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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. How has the narrator and Gin's relationship changed by the end of the summer?
(a) The narrator has begun to notice other girls in his neighborhood.
(b) Gin is not comfortable being alone with the narrator.
(c) They argue constantly about trivial things.
(d) Gin cries whenever the narrator tries to kiss her.

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

3. In the simile that the narrator uses when he describes holding Gin's breasts in his hands on page 234, to what does he compare her breasts?
(a) Cups.
(b) A garden.
(c) Water.
(d) Fruit.

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

5. In what sense is the drowned woman also still constantly in the narrator's thoughts?
(a) He imagines that every man he sees could be her killer.
(b) He constantly imagines her there beside Gin.
(c) He sees her as a symbol of his own recklessness.
(d) He begins collecting newspaper articles about drownings.

Short Answer Questions

1. In the light from the squad cars and flashlights, what does the narrator see on the beach as the other couples are running away?

2. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' social circumstances?

3. What is the tone of the narrator's description of people in Gold Coast apartments having sex?

4. What mood do the diction and details included in the scene where the police leave their cars and enter the water create?

5. 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)?

Short Essay Questions

1. On page 233, the narrator describes the girlfriend's mother's car as having "a rosary twined [around] the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs." Describe the tone of this image and explain how it is related to the narrator's later description of unbuttoning his girlfriend's shirt.

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

3. Where are some of the places listed in the poem's opening paragraph, and how do they convey the couple's youth?

4. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?

5. 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?

6. 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?

7. 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)?

8. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?

9. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?

10. 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?

(see the answer keys)

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