Institutional and social prisons characterize Eileen’s experience of X-ville. Eileen works as a secretary at Moorehead, the male juvenile penitentiary. She witnesses the consequences of institutional incarceration on both the inmates and their parents. Eileen’s repressed sexuality as well as her role caring for her emotionally abusive father act as social prisons.

The narrator describes her 24-year-old self’s hatred for her body and imprisonment within gendered beauty expectations. Eileen’s sense of physical imprisonment within a feminine body she finds repulsive is juxtaposed with physical incarceration: “I think of it [Moorehead] now for what it really was for all intents and purpose—a prison for children” (12). Eileen comments on the different forms of incarceration experienced by middle- to low-class Americans in 1964: the institutional, legal imprisonment of boys, and the cultural imprisonment of women within beauty and sexual standards. Eileen also links herself to the inmates of Moorehead during the Christmas pageant, after which she reflects that “I felt, in fact, that I was one of them. I was no worse or better” (106). Despite their different gender and social roles, Eileen thinks of herself as similarly imprisoned.

Eileen’s feelings of incarceration extend to her role as her father’s caretaker. Because of her father’s delusions and degrading mental stability, Eileen locks his shoes in the trunk of her car so that he can’t leave the house.