When we are young, most of us spend a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be grown up. We think of being grown up as synonymous with having freedom and privileges - which is of course one part of growing up. But there are also losses associated with growing up as well. When we grow up, we lose a number of the protections that we had as children, and among the most precious of these is the fact that we know that others will protect us and the fact that we will always have a place to go home to. Sandra Cisneros, in The House on Mango Street, John Updike in "A & P", and Amy Tan in "Two Kinds" each write about that moment in a person's life when he or she ceases to be a child and under the protections of those gods that shelter the innocent.
Updike's story is one variation on a theme with which we are all quintessentially familiar: This is the tale of a boy growing up to be a man. The story, first published in The New Yorker in 1961, follows a boy as he attempts to impress a girl who is not inclined to be impressed by him or his actions. At the end of the story, Sammy finds that he has discovered not what it will take to make this girl fall in love with him, but how difficult it is to be an adult. The loss of innocence that is a necessary part of all such coming-of-age tales is thus Sammy's understanding that life will always be hard after this. Becoming an adult, becoming responsible for oneself, does not make anything at all easier. It only means that one has to face the difficult decisions on one's own, as he summarizes at the end of the story:
àI could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
The other two works present a more complex view of growing up and moving on - a complexity engendered in no small part because of...