writeoneleaf:

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“She doesn’t have eyebrows,” she said, pouring over the sketchbook whose cover was hastily taped back together after an unfortunate backpack incident, Hello Kitty plastic book paper laminating it. The cats with no mouths littering the cover had eyebrows. Angry eyebrows. Waggly eyebrows. But the character we were looking at didn’t.

I flipped one page forward. Then two. Three. In high school I had a habit of forgetting to draw eyebrows. Too many of the shows I liked had characters whose hair flopped over their brows moppishly, and at 15, I wasn’t exactly a hotbed of creativity.

“This one needs eyebrows,” she said as I turned another page. I poised my pencil. Everyone was getting eyebrows that day, I decided. They were easy. I loved them. A few jagged strokes over the eye. Maybe a smudge of the finger for shadow. Instant expression. But I forgot them all the time. Two clicks of the BIC and I was going through page after page, my best friend lounging over our backpacks, straight onto my lap.

“Oh, this one actually has some,” she stopped my hand. It stood poised, like an awkward encounter with a crush. Close enough to kiss, but not ready. The now-or-never shuffle. This moment is important. A sad looking girl with eyebrows. She’s already been kissed. Maybe by the sad looking boy without any, hands in pockets because hands are hard.


“Double eyebrows!” I said, and I drew her an extra pair. I can’t stop my hand now. It becomes a joke. My friend is sitting up and we’re flipping through the pages faster now. Everything gets eyebrows. I come across the hilt of a sword I had drawn, large, gem-encrusted. “This sword needs eyebrows!” I say, and we nearly suffocate. We’re laughing too hard and I’m doubled over the paper.

It’s one of those jokes that follow me around for years. The two of us nudge each other all day in class the next morning, drawing eyebrows on everything. The rest of our friends laugh without knowing the joke. It’s contagious. Slow smiles. When I get home, my dad is in a mood. He’s poured his pills in the sink and turned on the water. He wants to die. His kids are ugly and untalented and today he hates his wife, who is also ugly and fat and untalented, and no one really knows how or why he came to that conclusion so suddenly. He has decided today to be very different, as periodically he decides to do. He breaks some furniture. He’s a lot like everyone’s dad.

When I can’t cry anymore my face feels too hot and my mouth feels heavy, but every mirror I check confirms that it’s a flat line. I take my flat line to bed and stare at the ceiling. The moment lasts forever, like every moment before it. When the phone rings, it’s my best friend. I sound like I have a cold and tell her so. She believes me and she’s drawn some eyebrows. She makes a pun that I can’t remember and I smile again. We laugh. I laugh so hard I cry a little and I’m not sure what it’s over, but it feels right. It’s important, laughing and crying. Remembering slow smiles. The moment lasts forever, but longer than the crying. Longer than forever.

This is how important eyebrows can be.

                                              ***
When I was in my second year of college, I worked part time at a Hello Kitty store. We put characters on shelves with no mouths and no eyebrows. Blank slates. Ready for any emotion you’d want to project. And people did. Angry one minute, happy the next. Every customer cooed at them a different way. “Doesn’t she have a grumpy face?” one would ask and hold up the one they liked. And something about that made me slow smile. Sure.

Not that I wasn’t guilty. When we closed up and turned off the lights they all looked lonely to me. “You’re weird, Mal,” my friend Ivonne would say as I gave the room a final look. I raised my eyebrow and we laughed. She’s weird, she knows it. I’m weird too. She is different from my high school friends, but the same. And so are my college friends. And the boys on security are too. But I have a slow smile for each, and that’s all that matters. I collect them.

When she tells me I should shape my eyebrows I go for it. I don’t know much about beauty or make-up. I know diets and crushing on boys. I know I’d like pretty clothes but don’t know how to wear them. The bare minimum. When I look in the mirror I don’t know how to fix it—my face. Make up brushes are lighter and softer than a pencil, but they feel like led in my hand. I don’t know how to fix that mess, but new eyebrows feel like I can swap expression. A Ms. Potato Head.
                     
                                                ***

Three years later I haven’t learned much more. My Godfather invites me to Cirque du Soleil when his nieces are in town. They are tall and gorgeous from what I can remember from my Pokemon years (so my entire life). As he offers, we’re on the train back from somewhere I don’t remember. He asks if I remember them and of course I say I do. They’re a hazy memory of pretty and maybe nice.

“You remember Mallory, right?” he says. One has my name. She is years older than me and the topic of how we were named is brought up every time we’re in the same room. Or topic. But like Buster and Babs, there’s no relation. And no one I have ever loved has ever called me Mallory. Save for one boy, and who the hell was he not to call me Mal I find myself thinking, glaring straight into the train window at strangers who did me no wrong.

I remember her. She’s really nice, I say. He brings up his other 15 year old niece who may or may not have an eating disorder and drops the other shoe. Carefully. Her parents are divorcing blah blah. It’s “affecting her adversely” gibber jabber. She eats like a bird—not like you, I know you eat, Mal. His nosy assumption about her relies on one he made about me as a teen. He thinks New York will be a breath of fresh air for her. Fun. His nieces are fun. You should talk to them, Mal.  You should talk to her, Mal.

By the end of the ride, we’ve read between a thousand lines and I’ve agreed to a nice friendly chat with a girl I don’t know for an event I admittedly want to see so that he can feel a little less tension on their visit to his home without so much as saying so. But we know. It’s too late to back out.

When I reach my stop, it occurs to me I have to be careful about what I wear. I am bony to some. Not to me. I am self-conscious and my shoulder blades are sharp and I wonder if it would make her uncomfortable. Or if I should wear something confident. Something that screams “you can be thin and healthy!” like a commercial that is clearly pushing something through its protagonist’s pearly white teeth. And then part of me tosses the whole thing out with the fact that she will be prettier and thinner already. She won’t be looking at me. There’s nothing to worry about.

Maybe. No. Yes. Maybe.

“I have to fix my eyebrows,” I conclude, in a mental fumble. I go long with it anyway. Eyebrows are important. If eyes are the windows to the soul then eyebrows are the curtains.

Okay, no, that’s eyelids. But eyebrows are important, I’m sure. This time tomorrow I’ll be on a train to change my eyebrows and I’ll wonder if they’ll make me feel differently. Prettier. Smarter. They won’t. I know that now.

But I set the alarm to head out anyway and wonder how how many slow smiles it will take to offset this feeling of I-don’t-know-what. A lot of things. Nothing. As I’m rationing slow-smiles I’m less and less sure this has anything to do with my Godfather’s nieces or eyebrows.

It probably isn’t right of me to ration something like that anyway. Nothing rationed can last longer than forever.

I should sleep.