Mesmerized by his initial sight of them, Sammy is on a romantic quest. Updike shows that Sammy is a "romantically infatuated young boy, for his frustrating infatuation with a beautiful but inaccessible girl whose allure excites him into confusing his sexual impulses for those of honor and chivalry- (Wells 127). Sammy solely views them as sex objects. He goes from noticing how little the girls are wearing, to what they are not wearing, to finally focusing on their bare skin. He initially notices that they are wearing "nothing but bathing suits, they didn't even have shoes on- (Updike 211).
"Admiring the three girls for daring to enter the grocery store dressed in bathing suits, he especially likes the one who wears her strap down and her head high- (Greiner 297). With the lowered straps of her bathing suit, which exposed the un-tanned skin on her breasts, "Sammy draws a conclusion which suggests that they are like the commodities in the store, that is they are objects to be observed, handled, and used- (Thomson 215). He describes one of the girls as having "a soft looking can with those two crescents of white just under it- (Updike 211), and the other as having "one of those chubby berry faces- (Updike 211). Most significantly, he views Queenie's breasts as "the two smoothest scoops of vanilla he had ever known- (Updike 215).
Sammy is halfway in love with their leader, "Queenie,"" who gives him an intimate and pleasurable detail, the fact that there was no place for the money to come from. "Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from- (Updike 214). The dollar bill is lifted from her cleavage and puts Sammy in to an almost fainting predicament.
Sammy is painfully aware of female appearances, and he describes the matrons he sees daily on his job in terms that are representative of his age group. There is a "witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows- (Updike 211) who screeches when he rings up her purchase twice.
