took off the sunglasses and she byword how picket the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in lighter-than-air. His eyes were alike chips of broken glass that snatch 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 around you, lots of things," Arnold Friend aforesaid. He had non moved yet but stood motionless leaning back against the side of his jalopy. "I took a special concern in you, such a bad girl, and found out all about you—like I get laid your parents and sister are at rest somewheres and I know where and how yearn they're going to be at rest, and I have it off who you were with last night, and your best young woman friend's name is Betty. Right?"

He spoke in a simple swingy voice, incisively atomic number 3 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 face around at them.

"Ellie can sit in the back seat," Arnold Friend aforesaid. Helium indicated his ally with a chance jerk of his chin, as if Ellie did not reckon 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," atomic number 2 said in a chant. "Raymond Stanley and Bob Hutter—"

"Do you know all those kids?"

"I know everybody."

"Look, you'Ra kidding. You're non from around here."

"Careful."

"But—how issue forth we never power saw you before?"

"Certain you proverb me before," atomic number 2 said. He looked down at his boots, as if he were a bit offended. "You just don't call back."

"I venture I'd remember you," Connie aforementioned.

"Yeah?" He looked up at this, beaming. Atomic number 2 was pleased. Helium began to tick time with the medicine from Ellie's radio, tapping his fists lightly together. Connie looked away from his grinning to the car, which was painted so bright it about hurt her eyes to deal it. She looked at that public figure, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front wing was an expression that was known—MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the class before but didn't wont this year. She looked at it awhile 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 some in the car, are you?"

"No."

"Think I maybe can't drive good enough?"

"How do I know?"

"You're a hard young lady to handle. How seed?" he said. "Don't you know I'm your friend? Didn't you insure me put my sign in the air when you walked away?"

"What sign?"

"My sign." And he drew an X in the air, inclined out toward her. They were perhaps ten feet asunder. Later his handwriting vanish back to his side the X was allay in the gentle wind, almost visible. Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it, hearing to the euphony from her radiocommunication and the boy's blend together. She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood in that respect and so stiffly relaxed, feigning to be relaxed, with one hand idly along the door handle as if he were guardianship himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again. She accepted most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buns and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even out that slippery comradely smiling of his, that sleepy languid smile that all the boys exploited to incur across ideas they didn't want to put out into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly teasing, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy, and she recognized the way atomic number 2 broached one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual euphony behind him. But all these things did not come put together.

She same of a sudden, "Hey, how grey-headed are you?"

His smiled attenuate. She could come across then that he wasn't a jolly, he was much older—thirty, maybe more. At this knowledge her heart began to pound faster.

"That's a crazy matter to ask. Can'tcha witness I'm your own age?"

"Like hell you are."

"Or mayhap a couple years older. I'm eighteen."

"Eighteen?" she same doubtfully.

He grinned to reassure her and lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were too large and white. He grinned so broadly his eyes became slits and she byword how thick the lashes were, thickened and negro as if painted with a black tarlike embodied. Then, abruptly, he seemed to get over chagrined and looked over his shoulder at Ellie. "Him, he's enthusiastic," he said. "Personal't he a riot? He's a nut, a material character." Ellie was tranquillize listening to the music. His dark glasses told nothing virtually what he was thinking. He wore a bright orange tree shirt unrestrained halfway to show his chest, which was a pale, bluish pectus and not hefty like Arnold Friend's. His shirt arrest was turned up altogether around and the real tips of the collar pointed out past his chin arsenic if they were protecting him. He was pressing the transistor radio up against his capitulum and Sat at that place in a kind of stupor, rightfield in the sun.

"Helium's sort of strange," Connie said.

"Hey, she says you're kinda strange! Rather strange!" Arnold Friend cried. He pounded on the railroad car to get Ellie's attention. Ellie turned for the first time and Connie sawing machine with shock that he wasn't a kid either—he had a sporty, naked-tailed face, cheeks colorful slightly atomic number 3 if the veins grew likewise careful to the surface of his pare, the face of a 40-twelvemonth-old sister. Connie felt a moving ridge of dizziness advance in her at this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the here and now, make it all right once again. Ellie's lips kept shaping dustup, gumming along with the speech blasting in his ear.

"Maybe you two better go out," Connie said faintly.

"What? How come?" Arnold Friend cried. "We come knocked out here to take you for a ride. It's Sunday." He had the voice of the man on the radio set 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'rhenium with Arnold Champion and don't you blank out it! Mayhap you ameliorate step KO'd here," he said, and this unlikely was in a different part. It was a little flatter, Eastern Samoa if the hotness was finally acquiring to him.

"No. I got things to do."

"Hey."

"You two better leave."

"We own't leaving until you come with us."

"Like hell I am—"

"Connie, don't fool or so with me. I mean—I mean, don't foolaround," he said, shaking his head. He laughed unbelievingly. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, arsenic if he were indeed wearing a wigging, and brought the stems down behind his ears. Connie stared at him, another roll of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a here and now he wasn't even out in focus but was just a smudge standing there against his gold automobile, and she had the idea that he had driven ahead the driveway all right merely had come with out of nothing earlier that and belonged nowhere and that everything virtually him and even well-nig the music that was so usual to her was only half real.

"If my father comes and sees you—"

"He personal't orgasm. He's at a barbecue."

"How do you do it that?"

"Aunty Tillie's. Right now they'rhenium uh—they'ray drinking. Session around," he said vaguely, squinting as if he were staring clear to town and over to Aunt Tillie's back yard. Then the vision seemed to buzz off clear and he nodded energetically. "Yeah. Sitting around. Thither's your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the underprivileged sad bitch—nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother's helping some fat woman with the corn, they're cleanup the corn whiskey—baring the corn—"

"What oleaginous woman?" Connie cried.

"How do I know what fat woman, I don't know all goddamn fat woman in the human race!" Arnold Friend laughed.

"Oh, that's Mrs. Hornsby . . . . WHO invited her?" Connie aforementioned. She felt a brief lightheaded. Her hint was coming quickly.

"She's too greasy. I Don River't like them double-chinned. I like them the way you are, honey," He aforementioned, smiling sleepily at her. They stared at each other for a while through the CRT screen door. He aforementioned softly, "Immediately, what you're going to do is this: you're going to hail out that door. You re going to sit down up front with me and Ellie's exit to sit in the second, the hell with Ellie, right? This isn't Ellie's date. You'ray my date. I'm your lover, honey."

"What? You're soft on—"

"Yes, I'm your devotee. You wear't know what that is but you will," he said. "I know that too. I have sex all about you. But facial expression: IT's existent nice and you couldn't require for nobody better than me, or more polite. I always keep on my word. I'll order you how information technology is, I'm always nice ab initio, the starting time time. I'll hold you indeed tight you won't guess you have to try to get out or pretend anything because you'll know you keister't. And I'll come up inside you where it's all secret and you'll give in to Maine and you'll lovemaking me "

"Shut upwards! You're loony!" Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put away her hands up against her ears as if she'd detected something terrible, something non meant for her. "People assume't talk like that, you'atomic number 75 infatuated," she muttered. Her heart was almost too colossal right away for her chest and its pumping made sweat break off out all over her. She looked out to see Arnold Friend interruption and and so take a step toward the porch, lurching. He nearly fell. But, like a clever bibulous man, he managed to catch his residual. He wobbled in his high boots and grabbed oblige of one of the porch posts.

"Dear?" he aforesaid. "You still listening?"

"Get the hell out of here!"

"Be discriminate, honey. Take heed."

"I'm going to call the police—"

He wobbled again and out of the side of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an by not meant for her to hear. But regular this "Christ!" sounded involuntary. So he began to grin again. She watched this smile seed, awkward as if He were smiling from inside a mask. His full-page face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned blue to his pharynx but then running out as if he had plastered make-up on his font just had forgotten about his throat.

"Dearest—? Take heed, here's how information technology is. I always tell the truth and I promise you this: I ain't coming in that firm after you."

"You better not! I'm going to promise the police if you—if you don't—"

"Honey," he aforementioned, talk right through with her voice, "dearest, I m non coming in there but you are coming out here. You know why?"

She was panting. The kitchen looked comparable a place she had never seen before, several room she had run interior but that wasn't upright enough, wasn't going away to help her. The kitchen window had never had a curtain, after 3 years, and there were dishes in the sink for her to do—belik—and if you ran your pass across the table you'd probably feel something sticky there.

"You listening, honey? Hey?" "—going to call the police—"

"Shortly as you touch the headphone I don't need to keep my promise and can descend inside. You North Korean won't lack that."

She rushed forward and dependable to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why lock IT," Arnold Protagonist said mildly, talking redress into her chee. "It's just a screen door. Information technology's meet nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed bent on the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody sack crack a concealment door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if atomic number 2 necessarily to, anybody at all, and particularly Arnold Friend. If the place got light up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' come out of the closet into my blazonry, right into my munition an' safe at home—like you knew I was your buff and'd stopped light about. I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't ilk nobelium casual just about." 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 hurry into her boy friend's weapons system and approach home again—

Connie stood unshoed on the linoleum floor, staring at him. "What do you want?" she whispered.

"I want you," atomic number 2 said.

"What?"

"Seen you that night and thought, that's the cardinal, yes sir. I never necessary to look anymore."

"Only my father's coming rachis. Helium's coming to get me. I had to wash my hair first—" She spoke in a air-dried, rapid sound, scarcely breeding IT for him to hear.

"No, your daddy is not coming and yes, you had to wash your hair's-breadth and you washed it for ME. IT's dainty and shining and all for me. I give thanks you sweetheart," he said with a mock bow, merely again helium nearly mixed-up his balance. He had to bend and adjust his boots. Evidently his feet did not go all the way kill; the boots must have been full with something then 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 wing, into goose egg. This Ellie said, pull the words taboo of the air unmatched afterward another as if he were just discovering them, "You want me to twist down the phone?"

"Shut your mouth and keep it compressed," Arnold Admirer 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 aforementioned. "If I call the police they'll get you, they'll collar you—"

"Forebode was not to come in unless you advert that call up, and I'll continue that anticipat," he said. He resumed his erect put over and tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded like a hero in a movie, declaring something key. But he spoke too loudly and it was as if atomic number 2 were speaking to someone behind Connie. "I ain't ready-made plans for advent in that house where I father't belong but just for you to come exterior to me, the way you should. Don't you know who I am?"

"You'atomic number 75 infatuated," she whispered. She backed away from the door merely did not want to come in another split of the house, as if this would give back him permission to come through the door. "What do you . . . you'ray crazy, you. . . ."

"Huh? What're you saying, honey?"

Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could non remember what IT was, this way.

"This is how it is, honey: you come out and we'll drive away, have a nice ride. Simply if you don't come out of the closet we're gonna wait boulder clay your people come home and then they're all leaving to stick it."

"You deficiency that telephone pulled out?" Ellie same. He held the radio away from his ear and grimaced, as if without the radio the air was overmuch for him.

"I toldja shut up, Ellie," Arnold Quaker same, "you're deaf, get a earshot assistance, straight? Fix yourself up. This little girl's no trouble and's gonna be nice to me, so Ellie hold on to yourself, this own't your date right? Don't hem in on me, don't hog, don't crush, don't bird dog, don't trail Maine," he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if He were running through all the expressions he'd learned just was nary longer sure which of them was a la mode, then hurry on to new ones, qualification them up with his eyes closed. "Don't crawl under my surround, father't squeeze in my chipmonk muddle, don't sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep your own greasy fingers on yourself!" He mirky his eyes and peered in at Connie, who was backed against the kitchen table. "Don't listen him, honey, he's fair a grow over. He's a dope. Right? I'm the son for you, and the likes of I said, you come out here nice similar a lady and give ME your hand, and nonentity else gets hurt, I average, your Nice old bald-headed dada and your mamma and your sister in her ill-smelling heels. Because listen: why contribute them therein?"

"Allow me lonely," Connie whispered.

"Hey, you know that old woman down the route, the one with the chickens and satiate—you know her?"

"She's dead!"

"Dead? What? You know her?" Arnold Friend said.

"She's stagnant—"

"Don't you look-alike her?"

"She's dead—she's—she isn't here any many—"

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 stirred the sunglasses perched upward on top of his head as if to make a point they were still there. "Now, you be a good girl."

'What are you going to do?"

"Just 2 things, surgery maybe three," Arnold Friend said. "But I assure it won't final long and you'll equivalent me the way you get to like people you're close to. You will. It's all over for you Here, so derive on exterior. You don't want your people in any fuss, do you?"

She soured and bumped against a president operating theatre 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 nil only mind to it—the telephone was dank and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial just were overly feeble to touch IT. She began to scream into the speech sound, into the prosperous. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath kickoff jerking hind and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Protagonist was stabbing her with again and again with no rawness. A uproarious sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house.

After a spell she could hear again. She was sitting on the take aback with her wet back against the wall.

Arnold Friend was saying from the door, "That's a adept miss. Put the telephone set back."

She kicked the phone away from her.

"No, honey. Pick it up. Commit IT back accurate."

She picked it up and put together it back. The telephone dial tone stopped up.

"That's a good girl. At present, you come outside."

She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. Entirely that screaming had goddam it out of her. She sat, one leg incommodious under her, and deep inside her brain was something like a pinpoint of light that unbroken going and would not let her relax. She thought, I'm non going to see my mother again. She thought, I'm not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright unripened blouse was all wet.

Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud spokesperson that was like a stage voice, "The place where you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to fail is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy's house—is nothing merely a artificial box I can knocking down some time. You know that and always did bed information technology. You hear me?"

She idea, I consume got to think. I accept got to lie with what to serve.

"We'll leave to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it's sunny," Arnold Champion said. "I'll have my arms tight close to you so you North Korean won't motive to try to get by and I'll show you what love is like, what it does. The netherworld with this business firm! It looks solid very well," he said. He ran a fingernail down the silver screen and the resound did not realise Connie shiver, as it would birth the day before. "Now, put away your hand on your heart, honey. Feel that? That feels substantial too but we know better. Be nice to ME, be sweet like you can because what other is there for a lady friend equivalent you but to be sweet and pretty and succumb?—and get away before her people come back?"

She felt her hammering ticker. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first meter in her life history that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, animate thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.

"You assume't require them to get hurt," Arnold Friend went on. "Now, get up, honey. Cram all past yourself."

She stood.

"Now, turn this way. That's right. Make out up here to me.—Ellie, put that gone, didn't I tell you? You dope. You miserable creepy-crawly dope," Arnold Friend said. His words were not angry but exclusively part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly. "Now turn up through the kitchen to me, honey, and let's see a smile, try it, you'atomic number 75 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 matter about you and never did and honey, you're better than them because non a one of them would have done this for you."

Connie felt the linoleum nether her feet; it was cool. She touched her hair's-breadth withdra of her eyes. Arnold Friend net ball go of the C. W. Post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists lax, to evidenc that this was an embarrassed cover and a trifle mocking, he didn't want to brand her self-conscious.

She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back innocuous somewhere in the strange doorway, observation this physical structure and this head of eternal hair touring out into the sunlight where Arnold Ally waited.

"My sweet little eyed girl," he said in a half-Sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was interpreted up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on completely sides of him—much land that Connie had never seen ahead and did not recognize except to roll in the hay that she was expiration to it.

*

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Ikon: Beata Beatrix, by Dante Gabriel Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
"Rossetti intended to interpret her, not at the moment of death, but changed by a 'sudden spiritual transfiguration'"—Frances Fowle

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Randy Souther

I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates network web site, Celestial Timepiece.

Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Essay

Source: https://celestialtimepiece.com/2015/01/21/where-are-you-going-where-have-you-been/

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