DIED 2006
AT THE ART SCHOOL in Baltimore where my husband and I drove down from Glen Rock to teach were many members of what I then called the BLT community: girls who wanted to be boys, boys who wanted to be girls, girls who liked girls, boys who liked boys, and some who had transcended gender altogether. One was a photographer, a web designer, the resident assistant in her dorm, the kind who would drag her sister and brother artists from their various morbid pursuits to go outside and ride bikes. Though she was a sturdy sort who wore men’s clothes and used a man’s nickname, because she was my writing student, I could never look at her without seeing the little girl from Massachusetts who kicked a hole in the door when she got locked out of the house one time, who suspected they liked her girlier sister better. In my husband’s class, Logic, which she hated with a passion, she hinted that she just might be able to refute the whole thing.
In her essays, and perhaps in real life, she called her parents by their first names. Old hippies with a messed-up marriage, they got more sympathy from me than they did from the author. It broke my heart when I read those names in her obituary. I imagined Sharon calling Martin in his home halfway across the country in the middle of the night to tell him the universe had thrown their brand-new college graduate from the backseat of a speeding jeep in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she’d been sleeping peacefully under the starry Western sky. The sister in China, the grandma in Texas, the brother in Concord: their phones were ringing too. I hope one of them found those files on her computer because she had it all written down, and she always turned in two or three more drafts than anyone else in the class.