Kingston is a crossing point on Jenny and Pauline’s westward flight, marking a change in how Jenny experiences the landscape around her. The place is not developed as a full setting in the supplied scenes; its significance lies in the route it names and in the uneasy passage from imagined refuge to familiar confinement.

Setting and Route

After fleeing Dolly’s, Jenny and Pauline turn west to cross the river at Kingston. Beyond the crossing, dark, humped mountains frame the road. Jenny compares them with the great mountains of the West: those had seemed to recede endlessly as she drove toward them, whereas these appear immense from a distance and resolve into bright, sunny hills when approached. The contrast makes the journey’s geography part of Jenny’s changing sense of possibility.

Near the mountains, the road passes a small, apparently forgotten town, with shuttered churches, a rusted gas station, and a dairy store with a pay telephone. Jenny recognizes in its shrinking pond the kind of place she had swum in for more than two years. The familiar rural scale no longer offers ease: what once seemed like the promise of the East now feels to her like being smothered by intimacy.

A Waypoint in Flight

Kingston belongs to a hurried escape, not a settled arrival. The crossing follows the women’s departure from Dolly’s, and the narrative keeps their movement practical and precarious: Pauline has no bag or coat, and Jenny has to stop at a store whose parking lot they reach around six in the morning. The store may not yet be open—or may not have opened in years—so even a brief pause offers no dependable welcome.

At this stop, Jenny tells Pauline that they are now responsible for a killing and rejects the idea that her earlier decision to stay with Pauline and the others had been good for her. The statement turns the journey west into more than a change of direction: their flight carries a newly explicit recognition of danger and a break in Jenny’s trust. Kingston is the named crossing on the route, while the nearby town and store register the exposed, uncertain conditions of travel.

Narrative Significance

The route’s reversal of expectation gives Kingston its force. The East had seemed to Jenny a refuge precisely because it was unfamiliar; on the road, she instead experiences it as too intimate and restrictive. The mountains enact the same reversal in miniature: distance first makes them seem wild and immense, but proximity reveals sunny hills. Neither the landscape nor the journey guarantees escape from what the women have already lived through.

Kingston therefore functions as a geographic marker within a larger passage through flight, rather than as an independently described community. The scene associates the crossing with Jenny’s altered perception, the women’s immediate lack of security, and the widening strain between them. The later supplied scenes do not establish that their motel, women’s gathering, or imprisonment is located in Kingston, so the place’s supported role remains concentrated in this moment on the road.