At the end of May,my students shared their designs. I paused over the thick coverchief, pleated wimple, and gaudy green beads for the nun. They looked more medieval on the workbenches, by the awls and needles. We would take them to Drama, a black box theater designed to resemble a barn. There, the limp forms would wait for a pair of shoulders to give them warmth and shape.
Every six months, the parents paid the price of a luxury car for their children to blow glass or sing madrigals. The students were exceptional at everything they did. I taught them fashion design and needlework. When they fit a swatch of charmeuse to the limbless torso of a dress form or hand-sewed a fell stitch along the hem of a gown without slipping, I marveled. In those moments, every pricked fingertip and ripped waist paid itself back.
After class, I walked with the seniors to Gardening. They sat in a ring by the sugar maples and began slicing rootstock for grafting. Next year’s students would espalier the saplings against fences in front of the school, where each tree would bear two different types of fruit. The parents loved demonstrations of value like this. Watching my students work with wax, twine, and folding knives, it was easy to forget they suffered the ways every adolescent did. They dated, bickered, and pled guilty to misdemeanors. They invented horrible words for their teachers and themselves. When they left one another for college, they wept without reservation. They did this every year, as sure as the wind or rain, to the exclusion of all advice. No matter how many times I counseled them across the arms of a sewing cabinet, no matter how common I told them these troubles were, they each believed themselves alone in them.
I wouldn’t see the seniors graduate this year; instead, I would drive four hours south to attend a trade show in Boston. Before that, I agreed to visit my friend, Bailey, for her birthday. I hadn’t seen Bailey in five or six years, and the thought of returning to Boston filled me with guilt. I associated the city with the witless girl I used to be, which was maybe why I lingered on the lawn by all the grafts that didn’t take. Noticing a change in my expression, one of my students set her gloves, wire, and folding knife in the grass and approached me. Thank you, Portia, she said. Thank you for everything.
A few times a year, the trans women of Boston convened to remember who they were without anyone else to tell them.
Bailey lived in East Somerville — another flinty street in the shadow of an auto body shop. On the way, I daydreamed into a wrong turn by Assembly Row, and it took me half an hour to finesse my car to the right side of the Mystic River. It didn’t matter how often I used to make this drive; experience of a place did not amount to knowledge of it. I could assign a memory to almost every street corner I passed. Remembering them all at once was like walking on knives.
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