The narrator begins recollecting her life as a twenty-four-year-old woman in a small New England town she calls X-ville. It is December 1964. To show how different she has become in the fifty years since the narrative takes place, the narrator gives her past self the name of Eileen Dunlop. She describes her depression, struggle with body dysmorphia, turbulent relationship with her mentally unstable father with an alcohol addiction, and her job as a secretary at X-ville's juvenile penitentiary, which she calls Moorehead. The narrator begins her story a week before she ran away to New York City on Christmas. Since then, she has had no contact with her family or anyone she knew in X-ville.

After returning from work each day, Eileen drives to the local liquor store to buy her father a bottle of gin. Though Eileen loathes her father, she obeys his demand for alcohol. She has locked up all his shoes in the trunk of her car so that he can’t leave the house. Her car’s exhaust is broken, so she drives with the windows down in the freezing cold. Eileen often fantasizes that the icicles that hang above the house’s front door will fall and impale her.