Lowbrow

Sunrise at St. Peter’s Abbey, Saskatchewan

I went to a week-long writing workshop in Toronto while still an undergrad student.  Unlike the retreat that I just finished attending in Saskatchewan, the one in Toronto was facilitated.  Meaning: I experienced out-of-body joy at regular intervals because the CanLit elite, all giving workshops that week, had just sat down two tables from me and OMG DID ONE OF THEM JUST GLANCE IN MY DIRECTION.  It’s hard for a girl who finds running her hands along a well-stocked bookshelf as erotic as running her hands along a well-maintained body to be around that kind of literary status for any length of time.

Here’s what happened, though: at some point early that week I was bitten in the face by a mutant Lake Ontario insect and my left eye went into an over-dramatic frenzy, swelling shut and looking like Margaret Atwood had just wound up and punched me one.  People were too polite to comment, including my mentor Wayson Choy, who looked at me without a blink of his own two fully functional baby blues.  But I felt as self-conscious as hell and one morning, in the pre-Smartphone era, I memorized a neighbourhood map on the wall of the campus cafeteria and then set out in search of a medical clinic.  It just so happened that the one I found was staffed by a former high school acquaintance of my sister, but the fun and games more or less ended there.  A scalpel was brandished, as well as enough gauze to stem the flow of the the Niagara River.  Something yellow and custard-like was drawn forth from my brow.  A new vocabulary tumbled from my mouth – vocabulary which, after a week of marinating in creative writing workshops, had become all the more inventive.  I left the clinic looking like a pirate and weaving around the sidewalk like one, too.  But the next day I could see again.

Cut to the week I just spent at a writing retreat of a very different sort, this time in rural Saskatchewan with nary a medical clinic for miles.  Fortunately I did not need one.  What I needed, with absolute desperation, was an esthetician.  Here’s where I must clarify: I care about as much about make-up and the general business of beauty salons as my cat cares about the state of his ballooning underbelly.  But I recently got my hair all lopped off, and such events can make even the most self-righteously “natural” woman feel a little twinge of obligation in the mug department.  I felt newly exposed without my long hair to toss distractingly around.  I was not suddenly crippled by Smashbox – I even found the inner integrity to scoff at a teen mag article wherein the writer had faced her editor’s challenge of going A WHOLE WEEK WITHOUT MAKE-UP OH MY GOSH and somehow, against herculean odds, managed to survive on her wits alone.  Make-up?  I don’t go near the stuff.  But cut off my hair and I suddenly become fourteen years old, contorting my face in the bathroom mirror in order to discover all of its flaws.

And here’s what I discovered: my eyebrows.

I did not go near my eyebrows with any sort of grooming tool – tweezers, hot wax appliqué – until someone forced me into it.  And that someone was Anne-Cécile Dewavrin, the glamorous older sister of my exchange partner in France.  She took pity on me and organized an intervention with her equally glamorous friend, Camille.  In a bedroom strewn with study notes (because French students never seem more than five minutes away from their next exam), she had me lie on my back and place my ungroomed cranium in her lap.  Under the glare of a 100-watt French lightbulb, she and Camille plucked away.  On that night, the bedragled, socially awkward butterfly emerged at last from her cocoon.

For the last twelve years, I have tried to achieve the standard towards which Anne-Cé and Camille pointed me.  I was like a blindfolded six-year-old at a party who has just been shoved in the general direction of the donkey drawing, tail clenched in my hand, dizzy from a dozen wrong turns.  I finally had eyebrows that did not inspire visions of a Sesame Street character.  I was on the right path.  Today, though, I have followed that path too fervently.  I have not yielded to warnings.  I have risked everything.  I have been blinkered and blind.  Ladies and gentleman, I have OVER PLUCKED.

I went to a spa just before leaving for Saskatchewan and begged them to save me from my own zealotry.  The esthetician traced a DO NOT CROSS line under each brow with the razor’s edge of her fingernail.  Half-heartedly, she invited me to visit the make-up counter.  Half-heartedly, I declined.  I left for Saskatchewan.  I did not cross the DO NOT CROSS line.  I felt confident from my feet right up to my eye-line.  Everything above that was up for grabs.  Because here is the thing: when you chop all your long hair off, people are shocked.  They grope for the first thing they can think of.  For most decent people, this thing is a complement.  And so you find yourself showered in complements for the first few days after your plunge, and that becomes the norm.  By the end of those few days, you have come to expect super-ego-inflation to kick off every encounter you have with people.  But, of course, it peters off.  And then you start to think.  You suspect things.  You contort your face in the mirror.  You go see an esthetician for the first time in your life (you even look up how to spell the word).  And she traces a line on your face and says, DO NOT CROSS.  You must obey her, but the toll this takes on your already fragile ego – built so high, then neglected so roundly – hobbles you.

So.  At one time, I was dealing with a swollen eye at a writing workshop.  When I dared take on a similar writing experience, I was dealing with over-plucked brows that were slowly reasserting themselves in coarse patches, like razored-down hedgehog quills.  I was sure that this was all people were seeing.  Which, of course, was ludicrous.  These were soulful, engaging writers.  These were MY PEOPLE.  What did they care for eyebrows?  Not a lot.  But I cared.  And when I finally got back to Ontario, and back to the spa that had given me such grueling homework, I could not abide just any old esthetician.  I needed Louise.   I didn’t even know this at the time, but that’s the universe for you, eh?  It waits until the very last minute, and then it shrugs and says, “Whatever.  Here you go, pipsqueak.”  Louise immediately told me I had radiant skin.  She insisted that my hair colour could not possibly be natural.  Complemented my five-year-old summer dress that I’d pulled, wrinkled and uncertain-smelling, from the closet just twenty minutes before.  She made up for a drought of complements that had left me parched and gasping for the better part of two weeks.  And she gave me an A+ on my eyebrow homework.

Now I have a new challenge: the underbelly of my brows seems to have been rescued, but I was scolded once more for overdoing it on the in-between section.  I have to add about a centimeter to either side of my nose.  Which is my favourite place to pluck.  It’s good therapy, to pinch and yank that stubble one devilish thread at a time.  But!  No more!  I am cultivating that little arena of over-pluckage, bringing it back to life, and I’m damning the self-consciousness that flares every time I lean close to the mirror.  Because being self-conscious about my face does not feel like ME.  Me, who doesn’t wear make-up, who loves her freckles, who flosses, who laughs at articles in beauty magazines.  I am not meant to waste a singly moment on worrying about such superficial details at eyebrows.

All of this to say: I had an amazing time in Saskatchewan.  I got so much written.  And I gave and received so much love with the seven incredible writers who were there with me, people I hadn’t known until the day I walked into the abbey, and who I will never forget.  Not a single person said a thing about my eyebrows.