Hey Lawd
The need to impress in “A&P” and “How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or hafie)” The narrators in “A&P” and “How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or hafie)” both feel the need to impress the opposite sex. In “A & P,” Sammy tries to impress Queenie and her friends by being the “hero,” whereas in “How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or hafie)” Yunior tries to impress the girls he dates by hiding who he really is but both of the narrator’s desire to impress comes from a lustful and insecure place. In “A&P” by John Updike, Sammy takes a strong interest in the girls in their bathing suits that come into the supermarket he works at. It is clear that he views the girls in a sexual way by the way he describes Queenie from her “white prima donna legs” (1), to the way the straps of her bathing suit “were off her shoulders looped loosely around the cool tops of her arms” (1) causing her suit to slide down a little, how when she “turned so slow it made [his] stomach rub the inside of [his] apron” (2), how cute it was when she lifted “a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top” (3) and her friend whom he “liked better from the back” because she had “a really sweet can” (3). Sammy was so infatuated with them, noticing every detail about each of the girls, that he wanted them to notice him too. When the manager of the supermarket embarrasses them for wearing bathing suits, Sammy uses this opportunity to get their attention and ultimately impress them. Sammy says he quits “quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch [him], their unsuspected hero” (4). He doesn’t stop to think about how quitting his job will affect his parents and his future; he only cares about impressing the girls and getting them to notice him. After his action he realized “how hard the world was going to be to [him] hereafter” (5) over girls that ended up not noticing him or being impresses and