New York City

New York City is the imagined destination of Eileen Dunlop’s escape from X-ville: less a visited place than a promise that life might be different elsewhere. It gives shape to her desire to disappear, shifting that desire from private daydream toward a practical, if improvised, plan.

An imagined alternative

Eileen’s attraction to New York City grows out of her sense of isolation in X-ville. After an older woman helps her when her car runs out of gas on a country road, Eileen begins to imagine that the answer to her life there lies in leaving. The contrast she draws is between the small world she knows and a city associated with possibility beyond it.

Her hope is idealized. Having heard “Hello, Dolly!” on the radio, she imagines arriving in Manhattan with enough money for a room in a boardinghouse and finding that her future will simply begin to unfold. In this fantasy, the city offers not a particular job or relationship but freedom from the need to work out every step in advance. Eileen’s later account makes clear that this was a daydream she deliberately nourished, not a journey already undertaken.

From daydream to escape plan

Eileen begins saving cash and hides it in the attic. She is also responsible for depositing Charlie Dunlop’s pension checks, sent monthly by the X-ville Police Department, and considers claiming she needs a new car as a way to withdraw money from the Dunlops’ savings. These preparations give a material edge to the imagined destination, though she does not tell anyone that she wants to leave.

The plan takes a more definite shape on a Monday when Eileen thinks through the journey and its disguises. New York City is 257 miles south of X-ville, but she proposes driving northwest across state lines to Vermont first. She would abandon the Dodge in Rutland, walk to the railway station, and take a train to the city. An empty suitcase would let her carry clothes after removing the layers she expected to wear for the drive. The detour is meant to misdirect anyone searching for her; the city remains the intended end of the route.

Distance and narrative significance

The account distinguishes New York City from the city Eileen has actually visited: her single trip with her dying mother was to Boston, to see a doctor. That excursion had seemed glamorous to her, but it did not establish the New York City of her imagination as a familiar place. Instead, the destination acquires its force through distance, radio, and anticipation.

New York City therefore functions as both a practical objective and an emblem of escape. Eileen’s early vision of an effortless future gives way to calculations about cash, clothing, transport, and a false trail, showing how a fantasy begins to take the form of action. The evidence describes her plans and the hope attached to them; it does not show her arriving in the city.