Christmas Day

Christmas Day is the threshold between Eileen’s life in X-ville and the uncertain beginning of her life elsewhere. In the bitter winter cold, she leaves her father’s house before sunrise with Rita Polk in the Dodge Coronet, abandons Rita beside a snow-covered road, and continues north on foot. By late Christmas Day she reaches New York City, frightened and hungry, with no settled refuge. The day offers no simple passage from misery to safety: it is both an escape from a home she cannot return to and the start of a future that will take years to become a life she values.

Winter Setting and the Holiday Ideal

The day’s significance is prepared by the winter landscape around X-ville. In late December, snow lies several feet deep, thawing briefly in daylight before freezing again into a hard surface at night. Eileen salts the narrow path from the porch to the street, while icicles hang over the front door. The weather makes departure a physical ordeal, but it also supplies the stark setting against which the old life is left behind. Christmas occurs not in a warmly sheltered domestic world but in a town locked under snow and cold.

Against this setting, the holiday carries an imagined promise of the family Eileen never had. Looking back, she pictures a lavish table, a handsome father carving a roast, a loving mother, a gentle grandfather, a dog, and a crackling fire. This is not a memory of Christmas fulfilled; it is a counterfactual vision of an ordinary, secure home. Eileen imagines that, without Rebecca, she might have driven away full of regret and promised herself to become a proper woman through respectable habits and domestic routines. Instead, her actual departure comes without those vows or the expectation that she can repair herself by conforming to an ideal.

Leaving X-ville on Christmas Morning

In the quiet darkness of Christmas morning, Eileen parks the Dodge Coronet in the driveway and leaves Rita slumped in the passenger seat. She goes inside knowing that these are her last moments in the house, but she does not pack a suitcase. When her father wakes, she gathers the gun and all the cash she has into her purse. She has not emptied his bank account or cashed her final paycheck. Her later decision not to return for the house makes the departure more than a temporary flight: she comes to regard herself as dead in X-ville, with no possession there worth reclaiming.

Before dawn, she drives through the deserted town with Rita still beside her. The route takes her past the elementary school, the high school, town hall, the police station, and Main Street. Rather than taking in X-ville as a single farewell panorama, Eileen remembers details: the bakery lettering, the barber shop, the post office, and the slush in the gutter. She tries the radio, passes the Christmas carols, and turns it off. The silent drive makes the holiday’s public sounds into something she refuses, while the familiar streets become a place she can leave only by seeing them in fragments.

Her planned destination is Rutland, and she has repeatedly plotted the route there. She had thought New Year’s Eve might provide a more fitting moment to disappear, amid the old year’s ending and the new one’s arrival, but Christmas proves just as usable. In hindsight, she doubts the trains were running that day; in any case, she never reaches Rutland. Her escape proceeds by an improvised road rather than according to the plan she had rehearsed.

The Road, the Abandonment, and New York City

On the northbound highway, Eileen experiences a brief stillness as she watches forests and snow-filled pastures pass. A deer appears in the road after sunlight blinds her at a bend. She pulls over, then leaves Rita asleep in the running car beside the road, with enough gas for it to run for hours. Eileen walks toward the animal, whose breath hangs in the cold air. Her encounter does not resolve the danger or explain what comes next, but it interrupts the escape with a moment of grief: she breaks down in tears as the deer faces her and then trots away.

By late Christmas Day, Eileen is in New York City, sobered, hungry, cramped, and frightened that the police may be looking for her. She walks around Times Square through the evening and goes to a dirty movie because she is cold and too nervous to check into a hotel. There she meets her first husband, in the back row of the theater. The destination therefore does not immediately deliver safety or a settled new identity; even reaching the city leaves her scared to speak to anyone and unsure where she can go.

Retrospective Meaning

Eileen’s later account resists treating Christmas Day as a miraculous rescue. She says that disappearing did not solve all her problems, although it gave her a chance to start over. What follows the story’s ending is not a direct road to paradise but a route marked by detours. The contrast between her fear in New York and the secure, solitary life she eventually describes gives the day its lasting importance: it begins the change without pretending that the change is complete.

The holiday’s customary image of home is also overturned. Eileen leaves a house she does not want to reclaim, carrying only money and a gun, and abandons Rita in the cold before continuing toward an unknown future. Christmas Day thus holds both separation and possibility, but not reconciliation or instant renewal. Its decisive gift is narrower and harder won: distance from X-ville, enough to make starting again possible.