A & P-updike

The short story A & P is about a cashier's experience at a cape cod grocery store when three young ladies walk into his store. One of them is beautiful, one of them is a butter face and the other is fat. Updike takes us through the girls experience in the store in great detail from the point of view of the cashier. The cashier immediately is all over them. He follows their every move and when they disappear into the other side of the store he describes it as a pinball game because he never knows where to look for them again. The cashier spends ten minutes describing how beautiful this women is, and he loves the way she acts describing the leader of the pack as a queen. At the end of their department store visit the cashier's boss tells the girls that they should be fully clothed while at the store instead of wearing bathing suits. the cashier, Sammy, in search of recognition from the girls quits his job. This story tells me that you should never search for recognition from others, and that if you try hard enough it will come.

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?"

I like the passage above because of the terrific descriptions of the store and what was happening. 

This passage is important because it describes the awkwardness after Lengel(the boss) confronted the girls about their attire.