Veiled

It was startling. Only the eyes.  I tried not to stare at my new student. I'd seen others like her before, who chose to cover their faces, but never in my English class. She was tall and thin and so timid that I could barely hear her voice through the veil. She was late the first day because she got lost. She seemed a little lost the whole term. 

At the beginning of the next term, a Latina woman and a woman from Ethiopia came in and sat down. I began to try to learn their names the way I always do. Large post-it notes with their first names on them went on the table in front of them, facing me. “So I can see your name. Face. Name. Face. And remember,” I said. My hands moved from the table to their faces, up and down. 

Just before class was supposed to start, a woman in a hijab walked in and sat in the back. Another new student. “And what’s your name? I need to write it on this paper,” I said. 

“Teacher, it’s me.  I’m not a new student.”

I stared at her face. It was true. The eyes were right. The voice was right. But I had never seen her face before. For the entire previous term, she had covered it with a veil. 

The fascinating thing was I had created a face for her. Her eyes were beautiful. Huge and trusting. Her long lashes used to get tangled in the top of the veil. She constantly pulled it down to see. I assumed that the veil was hiding unparalleled beauty, that those who gazed upon her face would be struck dumb by it’s radiance. 

Unveiled, the thing that struck me about her wasn’t her eyes. It was her crooked teeth. She was beautiful, to be sure, but not in the way of goddesses. She was a mere mortal, who—had she grown up in Minnesota—would have spent her adolescence dreading trips to the orthodontist to tighten her braces.