Lincoln Park

Lincoln Park is the Chicago neighborhood where Margaret Campbell’s apartment stands as she returns to the city after more than eighteen months away. Though close enough to visit, the apartment becomes a threshold she cannot bring herself to cross: it holds the belongings and memories of a former life, and makes the choice to move forward harder to avoid.

Setting and the Unvisited Apartment

Margaret has been back in Chicago for nearly three days when she realizes she has not gone to the north side to check on her Lincoln Park apartment. Neighbors have been collecting her mail and watering the plants, practical arrangements that have allowed her to remain away without yet confronting what the apartment might look like after her long absence.

The place is bound up with a seven-year relationship with the man she married. Margaret fears not only what may greet her inside but also the memories the visit would revive. Instead, she stays in her old bedroom in her parents’ redbrick house in Oak Park, where familiar surroundings offer comfort and a retreat into a time before she felt burdened by adult choices. She recognizes that this retreat is a form of hiding.

Return and Resistance

The apartment remains unvisited even as Margaret’s return to Chicago brings her professional life back into view. Watching news coverage of the mass grave discovered at a Shanghai building site, she misses her work and China, as well as Li Yan. The story stirs her professional interest, but Lincoln Park marks a different, personal obstacle: she has not yet faced the life she left behind in Chicago.

Her absence has lasted long enough for ordinary signs of neglect to loom over the decision. Margaret worries that junk mail may be accumulating and that the plants may be dead in the kitchen sink. These are fears, not confirmed conditions; the text leaves the apartment unseen, preserving the gap between what she imagines and what she has actually encountered.

Symbolic Role

Lincoln Park represents a past Margaret cannot simply recover by returning to its address. The apartment is associated with the person she used to be and with a marriage she is reluctant to revisit; in contrast, her childhood room in Oak Park offers the familiar safety of an earlier self. Neither refuge can settle the question of where her future lies.

An encounter with David has already made clear to Margaret that the past offers no real refuge. Her recognition that she cannot leave the apartment to gather dust turns the practical need to check on it into part of a larger necessity: whatever direction she chooses, she has to move on. Lincoln Park thus holds both the life she has avoided and the unresolved decision that her return to Chicago brings back into reach.