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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. What happens after the night on the beach, when the narrator senses Gin growing distant while they are kissing?
(a) He kisses her harder.
(b) He tries to tell her jokes to cheer her up.
(c) He pretends to feel the same way she does.
(d) He tells her she is crazy.

2. What mood do the diction and details included in the scene where the police leave their cars and enter the water create?
(a) Inflammatory.
(b) Reverent.
(c) Frantic.
(d) Factual.

3. Why does Gin tell the narrator "Stop" when they are just about to have sex (236)?
(a) She has changed her mind about having sex.
(b) The narrator's condom has fallen off.
(c) She sees something in the water.
(d) She sees the police lights.

4. Who asks the narrator and Gin questions as they try to leave the beach?
(a) The police officer with the crew cut.
(b) The ambulance attendant.
(c) The police officer with a beer belly.
(d) Curious onlookers.

5. What technique is employed in the phrase "How adept we were at fumbling" (233)?
(a) Juxtaposition.
(b) Oxymoron.
(c) Paradox.
(d) Verbal irony.

Short Answer Questions

1. 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) ?

2. What technique is evident in the phrase "feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs" (235)?

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?

4. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?

5. Why does the narrator say that Lake Michigan "became" the Pacific Ocean (235)?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

4. 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.

5. 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?

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

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 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?

9. 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)?

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?

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