Disappearance and escape

Disappearance and escape are first presented as Eileen Dunlop’s privately imagined alternative to remaining in X-ville, then as a practical plan whose secrecy matters as much as its destination. At twenty-four, working as a secretary at Moorehead for fifty-seven dollars a week, Eileen expects to leave home within a week and never return. The account looks back on the days leading to that departure, so the outcome is disclosed before the preparations are fully narrated: the central tension is not whether Eileen wants to go, but how she will make departure possible and what she wants others to believe has happened to her.

From dissatisfaction to a destination

Eileen’s idea of escape grows out of a sense that her life in X-ville has become the problem to be solved. Boston offers a brief image of a larger world, with young people living freely, but New York City becomes the destination of her recurring fantasy. After hearing Hello, Dolly!, she imagines arriving in Manhattan with enough money for a room in a boardinghouse and letting a new future unfold without much further effort. The simplicity of this daydream is part of its appeal: it allows escape to appear both close enough to plan and distant enough to promise a different life.

That fantasy develops against Eileen’s limited experience of independent travel. On an earlier drive down the coast, her car ran out of gas on a country road about an hour from home. An older woman gave her a dollar and a ride to a filling station, an encounter that left Eileen with a practical warning to plan ahead. The incident does not stop her from imagining departure, but it gives the idea a material problem: leaving requires more than wanting to be elsewhere. Eileen begins to convert the fantasy into a route, supplies, and money.

Money, route, and preparations

Eileen saves cash in the attic, where it is hidden from her father. She also has access, through her responsibility for depositing his pension checks, to the Dunlops’ savings account at the X-ville Bank. The tellers know her as Mrs. Dunlop, her mother’s name, and she imagines that she could obtain an envelope of hundred-dollar bills by lying that she was buying a car. This is a contemplated source of funds, not an action the account says she has taken; the distinction marks the gap between an increasingly detailed plan and its execution.

On a Monday morning, Eileen imagines driving about three hours northwest across state lines to Vermont, while calculating that New York City lies 257 miles south of X-ville. Her proposed route is deliberately indirect. She would abandon the Dodge car in Rutland, a place she knows from a book about railroads, then walk to the railway station and take a train to the city. An empty suitcase would let her carry the clothes she planned to remove once aboard. The outfit itself is imagined in layers: a gray coat, wool socks, snow boots, mittens, gloves, hat, scarf, and additional clothes. Eileen believes that bundling up will help her endure the drive with the car windows down after an initial hour with them closed. Such precise details show her trying to turn a fantasy of effortless reinvention into a journey she believes she can physically manage.

Books from the X-ville library also figure in the plan. Eileen considers taking several and never returning them. They would serve as private keepsakes, but also as evidence that could confuse anyone trying to understand her departure. She imagines investigators finding no clear sign that she had meant to leave, and her father insisting that she had no friends and would not have gone willingly. The books, abandoned car, and carefully chosen route belong to the same design: to make her absence look less like a decision and more like an unexplained disappearance.

Secrecy and the imagined aftermath

Eileen has never told another person that she wants to leave X-ville. Concealment is not incidental to her plan. She fears that if her father knew she had run away, he would ridicule her, and she therefore hopes that those left behind will suspect a kidnapping, an accident, or some other fate rather than a deliberate departure. Her imagined search turns absence into a message whose meaning she tries to control: she wants her father to confront the loss without being able to dismiss it as her foolish choice.

This imagined aftermath is intensely personal. Eileen pictures her father grieving, searching through her belongings, and finally recognizing that he had failed to value her. She wants him to feel the depth of the loss and to acknowledge that he had been wrong about how he treated her. The plan therefore carries two aims that pull in different directions: Eileen wants to escape her father’s household, yet she also wants her disappearance to reach him as a painful revelation. The imagined response cannot guarantee that he will understand her, but it gives her departure an emotional purpose beyond reaching New York City.

Death, choice, and retrospective narration

Escape also takes shape beside Eileen’s thoughts of death. She considers several possible ways to die and sometimes feels compelled toward self-harm, but the account distinguishes these thoughts from an intention to kill herself. She does not believe in heaven, fears hell, and tells herself that she is not going to die by suicide. Running away becomes an alternative: not a resolution of her distress, but a possible way to leave the life in which it has accumulated. This contrast makes the imagined journey a choice between forms of disappearance, with departure offering a future, however uncertain, where death would offer none.

The narration gives the plan a double perspective. The younger Eileen believes she is devising a clever way to leave without being found; the older narrator already knows that she will be gone by Christmas morning. She also acknowledges that her memories have changed over time and that she will include details when they contribute to the mood of those last days. The result is a narrative in which practical particulars—the hidden cash, Rutland, the train, the suitcase—sit beside fantasies about what her father will feel. Disappearance is both an event approaching in the story and a form of self-reinvention shaped in advance through secrecy, distance, and the hoped-for meaning of absence.