Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

“Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.”

Connie’s mother constantly chastises her for checking the mirror too often, but Connie is aware of certain similarities between them. Here, Oates uses the symbol of the mirror to gesture at Connie’s vanity and hint at her mother’s similar preoccupation. At the same time, the mirror suggests the world that Connie and her mother inhabit is predicated on superficiality. 

“June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams.” 

In many ways, June and Connie are opposites. Where June is obedient and dutiful, Connie goes her own way, preferring instead to take risks, flirt with boys and spend time with friends. However, Connie later acknowledges that the rivalry is a performance perpetuated by her mother’s fickle favoritism. Connie’s fixation on “trashy daydreams” alludes to her obsession with high romance of popular music, and her various nights out with boys.

“The father of Connie’s best girl friend drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.” 

Connie’s lack of any guiding example is a major theme in the story, suggested as such in the title. With no adults willing to monitor the lives of Connie and her friends, Connie is free to traverse dangerous boundaries and to meet boys, including Arnold Friend. Thus, the absence of any individual who asks the story’s titular questions—“where are you going” and “where have you been”—contribute to Connie’s death.