Masks and Mouths

 

We’d been in class a couple of weeks before I saw one of my student’s faces. Until this point, everyone had been following the mask protocol pretty well. I can’t remember who it was anymore, but they brought out a bottle of water or something, slipped the mask down and completely changed my perception of what they looked like. Under the mask: that knot of a nose, that burgeoning mustache, writhing lips over a chin looking like an elbow, something to be drawn into a shirtsleeve, not something to be loosed and wagged around. Everything below the mask had an underdone quality to it. This may have been the result of faithful covering or just the way we look. And then there were the teeth, askew, clawing at the air as if trying to find purchase on the emptiness that surrounds us all. Just as I was about to gasp, the mask went back up and the vision reconciled itself to the person I knew who sat in front of me twice a week from 10-12. That is, the student turned back into attentive, sleepy or furtive eyes. Without a face.

Later that week, I took my students from another class outside on a bold pretense, considering I teach English and there’s no reason to go outside that’s not flimsy or back-to-land sounding. But I’d convinced myself and, most of the time, that’s the only authority in need of convincing. We went out into the rawness of the afternoon sun and a student asked about masks. Here we were, six feet apart and outside. We could take them off right? Right, was my reply and, for most of the students, they came down. There were a few stragglers, but suddenly, I was looking at the chewing, cheeking, lisping humanity of my students. But rather than have another Poe-like epiphany when I was paralyzed by the moist gnashings of unmasked speech and riveted to the singular disturbing feature of what amounts to a hole in the head, I had a single impression: “my god, they’re all babies”, I thought. And I felt a sudden need to protect them or at least to treat them with all my kindness and patience. Their mouths, perhaps underused and silent, seem to speak their inexperience without moving.

The eyes have a deceit—it’s not intentional—but they are capable of holding back truths that the jaw and the mouth reveal in their nervous or flustered ruminating. They are also usually quite symmetrical—being mirrored by each other—and the mind naturally continues this symmetry all the way down the face as an assumption. But, in almost every case, the mouth acts against this symmetry. It might be that a mouth just isn’t symmetrically linked with the eyes or that mouths are just harder to balance, maybe because there’s only one. Whatever the case, the mouth, rather than the eyes, seems the vessel of our shared humanity. Perhaps this is why we kiss, rather than touch eyes. We carry around who we are like dogs carrying ravaged sticks. It may be that the eyes will give away a lie, but the mouth is where the lie will remain long after it’s told, sagging, pursing and drooling.

These students were people beyond the subdued expressions of their eyes. Their mouths suddenly began to twitch to life to communicate this; I think they were too polite to comment on everyone’s sudden change of appearance, but, thankfully, at least one observation was lobbed to me.

“Professor, you have a beard?!”

How incomparably older I must’ve seemed to them. Not of their fecundity, pale shoots stirring under the soil, but like something aged. What do they bury to age? Cheese? Wine? Certainly not pretty images, but I imagine they were just as vulnerable. I saw in the students, inexperience and eagerness, they saw in me—pirate bearded, crooked toothed, chapped—old indulgences, fatigue and sun ravaged skin. I’m sure they inwardly recoiled a little before remembering the archetype other teachers established before me: we are an ugly, time-ravaged lot. Often teachers are the first to give this impression to the youth. Their parents’ faces are too familiar to reveal it. Besides, unconsciously, they retain the memory of their parents’ faces from birth when they were still hale and, in the case of the mother, quite flushed with youth and purpose. I remember, in elementary school, musing on the ugliness of at least a few of my teachers. And here I was, equally aged and ugly before my own students, giving off faint fumes of stale coffee and out-of-country dental work, cheeks creased by lack of sleep and stress, shaven in strange places. And yet, this must’ve been expected in fact, if anything, I think it made me less intimidating for, suddenly, they all began to talk at once. It was as if the extra moisture from their mouths had pushed the saturation over the limit in the clouds above and it started to pour language, unimpeded, sighing, clicking, lingual, soft-palated language. For a moment, I left my mask dangling on my ear and then took it off. If nothing else, I was damn tired of breathing my own smell.