Everything seemed to be endowed with a strange and luminous intensity, as if all of reality had been reduced to what transpired within its walls,
Ruth did not feel welcome; she saw a blast of frostiness in the headmistress’s eye. At this rite of passage had the headmistress already picked her out? The girl with the Semitic features. The Jewish girl. (Photos: Shutterstock)
D
ecades after her schooldays had slipped by Ruth stood poised to cross a city road roaring with traffic her children’s hands in her own.
It was then she noticed a middle-aged woman waiting on the other side of the street. Something in the way she stood — her posture or the way her head leaned slightly to one side — caught Ruth’s attention. All of a sudden her consciousness formulated an unbidden question.
Could this woman waiting to cross the busy road really be Muriel Dean? Could she be the same girl who had stood outside her house as one day piled on another and waited wordlessly for her to emerge so they could walk to school together? Could she be the same girl who had been her competitor in amassing prizes: both of them the joint form prizes she the classics and arts prize and Muriel the sciences prize?
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