Boston

Boston occupies two roles in Eileen Dunlop’s account: it is an imagined refuge from X-ville and, eventually, the destination of a trial journey that exposes how difficult leaving will be. The city’s promise is first emotional and symbolic; when Eileen drives there in winter, escape becomes a question of cold, exhaustion, and whether her car can carry her beyond Moody Street.

Boston as an imagined refuge

Eileen remembers Boston through its brick and ivy, which seemed to offer proof that intelligent life existed beyond the narrow world she knew. She imagined young people living as they pleased and took the city as evidence that freedom might be close enough to reach. This hope contrasts with her isolation in X-ville, where she felt out of place and believed herself alone in her awareness of how strange it was to be alive.

Her earlier visit was a trip with her mother to see a doctor while her mother was dying. The doctor could not cure her, but prescribed medicine intended to make her comfortable. Although Eileen was twenty-four and technically an adult, the excursion felt glamorous to her. Boston therefore entered her imagination not through independence but through a journey made in the company of a dying parent, with the city’s promise set against the limits of what medicine could do.

From daydream to destination

The fantasy of escape did not begin as a firm plan. After an earlier drive down the coast left her stranded when her car ran out of gas, an older woman gave her a dollar and a ride to a filling station and advised her to plan ahead. Eileen later began to imagine disappearing, gradually locating a solution to her life in X-ville elsewhere. New York City, rather than Boston, was the imagined place where a future might unfold automatically; Boston represented the more immediate hope that a freer world existed.

On a Sunday in late December, after finding the X-ville library locked, Eileen returned books through its slot and decided to drive to Boston. She did not know this would be her last Sunday in X-ville. The retrospective account makes the ordinary decision carry an unrecognized consequence: she could have spent the day packing or mourning the home and youth she would soon leave, but instead she simply got onto the highway.

The winter road test

The trip was physically precarious from the start. The roads were slick with melting ice, and Eileen rolled down the windows to avoid exhaust fumes, pulling on a knit hat as the cold struck her face. With the windows closed she had nearly fallen asleep at the wheel on other winter drives; once, returning from Randy’s, she had drifted into a snowbank. On the Boston journey she considered stopping at her old college, where she had spent just over a year, but could not summon the courage. She had been pulled out halfway through her sophomore year and forced back to X-ville to attend to her mother, a duty she describes as nursing without warmth or affection.

In Boston, Eileen reached Moody Street and stopped at a coffee shop decorated with Christmas lights and cutout figures. Over hot tea, still angry and worried about the car, she recognized that it could not serve as a dependable getaway vehicle. Between the cold and the drowsiness brought on by driving with the windows up, she believed she would not get farther than Moody Street if she tried to leave for good. She regarded the outing as a road test and a dress rehearsal; the car had failed. The conclusion made escape less immediate, though not impossible: she would have to wait until spring, and still wondered whether she would actually go.

Narrative significance

Boston’s meaning shifts with the journey. At a distance it is a city of possibility, set against the confinement and disorder Eileen associates with X-ville. On the road, it becomes a real place reached by a vulnerable person in an unreliable car, where hope has to meet practical limits. The drive does not itself free her; it shows what her plan lacks and postpones departure. In that contrast, Boston marks both the reach of Eileen’s desire to disappear and the first concrete measure of what escape will require.