whereas “Girl” is all dialogue. But if we allow that plot elements do not always follow a prescribed flow and shift the focus from on-stage action to action by habit, we will clearly be able to see a plot emerge in “Girl.”

Part of your question is about certain actions in the story taking place at specific times, and certain actions that are one-time occurrences: I think both these aspects are interesting and, in fact, build the story’s plot. “Girl” is plotted as a series of instructions given by an older, female voice—presumably a mother—to a daughter.

The instructions (or orders, or life lessons, depending on how you look at them) are about how to maneuver the difficult experience of being a girl and a woman. These life lessons don’t take the typical form they may between a parent and a child in contemporary times, such as “Be yourself” or “Eat your vegetables.” Instead, they are more about the tasks the girl must perform, indicating that being a girl in the story’s context is more about duty and social roles than about being your individual self. Repetition plays an important role in outlining these duties. Variants of the same duty are repeated:

this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease . . .

Similarly, a warning is repeated at different times in the story, such as the mother’s anxiety about the daughter being seen as sexually promiscuous:

this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming . . . this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming . . .

Repetition also works in the form of the mother’s specific instructions to the girl for certain days of the week:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry . . .

Repetition works both as exposition and rising action to tell us that the women’s lives in the story are completely bound by their tasks, social roles, and duties. These duties can never be abandoned, and being a woman is a full-time job and responsibility. The girl can never slack on her watch, lest she be “seen as a slut”; neither can the mother abdicate her duty of being a good mother who has raised an obedient daughter.

Certain events are referred to less often, which in itself is very significant. For instance, this particular instruction of the mother’s is given only once:

don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know . . .

This indicates that it was quickly obeyed, and the daughter’s playfulness was quelled almost immediately.

The daughter’s voice, which is heard only twice and is rendered in the story in italics, marks both the climax and falling action. In behaving like a boy and asserting her voice, the girl presents a brief conflict in the story, a counterpoint to the mother’s litany of instructions:

but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school . . .

Toward the end of the story, when the mother instructs the girl to always squeeze the bread to check if it’s fresh, she responds:

but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?

Yet the sparseness of her voice and the mother’s quick dismissal of it indicate that the conflict is overcome quickly, and the action begins to fall towards the expected, tragic resolution, expressed in the mother’s response to the question about the bread:

you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?

The tragic end of the story is that the girl cannot escape her social role; she will grow up to be a particular “kind of woman,” a woman her mother is shaping and raising, a suitable sort of girl who watches her every step.

Jamaica Kincaid's short story "Girl" relates a series of commands, obligatory tasks, and fears, directed at the titular "girl" by presumably some older female relative. The tasks listed in this short directive are ones that should be repeated, so I don't know that I'd say any are onetime instructions.

Take for example some tasks associated with specific days of the week. The narrator insists,

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry

and later,

on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday school

These tasks are associated with days of the week, but the assumption is that these tasks are repeated every Monday, Tuesday, and Sunday. The narrator is giving the girl instructions on how to live her life daily and what needs to be completed on what day. The Sunday instructions belie a fear on the part of the narrator: that the girl will develop a reputation and will thus not be marriageable. She is concerned that the girl will get involved in sexual activity before marriage and warns her against it by predicting that the girl wants to become a "slut."

Many of the other instructions, though not falling on particular days, are laying out how to complete household duties. The narrator says, for example,

this is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease;
this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they don't have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants

These instructions indicate that the girl is still young and living with her parents. She will perform chores for her father, and presumably, this will train her to do the same for her eventual husband. She is also told how to grow okra, which she will then presumably need to learn to cook.

The story reads like a list of directives rather than a narrative with a plot. The narrator's repeated use of the phrase "this is how you" seems bossy but informative. The training she is getting here indicates that the girl's life will be all about serving others and staying out of trouble. There seems to be little to no room left for what the girl may want for herself.