Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a literary short story first published in the 1966 Fall edition of Epoch Magazine by the American author Joyce Carol Oates. Originally titled “Death And The Maiden,” Oates was inspired to write the story when she read an article in LIFE magazine titled “The Pied Piper of Tucson” regarding three murders in Arizona. Despite this startling real-world source of inspiration, the story’s dedication reads: “for Bob Dylan.” Oates later explained that Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, gave her further inspiration for the tale. This guide is based on the 2021 Kindle Edition of High Lonesome, featuring “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Other well-known works by Oates include We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Blonde: A Novel (2000), and The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007).

Connie is a 15-year-old girl who is vain and overly concerned with her looks. When her mother suggests that she should not be so preoccupied with her reflection in the mirror, Connie dismisses her mother as a woman who was once pretty but is now aged and far less attractive. Although Connie seems to hold her older sister June to these high standards, stating that she is “so plain and chunky and steady” (249), she knows that her animosity toward her sister is a performance encouraged by her mother’s fickle affections.

On a summer night, Connie and her friend Betty hurry across a divided highway to a drive-in burger shop where Connie and her friend ignore or meet with boys from school. They sit at the counter a while and enjoy the music until a boy named Eddie comes for Connie. Connie excuses herself from Betty, telling her that she will meet her across the way at 11 p.m. As she navigates the parking lot with Eddie, Connie briefly glimpses Arnold Friend, a man with messy dark hair sitting inside of a gold car who smiles and tells her, “Gonna get you, baby” (251). Connie spends three hours with Eddie, has sex with him in an alley, and meets with Betty again outside of the movie theatre.

As her summer break continues, Connie easily eludes her aloof mother and father’s vague interest in her life. She goes out a few more times, meeting other boys whom she spends time daydreaming about, although in Connie’s mind they “fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music” (252). On a Sunday morning, Connie wakes up late, refusing to go with her family to her aunt’s cookout. Instead, Connie washes her hair and lounges in the sun, allowing it to dry. To Connie, the heat reminds her of the warm caresses of boys she has been with, and when she opens her eyes again, she seems not to realize where she is. Her backyard seems to have grown so that she scarcely recognizes it: “[W]hen she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the backyard ran off into weeds and a fencelike line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still” (253). In her room, Connie listens to the radio, and the heat of the day and the music lulls her to sleep. 

Later, the sound of a car driving up the driveway startles her awake. Connie checks her hair and hurries downstairs to meet the car, stopping behind her screen as she recognizes the man she met at the drive-in, Arnold Friend. Arnold does most of the talking, reminding her that he told her he was to take her for a drive. When Connie reminds him that she does not know him, Arnold introduces himself more formally by indicating the name emblazoned on the side of his car beside a big smiling face that looked like a pumpkin to Connie: “ARNOLD FRIEND was written in tarlike black letters on the side, with a drawing of a round, grinning face” (255). There is another man in the car with him named Ellie, who seems in a daze as he listens to music from his transistor radio—the same music Connie had been listening to on her radio in the house. When Arnold asks for Connie to take a ride with them, she says that she has things to do. Arnold laughs and tells her that he knows her name and “all about you, lots of things” (257). He also tells her he knows that her parents are gone, and he knows the name of her friend and others from her circle. He asks her why she is being so difficult and whether she remembers him making his sign in the air when she passed the night they met. When she asks, “What sign?” he replies, “‘My sign.’ And he drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her...After his hand fell back to his side the X was still in the air, almost visible” (258).

As Arnold continues to try to convince Connie to take a ride with him, she notices peculiarities that make her hesitate. Among them is the alarming fact that Arnold knows her name. His golden car is a curio in itself, painted with numbers that Arnold Friend proudly explains is a “secret code”: “He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn’t think much of it” (255). Also emblazoned on the car is the phrase: “MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS” (258), which Connie considers to be a distinctly outdated term amongst kids her age. Arnold seems to be leaning on the car for balance. This and the makeup he applied but did not blend into the skin of his neck leads Connie to believe that Arnold Friend is much older than she is. When she asks his age, he tells her that he is 18, but Connie thinks he and Ellie are likely in their thirties or older. This sends Connie into a quiet panic.

Connie lies to Arnold, telling him that although she is alone her father is coming back, and he had only left her so that she could wash her hair. Arnold tells her that her family is at a cookout, eating hot dogs and corn. Connie begins to feel dizzy at Arnold’s supernatural insight, but he continues to insist she come out and ride with him in the front seat because she is his “lover.” Horrified, Connie shouts to him that he is crazy and retreats inside to the kitchen. As she does, Connie finds herself extremely disoriented in fear for her life. Feeling like a victim of some supernatural insight, she barely recognizes her home. 

From the screen door, Arnold tells her that he will not come inside the house unless she touches the phone. He tells her that if she comes out, they will have “a nice ride,” but if she does not, he’ll wait for her family to come home “and then they’re all going to get it” (263). He asks Connie about a woman down the road who owns chickens, but Connie replies that she is dead. At the mention of her death, Arnold becomes defensive. Connie runs into the back room to call for help, but she can hear only a roaring sound as she shouts into the phone. 

The next passage becomes elliptical: A blur of unclear action resolves with Connie on the floor, her back wet. Arnold tells her to put the phone back and she does. He tells her to come out to him, reminding her that her home is a “cardboard box I can knock down anytime” (265). Connie tells herself, “I have got to think. I have got to know what to do” (265). In his sing-song lilt, Arnold tells Connie that her family is eating hot dogs and enjoying an open-air bonfire, and that she is better than them because none of them would make such a noble sacrifice for Connie. In the story’s final image, Connie stands and walks out into the daylight. All around her is a wide expanse of greenery and sunlight that she does not recognize: “so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it” (266).