by Faith Salie
I’d never seen convincing, noncheesy lash extensions. They always looked very stripper cum Snuffleupagus to me. But Karina insisted, “Trust me,” and if you’ve ever seen a Bond movie, you understand that there’s something irresistible about a sexy Russian voice demanding your trust. Turned out, when I met her in person, that Karina is hot enough to be a Bond girl, with a license to beautify. She has a perfect body, which I think might be aided by breast extensions. It can be a slippery slope once you start extending yourself.
So I put my eyes in her hands, and I lay down on her table, and thus began two beautiful relationships. One between me and my lash extensions and the other between me and Karina.
The whole thing took about two hours. During that time, I bonded with Karina as immediately as the extensions did with my lashes. I told her about my boyfriend John and how I wanted to start a family. She told me how much she loved Sunday Morning and her two kids and husband. We agreed that Jewish guys are the best. Finally I was allowed to open my eyes, which were stinging from glue fumes. I saw Karina peering down at me, drying my lashes with a miniature fan in her hand—the kind gals “going through the change” use at the gym. She gave my face a studied appraisal and then declared, “Kukla.” Kukla, she explained, means “doll” in Russian.
When I got up from her magic table and looked in the mirror, I was astonished. My eyes appeared bigger than ever, framed stunningly as promised. The lashes were black and curly and splayed in a classily unnatural way, which was fine with me since I wasn’t exactly whipping out my Visa to achieve the natural look.
They also distracted from my skin. I have a flawful complexion. Just ask the woman who, after seeing me on CNN—where I opined that a pregastric bypass Chris Christie should lose weight for health reasons—e-mailed to inquire, “You know, your skin looks pretty rough, so why don’t you fix THAT???” I’ve always gazed at women with beautiful skin wondering if they have any notion how lucky they are, especially that they can wear red lipstick, which is one of my unattainable life goals right up there with achieving a reliable vaginal orgasm and cutting back on salt. Having a constantly lackluster complexion is embarrassing and humbling, especially when you’re on camera. Extra especially when you’ve heard a director whisper to his DP (director of photography) about you, “Don’t worry—we’ll fix it in post.” My new kuklashes were fixed in pre. They drew invaluable attention to my eyes.
It took a little while for me to accept them as part of my face. A day after application, I caught sight of myself in a window near Fifth Avenue. My hair was in a ponytail, I was wearing workout clothes with a Nike puffer jacket and thought maybe I looked like a chorus girl running errands in between her matinee and evening performances. I wondered if everyone was looking at me thinking I was a hussy with a fringe on top.
John never mentioned them. A few days after I got the extensions, we were on his sofa watching The Social Network. At some point, I ended up snuggling on top of him and he murmured, “Pretty eyes.” I had to make sure he knew. “The lashes aren’t mine, you know.” “I know,” he said. “I don’t care, I’m talking about your green eyes.”
We never talked about them again until they came off.
At the root of it all, I just wanted to be naturally pretty. Of course it makes no rational sense that fake eyelashes made me feel naturally pretty, but they did. It wasn’t just their convenience, even though I saved at least fifteen minutes a day not having to deal with my demanding eyelash habit. My system involved curling naked, pale, Anglo-Saxon lashes, brushing loose powder on them, applying one coat of curling mascara, waiting for it to dry, optional reapplication of powder, more curling, another coat of volumizing mascara. Assiduous declumping and wiping away smudges with Q-tips followed. Recurling throughout the day advised. I curled so much I could have qualified for the Canadian Winter Olympics team.
Lash extensions let me swan about, pretending I had effortlessly beautiful eyes. Strangers told me so; friends interrupted conversations to say, “Your lashes are so amazing, I can’t concentrate.” The extensions were there when I woke up, they were there on my makeup-less face at the gym, they were there when I sat in the makeup chair before going on camera. They were there when I cried through two miscarriages, one wedding, and one birth.
Two months after I met Karina, I fairly floated into her room at the salon in an Upper East Side town house.
“So…” I said, as I slipped off my shoes, smiling like the Cheshire Cat. “I’m pregnant.”
“Hewaaat? Oh my Got. Baby. I em so heppy for yew. But yew should not tell peepul. Eets too soon.”
“How could I lie here for an hour and not tell you? Anyway, I don’t believe in jinxing good news.”
But she was right. I had to untell too many people about the loss of my first pregnancy.
That wasn’t the first time Karina was right. Karina was right about everything.
Karina’s wisdom changed me. It didn’t just change me because she gave me invaluable guidance; no, she was a lesson in not judging a book by its cover or vocation. I was surprised that a person who focused on faces could be so deep. I do recognize that this was obnoxious of me since I, in fact, met Karina solely because I was paying her to improve my face. Because her calling was cosmetic, I did not expect her to be so smart (fluency in three languages and degrees in music and gemology), and I did not expect her to be so wise. I feel ashamed now about my superficial presumption. Which is the same way I feel thinking back to when I found out I was having a boy.
“So it’s a boy,” I said to Karina, sighing as I settled in for the touch-up.
“Det’s purrfict.”
“I know I’m so lucky to be having any kind of baby,” I said, “but I always wanted a girl.”
“Boy is purrfict for your ferst. Den he can be beek bruhdair,” she replied as she commenced yanking old glue off old fake lashes.
“But what if I never have another baby, what if I never get my girl?”
“I know hew vant your gerril but beleef me, Faithy, hew vil fall in loff with your boy. Hew vil loff him so much hew vil forget about John. I was so fet for a whole year after I hed Alex, hew would not haff beleeft it and I did not vant my husband to touch me anyvay.”
“How were you fat? You were breastfeeding—that’s supposed to make you skinny.”
“Det is such a bunch of bullsheet, excuse me. Ven hew are breastfeeding, hew are a cow. Ecktuelly a cow. Hew don’t loos deh veight until hew stop, I’m tellink hew.”
She was right. I am crazy about my son, and breastfeeding makes you eat like a trucker ordering his last meal on death row.
One day Karina and I didn’t talk at all. I shuffled in, hugged her, hopped onto the table, arranged my growing belly to my left side so as not to impede blood flow to my placenta and shut my eyes.
With her hands on my face, my friend said, “Hew juss sleep, baby.”
Karina fixed my extensions two days before Augustus arrived. I was completely naked when I gave birth, wearing only my lashes. My doula* took a photo of me, holding my son, covered in our collective goo. I’m crying from happiness. My eyes, as I gaze down on my tiny boy, look gorgeous.
The only thing I’ll never know whether Karina was right about was her advice regarding how to conceive a girl.
“Listen to me: when hew’r ovulatink, hew must make a douche with lemon just before hew heff sex. I know diss sounds crazy but I’m tellink hew it verks, eet’s how I got my Julia.”
I’ll never know because I wasn’t up for a citron pressé in the vadge.
My sessions with Karina kept me sane. I didn’t need to go to therapy.
I didn’t need to “see someone” because I was seeing Karina, by which I mean not seeing her for ninety minutes every three weeks. Three weeks was as long as it took for a couple of my spider-leggy lashes to wilt downward and just dangle, leaving me looking like a soused prostitute in a Toulouse Lautrec painting. I can’t really describe the reapplication process, because I didn’t want to k
now how the sausage was made. I invariably felt some tugging and trusted she wasn’t pulling my real eyelashes out by the roots.
“How are hew, baby?”
I closed my eyes to begin. Her iPhone always played a relaxing Pandora station.
“Oh, Karina. I mean, big picture, fine, nobody’s dying and we can pay the rent. Little picture, it sucks. Augustus doesn’t eat, and John and I are not very nice to each other. How do people do this?? I have only one kid and it’s so hard and I want to have another! What’s wrong with me?”
“Let me tell hew somedink,” she said. “It vil suck for…five years.”
“Five YEARS?”
“I’m sorry, baby, but it’s true. Hew vil get your gerril and hew vil be exhosted and vil fight more with John, and in about five years dee sun vil shine and hew vil feel like hew agen.”
She had to cancel our appointment once because her mother had died suddenly in Moscow. When she returned, we talked about it. I mostly listened. While my eyes were closed, I felt something wet on my face. It was Karina’s tear.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she sniffled.
“Please don’t be sorry,” I said. “I love hearing about your mom.”
I was deeply sad for her but glad she was able to cry with me.
So why did I ever, ever unlash myself? There were practical reasons. I didn’t think I could pull off the maintenance time commitment with a ton of new work and imminent fertility treatments. I wanted to see my son more than look pretty. But there were more spiritual reasons. I’d forgotten what I really looked like. When you’re a little scared to see what you really look like, it’s probably time to face the truth of your face. And I’d lost another pregnancy. After that sobering denouement, it seemed like the right time to strip something else away.
My fertility doctor had advised us to travel as a way to heal physically and emotionally before starting another round of IVF, so we were about to go to France. I figured I could have Karina take off the extensions, and I’d hide in Paris for a week where I could learn to tie a scarf in such a soigné way that no one would notice my lack of lash. Surely a week was enough time for lashes to grow in fully.
Karina took them off in a remarkably brief session. I was afraid to look, so I tried to read her face.
A small smile.
“Is it horrible?” I asked.
“No, baby,” she said.
So I turned to face the mirror.
I was shocked. I wasn’t ready for the fallout. I didn’t expect beauty, but I also didn’t expect a kukla with facial alopecia. My top lashes were stubs. The roots were all there, but there was no there there. No hairs that grew out and up, however modestly—it was as if someone or something, like the Vanity Fairy, had taken tiny little scissors and made a blunt cut about one-eighth of an inch from my eyelid. I put my hands to my cheeks, looking more Munch’s The Scream than Home Alone. The first thing I said was the only thought in my head: “Oh my God, I look like my mother before she died.”
My mother didn’t really have much of a choice when it came to chemotherapy stripping her of her lashes. But I had chosen this, and my inner Catholic girl felt like it was punishment. I was Icarus: I had flown too close to the sun and scorched off my fringe.
My bottom lashes were three times as long as my top lashes. This is a cute look only if you’re Raggedy Ann.
“Hew loog pretty. Dey are dair. Dey are short but dey are dair,” Karina assured me. “Hew loog fresh in a vay.”
She gave me a vial of something called Lash Food. I would have taken hemlock.
“Dey vil grow beck. Geef eet few months.”
The removal of my lashes—which were never completely mine—so humbled me that I didn’t want to see anyone, much less myself. I wore my sunglasses a lot and avoided mirrors. It reminded me of how I feel about once every seven years when one of the veneers on my two front teeth pops off, and I have to face up to the fact that my real front teeth are now whittled nubs that make me look like an Ozarkian crank addict.
No matter how many times I tried to get John to admit I looked like a chemo patient, he refused. “I don’t look at parts of you,” he’d insist, like a perfectly evolved husband who also never notices when I get my hair done or have large pieces of skin flaking off after a facial peel. We went to Paris, and I focused on the way the light in Sainte-Chapelle shone down on my son on his first birthday. I stockpiled unpasteurized fromage in my fat cells, hoping a new pregnancy would soon make it off-limits.
And my eyelashes did grow back over ten months, at approximately the same rate as the daughter I began to grow, with the help of science rather than lemon juice.
I do not look beautiful in pictures with my newborn daughter. When you have babies in your forties, you are constantly and dramatically confronted with your aging. In photos, my babies’ perfect skin poses next to my bumpy, wrinkly, spotted technically-old-enough-to-be-their-grandma skin. In the rare photos of Minerva’s first year in which I appear—in contrast to my presence in photos from her older brother’s first year—I have no lash extensions to balance out my crow’s-feet.
There is a postextension photo I truly love. I love it because it surprised me. My brother took it the Thanksgiving when I was five months’ pregnant with Minerva, and our little family of three and a half people was walking on the beach. I was in sweats, not wearing a lick of makeup, which is usual for a holiday with my family. But I remember thinking—when David took the picture—I wish I’d at least put on some mascara for Thanksgiving Day. The picture turned out beautiful—of all of us. Simple. Happy. Real. Burgeoning with things to come, a kukla inside me.
When I use mascara now, I apply it to such dramatic effect that my children often reach out to touch my eyelashes, in wonder of how different I look with three to four coats of its “K-Polymer formula with a lipid complex of abyssinia oil and pseudo-ceramid.” In fact, “Mommy wears mascara on her eyes” were my son’s very first words to Santa when I took him for his inaugural visit to Macy’s Santaland. He thrice announced this to Santa and his elves before we left to let the next little Jewish child have a turn.
I was never sheepish about devoting so much energy and money to my eyelash extensions. Maybe it was the Oscar Wildean side of me that believes “It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” or maybe it was because it was all tax-deductible. But what surprised me was the depth my frivolous endeavor could yield.
—
Now, almost three years later, I miss Karina much more than I miss my lashes. Karina and I still text, and we’re always trying to make a plan to meet, but we haven’t for a long time. After I had Minerva, Karina offered me the gift of a facial multiple times, and I simply could not find the two hours to get across town and into her hands.
I miss going to great lengths to take care of myself. I miss that quiet hour with my friend.
Her most recent text read:
Your babies are so so precious and remind yourself that you got the perfect family you always dreamt about, beautiful boy and a girl and a husband who loves you and actually does help with the kids. She is so big, our baby Minushka! Miss you, please get your butt out to swim and tan in our semi-furnished backyard.
The glue has set between Karina and me.
* * *
* The word doula comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “female servant,” but in modern days, they’re women to whom you pay a lot of drachmas to help you through labor. You can then give certain relatives another reason to roll their eyes when you drop things like, “My doula is coming over tonight to explain birth stations of presentation using a doll and a turtleneck.”
My first memory is of sitting with my mother in a white rocking chair with a pink gingham cushion as she reads me The Giving Tree. In the book, an apple tree gives herself to a boy as he grows up—first her branches for swinging, then her apples for selling, next her limbs for building a house, and finally her trunk for a boat in which he can sail away. In the end, the lad—now an o
ld man—returns, and the tree can only offer him her stump as a place to rest. This tree is the ultimate woodland approval junkie: here’s all of me; use me, love me. At the end of the book, my mother’s voice breaks, and she wipes her eyes. But I am maybe three, and I do not understand how a story—told mostly in pictures—about a tree and a boy moves her to tears. On her lap, I feel happy. She is the giving; I am the given to. I have not yet gone to college to take Women’s Studies 101 and recognize the tree’s gender-predictable self-abnegation. I have not yet become a parent-stump to my own emotionally ax-wielding child. So I do not yet grasp that Shel Silverstein’s genius lies in telling the story of parenting as an arboresque fable, because if he didn’t get all poetic about it, the real title of a children’s book about parenting would be This Shit Is Hard as Shit.
Even though it took me almost forty years to learn it, my mother gave me this one book as a lesson.
My father, on the other hand, gave me countless books as a lifelong conversation.
I didn’t talk with him the way I talked with my mom—easily and about everything. My mother was effusive. If I got the lead in a play, she might have clapped, beamed, and clutched her heart, saying, “I just don’t know how I got a daughter like you!” My father, on the other hand, faced, perhaps, with one of my report cards, would deliver this, very calmly:
“I’m impressed but not surprised.”
It’s not accurate to call him a man of few words. He’s articulate and witty, learned and opinionated. But he’s not social, and he’s not chatty. He’s a man of select words who loves words. Books helped us say things to each other. Books with plots that have nothing to do with your life can still say I understand you, or I want you to understand me. When your father says read this, he can also be saying this story moved me, or this one changed the way I viewed the world when I was your age, or I believe you’re mature enough to handle what this author wants you to know.