Linda is tiny, blond, amazingly thin; we like each other immediately, though I am not sure just what brings us together. Partly it’s that I like her name; back in Tennessee, when we’d rented a farmhouse in the middle of acres of field roamed by our landlord’s horses, I’d named one spotted Appaloosa pony Linda, busy imagining relationships with horses that weren’t mine and that I wasn’t supposed to touch. One of them used its big yellow teeth to scrape the paint off the fenders of our Chevrolet.

Linda is a little frail looking, not so quick to speak up, and probably she’s a good match for a new boy, a stranger with a thick Tennessee accent newly added to the roster of the second grade months after the beginning of the school year. If she were to draw her self-portrait she’d be a wisp of a thing, tucked into some corner of the page; somehow this makes her seem open, available; she seems to look at the world as though it will impose itself upon her in whatever way it chooses. One day Linda comes to my house to play, and my mother serves us lunch: Swanson’s chicken pot pies, lovely bland childhood comfort food, mostly gravy and peas, a few chunks of chicken aswim in translucent thickened sauce and pieces of crust. Linda is amazed, her eyes huge; at her house, she says, one of these pies is cut into slices and divided for everyone in the family. When I go to her house, it’s true; we have a tiny lunch, a fraction of a bologna sandwich. I imagine her at the dinner table, tiny girl with a wedge of pot pie on her plate, just a small radius of crust with its mechanically crimped edge.

I like playing with Linda: easy, no pressure. She seems to regard anything pleasant that comes her way as a surprise, not a given. We are considerate of each other; we invent quiet games; we are cooperative. One of my teachers says to my parents, on open house night, when a particularly silly-looking drawing of a reindeer I’ve done is tacked to the bulletin board, all sausage body and spindly legs and huge antlers, Mark relates so well to girls.