Her image in the mirror was subtly blurred and discolored by the old glass. Unnaturally bright eyes of no discernible color, flushed cheeks, a forehead raised in small anxious creases. The three-inch scar that ran along her lower jaw, which she had once believed would alter her life, had faded over the months and was now nearly invisible. She often found herself stroking it unconsciously, however, though she hated the sensation. She wondered if she had been touching it during Sheila Trask’s visit. And whether the woman had noticed. She stared so hard at everything.

They would probably not meet again, Monica thought.

Early the following week Monica happened to encounter Sheila in Glenkill as one woman was leaving the post office and the other entering. Sheila, wearing an old belted sweater and paint-splattered jeans, was studying something in her hand, frowning at a slip of paper, and when she glanced up at Monica her black stare was piercing and ungiving: then she smiled: and the two women found themselves greeting each other with the happy avidity of friends—whose mutual feeling, whose mutual affection, had evidently grown in their absence. “Monica, what are you doing here?” Sheila asked, as if they had met in a remote spot, and Monica, laughing, said: “What are you doing here?”

It was a heady, disorienting sensation, a very odd development—a friendship that had taken root and grown in secret, without their conscious knowledge or guidance. Monica had never experienced anything quite so remarkable before. She warmly accepted Sheila’s invitation to come to dinner the following night—if she could find Edgemont. “You’ll find it,” Sheila said. She added: “I’ll come by at seven and pick you up.”

3

So it began.

In the weeks that followed the two women saw each other frequently, except when Sheila was away (in New York City? in Philadelphia? elsewhere?)—rarely less than once a week, often as many as three or four times. They spoke very little on the telephone since Sheila hated the telephone—she felt crippled, she said, she felt aphasic, if she couldn’t gesture with her hands as she spoke—but they had lengthy and immensely absorbing conversations in one or the other of their houses, or in Sheila’s studio. There was so much to say, so much that suddenly demanded to be said. . . . Monica realized she had been desperately lonely without knowing it. And she was a little dazed, and certainly flattered, by Sheila Trask’s interest in her.

“Really—!” Sheila would say, staring at Monica. “How odd. How fascinating. But could you explain—?”

And Monica saw that—perhaps—she was fascinating.