Smiling Behind My Mask
I’m smiling behind my mask. Really, I promise!
Behind the Ninja-black mask cut from an old t-shirt, my face is breaking into a wide grin as our eyes meet across the fiberglass partition that now protects you from the parade of people coming through your check-out line at the grocery store, hour after hour, day after day. You’re one of my favorites. I’m always happy when your line is short. When there’s time, I’ll even wait longer just so you can scan and load my groceries. There’s an art to packing a full cart into oversized reusable bags, and it’s an art you've perfected, carefully placing items together by type and temperature, making unloading groceries at home so much faster. On a normal Saturday, we smile at each other and make small talk while you carefully place boxes of pasta together in one bag, ice cream and yogurt in another, always asking if I need the gallons of milk bagged. To which my response is always no. And in small bits along the way, we exchange acknowledgments of what it’s like to feed teenage boys, seemingly bottomless pits of hunger that consume large quantities of milk, cereal, and ice cream, more than a single trip to the grocery each week can sustain. Which is why our paths often cross multiple times a week, the slight banter a steady backdrop to the routine chore of shopping.
Today, I crinkle my eyes and scrunch my nose, hoping to convey the smile behind the mask. Not a mask, technically, but a face-covering. As my colleagues in public health emphasize, true masks are reserved for health care workers who so desperately need more than the available supply. My Ninja-black cut-out t-shirt face-covering is simply a piece of cloth, a stretch of fabric of unknown efficacy at blocking coronavirus particles, but a relatively easy precaution to take in case I’m one of those healthy people going about my weekly shopping with no idea I’m carrying the plague, potentially contaminating the air around me with every breath. So it’s a face-covering, but it does mask the expressions I typically use to connect with people I meet along the way.
I’m a habitual smiler. One of the stereotypes of Americans is that we’re always smiling. Not that we’re always happy, but that our gregarious cultural norm is one of broad grins and friendly greetings to acquaintances and strangers alike. At least that's true in the Midwest town where I grew up. In my late teens and early 20's, I had to learn to temper my smiling demeanor. One of the first and clearest memories of my freshman year at college, on the East Coast outside of Philadelphia, is of walking down a sidewalk across a broad expanse of rolling green grass in between stone buildings and smiling to greet the person approaching from the other direction. She didn’t look up. Didn’t acknowledge our paths crossing. Definitely did not smile. It was jolting to feel invisible, to be rebuffed in what had seemed at the time a simple courtesy that people exchanged, if only out of politeness. Several years later, while living in Moscow in mid-1990's, I quickly discovered it was physically impossible to make my face as flat and expressionless as the faces of fellow subway commuters. Traveling each morning from the southern suburbs to the city center, I studied the faces of the men and women sitting near me, pulled tightly into themselves in their nondescript clothing, heavy socks, and black shoes. As residents of the former Soviet Union, they were masters at the art of being invisible. No change of expression ever caused the slightest movement of facial muscles. Even their eyes were sheltered in a way that communicated nothing. No interest. No curiosity. No greeting. No acknowledgment of fellow passengers, sometimes packed so tightly we breathed each other's breath. Every morning I practiced assuming a neutral expression, hoping that a mask-like face would allow me to pass through the crowd as nondescript as everyone else, in spite of my Western coat and hair cut, and the expensive boots that kept my feet warm against the Russian winter.
I doubt I was successful. Being expressionless is deeply counterintuitive to me. But by the time I returned home, people with whom I interacted during casual encounters did not immediately detect I was American. Not Russian, clearly, but perhaps from Bulgaria, or one of the Baltic states — or so the woman who sold apples on weekdays outside my office said when, on a whim, I offered a “good-bye” before leaving the country. Maybe my Russian had improved enough to erase the glaring American accent, but I also credit progress in meeting blank expression with blank expression, at curbing my instinct to smile, and at walking through the world as I if were invisible.
Standing at the grocery check-out counter in April of 2020 behind my Ninja face-covering, I feel an odd mixture of invisible and uncomfortably self-conscious. About half of the people in the store are wearing true masks. A couple of people are sporting scarf wrap-arounds or bandana coverings. It seems as if everyone is staring at the ridiculous piece of cloth that makes me look like a burglar or a bandit. I keep smiling, smiling at my favorite cashier, but she can’t see the smile. Possibly because I haven’t learned, yet, how to smile with my eyes and with my forehead in a way that’s visible to another person. Possibly because her job has unexpectedly morphed from carefully scanning and bagging other people’s food for hourly wages lower than I can imagine, into standing on the front line of exposure to a virus that could be coming toward her, invisible, at any moment. No wonder she watches those of us shopping with what seems like fear as we load our carts with food and stress about what we could or couldn’t find on the shelves, whether or not we have enough provisions for the week, and if we've managed to stay 6 feet away from everyone else in the process.
She hurries, now, to fill small plastic bags with my groceries. The carefully packed reusable ones transformed from a socially conscious choice to a potentially germ-laden luxury of the past. When she’s finished, and after I've paid with a credit card, disinfecting the card reader with wipes I now carry in a bag in my pocket, she passes the receipt to me in a reluctant gesture that brings us within six feet of each other. I keep my face down, sad that this part of life is also so altered, ashamed that my ability to keep a well-stocked refrigerator requires that she, and so many others, put themselves at risk. Hurrying out of the store, I transfer the bags to the trunk of my car and pull the Ninja face-covering off as quickly as I can, then disinfect my hands and everything I've touched using the second bag of wipes stored in the front-seat cupholder.
Meeting my own eyes in the mirror, I wonder why I was in such a hurry to leave. There's nothing pressing on my calendar. No activities to juggle. More than enough time to cook dinner. I wish I could rewind the clock to eight weeks ago. To a Saturday afternoon in February, when I was in a rush after skating practice, trying to get home in time to fix dinner. Wondering how many teenage boys would be at the house, and how long they would stay. Thinking I could grill chicken, or just order pizza. I wish I could go back to that particular afternoon, standing in the grocery, when I took a deep breath and stopped to enjoy the care the cashier took sorting and bagging my purchases. When I reminded myself to slow down, and made a joke about how much cereal my kids eat, and she nodded her head in understanding, and we laughed about growing boys. Sitting in my car now, I wish I had also taken the time to look more closely at the name-tag pinned to her uniform shirt. That I had greeted her not just with a smile, uncovered and free, but also with her name. I wish I had met her eyes and said "thank you" for the job she does so well that makes my life a little bit easier, and for the weekly rhythm of small moments of shared understanding between two strangers.
Next time I'm in the grocery store, sporting a Ninja face-cover beneath smiling eyes, I hope I get the chance.