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Twyla And Roberta Meet :

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Twyla and Roberta meet – which occurs at intervals that are not dated, but which take place many years apart. Each of the girls gets married, but Twyla remains in a lower middle-class existence – she gets married to a working-class man, a fireman – while Roberta accumulates a chauffeur, a fur coat and evening gowns, a house in a better suburb, and a husband who works as a IBM executive. Each time that the pair meet, Twyla is in some way rejected, just as her own mother was rejected by Roberta’s mother. If anything, this rejection intensifies over the years, as the class divide between the two stratifies and increases. However, there is one occasion when Twyla and Roberta do not battle along class lines: this takes place during their first meeting as fully-grown adults, when the two bump into each other a fancy supermarket (Twyla feels guilty for spending her husband’s hard-earned money there), and then go to lunch. This time, instead of fighting over class distinctions, the pair fight about something else: memory. Specifically, they argue about the memory of an employee at St. Bonaventure, a mute kitchen-worker named Maggie who was mocked by the older girls at “St. Bonnie’s,” and by Twyla and Roberta as well. Oddly, the two women cannot come to a consensus on a single memory – whether Maggie fell down in the orchard next to the orphanage (as Twyla claims), or whether she was pushed down by the older girls (as Roberta states that she was). Twyla finds it odd that Roberta

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