In A&P by John Updike, he expresses that doing a heroic act doesn’t always get recognized. These three young teenage girls are only wearing their bathing when they walk into the grocery store where Sammy, a young boy working the checkout line watches these girls. He watches how they carry themselves. He also questions the reason they entered the store dressed the way they were. Sammy attention is to the most attractive girl in the group, who also seems to be the leader. This girl, Sammy calls “Queenie,” has confidence and beauty. The girls create attention in the store because of how there dressed. The store is in the center of town, nowhere near the beach which is why the way the girls are dressed gets the attention of other shoppers in the store. Because Sammy has worked so long at the A&P he gets bored and to entertain himself he has created a song that goes with the sounds of the cash register, he also expresses that he knows the story very well because he can recalls all of the items that are in the aisle that the three girls has entered. “All three of them went up the …show more content…
Yet another one of Sammy’s coworkers begins to admire and comment the girls,this angers Sammy but it soon disappears when the girls choose Sammy’s checkout line to make their purchase. As the girls were about to make their purchase when Lengel, the store manager approaches the checkout lane. Lengel criticize the girls for entering the store in bathing suits, and expressing that it’s against store policy but Queenie explains that she came to the store just to get some herring snacks for her mothers. This lets Sammy get a hint into Queenie’s life. He compares her parents to his, and how her parents would be “drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them.” While his own parents drink lemonade or cheap