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

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) ?
(a) Imagery.
(b) Personification.
(c) Allusion.
(d) Metonymy.

3. What kind of blanket does Gin bring to the beach?
(a) Her grandmother's quilt.
(b) A Navajo blanket.
(c) An army blanket.
(d) A picnic blanket.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What technique is employed in the phrase "How adept we were at fumbling" (233)?

2. What repetition technique is used in the story's opening paragraph?

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

5. What is the first priority of the ambulance attendant when he arrives?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?

3. 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.

4. On the night in the lover's lane toward the end of the story, what does the narrator realize about his relationship with Gin?

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 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)?

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

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

9. 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)?

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

(see the answer keys)

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