A little while ago, I saw a sky-blue Volvo station wagon, circa 1977, pass by, and it reminded me of Maria Leoncavallo, whose parents drove one just like it. Maria and I went to the same grade school, and although we were friends, we were worlds apart. She was one of the perfect people, blessed with poise and intelligence evident even in the second grade, and her father was a physician. We took ballet classes together, and sometimes her mother would drive us in the Volvo, its spotless interior an acute contrast to my family's economy car, a bright-yellow Toyota Corolla littered with books and bags of seeds and nuts from the one health food store in town. (My mother was obsessed with health food, and would embarrass me by offering my friends raw pumpkin seeds, or a handful of raisins from a thin plastic bag, when it was her turn to drive. "Five almonds contain enough protein to be a good snack!" was a favorite phrase.) Maria's mother never offered us unpackaged seeds or grains. She picked us up on time, and drove us in a car uncluttered by papers and trash. I wished desperately that I had a normal, Maria-style family.

Maria and I went to junior high together as well, where one day, near the end of the year, our gym teacher, whose name I no longer recall, gathered us in the locker room and singled out Maria, commending her not only on her intelligence, but for her niceness and popularity--a combination this teacher found rare. Usually, she informed us, the really smart kids were socially inept, although I think she worded it differently. ("That's not true!" my mother scoffed when I told her about it, "There are lots of nice, popular, smart people!" It occurs to me now that she was probably thinking of herself.) I remember feeling baffled and slightly jealous, and wondering why Maria had been singled out. "I'm smart," I thought, "I'm popular." (Both lies, incidentally, but I hadn't yet understood that.) Maria was always being singled out--once, toward the end of 2nd grade, Miss Britska, who was coincidentally our ballet teacher, stood at the chalkboard and instructed us all to get out our erasers. She held up a pink, school-issued eraser in nearly perfect shape, as an example of, I guess, what an eraser should look like. "This is Maria's eraser," she said proudly. "It's the same one she was given on the first day of class!" Miss Britska was overjoyed to be the teacher of such a tidy student. "Do YOUR erasers look like this?" She turned the eraser from side to side, and paraded from one side of the class to the other, pointedly looking each of us in the eye. I looked at the eraser's clean surface, the barely-worn edges, and then at my own dark-grey, misshapen lump of an eraser. I had not known, back there at the beginning of the year when I was handed that new Pink Pearl eraser, that it was a test of my perfection, and I had used it to erase mistakes, and the doodles in the margin I was forbidden to draw.

Maria's perfect image took a hit one day in junior high when, called on to read an essay she'd written entitled "My Favorite Food," she informed us all about gnocchi. We were repulsed not only by the name, but by the description of the dish--doughy little dumplings stuffed with meat--and there were many loud comments. "Yucky?" the kids asked, snickering, as Maria gripped her paper in both hands and raised her voice to be heard over the chuckling. I remember feeling simultaneously sorry for her and intrigued by the perceived chink in her armor. It was a long way from the carob chips and plastic bags of brewer's yeast cluttering the floor of my parent's car, but it was something, and I savored it, as consolation.

Star of the day. . .David Denby