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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who is the author of "We Didn't"?
(a) Stuart Dybek.
(b) Perry Katzek.
(c) Vincent Kowalski.
(d) Yehuda Amichai.

2. Gin mentions her "nonna's cottage" (240). Whose cottage is this?
(a) Her mother.
(b) Her sister.
(c) Her aunt.
(d) Her grandmother.

3. To what does the narrator compare the other lovers on the beach?
(a) Fallen soldiers.
(b) Abandoned mannequins.
(c) Sleeping dolls.
(d) Crash-test dummies.

4. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' social circumstances?
(a) Gin's bed and their parents' cars.
(b) The condition of the Rambler and the rosary.
(c) Light and darkness.
(d) Grass, leaves, and snow.

5. What is the title of the poem used as an epigraph for this story?
(a) "Water."
(b) "In Darkness and in Light."
(c) "The Mirror."
(d) "We Did It."

Short Answer Questions

1. Which of the following is one of the places where the narrator and Gin go to try to resume their attempts at intimacy after the incident at the beach?

2. What technique is used in the sentence "On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we’d repeatedly smeared over each other's bodies" (234) ?

3. How has the narrator and Gin's relationship changed by the end of the summer?

4. Which of the following techniques is used in the sentence "How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy" (233)?

5. When the narrator unbuttons the second button on Gin's shirt, what does he see?

Short Essay Questions

1. What point about the relationship between men and women is made by the details the narrator observes on his train ride home after the night at Oak Street Beach?

2. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?

3. Explain the relationship of the story's title to the Amichai poem excerpt used as an epigraph.

4. What messages about gender, sex, and adulthood are being conveyed in the phrase "entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life," which the narrator uses to describe his beliefs about what is happening on the beach that night?

5. What does the narrator say might have happened if the dead woman had washed up beside them while he and Gin were trying to have sex on the beach, and why is Gin so offended?

6. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?

7. What is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?

8. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?

9. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?

10. What is the rhetorical effect of the diction used in the following description of the setting at Oak Street Beach: "The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed" (234)?

(see the answer keys)

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