Midsummer: I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went to see my tailor. He doesn’t know my name; I don’t know his. But we know each other. He seemed glad to see me as he walked out from the back of the tiny Lower East Side shop. I had three things in tow: a handmade blue gingham cotton dress from Italy that was too big, vintage Levi’s whose button holes had come loose, and a nineties Jil Sander navy blue leather jacket my sister Abigail had given to me, which had a tear at the pocket.
My tailor is a small man with a thick accent. I didn’t realize just how small until he was pinning the sides of my dress as we both faced the mirror—I loomed over him. He came up to my shoulder. (I’m not by any definition, tall). He smiled when I showed him the jacket. “Do you want me to stitch it? Or do you want me to glue it?”
I asked him which would last longer and he explained that stitching it would leave it bunched and uneven. “I think I’m going to glue it,” he told me. “But the leather here is weak, it might come undone again. I’m going to put another leather behind it to make it strong,” he explained.
He laughed when I showed him the jeans. After looking at each one carefully, he explained that the buttonholes had been sewn by hand, “so when you wash it and wash it,” he said, “they come loose. Not like when it’s done by a machine.” He wrote down my total ($75), declined a deposit, and told me to come back next Sunday. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” he said. “See you next week.”
Earlier this month and deeper into summer I dropped in again, this time to pick up a pair of trousers that had been too big, and a pair of my boyfriend’s denim. My tailor had a guest with him, an older man who asked about me as I was trying on my now perfectly fitted trousers in a language I don’t understand. “She is good customer,” my tailor said when I opened the dressing room curtain.
“The pants are perfect,” I said to prove his point.
“I wish all customer like her.”
My swampy summer boredom abated, I set off for home. After transferring to the the G, a young man in front of me was going through his thrift store haul with determined concentration, using a lighter to remove the security sensors from each piece, dropping hangers on the floor of the train. Checking off his to-do list. If you have nothing to do, I suppose—find something.