Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Although reminiscent now, the mood of Joyce Carol Oates’s short story seems appropriate today. The story tells of the adventures of a teenage girl, its title a perfectly timed metaphor as we forge ahead into an uncertain future. Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) dedicated this work to Bob Dylan. It allows the reader a glimpse into the thoughts of a young writer of her time. Below is the fourth and last installment.

For continuity, here is the last paragraph from the previous installment: "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–are you doing? What do you want?" Connie said. "If I call the police they’ll get you, they’ll arrest you"

"I promise 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. 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 give him permission to come through the door. "What do you...You’re crazy, you..."

"Huh? What are 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 til 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 one 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 chipmunk 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 up 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!"

"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 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 the chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran in to 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 were stabbing her 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 into 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."

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 sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet.

Arnold Friend said, in a gentle–loud voice what 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 canceled 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 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 alright," 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, 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 towards 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 safe back 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.