The screenplay, by Stewart Stern based on the 1966 novel A Jest of God by Canadian author Margaret Laurence, concerns a schoolteacher in small-town Connecticut and her sexual awakening and independence in her mid-30s.

Rachel Cameron is a shy, 35-year-old, unmarried schoolteacher living with her widowed mother in an apartment above the funeral home once owned by her father in a small town in Connecticut.

Nick Kazlik, Rachel's high-school classmate who now teaches at an inner city school in the Bronx, arrives for a short visit.

Mistaking lust for love, she begins to plan a future with Nick, who tries to rebuff her gently by showing her a photo of a young boy who looks exactly like him that Rachel thinks is his son.

With Calla's assistance, she finds a teaching job in Oregon, but before the summer ends, she learns, to her great disappointment, that she is not pregnant and that her symptoms are the result of a benign cyst.

Rachel sets out with hope for the future, having learned that she has choices, that she is able to give and receive sexual pleasure, and that it is possible for her to actively embrace life rather than waiting for it to find her.

You cannot convey the quality of life in this sort of town, through Rachel's perspective, without losing proportion in melodrama and glop.

Petty tragedies, faithfully portrayed, are a little embarrassing...If this were a less ironic age, it might work seriously and completely—like a kind of American cinema Balzac.