Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is the hinge on which Eileen’s last days in X-ville turn: a holiday associated with family rituals and old deprivation becomes the night she reaches Rebecca and learns of the violence unfolding in the Polk house. In retrospect, the date gathers together childhood memories, a morning at Moorehead, the exhilaration of an invitation, and a journey toward a meeting that changes what Eileen believes her new friendship means.

Place in the Narrative

The Christmas Eve heading marks a movement into the final stretch of Eileen’s life in X-ville. Looking back, she says that she will try to reconstruct her last days before leaving, while acknowledging that memory is uneven: some apparently irrelevant details remain vivid, and other things she might expect to recall have disappeared. The account’s attention to such unevenness makes the holiday both a point in the chronology and a frame for memories that reach beyond that single day.

Eileen’s retrospective account establishes the approaching departure before the evening’s events have played out. She says that, unbeknownst to her at the time, she would be gone by Christmas morning. Her imagined disappearance is not an announced escape: she wants those around her to think that she has died or vanished through some other misfortune, rather than know that she chose to leave. Christmas Eve therefore stands at the edge of a life she expects to abandon, even while the day itself initially feels like an opening toward companionship.

Earlier Christmases and the Morning at Moorehead

The chapter’s holiday setting draws on Eileen’s memories of family meals. As a child, she often had no lunch packed for school and watched other children eat while she sat hungry. At home she filled herself with bread and butter, but dinner offered little comfort: her parents argued in front of her and Joanie, her father threw his fork and looked toward the Smith & Wesson beside his plate, and her mother snapped a rag against the floor when the children fussed. Eileen recalls eating quickly and taking her plate to the sink before going upstairs. Christmas changed little; the family’s familiar meal might include dry chicken, instant mashed potatoes, canned beans, and limp bacon. The store-bought sponge cake was the exception she remembers enjoying year after year.

On the morning of the narrated Christmas Eve, a different, institutional holiday gesture reaches Eileen at Moorehead. A church group has knitted special sweaters for the boys, and a surplus garment arrives on her desk in brown paper. Mrs. Stephens tells her it is a Christmas present from the warden. Inside is a navy-blue knitted vest with an orange crucifix across the chest; a scrap of wax paper marked with an S for small is safety-pinned to its collar. Eileen wonders whether the warden might like her, then imagines throwing herself at him in his office. The vest thus becomes the focus of an uneasy private fantasy, not a simple token of warmth. She remembers the dull thud of the drawer as she shuts it inside, but cannot recover whether the Christmas pageant took place in the gymnasium, chapel, or an auditorium she may be confusing with her old high school.

The Invitation and Eileen’s Anticipation

The evening’s importance grows out of Eileen’s account of friendship. She says that before Rebecca she had never had a real friend: Joanie disliked her, and the few girls who had spent time with her were brief or uncertain companions. Eileen had defined friendship through an ideal of love as willingness to sacrifice anything for another person’s happiness. By her own account, that standard had left her with an impossible expectation until Rebecca. The invitation consequently arrives with a force far beyond an ordinary social plan.

Rebecca tells Eileen she can come over, explaining that they can sit and talk, play records, and perhaps dance again. Eileen remembers Rebecca’s measured kindness and the intensity of her own response: she writes down an unfamiliar address, hangs up, and stands momentarily overwhelmed. At the kitchen table, her father taps to startle her from the reverie and demands chips. Eileen mutters that the matter is none of his business; he appears to have forgotten her earlier night out with Leonard Polk. His interruption does not diminish her anticipation. When he remarks on how pale she looks, she laughs, feeling that nothing can hurt her, then sets out along the shoveled path into the wet, dark street.

The Drive and the Polk House

The drive through X-ville is charged by contrast. Snow falls softly, homes display Christmas lights, and families prepare for the holiday, while Eileen’s car smells of exhaust and vomit. She notices the food scents outside but has no use for the cheer around her; she feels that having Rebecca makes her own small, unpleasant world wonderful. The holiday’s conventional promise of domestic happiness is visible along the route, yet Eileen’s excitement is concentrated on a single person and a promised evening together.

Rebecca’s neighborhood unsettles Eileen’s expectations. She imagines that a wealthy woman might prefer Boston or Cambridge, and tries to read Rebecca’s decision to live in X-ville as evidence of courage and generosity. Her arrival is precise in memory: Rebecca’s dark-brown, two-story house has white trim and a decrepit plant frozen at the top of the steps. Lights shine in every window, and music carries outside. Eileen parks, checks her appearance in the rearview mirror, and approaches with a bottle of wine. The path through the yard is narrow, hastily cleared, and still icy. Nervous about slipping or looking foolish, she walks carefully to the painted plywood door; it swings open as soon as she touches it.

The Revelation

The welcoming visit becomes something else when Rebecca discloses what is happening in the house. Before doing so, Rebecca has told Eileen that she does not believe the evidence makes Rita Polk seem threatened by her husband, and that she sees an unresolved wrong requiring retribution rather than punishment. She insists that Eileen keep the matter secret. Eileen agrees, moved by Rebecca’s earnestness and by her hand on Eileen’s leg; they seal the promise with a little-finger gesture that Eileen experiences as both heartfelt and unsettling.

Rebecca then tells Eileen that this is the Polk house and that Rita Polk is tied up downstairs. The revelation overturns the evening Eileen had imagined from Rebecca’s invitation: the records and dancing have given way to a concealed act of confinement, and the woman Eileen came to see as a new friend has drawn her into a dangerous secret. Christmas Eve’s decisive turn is not a reconciliation with family or a conventional holiday celebration, but the collision between Eileen’s longing for intimacy and Rebecca’s demand for complicity. It makes the night the threshold between Eileen’s anticipation of belonging and the perilous course that leads toward her disappearance.