A & P by John Updike

I did not particularly like this story because I found it creepy and odd. It's about a nineteen year old boy named Sammy working in a grocery store. This story takes place around the 1950s and three girls walk into the store wearing bikinis. Back then that was unheard of and completely immodest. All the customers and employees in the store stare at the girls. When the manager, Lengel, who is a Sunday school teacher sees the girls he is baffled. He doesn't want to let them shop there because of the way they are dressed. Sammy refers to them as his girls and he quits because Lengel embarrassed them. Lengel replies that it is the other way around and they embarrassed him by dressing immodestly. Sammy refers to the three girls as "my girls" and believed they would view him as their hero. I found that very odd because they may not have even been aware that he quit his job for them. Another thing I found odd was that Sammy constantly referred to people as sheep. My favorite passage in the whole story is, "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. " I like this passage because it is the truth about why Sammy quit his job. Its purpose is as an explanation as to why Sammy didn't take his job back when Lengel offered it. He felt he owed that to the pretty girls he just met. Yet, when he steps outside the girls do not run up to him and hug him for being their hero. They are gone and he'll never see them again.