A surprise awaits her in the lobby.

“Malka!”

Her seventh-grade granddaughter gives her a quick hug. She’s self-conscious around her group of friends, because getting a kiss from Bubby is the most embarrassing and socially off thing in the world, Ruti knows.

“Mrs. Pravner will be so happy you came!” Ruti tells her. “She’s been humming the songs you sang with her last week all week. You girls have no idea what a huge mitzvah this is.”

The girls beam.

“Bubby,” Malka says, and Ruti notices an eagerness in her eyes. “Can I interview you about your school years? It’s for a project. You would be the perfect subject.”

Her granddaughter’s exuberant voice clashes with the hush of the rehab’s walls.

“You want to interview me about my school years?” she asks dazedly.

“Yes!” Malka blabbers excitedly. “First, I’ll need to write a report, and then I’ll need to give a speech. It’s part of our Living History project.”

She is history.

Ruti bends in the handles of her reading glasses, then out, then in.

Naturally, her grandkids think their bubby, who has yet to master the art of texting, is ancient.

Maybe it’s her feet, strained from standing for so long. Maybe it’s the gravity of the work she engages in.

Okay, maybe it’s the new admission settled in her bed in Room 306. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she does not want to be interviewed for the Living History project.

She falls back on an important skill life has taught her: stall.

Resting her arm on the front desk counter, she regulates her voice. “Tell me more, mammele. What kind of questions would I need to answer?”

Malka takes off happily. “So first, how technology changed stuff. Like, you didn’t have computers and photocopy machines, right? Did you have school buses? Uniforms? Homework? School projects? Trips? Plays? And then about the actual learning — was anything different in your day?”

In my day…

Stall, Ruti.

“You know I grew up in a small town, not in the city, right? Saba Hagadol found a job in America – he became a truck driver for a steel factory. He brought us across the ocean to live near his workplace.”

“Right! But like, don’t tell me you had a one-room schoolhouse idea type of situation, please!”

Her friends giggle. Ruti gives a short laugh. “No, no. Not a one-room schoolhouse idea type of situation.”

A group of visitors enter through the revolving door of the building. It’s Maya Kerr’s family. They will want to talk to her before going up to Maya’s room.

“I need go now, sheifeleh,” she tells Malka. “Go up to Mrs. Pravner, she’ll be so happy to see you. We’ll talk later, okay?”

“Any new patients we should visit today?” Malka asks.

Ruti inhales, blots the words Room 306 from her tongue, firmly shakes her head.

As the elevator closes behind the young volunteers, Ruti remains rooted near the front desk. She needs to clear her mind of Malka’s chatter before addressing the Kerrs. She needs to reassume the 59 years that have brought her to this day.

She needs to leave Room 306. Leave the very gray walls of Miss Merrick’s classroom.

Miss Merrick — hair parted close to her ear, like a side entrance to her head, and teased four inches above her hairline — hates her from the moment she thrusts open the door to the fifth-grade classroom. An image crosses Ruti’s mind, unbidden, of this stiffly dressed teacher curling strands of hair around rollers before going to sleep, until her entire head is lined with rolled hair, like bales of hay. Laughter plays on her lips, but the teacher’s hatred bores through her with such sharpness, the sound quickly morphs into a snort.

When Miss Merrick introduces the class to her system of “demerits,” Ruti can read the suspicion on her face, the clear assumption that: Ruti Hartman? She’ll get a dozen a day.

Naturally, Ruti hates her right back. She hates her so much, she refrains from acting out so as not to provide Miss Merrick the satisfaction of being right.

Instead, she does something a lot worse. She sits in her seat with a majestic scowl carved on her narrow face. She never once arms Miss Merrick with a reason to mark her down, because the teacher can never furnish proof of any misdemeanor. She never disturbs her lessons. She never talks fresh. She never “merits a demerit,” as Miss Merrick puts it with other girls who whisper or pass notes during class. Ruti simply chills the atmosphere in the room with the frosty glower on her face, aloof shoulders pointed like arrows at anyone who dares come near.

She also never hands in any schoolwork.

It starts right at the beginning of the school year.

“I’m missing your vocabulary sentences,” Miss Merrick points out as she takes attendance. Ruti sits motionlessly, as though it’s another Ruti the teacher is calling on. She wonders if she’ll “merit a demerit,” but Miss Merrick doesn’t record anything in her roll book.

The incident repeats itself the next day, and Miss Merrick instructs her to remain behind after dismissal. Ruti does not intend to do so, but the teacher stops her before she can slink out the door. “Maybe you want me to explain the words to you again?”

Ruti cringes at the sugar in her teacher’s voice. She looks down, drawing a frown-shaped scuffmark with the sole of her navy patent Mary Jane on the linoleum floor, then mutters, “I know what the words mean.”

Miss Merrick regards her through her round, wire-rimmed glasses, clearly skeptical. “Do you want to give me a sentence for the word launch?”

Ruti allows a moment to pass. Then, in a clipped voice, she says, “It took ten manned launches for NASA to finish Project Gemini.”

She can barely repress a smirk as she observes her teacher’s astonishment. Miss Merrick clutches the edges of her blazer, to regain control. She had expected to catch Ruti failing. She had not expected a sentence that both correctly used the vocabulary word and sophisticatedly shared a fact about world affairs.

Ruti does not merit a demerit. She can read the perplexity in her teacher’s mind, and it’s a heady feeling; to enter her head through that side entrance and mess around in there. That’s what you do to someone who hates you for no reason.

When she arrives home, her mother greets her with a yelp. “Ima’le! Yowww! You deedn’t clawz yer zeeper! Do you vont to cetch bronchitis?!”

It’s 59 degrees outside, a fine autumn day, and most of her classmates had come to school in thin sweaters. But it’s no use explaining this to her mother, who thinks Amerika is the North Pole and dresses her children like Eskimos.

Her mother orders her to the table immediately, to eat piping hot marak yerakot. Then she hovers over her until she finishes her entire plate of schnitzelim and pireh.

She never asks if she has homework. Maybe because fifth-grade English is above her immigrant pay grade, or maybe because homework is nowhere as important as finishing your supper, dressing warmly, and going to sleep on time.

If her mother doesn’t ask and Miss Merrick won’t give her a demerit, she has better things to do.

Like hiding in her room to listen to the latest reports from the battlefield in Vietnam on the radio of her alarm clock. She’d much rather come to Miss Merrick’s class equipped with quotes from LBJ than with dumb sentences for words that had long been part of her vocabulary.

That night, Ruti drifts off to the backdrop of casualty numbers and conscription lotteries.

Two decades of living alone hasn’t broken Ruti’s habit of maneuvering her shopping cart into the narrow aisle that juts off the paper goods section in the supermarket to check the price of tuna.

Ruti doesn’t eat tuna, but when Moshe had been alive he’d eaten it every day for lunch. It had been part of their weekly routine to compare the prices in every grocery in town.

She’d never dropped this routine, and when she sees a good deal, she thinks, “Moshe would have been so happy.” Then she calls each of her children to let them know, “Roth has the fancy tuna for $1.39.”

Her call to Bluma goes to voicemail, and when her daughter calls her back, Ruti is already home, unpacking the order, and she tells her she’s calling her right back from her landline, she hates talking on her cell.

“Next time text me,” Bluma says. “I can’t answer calls while I’m working, but I can read texts.”

Would her kids never give up on their mission to turn her into a millennial? Ruti snorts. “You know me and texting. I don’t know how everyone does it. Those tiny buttons….”

“You know, Ma? If you find texting clumsy, you can learn how to use voice notes.”

“Voice notes?”

Bluma says she’ll show her the next time she comes. Meanwhile, she wants to know if she’d spoken to Malka about her interview.

“Yes, yes. She called me,” Ruti says as she puts olives in the fridge. “What does she want to hear? I don’t have anything interesting to say. I’m not that old. I didn’t grow up in the shtetl.”

“Oh, leave it up to Malka, she’ll make it interesting,” Bluma assures her. “You must see how she writes. A budding little author. Did I show you the essay she wrote about summer vacation? Her teacher was astounded. She showed it to the principal. Hang on, I took a picture on my phone, I’ll send it to you.”

A second later, Ruti’s cellphone pings. She opens the message and clicks on the attachment.

She squints at the photo, at the tiny letters hopping like fruit flies over the lines of the paper. Her vision blurs and she gives a brittle laugh. “Oh, please. You don’t expect me to read this on a one-inch screen, Bluma, do you? I didn’t grow up in the shtetl, but I’m not that young.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. I’ll tell her to bring it over to show you. I think she wants to come over anyway, for the interview. Does tonight work for you?”

“You’re giving me homework, huh?”

Bluma says, “That’s it, exactly!” at the same moment that Ruti murmurs, too quietly for Bluma to hear, “I never did any homework, you know.”

Bluma doesn’t know, but Miss Merrick does. That day, in Room 306, when she’d gone in to serve the new patient her lunch, she’d avoided the woman’s gaze. It was as though her teacher would attack her again, demand an explanation for her negligence, for her poor attitude and lack of participation.

She’d focused on the lunch tray. Moved away the thick book that rested on the bedside table to make room for the food. “That’s a book about the Great Chinese Famine,” the old lady — Mrs. Sarah Russack — had explained. “Fascinating story. I can lend it to you when I’m done.”

Her voice gave Ruti chills. She spoke as though she was a teacher in a classroom, imparting a history lesson to her students. Ruti almost shot back, “When is the essay due?”

No, she’d never done any homework, and she has no intention of doing so tonight. The thought of homework ships her all the way back to those gray walls again, to that day when Miss Merrick pulled her aside and said, “If you’d like, Ruti, we can do your math homework together after school. Ratios can be really scary, right? So maybe we can turn it into a game, and then you’ll see that there’s nothing to be afraid of, because you’re such a smart girl.”

Smart girl, ha. Ruti hadn’t answered. Instead, she took the homework sheet from her teacher’s hand, fished out a perfectly sharpened, unused pencil from her plaid pencil case, and neatly filled in every example.

She’d played with the zipper of her pencil case while her teacher reviewed the work. Miss Merrick’s face remained impassive, but Ruti could sense her mounting surprise. Every answer was correct. Miss Merrick was speechless.

The next morning, her mother had confronted her. “Yer teacher culled me lest night. Vat’s the story vees yer humverk?”

Ruti kept her gaze on the pot of farina on the stove. “My homework? I got every answer right. I can show you. My teacher hates me for no reason.”

Her mother shrugged, put farina in a bowl, and reminded Ruti to wear a shawl, “Eet, metuka, eet the daisa. It’s frizink today.”

“Ma? Are you there?”

It’s Bluma, still on the phone, waiting for an answer.

For a moment, Ruti thinks about saying no, tonight won’t work, she needs to go to the rehab to cover a shift. But the rehab makes her think of Room 306, and she doesn’t want to go there, not even for an excuse.

Malka comes, backpack slung over her shoulder. “Styles work in cycles,” Ruti tells her. “I had a very similar plaid briefcase when I was your age. With a matching pencil case. You can write that in your report. I’ve watched those briefcases come in and go out of style many times over the years.”

Along with hairstyles.

Malka grins. “Cute!”

Ruti serves her cookies. Malka withdraws a folder from her backpack and finds her assignment sheets. She slides the stapled leaflet over to where Ruti sits.

Ruti stares.

School sheets look different today than they did “in her day.” None of the waxy paper stencil sheets smudged by the Ditto. Nothing handwritten.

This is probably what Malka wants to hear. Living History — the days before computers and photocopiers.

But she can’t talk about those days.

She doesn’t want to talk about school.

She doesn’t want to return to Miss Merrick’s classroom.

She doesn’t want to relive the humiliation of that day. That day in January. The day that the hatred exploded into something bigger than the gray classroom walls. Bigger than a little girl’s heart could contain.

She’d endured the rest of the year in silence, pretending the hatred didn’t hurt, that her skin was so thick. And the next year, Miss Merrick did not return. Her sixth-grade teacher was kind — she left Ruti alone. As did all her teachers for the rest of her school years. She didn’t bother them, they didn’t bother her. And if her failing grades bothered her mother, she didn’t do much about it. She was happy that Ruti was growing tall and beautiful and learning to cook and to sew with great skill.

But now, she needs to face Miss Merrick again. She is forced to enter Room 306 multiple times a day, to bring meals and take trays and to escort the patient to and from therapy. She is forced to listen to Miss Merrick — it is Miss Merrick, there’s no room for doubt, even if she goes by Mrs. Sarah Russack now — describe the book she’s reading, the columns in the magazines she’s into, her great interest in modern education.

Ruti looks at her granddaughter and swallows. This — talking about her generation’s stencils — she can do. She describes the purple ink permanently etched on pinkies. The chalk dust on uniform sweaters. Malka scribbles with the earnestness of a hungry reporter.

“Whoa, thanks!” she gushes. “This is, like, perfect. My teacher always asks us to include vivid details, and this is, like, totally perfect.” She smooths her paper, and something in her movements — that confident swiftness — makes the obstinacy in Ruti snap.

“Things were different in my day,” she tells Malka.

“You bet!” Malka says. “I’m trying to picture a blackboard in my classroom. It’s like, quaint.”

“Different, I mean, the learning was different. For certain girls. We did not have the resources you have today. So if a girl—”

What are you doing? What are you telling her?

But Malka is listening with great interest, and a devilish current propels the words from her mouth. “There was this girl… she… she couldn’t read. When her classmates learned the ABCs, then words and sentences, it all swam before her eyes. It was like looking at a whole bunch of floating shapes and being unable to form anything out of them.”

“So what did she do?”

“What did she do?” Ruti’s eyes race around wildly. “She fooled them. Her parents, her teachers, her friends. Nobody knew about her problem.”

“Really?”

“Except one teacher. She realized what was happening, and she wanted to help the girl. She wanted to teach her how to read. But the girl refused. She didn’t want to accept the teacher’s help.”

“And?”

And then the current halts, and Ruti emerges as though from a trance.

“And that was that,” she says brusquely. “It’s getting late, did you want anything else?”

Malka looks bewildered. “Um, yeah,” she says. “I need you to answer these questions.”

She waves the leaflet in front of her grandmother, and suddenly, Ruti’s eyes are smarting, the room is spinning, she feels sick.

She can’t do this.

She can’t do homework.

She needs to come up with an excuse.

You’re great at excuses. You survived fifth grade on the very best of them.

The image of Miss Merrick, with the facade of wrinkled skin and sagging eyelids, stationed in her wheelchair, floats before her eyes.

She can’t help her granddaughter with this assignment.

She will be that difficult interviewee, until Malka gives up and finds another subject. Or maybe she’ll “merit a demerit” — is that so terrible?

Okay, first, the sheet.

She takes the leaflet from her granddaughter and holds it at a distance from her eyes. Automatically, she gropes on her chest for her reading glasses. They’re not there.

“Did you see my reading glasses?” she asks Malka.

She checks the table, the counters. They spend some time searching the dining room, the study, her bedroom.

“I should have a spare pair somewhere,” she mutters, opening drawers, checking the mail cabinet. “Where did I put it?”

Malka keeps searching until Ruti says, “Forget it, mammele. Let’s not waste more time. How about you read those questions and I’ll try to answer?”

“Um… Okay. I guess.”

She gives her grandmother a strange look, like she’s some old and senile woman, a patient in the rehab facility where she works. Then she starts reading, slowly and loudly, as though Ruti is hard of hearing, slow on the uptake.

Sweetie, she wishes to tell the girl, you may think I lost my reading glasses, but you may not think I lost my mind.

The door to Room 306 is open when Ruti passes.

She means to walk right by, but her eyes are quick, and she cannot control what they take in during an unintended glance.

It’s Mrs. Sarah Russack, reading yet another book from the stash she’s brought along. As though this is an oceanside retreat and she is making the most out of her cherished vacation days.

Miss Merrick waves. Ruti’s hand intuits that it should wave back, but her brain halts the motion. She forces her arm up in the air, and the woman — Mrs. Russack, this is a patient named Sarah Russack, she needs to acknowledge that — smiles excitedly.

“Come,” she calls. “I need to show you something.”

Ruti propels her body into Room 306.

“Look,” the old woman says, holding up a pretty album. “My grandchildren made this for me. It’s a family tree. And they wrote a short story next to each name. Stories they’ve heard from me. They know how much I love these things. I’ve always had a passion for history, and my family’s history was always very important to me.”

Why am I not surprised?

“You should take a little break and read these. Here, this is about my father,” she says, pointing. “He married my mother shortly after he left a DP camp — he squeezed over a hundred oranges to make orange juice for their wedding — and they spent three years in Italy before moving to America.”

She extends the album for Ruti to take.

“Uh, sorry,” Ruti mutters. “I don’t have my reading glasses here.”

The woman — Miss Merrick, Sarah Russack, it’s all one and the same — looks at her sharply. “Your reading glasses,” she murmurs.

Ruti shivers.

“I need to go now. Uh….” She hesitates. She needs to say something. Excuse her ill-mannered behavior. “Uh, maybe I’ll send my granddaughter by later. She likes to come here with her friends.”

“Yes, of course,” the woman says softly, nodding. “School chesed project.”

“That’s… Her name is Malka. I’ll tell her to come say hello.”

“Of course. And bring your reading glasses. We can read those stories together.”

Is it her imagination, or does Ruti detect a wink?

She has errands to take care of after work — pick up ant traps from the hardware store, she’d found a colony near the guest room window; go to the bank to make a deposit; buy tights.

But her head is spinning, she needs a reset, so she goes home first.

At the door, she pauses to take in the day’s mail. Bills. Automatically, her stomach knots.

Moshe has been gone for twenty years, and still, the bills make her sweat. Bills are a man’s job. When her husband lived, she’d never spared those envelopes a glance.

But she will do it. She will rip them open, review the charges, make payments. She will be a big girl, as she’s learned to be with Moshe’s passing.

To do those bills, she needs her reading glasses. A smirk rises to her lips. You’ve got to sharpen your searching skills, she mentally teases her granddaughter. Because she knows exactly where to find her reading glasses when she needs them.

In her bedroom, Ruti crouches near her bed. She pulls out a shoe box — it’s the box from her rain boots, a good, strong box, a dependable hiding place — and removes the lid. Which pair? She rakes her fingers through her ever-growing collection of glasses. Some are twisted in chains she’s meant to wear from her neck — a sensible one from Walmart, a beaded one from one of the kids’ camp projects, one from lanyard that was “really cute just makes me sweat,” as she’d explained to another grandchild who’d crafted it for her.

She chooses a pair with a black plastic oblong frame. She will return it to the rain boots box as soon as she’s done with those bills. She’s careful not to let a single pair roam about, lest it’s found when it’s meant to be lost.

In the kitchen, she frowns at the credit card statement.

CONEDSSSSSION……… Bllliisiisl & Uliitissies …… $114.09

RRRRMAAANOWN SUPPPPRKAAAMEMMT …….. Goooorccsssiesrr ….. $139.55

FNNNINNEEEER PAAHARCCAAMY ……… Haaaleeeht & Wwwwwnnnlesnseee …….. $24.63

Her fingers ascend to her face. She yanks the glasses off, plants them on the table with a thud.

Enough.

She’ll call. She’ll pay the total. Whatever it is. Hopefully there are no mistakes, no wrong charges.

She hates this. Hates the dizzying dance of letters on the page. Hates those glasses that can’t seem to get those letters to stand still.

They won’t stand still.

They would never stand still for her.

Her mind races, far, far back, through years of school, her eyes stinging as they fight those dancing letters. Books; turning pages, as though absorbed in the story. Letters from her grandparents in Eretz Yisrael, surely filled with love and longing. Vy you dunt write beck? her mother questions, and she smiles and says, I have nothing to tell them. I’d rather send them something I drew.

Age doesn’t make things easier, but she masters those letters. She finds solutions, practical ones. Men take care of the mail. They fill out forms. Moshe is the only person in the world who knows the truth, and he protectively keeps her far away from all those graceless dancing letters.

And her children? Her children must never know. Must never suspect. No, she’s not much of a reader: If she has free time she’d rather bake or take a nap. Their homework? Lali Gluck from down the block is only too happy to earn a modest wage for being Ruti’s special homework teacher.

She lands back in reality with the ping of her phone. A message from Bluma, only it’s not a text, Ruti discovers as she puts back on her reading glasses. It’s a recording. A voice note, hey! She hits play.

Hey, Ma, how are you, where am I catching you? If you’re in my neighborhood today, mind stopping in to see these dresses I picked up for my girls? I found—

The message halts, but a moment later another one appears. How would her grandchildren put it? Cool.

She plays the message. Sorry, got cut off there. I want you to tell me if these can work for Meir’s bar mitzvah. I have until tomorrow to return them.

For a moment, Miss Merrick’s face swims before her eyes, but Ruti blinks the image away. She trains her eyes on her phone. It’s not a new phone, but this is the first time she notices the small microphone symbol near the typing field. Probably because she never texts, so why would she look? She hits it now. Nothing happens. Then she tries to hold it down, and, yep! She can record.

“Yes, I’m going to pass…”

Whoops. The recording stops abruptly. She fiddles around, notices the little “x” on the corner of her one-second recording, and deletes it before sending. She tries again. “Yes, I’m going to pass your house soon, in around fifteen minutes.”

It works! She is ecstatic. The children will be so proud. She’s practically 23.

In her daughter’s house, the contrast of her intense morning with the homey sizzle of sautéing onions hits her. The aroma is grounding.

Bluma shows her the dresses. Ruti frowns and — knowing they can still be returned — tells her the truth: She really doesn’t like them. “They may be in style, but I’ve seen this style on girls, and it really isn’t flattering. I would try to find something somewhat classier, no?”

“Right, that’s what I wasn’t sure about….”

She thanks her for her opinion, and Ruti is pretty sure her daughter is relieved that this decision has been made for her.

Bluma offers to pack up a portion of supper, but Ruti declines. She’s glad to help her daughter when she can, but she likes to make her own simple food. She likes to follow her own quiet routine, her own private life.

She’s at the door, on her way out, when Bluma brings up the interview.

“Malka says you’ve been so helpful with this assignment.”

Helpful?

She’d spoken to her granddaughter several times, but she hasn’t told her a thing.

Oh, sure, she’d shared lots of school memories. Where they’d gone for their school trips, which stories they’d acted out for their school plays and all the homegrown props and costumes they’d used. She’d spoken about typewriters and Kodak film and chalkboards; about paper fans in June and about Rosh Chodesh money — the dollar every girl was expected to bring to school on the first of every month, to cover the cost of chalk and paper.

But about school? About the rhythm and pulse that drove the days in Miss Merrick’s classroom? Of her fierce, almost obsessive grip on politics and war briefings? Of that, she hasn’t breathed a word.

“Oh, sure,” she tells Bluma drily. “No problem. I’m glad to help.”

“Isn’t it cute,” Bluma goes on, “how Malka takes these school projects so seriously? Soooo different from me, huh? I never gave a hoot. I partied straight through school.” She grins. “Honestly, I have no idea how you put up with that. I don’t think I would be so chilled if my daughter would have such an attitude.”

The words hit her like a spray of cold water. Chilled? She had never been chilled. She’d simply stayed away, as far away as she could from anything that would take her back to That Day.

“The truth?” she finds herself saying. “I never liked school. I… I really never liked it.”

“…and also about fashion. Shoes, clothing, hairstyles?”

“Hairstyles.” She needs to swallow before continuing. “There were no ponytails in my day. We wore our hair short. In a wedge. Very, very short.”

So short.

Her hair is cropped so short, she looks like a boy.

She cannot look in the mirror.

She cannot go to school.

She will stay in bed, pretend to be sick.

She will stay there for a week, for a month, for all the time it takes for her hair to grow back.

With her head resting on her pillow, she reaches up, tugs at the tufts of hair.

A cupcake.

Her hair looks like a cupcake.

She buries her face in her pillow, shivers beneath the nakedness on her head.

But then her mother comes into her room, and the alarm on her face is so fierce, Ruti cannot bear it. “Vut heppened, Ruti’la?!” She gasps. “Do you hev a fever?”

Ruti drags herself out of bed, gets dressed, and follows her mother to the kitchen. She assures her mother, who’s concocting an odorous drink of honey and vinegar and black pepper and alcohol, that she’s feeling perfectly fine now, she does not need this drink, she needs to leave quickly so she’s not late for school.

It’s January, and although hardly any of her classmates wear hats, at her mother’s behest, she does. Every day, she yanks the off-white earflap hat off her head before she reaches the block of the school, but today, she is in no rush to remove it. For a moment, she considers wearing it all day so nobody sees her awful haircut.

Earflap hat or cupcake? She has to pick her poison.

The crazy part is that it is not even a mistake. Her mother had done it quite on purpose.

Yaffa Monheit had called her mother the previous day, while Ruti was eating supper. Yaffa is her mother’s good friend from Petach Tikvah, who had moved to America a year after Ruti’s parents. It was her mother’s idea. There was an opening at the steel factory where her father worked, and she knew Yaffa’s husband struggled with parnassah, so she arranged the job for him. She has a daughter in the third grade in Ruti’s school. Whenever Yaffa calls, her mother lapses into an animated discussion in Hebrew, usually exchanging recipes and lamenting how cold it is in Amerika, so unlike the mild Israeli winters they so sorely miss.

Ruti had stopped eating to answer the phone on the kitchen wall. She had uncoiled the twisted cord to reach her mother at the sink. Her mother had planted the phone at her ear, leaning her head over the shoulder rest to talk to her friend. A minute into the call, she turned to Ruti abruptly and cried, “Yaffa says som geerls in skul hev neets!”

That had sealed her fate.

She was barely allowed to finish eating her meal before her mother’s haircutting scissors were out. Ruti was made to poke her arms through the two sides of a garbage bag and sit straight on the stepstool while her mother snipped. The dread hit her when her gaze landed on the floor. Her mother had cut so much hair — had she left any of it on?

“Ima’le,” her mother groaned with relief when the deed was done. “Neets! Eemejin!”

In the end, Ruti suffers a double humiliation. She starts the day wearing her hat, and when she can no longer stand her classmates’ stifled giggles, she yanks it off to reveal the greater of her shames.

Her imagination travels at great speed on that day in January. It makes her shrink, smaller and smaller, until she is an invisible particle nestled in the crevice of the screw that connects her seat with its legs. She is not here in the classroom.

When Miss Merrick starts Daily News by telling the class about a terrible accident in Spain, a jet collision, her hand is about to shoot up. She wishes to say, It was a B-52 bomber, it collided with a KC-135 jet tanker over Spain’s Mediterranean coast. She had heard it all two nights ago, in bed, on her alarm clock radio, and committed those names to memory to use at just this occasion.

But she will not share her knowledge today. She will not draw extra attention to herself, to the slashed rows of hair on her head.

It is a terrible day. The worst day of this school year.

And it is on this day, when she wishes to blend into the gray walls of the fifth-grade classroom, that Miss Merrick calls her out.

Miss Merrick is quiet.

As though from a cassette player with batteries that are expiring, Ruti hears her classmates’ garbled voices. They are calling names, assigning teams, and within minutes, the cries are heard. “Red Rover, Red Rover, we call… Chana right over!”

She pictures the two rows of girls, arms tightly linked, and Chana Meyer staking her prey. She can almost feel the slam of the girl’s body, swinging off her arm as she grips the hand of the girl next to her so the chain does not break.

Her classmates are enjoying recess. Only she stands outside in the hallway, her teacher staring at her, at her chopped-up hair.

Still, Miss Merrick is quiet.

Ruti shifts her weight. She dares a quick glance at her teacher’s face. Her teacher’s eyes are strange. They are grazing straight through her, with… with…

With hatred.

She blinks quickly.

Miss Merrick’s palm lands on her shoulder. Ruti shrugs it off. Don’t you dare touch me. I will… I will scream.

But she doesn’t scream. And Miss Merrick’s hand remains there, patting her back as though she is a goat in a farm, and it’s just so… horrible. How Miss Merrick is going to hurt her. How she is going to yell at her. How she will demand every homework assignment she’d issued since September. How she takes her other hand and lifts Ruti’s chin and says, “Ruti… It’s okay. You know that I know, right?”

And Ruti stands there on that day in January, the edges of her tiny hairs standing up, freezing at the roots, prickling at the tips, and she blinks rapidly, and she gives a small — a really, really small — nod.

“I can try to help you,” Miss Merrick is saying in a soft, gentle, warm voice. “After school. We will start with the ABCs. Move on to easy words. Slowly. One at a time. Nobody will know. You are a very smart girl, Ruti. A very, very smart girl.”

Ruti looks up at her teacher. Stares into those soft, green, glittering eyes.

“I hate you,” she blurts.

She breaks out of her teacher’s grasp, runs down the hallway, down the stairs. She pushes open the tall, heavy doors of the school building, and runs outside.

Without a coat.

Without a hat.

On That Day in January.

AT the bottom of the garbage bag, between peels of chatzilim, a mound of garinim shells, yeast paper from the bakery, and an empty jar of Israeli chocolate spread that her mother stocks up every time she goes to Israel, her radio alarm clock rests.

The clock ticks on the wall in Room 306 when Ruti shows up with lunch, a drumming beat. The TV screen is off, but in Ruti’s ears, the meteorologist reports the weather, the show host announces breaking news.

“Ah,” Mrs. Russack greets her. “Lunch. Thank you.”

Ruti nods. Then she starts rambling. “There’s split pea soup today. Eat it while it’s hot. And fish and mashed potatoes. Do you want me to refill your water pitcher? You can always call me if you need more water, you know. Or anything, you know. Adjust the heating. Fresh towels or whatever.”

Mrs. Russack gazes at her, lips hidden in the creases of her face. “Your granddaughter is sweet.”

She nods again.

“Really, really sweet. So full of life. She’s been telling me about her school project, her history report.”

Ruti’s vision blurs. Before her eyes, alphabets break into a dance. They flutter over lined paper, on tiny cell phone screens, on credit card statements and letters from grandparents in Eretz Yisrael.

Her breath shakes. She needs to adjust the heating. Hike up the temperature. No, drop it. Drastically. The room is small and stuffy. She needs to get out, quickly.

Mrs. Russack continues talking, a serene expression on her face. “I told her she can interview me. Not as a student — from a teacher’s point of view. Did I tell you I taught the fifth grade for several years?”

Ruti’s throat closes. Robotically, her fingers reach for the reading glasses dangling from her neck and wrap themselves around the frames protectively. She blinks stupidly at the old woman.

Ruti stays away from Room 306. At dinnertime, she tries to get someone else to deliver Mrs. Russack’s meal, but she doesn’t see any staff around, no volunteers.

Well, she would just drop off the food and leave. Her workday is over; it’s time to go home.

But when she nudges open the door, voices hit her. Young girls. Malka.

“Sooooo nice,” Malka is enthusing. “I wish we could make something like this for my grandmother. It’s so special!”

“This” is Mrs. Russack’s precious family tree album. So. Mrs. Russack has found someone to show it to.

Ruti wants to retreat, but it’s too late. Malka spies her and squeals, “Bubby!”

“Your grandmother,” Mrs. Russack murmers.

Everything twists into one big mess. The classroom walls and the rehab walls. Vocabulary words and family trees. Stiffly parted hair, swinging ponytail, closely cropped cupcake hair.

“Yes!” she hears Malka exclaim. “She’s the one I’m interviewing for my history report. Bubby, did you know that Mrs. Russack was a teacher? I’m adding a short Q&A to my report, what it was like to be a teacher in those days. And Mrs. Russack says she’ll answer my questions.”

Her arms weaken, she needs to put down the tray. Silently, she drags her feet through the room and deposits it on the bedside table.

“I told you I was a teacher,” Mrs. Russack says, addressing Ruti. “But only for a few years.”

“Why’d you stop teaching?” her reporter granddaughter asks.

It’s a question that had mystified Ruti for years. She’d been relieved that she didn’t need to face Miss Merrick again, but she’d always wondered, Why? Why did she leave? Where did she go?

“I didn’t really stopped teaching,” Mrs. Russack explains. “I just switched course. After a few years in the classroom, I got a degree in education and spent the next many, many years doing reading remediation. I taught children how to read, children who needed to learn in a different way than most students.”

“Wow,” Malka says admiringly. “That’s really special. Oh my!” she exclaims, and Ruti can read her thought patterns more precisely than any written sentence she’s ever faced.

She inches toward the door, but it’s too late.

“That’s like the girl you told me about. The one who couldn’t read. Except that girl didn’t want to learn, right?”

“I had a student like that,” Mrs. Russack says. “She was a bright girl, so intelligent. She had all those big words, I don’t know where she picked them up, because she couldn’t read.” She hunches her aged shoulders. “I wanted to help her. But she refused. She was so… proud. Too proud.”

Malka frowns.

“Sometimes I think,” Mrs. Russack continues, “all my work with struggling students, it’s all her credit. It was so frustrating, watching her suffer. It pushed me to get through to the weakest readers.” She pauses, shifts her gaze, stares directly at Ruti with squinting eyes. “And all those years, when I taught children to read, I thought about her, hoped she’d somehow mastered reading.”

The room is silent, Malka and her friends hanging on to every word. Ruti wavers at the door, feet prickling with the urge to run.

And then Malka throws out a question, to the air. “Did she?”

Mrs. Russack doesn’t answer. Instead, she looks at Ruti with a sad smile.

Ruti holds the door with one hand. With the other, she clutches the reading glasses that are now buried deep in her pocket.

She withdraws the glasses and slides them onto her face. “No,” she says to Malka. To Miss Merrick. To herself. “She never learned to read.”

And she adds, wistfully. “But what do you think, Malka? Can she still be taught?”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 976)