Runner-up for the 2010 Bishop Prize in Fiction

Missing Eyebrows

by Sarah Gleason

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Sarah had drawn a portrait of a woman and had forgotten her eyebrows. Funny, she thought, she tended to pay attention to eyebrows more than normal, as she had once (probably in sixth grade or so) had eyebrows so bushy that her mother finally suggested she get them waxed. Some people have eyebrows so thin they look like curved lines of brown pencil, a child’s drawing. Sarah had never wanted her eyebrows that thin, but as the years went by she found herself plucking them until she barely had eyebrows at all. About a year ago she grew them out (a horrible experience, as the hair grew back slowly and she felt like hiding her face whenever she walked outside), and after that she felt better about looking in the mirror. She had actually learned to raise one of them, her left. It’s strange how appealing natural can be in a world of fake, fake, fake.

Anyway, this drawing: it was in profile and of course profiles are the most difficult. You would think that a full frontal portrait (such as the photographs of Diane Arbus, in which freakish people stare into the lens, hiding nothing) would be harder to capture, but sometimes emotion flows easily from the pencil—and there’s not much emotion in a profile, is there? In a profile view, the nose is always strange-looking, and the eye (whichever, since you can show only one, unless you think you’re Picasso) is quite slanted. Cheekbones can become hard to define, and lips—forget about it. Sarah figured the only easy way to draw a person from the side was to use one of those figure sketching books, the ones that show you step by step the right way to do it.

So of course Sarah was having difficulty with this drawing. It was on lined paper, and she remembered thinking to herself, “If this doesn’t come out shitty, I’m going to be pissed.” She found it so irritating when she created a masterpiece and then couldn’t even do anything with it because of those stupid lines slicing through the paper as if they were there on purpose just to make her drawing look ugly.

Sarah was in this room that was wide and light, the type that echoes. She was imagining the sound of her pencil hundreds of times louder—scratch, scratch. People might look around for some sort of enormous bird, or one that made scratching noises, anyway. It was one of those rooms where you’re afraid to talk too loudly, like in the reference section of the Philadelphia Library. (She had once spent hours in there looking up facts on Muhammad for a history project. She had left with her head pounding from the weight of the silence.) After a while, when the sound of indistinct conversation begins to press upon your ears, you feel like you’re in the den of some slumbering, snoring beast.

Back to the drawing. It wasn’t of anyone she knew, just a figment of her imagination. Drawing a person reminded her of the process of meiosis (lots of things did these days—she had just been cramming for a biology test on it). One feature can end up so many different ways; you can put your pencil down on the paper and draw with the same movement each time, but you never come up with the same portrait. Drawing is like creating your own little person—you never know how it will come out.

The woman’s hair was in spirals. Sarah was so excited because, for some reason, she always drew straight-haired people, despite being curly-haired herself. She had turned to her friend and asked, “Does this hair look realistic? I’ve never tried this before.” Her friend had answered yes, and so she drew, and the hair looked amazing, really. The other features looked half-decent, so Sarah held the drawing up to the light and said, “Man, I wish this wasn’t on lined paper. It’s so much better than I thought it would be.”

She sighed, tucked it away in the notebook she had with her, and thought about how hungry she was and how much she wanted to go home. They were on a field trip to Washington, D.C., and it was so horribly planned. Who wants to go five hours without eating? Not Sarah, that’s for sure. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be here or didn’t find it interesting, but she kept seeing people crying (they were in the Holocaust Museum) and it made her want to cry, but she didn’t feel she had the right. She wasn’t Jewish and, after all, she had some German in her. She had walked quickly through the exhibit, absorbing what she saw but trying not to process it, and had found herself ahead of the group, finished half an hour early.

And so she sat and drew. It wasn’t something she really thought about. After all, going to a Waldorf school will make you like that (learning to draw before learning to read, to share—hell, to make a peanut butter sandwich). They had these special rectangular crayons and this unique way of drawing, but Sarah hadn’t gone there long enough to carry on that style. Her sister had, but not her. It hadn’t registered at the time, but she realized now that the school had been a sort of cult: no computers, no TVs, no shirts with writing on them. And the parents were discouraged from vaccinating their children. Sarah had never been vaccinated for whooping cough or polio, and when she was four she had gotten whooping cough. It was absolutely terrible.

She thought about all of this as she sat drawing, as the room slowly filled up with fellow students and with people she didn’t know, all of them united by the solemn atmosphere. She tucked her drawing away as they prepared to leave, planned on tracing it when she got home because she felt it was so good. It wasn’t until the next day that she discovered the missing eyebrows, and Sarah wondered how she could have forgotten such an important thing.

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Read about the winners of the 2010 Bishop Prizes here.