You there? Tzippy again.

Two seconds later, she calls.

“Chava, I loved what you said, how you said it. You’re fun, interesting, you sound scholarly without even trying. Listen, I’m going say it again. You should teach, you know you should.”

“Tzippy, we’re not going there, please. You know I can’t.”

$$does this need a separator? Ask Bassi$$

I come out of my room and stretch. Wonder what’s for dinner? Most of my classmates are cooking; trying and flopping new recipes. I get Ma’s cooking. Not complaining about that one.

Ma’s on the phone. “Mrs Rottenberg,” she mouths.

I ladle some soup into a plate, sit and eat with a practiced calm, like Ma’s conversation has nothing to do with me.

“What’s his problem?” I say casually, as soon as she gets off the phone.

“Oh, Chava. I don’t think we’re gonna look into it. Mrs. Rottenberg doesn’t realize—”

“You didn’t say what his issue was.”

While my mother is pursing her lips, wondering if she’s going to hurt me more by saying or holding back, I push back my chair and scram. Who says I can take this?

I take the stairs and peer into the bathroom mirror. As if I don’t know what I’ll see… I reach out and probe the scar, the puckered skin across my cheek, the hardened line that juts down toward my mouth and disfigures my lip. It’s not fascinating anymore. Not repelling anymore. Maybe it’s already me, embedded into skin, gone more than skin-deep.

I almost died, okay. One of these huge building sites, cement and rubble and a hole six feet deep. It was dark, they hadn’t put up a proper barrier, I lost my footing.

So what if I don’t want to remember? Can’t remember? When I try to focus, all I see is the hole.

They told me there were broken bones, that I nearly lost my eyesight, that it was a miracle I was healing as fast I was. They said I’d scraped the skin on my face clean off, so they sewed me up, grafting skin to make me whole again. For weeks I couldn’t look at my face.

But I’d been saved. It was the longest, hardest summer of my life. By September the pain had subsided, but the ugliness was still there. I gulped and went back to school with everyone else. My friends knew me from before the accident, and somehow — sheer teenage grit — I got back to the place I had in school, somewhere very near the top, plugging away at my grades again, learning, devouring knowledge, acing tests. My confidence following somewhere behind me, never quite catching up.

“Chava,” Ma calls up the stairs.

I turn away from the mirror.

Mrs Rottenberg, she doesn’t get it. Does she realize what it took for me to go back to school, to graduate, to attend seminary? The boys she suggests… And if the shadchan can’t give me a chance, can’t look beyond my face to see me…

I shut the light and slam the door. The mirror rattles. Good.

****

Cursor’s blinking, white on dark blue. I’m stuck on a line of coding. Hm. I click to open Coding Connected, the Slack group for developers I’m part of when my phone rings.

“Hey, Tzip,” I say distractedly, still trying to figure out that last line.

“Whatcha doing? Work?”

“So what if I am?”

“Boring,” Tzippy says. “But at least you can keep working.”

“Through the lockdown, you mean?” My tone is too chipper.

“Yeah, lockdown.” She says this with appropriate dread. “They want me to teach from home. And Yudi’s not going to playgroup, Shlomo has no kollel, obviously… but like all three of us, in my tiny one-bedroom apartment? Chava, I need air, I need space. I need them out, I need to be out. I can’t.”

Note of panic in her voice.

Stuck home with all her blessings? Nebach.

A cynic lives inside me; I’m 23 and I’ve seen too much of life. But it’s dwarfed by other things, I like to think.

“Poor girl,” I say. “No, you can’t, that’s crazy for you.”

Quiet.

“And you can, huh? It’s easy for you?” Tzippy sounds angry. She falters then, realizes that maybe it hurts, maybe it’s not a choice I ever made — to work from home, to stay home for days on end.

“Chava,” she says in a small voice, “I’m sorry. How do you do it?” I feel it then, her empathy. She’s not asking because she’s frantic about herself, but because for once she really gets me, feels me. What it’s like to keep yourself in, stay inside, when maybe you’re not even wired like that.

I finger my injured jaw. “I don’t know anymore.”

*****

I check the news again. I was never so into the news before, but it’s become a thing. A world biting its nails and refreshing the page. I scroll through an article about the most recent restrictions, pausing to look at the photos. They still seem surreal to me: empty streets, shuttered shops, the lone passersby masked. I skim the banner at the bottom of the screen: County closes parks and playgrounds through April 30.

Suddenly I need to get out. Forget work emails, forget Coding Connected. The world is closing in on us, swing set by bolted swing set. Could they really do that?

I sit in my car, feeling the jolt of the wheel, the rush of my own pulse in my wrists. The sidewalks are empty, but in the Walmart at the junction there’s a line of people waiting to enter. I join the highway, the trickle of cars leaving town. On the other side there’s heavy traffic into the city. Everyone’s going home, heading back, staying close to base. Like I always d.o

Why am I gallivanting away when people are only out for toilet paper, and hand soap?

Twenty minutes of coasting. There’s the exit, the boardwalk. A strip of sea not too far from home.

I get out of the car, take a mask from the glove compartment. New normal. I pull it onto my ears, over my nose, over my scar. I lean against the railing, and watch the sea; wild and foaming in the waning light.

There are others out too, walking on the boardwalk. I’m not the only one out for a whiff of freedom on one of the last days of the world as we know. They’re masked, each one, I realize. Today, I’m just another girl. I want to laugh, to shout.

Instead I bite back tears. The brine of the sea tastes of freedom, so caustic, so wonderful. I cry because I’ve never felt like this before. The freedom of being trapped in a mask, looking exactly like everyone else, it pulls my heart wide open.

I stand there, thinking how crazy I am. Half-caring so badly, half not caring at all.

The night grows darker, my phone vibrates inside my bag as I get back in the car. In the dark I think of all the journeys, to specialists, dermatologists, who all shook their heads and said, in grave voices, I should be glad I’d gotten away with this.

This. Kids who pointed, expressions that flinched and then recovered. Seven years since the accident; a lifetime of running away from people who didn’t know better. Of holding back from what I wanted to do.

I get home, wrung and weary, into a quiet that sits on the city like an intruder, and I wonder if an end can also be a beginning.

*****

Pesach under lockdown, a summer of restrictions, enforced then eased, then enforced again. Stores and offices open, then closed. And through it all the masks.

They weren’t as strict in other places. I knew that in town, most shuls and communities had reverted back to normal. My friends in Lakewood laughed when I described the masks and restrictions that were still in place here, eight months into the pandemic. “It’s soo typical for you out-of-towners,” Fraida had laughed. I smiled, said nothing.

Tzippy calls one day, a couple weeks after Succos. “Positive,” she says in a sniffy voice.

“Noooo, poor you. But hey, listen, you’re healthy, young, strong, you’ll be good to go in a week.” I’d had the virus myself for a few days in the summer. Was back to myself in less than a week.

“So first, we’re all home. Yudi can’t go to playgroup, we’re quarantining again when no one else is. And school’s finally started, and what am I going to do?”

She sounds like she’s drowning.

“I don’t mean to spring this,” she says in a rush. “, but I’m in my third month, and I’ve been feeling so awful…. Remember how I was with Yudi? And now this, and I’m scared, they said I was vulnerable.” She says this like a dirty word. “School is being awful about it, they’re insisting we get substitutes, competent substitutes. Mrs Schon says they’re just picking up the pieces, and can’t have teachers dropping them again.” She mimics the principal of the high school she works in.

I laugh. She doesn’t.

“Chava, won’t you do it for me? Eleventh-grade Chumash would be a breeze for you. I trust you, I’d feel so much better about it. Listen, Chava, these are desperate times, and hello,” something dawns on her, her tone loses its whine, like she knows this is a deal-clincher. “Hello, Chava, we gotta wear masks all day in school, they’re super strict about it. You could do it, couldn’t you, with a mask?”

I throw my cell phone onto the bed. The nerve.

Muffled static. Tzippy’s saying something, let her say it to my linen. The girl had gall. I’d always promised myself I would never teach, I couldn’t put myself at the mercy of young girls. Tzippy knew that.

But… she was right, there were masks. For once, no one would know what I really looked like. Could I do it?

“Tzip.” I sit down on my bed.

“Yeah,” she says gingerly.

“Okay, fine, I’ll do it. But only because they say you’re vulnerable.”

We both laugh.

And just like that, I’m a teacher.

*****

Monday. I blow my hair, choose an outfit, choose a mask. Light gray to go with my sweater.

I put my notes in a bag, and get in the car. It’s early, I’m unhurried, out with the birds, with the commuters. It’s a fairly new high school, just a half-hour drive. I don’t know almost anyone there, which suits me just fine.

Mrs Schon gives me a brief, distracted welcome, and shows me to my classroom. It’s real, it’s happening. Fifteen socially distanced 11th graders stand for me.

I see flimsy, blue masks, one white cloth mask. My notes tremble in my hand.

The girls sit, the principal click-clacks down the hall. I hear my voice in the room.

“Good morning, I’m Miss Eigner, I’ll be teaching Chumash instead of Mrs Halpern for the next little while. Bereishis, perek beis, let’s start.”

I translate and explain, and someone has a question. A great question. They scan their Chumashim, brows furrowed. I find a response, they like it.

“Now I get it,” says a petite kid in the front row.

I pretend this is all normal. That I know what I’m doing, that I’ve done it before.

They don’t know that this is a first, a very first. I’m a small woman in the front of the room, with a lot of conviction, a love for Chumash, and what will become a signature piece, a gray mask.

I throw myself in, listen to the buzz of learning, watch them leave with the bell. They have no idea what they’ve given me.

“How was it?” The vice principal, Mrs. Reinhold, asks, just as Mrs. Schon is coming toward me.

“Good, good,” I say. I’m smiling under my mask, but maybe she can’t even tell.

Just for today I relish the feeling of heady potential, the care I feel for the girls I’ve only just met.

*****

It’s a week in and I ask Nina, the girl in the front, to read aloud from the Chumash. She reads slowly, stumbling over the words. Why did no one tell me? Why did she agree to read? The girls sit through her halting reading. They’re used to it.

I smile at Nina, hoping it reaches my eyes, hoping she can tell from the crinkles atop my mask how much her effort means. I should lower it, just a bit, so she can see my expression. But I wouldn’t, not even for Nina.

I assign work in pairs. The hum of translation, explanation, around me. I circle the desks, stopping here to point out a word, there to murmur agreement. Once around the room, twice, I come back to the board. I’m telling them the pshat, the profound simplicity of the pasuk, before we go on to the mefarshim. My voice is quick and excited, and I’ve been doing this for a week, and maybe I was born to do this?

Miriam stretches, then shoves her mask under her chin. It’s not the first time the girls have moved and adjusted and divested themselves of the required mask, but suddenly I go clammy.

“Miriam,” I say, in a warning voice and make a motion with my hand, up, up.

Someone titters. I hold my hands together to ground myself, finish the explanation quickly.

They are writing notes and I look back at Miriam, who’s readjusted her mask. I watch them, my charges, my girls, checking and writing and absorbed, when a thought hits me: What if corona ends tomorrow? They find a vaccine, whatever. What if they let go of the masks just like that?

*****

“Chava, how are you?” Tzippy’s all cheer. “The principal’s thrilled to pieces. Did you know that she spent like 20 minutes outside your classroom today?”

“I thought I noticed someone there. Does she really do that? Just stand and listen?”

“Well, if she’s interested enough, yeah.”

I’m at my desk, catching up on work for my real job. I’m doing both jobs and managing. Sort of.

“The thing is this,” Tzippy says, and I gulp. She’s going to come back next week and I’d be back to my lonely existence, yawning days spent coding in my bedroom, with only Coding Connected, that virtual group that was more virtual than it was group. How will I go back to that?

“…my two weeks of quarantine are nearly up, but I’m still not feeling well…. My doctor’s a little worried. Maybe it’s not even related to the COVID, who knows, but he told me that I need to take it easy, he’s even talking about maybe putting me on bedrest.”

“Really?” I say cautiously. “I mean I hope you feel good soon.”

When she gets off the phone, I twirl, all 23 years of me, round and round the room.

*****

The teachers are still schmoozing in the teachers’ room, as if the bell isn’t going to ring in a half a minute.

Mrs. Schon enters, conspicuously checks her watch, then frowns at Baila, another 11th-grade teacher, whose mask is on her chin. “Masks, ladies.”

“Enough is enough.” Baila is clearly trying not to roll her eyes. “We’re in the teachers’ room, no one else is here.”

Mrs Schon sighs. “I’m afraid we need to follow the guidelines, even when they seem over the top. All we need is to be closed down again.”

“Right.” Mrs. Reinhold, the vice principal, gives Baila a look.

My mask’s over my nose, as it always is.

Baila turns on me, “How do you do it? I mean don’t you feel stifled? Sweaty? Do you ever eat? I’ve never so much as seen you even adjust your mask.”

I start to sweat, then mumble something. “It’s not so hard, you know—”

“Poster child for the department of health,” Baila mutters. I turn and flee the room.

*****

A couple more weeks of Chumash with the 11th grade. I learn almost more than I teach. About the girls, the dynamics; characters, confidence, bluster. I learn how to show up as a person so that they can trust me, so I can get through to them. And I think I am — even to Miriam, who has attitude with a capital A. I learn to swallow and smile and not take it personally when she needs to leave the room again, when she removes her mask and plays with it and the elastic breaks off. It’s my thing, not hers. I start to feel comfortable in the classroom, with Nina’s reading, with Sara’s questions.

I can’t not do this, I think, when I dismiss them each day, when I watch them wander down to the lunchroom and worry if Leah will have a seat, if Nechama will just sit and review her notes instead of socializing. I can’t not teach.

I dare to call Tzippy.

“I’m getting back to myself,” she says, while I try to breathe. “I hope I’ll be up to coming back next week. Thanks so much for—”

But I don’t hear. One more week, and, and… and one day the pandemic will be over and I’ll never get a chance again.

Can I ever go back to my other life? I never found coding boring. It’s like learning a new language, I tried to tell Tzippy and the naysayers. But now I’ve found more. I invest myself in Bereishis, in Rashis, let the narrative come alive for me. Sure, I follow speakers and listen to a weekly shiur, but this is the deep end all over again.

“Talk soon,” I cut Tzippy off, too cold inside to care.

*****

On Friday, there’s pandemonium in the teachers’ room. The principal’s son tested positive. And though she tested negative, she’s going to be off from school for two weeks. Mrs. Reinhold clicks around the room, tapping teachers on the shoulder. “Teachers, teachers, to your classrooms.”

There’s someone who’s been waiting for her moment.

But apparently she’d forgotten that Friday is assembly. That this Shabbos is not just any Shabbos, it’s the Shabbos before Chanukah.

She corners me as I’m coming out of my classroom. “I haven’t had time to prepare anything,” she tells me, in a voice just short of nonchalant. “I’m more of an administrator, you know, not a speaker. You don’t happen to have a vort on Chanukah that I could tell to the school, do you?”

I can’t help being flattered even if she’s probably only asking me because I’m young and unmarried and temporary and she doesn’t care as much about what I think of her.

I nod, but she’s talking again, “Chava, how about if you talk? I mean, I’ll start, I’ll introduce you of course. But you have something ready, you might as well tell it.” She looks at her watch. “And also, we’re running out of time.”

The assembly’s in five minutes. Ha. What to say? I’d heard a few shiurim this week, shared some ideas with my class.

“So you’ll do it?” It’s not really a question.

“How much choice do I have?” I say lightly.

Relief colors her features. “Thanks, Chava, really.”

More bark than bite there, I think. It’s not really such a big deal. I know how to talk, how to deliver a point. I walk away, fingering my mask.

A short while later Mrs. Reinhold’s standing in front of the whole school, clapping a hand on the lectern.

The student body rises, then sits.

“A gutten Erev Shabbos,” she says, clearly enjoying herself up there. Sure, she’s taking the honors and leaving the hard part to me.

She introduces me, and I walk up to the front. It’s a big crowd from here. Groups and groups of girls in scattered capsules, the teachers sitting all along the periphery.

I take the mic, feeling my heart in my chest. Inhale. I start to talk.

The sound is slightly muffled. Is it the mic? I tap at it, but when nothing resolves, I keep going. I explain an initial thought about Greek culture, ask a question. I can sense the interest in the room. I start to relax, when someone in the back says, “We can’t hear you.”

Oh.

“It’s the mask effect,” someone else says, “Talking through a mask into the mic makes it unclear.”

From the side I see Mrs. Reinhold motioning to me. “Listen, no one else is on stage. You don’t need a mask from that distance,” she says. “Take it off, we’ll hear you better.”

Whispered words shouted so loud. I start to shake my head. I blink and see blue, blue, blue of hundreds of masks, of Mrs Reinhold’s teal scarf. Blue, blue, I’m blacking out. I’m going to fall. I see myself coughing and wheezing and feigning an asthma attack, collapsing onto the stage, it shouldn’t be too hard to buckle, bend—

Blue, blue, faceless girls. There in the third row is Nina. Winking?

I’m a teacher, her teacher. She knows me, they know what I can give, what I have given all these weeks. And it was me.

I cough.

All along it was me.

I force myself to stop coughing. Reinhold is still staring at me expectantly. It might have been just half a minute. The girls aren’t fidgeting, they’re still looking at me, my own students beaming.

I summon the shiur back into my mind, over the voice that’s screaming for me to run, run away. I swallow seven years of restraint, and I slowly lower my mask.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 720)