Don't Touch My Eyebrows.
Pastrami a go-go and other wry tales of the city #39
Black women complain about people touching their hair without permission. I have a slightly different issue.
People reach out and touch - my eyebrows.
“Are they real?”
“Do they come off?”
They’re just, well, my eyebrows. Blonde (and now a little gray), they appear not to have been tweezed. That’s because they haven’t. The pain of a thousand plucks is not for me. Maybe one here and there but thin eyebrows arched into surprise and submission you will never see. A little trim with cuticle scissors keeps them from getting out of control.
My brows are partially hidden these days behind thick black eyeglass frames, now required due to endless hours on the computer. Years ago, optometrists would point to a selection of three plastic frames including one that looked like Sophia’s from the Golden Girls. That might be fine if you were 80 but when you’re in the fourth grade? No thanks.
When I wore contact lenses, my eyebrows were more accessible for curious fingers.
My eyebrows have been most popular in the Bronx, from Mott Haven, Soundview, Mott Haven, the South Bronx, Kingsbridge (where I was born), Claremont, Bathgate, Hunts Point, East Tremont. . .neighborhoods not well populated with (real) redheads and blondes. A number of years ago, I found myself in different areas each of the five days a week, teaching writing and photography to kids in public schools. Sometimes, I felt like a celebrity.
“Are you a soap opera actress?” one asked. “You look like someone on tv.”
“You look like Helen Hunt,” a teacher decided.
Helen Hunt is very thin and very blonde. The phrase “get glasses!” came to mind.
I sat on a bench, my legs squeezed under the attached table, in the school lunchroom, waiting for second graders to finish lunch. One of the girls, maybe nine or 10, finished chewing her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Her eyebrows were much darker and flatter than mine. She reached over with her pointer finger with a smudge of peanut butter stuck on the tip. She ran her finger across one of my bushy eyebrows that stood out against my pink sunburned skin.
“It feels like a caterpillar!”
Soon, the rest of the class lined up to feel a furry chrysalis.
I stepped on the bus to return home, smelling faintly of peanut butter.
A kid turned around as I sat behind him, staring at my face.
I smiled.
“Yes, they’re real,” I sighed.
On the subway, people have asked if my eyebrows belong to me, as if I have borrowed them from someone else’s visage.
And once, a man called out, “Hey, you’ve got a great pair of - eyebrows.” The woman next to me looked relieved.
Friends have asked me if what I’m going to do with my eyebrows. Long response? Nothing.
I’ve been at parties where people forgo appetizers to connect with my brows, putting their plates down to reach over for a feel. Although when my New York defensive instincts kick in and I sense people walking too close to me, for some reason, this doesn’t make me flinch. I can tell what they’re going for. But go anywhere near my handbag and they’re done for.
What can I say? People are curious.
In a third grade class, this one in an afterschool program in Harlem, three girls and I sat together at a desk reading a book. They examined my eyebrows.
“Do you take them on and off every night?” one asked.
“Uh, no,” I said.
Another picked up a large black comb from the classroom floor that had traces of someone else’s hair and ran it through mine. I didn’t have time to react.
“Your hair is so soft,” said one, yanking through a knot at the end that made my eyes water.
“I want your hair,” said another, holding my head in place while another decided to even out the middle part.
“What’s wrong with yours? You have wonderful hair,” I said, in the same tone used when a high school student said she hated her dark skin. Her relatives in West Africa, she said, used skin lighteners.
“No,” this was a 90 point font no from me. “Your skin is beautiful the way it is.”
Maybe I influenced her, maybe I didn’t. Her Linkedin profile photograph shows a serious young woman, her skin color unchanged.
One of the three girls examined my face, squeezing her eyes in concentration.
“Are they really real?”
On a recent subway ride, a man awakened from his bed across five seats. His perfume of too few few baths and too much liquor reached me before his eyes focused.
He stood up, blinking, stumbling and holding up his ripped pants one hand. His other hand, finger pointed, was coming straight at my head.
“Don’t. Touch. My. Eyebrows,” I warned, raising my eyebrows, channeling the many prizefighters I had interviewed.
“Ah. Okay,” he said, falling back into the plastic seat.
I’m keeping my eyebrows the way they are.
I wonder what people said to Frida Kahlo. For what it’s worth, I never noticed anything out of the ordinary about your eyebrows, but mine are completely natural too.