Eileen Dunlop

Eileen Dunlop is the retrospective narrator of her own disappearance from X-ville, and her account makes self-invention inseparable from self-judgment. At twenty-four, she is a lonely, angry woman whose work at Moorehead requires a composed public face, even as her private life is marked by shame, fixation, and a wish to be noticed. Looking back, she presents not a stable portrait but a series of corrections: the young woman who thought herself ugly and invisible, the narrator who can recognize her own misreadings, and the person who finally leaves home.

Identity and Background

The narrative begins by separating the older teller from her younger self. Eileen recalls being born and raised in X-ville, where her last days there unfold in late December, amid deep snow and repeated freezes. She describes herself as twenty-four and says that her story begins fifty years earlier. The distinction between then and now allows the narrator to describe her former thoughts while also questioning them.

Her remembered appearance is specific and self-conscious: light brown hair, acne scars, a thin and angular figure, and movements she sees as hesitant. She imagines herself as an inconspicuous young woman on a bus, perhaps mistaken for a nursing student or typist. Heavy skirts, thick stockings, buttoned-up clothes, little jewelry, and no perfume or nail polish express a wish not to draw attention. A ring with a small ruby, which belonged to Eileen's mother, is an exception. Although she concedes in retrospect that her appearance was ordinary, at the time she believed herself ugly, disgusting, and unfit for the world.

That conviction reaches beyond appearance. Eileen recalls being unhappy and angry, unable to find stillness comforting and unable to make self-control ease her awkwardness. She remembers feeling like a person born into the wrong life, someone both exceptional in her imagination and invisible in her surroundings. Her later narration does not erase this self-description; it shows how fiercely the younger Eileen treated it as fact.

Work and the Death Mask

At twenty-four, Eileen earns fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at Moorehead, a private juvenile correctional facility she retrospectively describes as a prison for children. She had begun working there at twenty-one, expecting the job to be temporary while she returned to X-ville because Eileen's mother was ill. After her mother died, she stayed, and the years passed. The job's routines placed her among the suffering of the boys and their visiting families without giving her a way to respond openly.

Eileen turns a library book about casts made from the faces of dead historical figures into a practical model for emotional concealment. She practices a composed expression in the mirror and calls the result her death mask. At work she uses it to hide sensitivity and maintain a flat manner, even when she witnesses a corrections officer degrading a boy. Her recollection of looking away from the scene shows the gap between seeing harm and intervening. The mask is not evidence that she feels nothing; it is the face she has trained herself to wear so that the place's misery does not become visible on her.

Her duties also make her an agent of Moorehead's rules. She records visitors, directs them to wait, and is made responsible for patting down women because there are no female guards. She recognizes that the mothers she searches are sad and passive, and says that none conceals a weapon. Yet she follows the procedure. During visits, she also tells families that gifts are prohibited for security, although she understands that the rule keeps the boys desperate. When a young boy cries and his mother offers him a handkerchief, Eileen repeats the official explanation rather than challenge the restriction.

The pressure of appearing unaffected shows up in less official habits too. Before visiting hours, she takes a swig of sweet vermouth and eats mint chocolates, some stolen from a drugstore in X-ville. She invents surveys for waiting mothers, presenting them as state questionnaires so that their time feels purposeful. Their sincere answers affect her, but she still keeps to her performed role. When upset, she finds an empty room and pinches herself while kicking at the air until she feels foolish and ashamed. These private actions reveal the strain underneath the controlled manner that her workplace demands.

Longing, Attention, and Rebecca Saint John

Eileen's social isolation makes attention feel consequential. She describes herself as someone who did not know how to relate to people or speak up for herself, and who preferred to sit silently with her anger. At Moorehead, her attraction to Randy gives visiting hours a personal appeal: she attends to his presence and even imagines, while patting down mothers, that she is touching him. She recalls his smell and the nearness of the work as a bright spot in an otherwise grim routine.

That attachment shifts when Eileen encounters Rebecca Saint John. After watching Randy during a visit, she realizes that she is no longer in love with him; in her account, the change is abrupt, and he seems suddenly unremarkable. Rebecca becomes the new focus of Eileen's attention. Rebecca calls her by name, invites her to use Rebecca's first name, and tells her that her face is unusual and fascinating. Eileen remembers this praise as a startling reversal of her own conviction that she is plain and unworthy of notice. Walking away from O’Hara’s afterward, she feels important and beloved, and returns to the bar after Rebecca has left.

The older narrator later complicates this idealized memory. She explains that Rebecca built rapport with her strategically and that Rebecca's interest was not simply admiration or affection. Eileen is hurt by this conclusion and feels humiliated by her own willingness to believe otherwise. When she tries to leave, Rebecca catches her arm, says she is in trouble, and asks for help. Eileen considers breaking away or contacting her father or the police, but Rebecca's tears and appeal to friendship draw her back. Eileen agrees to help. The scene shows how strongly the possibility of being trusted can overcome her suspicion and hurt.

Family, Isolation, and Departure

Eileen's relationship with her father, Charlie Dunlop, is also narrated through competing interpretations. She imagines that if she disappears, he might believe she is dead or missing rather than conclude that she chose to leave. She wants him to grieve, search through her belongings, and finally recognize that he loved her and had treated her wrongly. The fantasy exposes how much recognition she wants from him, even as she plans to leave without telling him her purpose.

The Dunlops' place in the neighborhood reinforces her sense of exclusion. The lawn is neglected, the house lacks Christmas lights, a tree in the window, and a wreath on the door, and neighborhood children do not come by for Halloween treats. Eileen eats the candy herself and spits it out in the attic. She resents the neighbors' judgment and does not welcome their gestures of help, while also fearing that her conduct will give them more to gossip about. The house is not merely the setting she intends to escape; it is a place whose rooms and familiar objects she later admits she will miss.

After a night of heavy drinking, Eileen wakes in her car, parked partly in a snowbank, with her keys missing. She suspects that Charlie Dunlop came outside and removed them. She imagines he may have saved her from carbon monoxide poisoning, but acknowledges that she cannot know whether the engine was running or why he took the keys. Her preference for the protective explanation captures the uncertainty in their relationship: she wants to believe that his care overcame his madness and selfishness, without claiming certainty about what happened.

At the eventual parting, Eileen helps her father drink gin and puts him to bed. She does not wait for Rebecca Saint John, having concluded that Rebecca is gone. The narrator says she holds no grudge, but judges Rebecca's idealism as unaccompanied by consequences. Before leaving, Eileen looks at herself in the bathroom mirror and sees a changed expression; the gun and money in her purse confirm that she is ready to go. She says goodbye to the house, recognizes the pain of leaving its rooms and worn furnishings, and descends the stairs for the last time. Her final recollection of Charlie Dunlop is of his panic and diminished state as he moves through the snow. The departure does not resolve their history; it leaves Eileen carrying both attachment to home and the determination to disappear.

Narrative Role and Significance

Eileen's character is formed as much by the way she tells her story as by the events she recounts. The older narrator can identify where her younger self lied, misread Rebecca Saint John, or preferred a consoling explanation about Charlie Dunlop. Yet her corrections do not make her former feelings disappear. She preserves the intensity of her desire to be loved and her anger at being overlooked, while acknowledging that her understanding of other people was limited.

Her performed composure links the private and institutional parts of her life. At Moorehead, the death mask helps her carry out duties amid suffering; in her personal life, self-scrutiny and concealment make it difficult to speak directly or trust attention. The acts of shoplifting, inventing questionnaires, enforcing rules, and imagining a different response from her father show distinct ways she moves through a world in which she feels powerless, without making her a simple observer of its harms. Her departure is therefore both an action and a change in the story she can tell about herself: the person who once imagined herself as nobody becomes the narrator who names the life she is leaving.