Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? quiz
By Joyce Carol Oates
A restless teenager, home alone on a summer Sunday, faces a smiling stranger in a gold car who knows far too much about her
22 questions · about 23 minutes
Questions and answers
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Question 1. Which genre best describes “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
- Fantasy
- Correct answer: Realistic Fiction
- Historical Fiction
- Science Fiction
- Mystery
Realistic Fiction is right. The people and places are invented, but every one of them could exist: a teenager, her family, a drive-in, a stranger in a car. Oates called the story a ‘realistic allegory’: a realistic surface that many readers also take as a symbolic tale.
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Question 2. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home.” What does this tell readers about Connie?
- Correct answer: She acts one way with her family and another way when out
- She is kind to June in public but cruel to her at home
- She spends half the summer at home and half at her aunt's
- She wants to stay in school but her mother wants her to work
Connie changes when she leaves the house. Her laugh is “cynical and drawling at home” but “high-pitched and nervous anywhere else,” and her blouse looked one way at home and another away from it. She is trying out a grown-up self she has not yet become, and that is the self Arnold Friend speaks to.
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Question 3. What does "Languid" mean in this story?
- Quick, jumpy, and nervous
- Stiff, proud, and formal
- Correct answer: Slow, relaxed, and dreamy
- Loud, rough, and clumsy
Languid means slow and relaxed, without hurry or energy. Out with her friends, Connie's walk could be “languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head.” On Sunday the joy that rises from the radio music lies “languidly about the airless little room.”
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Question 4. Why does Connie resent her older sister, June?
- June tells their parents about the boys Connie meets
- June has moved out and left Connie with all the chores
- June borrows Connie's clothes without ever asking first
- Correct answer: Their mother keeps praising June and criticizing Connie
June is plain and steady, saves money, and helps clean and cook, and Connie “had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother’s sisters.” Her mother scolds, “Why don’t you keep your room clean like your sister?” The resentment matters at the end, when Connie acts to protect the family she has been fighting with.
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Question 5. At the drive-in, the music is “always in the background, like music at a church service.” What does this comparison suggest?
- The restaurant plays hymns to keep the teenagers calm
- Connie feels guilty about skipping church to go out
- Correct answer: Popular music is something close to a faith for Connie
- The music is so quiet that nobody can really hear it
The simile makes the drive-in a kind of church. The girls go in “as if they were entering a sacred building,” and the music is “something to depend upon.” Connie trusts songs to tell her what love will be like, and Arnold Friend will speak to her in exactly that language.
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Question 6. Which disc jockey do both Connie and Arnold Friend listen to?
- Tommy Lane
- Billy Rogers
- Ricky Dale
- Correct answer: Bobby King
Bobby King hosts XYZ Sunday Jamboree, the program Connie is listening to in her room when the car arrives. Ellie's transistor radio is playing the same program. Arnold says of him, “I listen to him all the time. I think he’s great.”
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Question 7. What does "Jalopy" mean in this story?
- A sleek, brand-new car
- Correct answer: An old, battered car
- A large delivery truck
- A long, fancy limousine
A jalopy is an old car in poor condition. Arnold's is “an open jalopy, painted a bright gold,” with a smashed left rear fender. A shiny new paint job on a battered old car: like its driver, it is dressed up to look like something it is not.
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Question 8. How does Arnold Friend first unsettle Connie at the screen door?
- Correct answer: He knows her name, her best friend, and where her family is
- He shows her a photograph he took of her at the plaza
- He says her father sent him to drive her to the barbecue
- He claims he just moved into the house down the road
“I know your name and all about you, lots of things,” he tells her. He knows her parents and sister are gone and for how long, who she was with last night, and that her best friend is Betty. He even chants a list of kids from town. Connie never learns how he knows.
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Question 9. What does Arnold Friend draw in the air and call his sign?
- A heart
- A star
- Correct answer: An X
- A circle
“Didn’t you see me put my sign in the air when you walked by?” he asks, and draws an X. After his hand drops, “the X was still in the air, almost visible,” as though he has marked her.
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Question 10. When Connie asks Arnold Friend how old he is, what does she realize?
- Correct answer: He is no kid at all, but a man of thirty or more
- He is exactly her own age, just as he claims
- He is younger than she is and trying to act tough
- He is a very old man disguised in a wig
“His smile faded. She could see then that he wasn’t a kid, he was much older—thirty, maybe more.” He insists, “Can’tcha see I’m your own age?” and then says he is eighteen. Soon after, Connie sees that Ellie is not a kid either.
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Question 11. “He had the voice of the man on the radio now.” Why does it matter that Arnold sounds like the disc jockey?
- He is secretly the disc jockey, out on his day off
- He is mocking Connie for liking such silly music
- He wants Connie to phone the station and request a song
- Correct answer: He speaks the pop-song language Connie trusts most
Connie's dreams of love are “the way it was in movies and promised in songs.” Arnold talks in that language: he speaks “as if he were reciting the words to a song,” and one of his speeches is “the echo of a song from last year.” He builds himself out of the music she depends on, which is why she half recognizes him.
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Question 12. Which clues suggest that Arnold Friend is wearing a kind of disguise?
- He wears a false beard and talks with a foreign accent
- Correct answer: His boots seem stuffed, and his face looks like a mask
- He keeps a hat over his eyes and never takes it off
- He uses Ellie's name and drives Ellie's car as his own
He keeps losing his balance because “the boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller.” “His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly,” tanned down to the throat as if he had “plastered make-up on his face.” His hair looks “crazy as a wig,” and even the slogan on his fender is “an expression kids had used the year before.” He is a grown man dressed up as a teenager.
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Question 13. What happens when Connie runs to the telephone?
- She calls the police, but they don't believe her
- She reaches her mother at Aunt Tillie's house
- Ellie pulls the phone out before she can use it
- Correct answer: She cannot dial, and screams into the roaring line
Arnold has promised not to come in unless she touches the phone. She picks it up, but “her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it.” She screams and cries for her mother. Afterward he tells her to put it back, and she obeys: “She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped.”
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Question 14. Arnold calls the house “nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time.” What does the house stand for?
- The wealth of Connie's family, which Arnold means to steal
- Correct answer: The safety of home and family, which cannot protect her now
- A trap Connie has set to catch Arnold if he tries the door
- The town's old ways, which Arnold plans to tear down
“It’s just a screen door. It’s just nothing,” Arnold says, and the house that should shelter her becomes a place where she is “locked inside.” The kitchen looks “like a place she had never seen before.” The walls of home, and of childhood, only seem solid: “It looks solid all right,” he says, and then says the same of her own heart.
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Question 15. What does "Incantation" mean in this story?
- A sharp, angry order to obey
- A loud and public apology
- Correct answer: Words chanted like a magic spell
- A quiet, honest confession
An incantation is a set of words chanted to cast a spell. As Arnold talks Connie to her feet, “His words were not angry but only part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly.” His steady, soft commands work on her like a spell.
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Question 16. What finally makes Connie walk out to Arnold Friend?
- Correct answer: He threatens to hurt her family if she stays inside
- He swears he will bring her home before dark
- She has fallen in love with him and wants to go
- Ellie has pulled out the phone, so help cannot come
“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.” Later: “You don’t want them to get hurt.” He even tells her she is better than them “because not a one of them would have done this for you.” Oates has called Connie's going out an act of heroism, made to protect her family.
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Question 17. At the end, Connie watches herself push the door open “as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway.” What does this show?
- Her family has come home and is watching from inside
- Correct answer: Fear has made her feel cut off from her own body
- She has slipped out the back while Arnold waits in front
- The narrator has switched over to Arnold's point of view
The story is told in the third person, close to Connie throughout. Just before the end she feels her heart is “a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either.” Then she watches “this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight” as if from somewhere else. Terror has split her from herself.
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Question 18. Many readers see Arnold Friend as the devil, or as Death. How does the story handle that idea?
- It confirms it when Arnold vanishes in a cloud of smoke
- It rules it out by giving Arnold's home and family
- It has Ellie reveal the truth in the story's last line
- Correct answer: It hints at it again and again but never says so
The hints are many: he knows things he could not know, his foot seems not to fill his boot, and Connie feels he “had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere.” Oates's early draft was titled 'Death and the Maiden.' But the text keeps him a man in a gold car and never says what he is. The devil and Death are readings, not facts.
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Question 19. What does the story tell readers about the numbers 33, 19, 17 painted on Arnold's car?
- Correct answer: Only that Arnold calls them a secret code
- That they give Arnold's and Ellie's ages
- That they are the plate of a stolen car
- That they mark the night he first saw her
“Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,” Arnold says, and Connie does not think much of it. The story never decodes them. Readers have proposed a Bible verse (Judges 19:17), ages, and other meanings, but each is an interpretation. The code stays Arnold's secret, like his X in the air.
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Question 20. In a 1986 essay, Oates named two sources for this story. What were they?
- A Detroit newspaper crime story and an Elvis Presley film
- Her own high school diary and a Beatles record she owned
- A Grimm fairy tale and a radio show from her childhood
- Correct answer: A magazine report on a Tucson killer and a Bob Dylan song
Oates wrote that the idea began with a report, very likely in Life, on the Pied Piper of Tucson, a man who charmed teenagers there and murdered girls (the case of Charles Schmid). The other source was Bob Dylan's song 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue,' which is why the story is dedicated to Dylan. She added that in later drafts the killer dropped into the background and the girl became the true protagonist, so the story is not a retelling of the murders.
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Question 21. Which theme does the story best support?
- Teenagers who obey their parents are always kept safe
- Country life is far safer than life in a busy town
- Correct answer: Danger can come dressed in the songs and dreams we trust
- Hard work always earns a family's love and respect
Connie's dreams of love come from “the way it was in movies and promised in songs,” and Arnold Friend arrives speaking that language, with the disc jockey's voice and a song's lilt. The stranger looks like the boys she knows, but “all these things did not come together.” The story's power is that the danger is dressed in what she loves.
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Question 22. Which of these events actually happened in the story?
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Connie's sister June works as a secretary at Connie's high school.
Happened
June is a secretary in the high school Connie attends, which Connie finds bad enough, with her sister in the same building.
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Connie first sees Arnold Friend at the shopping plaza.
Didn't happen
She first sees him at the drive-in restaurant across the highway, on the night she goes off with Eddie. He wags a finger at her and says, “Gonna get you, baby.”
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Connie's family goes to a barbecue at Aunt Tillie's house without her.
Happened
Connie says she isn't interested, and her mother tells her to stay home alone then.
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The words MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS are painted on Arnold's front fender.
Happened
It is an expression kids had used the year before but no longer used: one more sign that Arnold's teenage look is out of date.
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Ellie Oscar gets out of the car to help Arnold Friend.
Didn't happen
Ellie never leaves the car. He sits with his transistor radio pressed to his ear and twice offers to pull out the phone, and Arnold tells him to shut up.
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Arnold Friend breaks through the screen door to get into the house.
Didn't happen
Arnold never comes in. He promises not to enter unless Connie touches the phone, and he waits outside at the porch post until she comes out to him.
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Arnold describes June at the barbecue in a blue dress and high heels.
Happened
Squinting as if he could see all the way to Aunt Tillie's back yard, he describes June and says Connie's mother is husking corn with a fat woman, whom Connie names as Mrs. Hornsby.
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Connie gets through to the police, but they don't believe her.
Didn't happen
She never calls anyone. Her fingers are too weak to dial, and she can only scream into the phone. Then, at Arnold's order, she puts it back.
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Arnold calls Connie his blue-eyed girl, though her eyes are brown.
Happened
His last words are “My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” which have “nothing to do with her brown eyes.” He is talking to a girl from a song, not to Connie.
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The story ends with Connie's family coming home from the barbecue.
Didn't happen
The story ends as Connie walks out to Arnold Friend, toward land she has never seen before. Nothing after that is shown. The 1985 film Smooth Talk goes on to show her back home; the story does not.
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Play it live with your class.
Put the code on the screen and students join on whatever they have.