Eileen Dunlop and Rebecca's relationship

Eileen Dunlop and Rebecca's relationship is a brief but defining alliance in which attention becomes, for Eileen, a promise of belonging. At Moorehead, where Eileen has learned to conceal distress behind a composed public face, Rebecca’s recognition seems to transform her life. Eileen’s retrospective account preserves the exhilaration of that attachment while revising her original belief that Rebecca’s affection was uncomplicated. The relationship moves from idealization, through a shared secret and a crisis, to separation without a lasting claim of resentment.

Isolation and First Recognition

Eileen’s longing for connection grows out of a harsh view of herself. She remembers feeling unattractive, angry, and invisible, and describes her younger self as someone who struggled to relate to people or speak up. At Moorehead, she practiced a controlled expression in the mirror and wore it at work as a mask. Her routine also required her to perform calmness: she greeted visitors, enforced institutional rules, and concealed her own feelings while mothers waited to see their sons. This setting matters to the relationship because Rebecca’s attention reaches Eileen in a life where being noticed feels rare.

Before Rebecca becomes the focus of her affections, Eileen is infatuated with Randy, a guard at Moorehead. During security checks of women visitors, she sometimes imagines that the hands she is using belong to Randy; she sees herself as little more than a pair of nervous hands, barely noticed by him. The visitation room also exposes her to the distress of families and the institution’s restrictions, including Randy preventing a boy from receiving a handkerchief from his mother. Eileen follows the rules even as she recognizes their cruelty. Her attachment to Rebecca will displace this earlier fixation, showing how completely her attention shifts when someone appears to choose her.

Attention, Intimacy, and Idealization

Rebecca’s use of Eileen’s name has an outsized effect. When Rebecca invites her to use her first name, Eileen feels remembered and wanted; she describes the exchange as the beginning of a happiness she had long expected to arrive. She compares meeting Rebecca to discovering dance and jazz, and to falling in love for the first time. The intensity belongs not only to what Rebecca says but to what Eileen has been waiting for: a future in which she is no longer anonymous.

Their first evening together at O’Hara’s deepens that feeling. Rebecca dismisses the men who had been paying for drinks and leaves a twenty-dollar bill as a retainer for another martini. Eileen later interprets this gesture, and Rebecca’s dismissal of men more generally, as a way of easing her envy and her fear that Rebecca might attract Randy. Rebecca then asks about Eileen’s years at Moorehead and learns that Eileen remained after returning to X-ville while her mother was ill and then died. Eileen can barely account for the passage of those years in Rebecca’s presence. Outside the bar, Rebecca praises Eileen’s unusual face and imagines that she dreams of other worlds. Eileen leaves feeling beloved and important; after Rebecca drives away, she returns to the bar and drinks whiskey. The next morning she wakes in her car, disheveled and without her purse or keys. The episode marks how powerfully the evening has affected her, though it does not yet give her a secure understanding of Rebecca.

Rebecca’s touch reinforces Eileen’s sense of intimacy. When Rebecca puts a hand on her shoulder after Eileen returns the notebook, Eileen says that nobody has touched her like that in years. She immediately forgives Rebecca for what she sees as a betrayal involving a boy. Rebecca then invites her for a drink, and Eileen accepts, flattered by an invitation unlike any she has received before. In these scenes, small acts—a remembered name, a hand on the shoulder, a compliment—carry enormous weight because Eileen experiences them as proof that she has entered Rebecca’s private world.

Alliance and the Polk Secret

The closeness takes on a more consequential meaning when Rebecca calls Eileen her ally and partner in a plan. Rebecca links that proposed bond to Rita Polk and to the unresolved harm Rebecca says Leonard Polk suffered within his family. Eileen admits that her attention is centered less on the Polks than on Rebecca: she would have made a solemn pact to preserve their friendship. When Rebecca asks for secrecy, Eileen agrees and hooks her little finger around Rebecca’s. The gesture feels both sincere and unsettling to her, joining childish intimacy to the seriousness of the secret.

Rebecca then tells Eileen that they are in the Polk house and that Rita is tied up downstairs. Eileen’s response exposes the gap between her idealized picture of their bond and Rebecca’s practical purpose. She realizes that Rebecca’s friendship may have been cultivated in part because Rebecca believed Eileen could be useful. The discovery wounds her: she had wanted to understand Rebecca’s attention as pure admiration and affection. Eileen initially tries to leave, saying she is unwell rather than confronting Rebecca with her disappointment. Rebecca stops her, asks for help, and presents herself as frightened and in need of a trusted friend. Eileen agrees to help after Rebecca cries and asks her to stay. Her decision is therefore not evidence that the earlier hurt has disappeared; it follows a renewed appeal to the very need for recognition that made her vulnerable to Rebecca’s attention.

Separation and Retrospective Judgment

Eileen’s later account holds two judgments together. Rebecca mattered profoundly at a moment when Eileen most wanted to escape her life, and Eileen does not claim to regret having known her. Yet Eileen also describes Rebecca as a coward who left when the consequences of their entanglement remained. By the time Eileen prepares to leave X-ville, she knows Rebecca will not come. She does not turn that absence into a final grievance, but she rejects the idealism she associates with Rebecca as a dream detached from consequences.

The narrative’s retrospective voice makes the relationship more complicated than Eileen’s first impressions allowed. The younger Eileen treats attention as proof of devotion; the older narrator can name the possibility of strategy without denying the happiness she felt. Rebecca’s absence does not erase the bond’s influence, but neither does that influence make the alliance reciprocal or lasting. Its decisive effect is on Eileen’s sense of herself: for a time, being chosen by Rebecca makes her feel visible, and the collapse of that certainty forces her to reckon with what she had mistaken for secure affection.