A&P by John Updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door,
so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid
green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two
crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood
there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and
the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on
her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash
registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in passing, if
she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way
the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the
counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was
this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her
belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby
berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't
quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you
know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very
well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the
queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look
around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came
down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and
then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little
deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in
there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into
coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and,
what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her
arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this
shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than
those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her
head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented
sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind
of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have.
She held her head so high her neck, coming up out o fthose white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I
didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but
she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it
made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her
for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri ce-raisins-
seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- rackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this
aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the
cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the
girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty
hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or
hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite
in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and
muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever
it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked
around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.

You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody
can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights,
against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-
cream rubber-tile floor.

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but
as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's going to be
manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company
or something.

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but
we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they
get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins
mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and
if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store
and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the
sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town
haven't seen the ocean for twenty years.

The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and
they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old
McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for
them, they couldn't help it.

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself. The
store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register
and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which
tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records
at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on,
sixpacks of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them anyway.
Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through
Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck
draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these
bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the
jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands
are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from.
Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The
jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.

Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot
and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his
eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over
and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was
so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way
voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked
over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the
other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up
herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and
sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair
Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.

"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it hadjust
occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head
lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls
that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.

Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really
sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing."

"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed
she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come in here."

"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her
place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks
flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He
turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile
delinquency.

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they
had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss
a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have
you rung up this purchase?"

I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's
more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a lttle song, that you
hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer
flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two
smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink
palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.

The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to
hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric
eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-
Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.

"Did you say something, Sammy?"

"I said I quit."

"I thought you did."

"You didn't have to embarrass them."

"It was they who were embarrassing us."

I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and I know she
would have been pleased.

"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.

"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my
shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like
scared pigs in a chute.

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years.
"Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't. But it seems to me
that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on
the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever
wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering
how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine
whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow
this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the
electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and
outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn'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 gray
and his back stiff, as if he'djust had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the
world was going to be to me hereafter.
Introduction to John Updike’s A&P (Before Reading)
Are you a fashion trendsetter? Or do you prefer PJs and slippers? Do you dress to blend in or stick out? Do you
go to school or work in a place with a dress code? Do you show skin?
All these questions are inspired by John Updike's "A&P," a very short story about three girls wearing their
bathing suits into a grocery store in the early 1960s (back when people were way stuffier). How do people react
to these girls? Well, you'll just have to read the story to find out. But while you read the story, think about this:
Should people be able to wear whatever they want, wherever they want? Is it better to conform to social norms
in public, or proudly stand out?

A&P, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, is a real grocery store (and liquor) chain, founded in
New York City in 1859. But why write a story about it?
Updike says that one day in 1961 he was, as usual, on the lookout for story ideas when he happened to
drive past an A&P. He wondered why nobody had ever set a story in one. He combined this question with a
personal experience he once had at a grocery store: yes, he ran into a bathing-suit-clad beauty. He was stunned
by how different this was from seeing someone in a bathing suit at the beach. Updike says this "public
nakedness" in a "commercial setting" was the beginning of his story.
Updike is known for this kind of thing – taking ordinary aspects of American life and showing us how
they are actually extraordinary. He calls this technique "giving the mundane its beautiful due." Updike
transforms this seemingly ordinary locale, which most of us can relate to, into an intense battleground where the
struggle for power and freedom plays out in the aisles. By calling the story "A&P," Updike emphasizes that this
particular setting (the grocery store) holds an important place in American life – one that's worth observing and
writing about.
Like so many short stories, both European and American, “A & P” is primarily a story of initiation, as a
young boy moves from innocence (and ignorance) to experience (and knowledge). Sammy has gained some
knowledge (through what Joyce called an “epiphany” or revelation) both of himself and of adulthood, but he
has also discovered “how hard the world was going to be” to those who cling to their idealistic notions about
life. Lacking as yet the maturity to accept compromise or to live with the world’s injustices, this noble and still
uncorrupted youth has acted rashly and lost everything, except perhaps himself. The reader implicitly feels that
Sammy’s initiation into the adult world will continue long after this short story is over.

Themes (look for proof of these themes while we read): Coming of Age, Loss of Innocence, Appearance,
Power, Principles, Society/Class

Reflection and Discussion Questions (After Reading)

How does Updike's description of the A&P compare with your local supermarket chain? Could this story have
taken place there? What would you have to wear in your store for somebody to actually make a comment?

Considering the context, how might this incident have been responded to differently today? Imagine that,
instead of Sammy, it is you in slot number three of the A&P in this small town when the three girls walk in
wearing nothing but bathing suits. What do you think? How do you react?

This small event, it took less than half an hour, changed Sammy’s life, how?

What predictions can you make for Sammy's future?

 Reminder: this was a time when a cashier in a supermarket was a decent job, you could raise a family on
the salary and it could even be a career with promotions and respect. Quitting this job was a big deal,
also, because it’s a small town, everyone knows everyone (Lengle knows his parents) and he might get a
reputation as unreliable and find it hard to get another job.
 The A&P – John Updike

Characterization: make notes about each character as their personality,

characteristics, and appearance is revealed

Sammy Lengle

Stokesie Queenie

Highlight some imagery, similes, and metaphor in the writing.

Done? Yes No

Write: What grabbed you from this story? What is the purpose?