The New Yorker, November 9, 1981 P. 48
When the narrator was a student at a convent school, she fell in love with a young nun named Sister Imelda. She was Sister Imelda's petNSister Imelda gave her small presents and helped her with her geometry. She kissed the narrator on the night of the school play. Sister Imelda was tall and thin, and because she was young, the schoolgirls had all kinds of rumors about her past life. Sister Imelda wanted the narrator to become a nun. The Mother Superior warned Sister Imelda to keep away from the narrator, and the narrator was made sad and nervous by Sister Imelda's apparent coldness. After she left school, the narrator wrote Sister Imelda regularly for a while, but she went to college and decided not to become a nun. In her senior year of college, the narrator and her bold, brash friend Baba were on a bus, wearing alot of makeup, going somewhere to meet men. They saw Sister Imelda with another nun in the back of the bus. The narrator was embarrassed, but Baba insisted they had to walk right past the nuns. Luckily, the nuns got off before Baba and the narrator, so there was no confrontation. The narrator wondered if she would have said something about the sadness of love's ending, but doubts she would have, because, she realised, in our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
