Kimmy stops the bus and wants to stay in New York, as she would only be remembered back in Indiana as one of the Mole Women. While this seems like a good idea, she only has a middle school education and is pretty naive to things. She ends up finding an ad in the newspaper about an apartment and accepts the place within one minute of meeting her roommate and new landlord.
After the landlord, Lillian, tells her the place is hers if she comes back with a job, Kimmy finds a job as a nanny at a rich woman’s house. When she goes back to let her landlord and new roommate, Titus, know she has a job that “pays $17 an hour under the tables,” they let her move in. All she has is a backpack with a few books she had in the bunker and her cash that was given to her from the fund for the Mole Women. Her bag gets stolen from her, which is a big deal because that was basically all she had, plus it had all her money in …show more content…
Both of these are sort of tied together in that she is so naive because she was sheltered down in the bunker. The women wore fully covered dresses and used each other for mirrors down there; they were forced to literally sit in front of each other and describe the other woman, pretending to be her mirror. Being sheltered like that, Kimmy of course didn’t know a lot of the technology of the day when she was rescued. This is an issue because she wants to hide that she is a Mole Woman. In one scene, Kimmy is in a public bathroom and laughs hysterically after finding out how to use the automatic sink and automatic hand dryer, things we take for granted. She goes to a candy store and decides she will have candy for dinner. She only buys one bag of candy in the entire candy store though, which is interesting because she somehow has the willpower to not splurge on a ton of candy. When she comes across a Chanel store, she comes out wearing a pair of sequined, embroidered, light-up pink shoes- something a middle schooler would have worn like ten years ago, which is fitting for Kimmy since she only has a middle school