Lashed to the Max
During WWII, brilliant, carmine lipstick was understandably dubbed “The Red Badge of Courage.” Women applied it, good and thick, to keep their spirits up, and as a reminder that wanton labial sexuality endured even amid life’s darkest fears, threats and setbacks.
So now, even as the pandemic spikes and flattens; as isolation lengthens, and as dismay, danger and even despair rattle the door, I apply my false eyelashes every day. They are my black fringe of courage.
I am one with my false eyelashes, which I prefer to call merely “lashes” without the pejorative prefix. The days in my life I’ve spent unlashed compared to the days I’ve worn them are a factor of Pluto to Jupiter. I have endured nearly all of life’s triumphs, misfortunes, changes, scares and losses fully lashed.
Nobody can convince me that my life would have been more meaningful, grounded, or honest without my lashes, though some people have tried. In college. I taught myself even to endure pepper spray without letting my lashes come untethered.
Right now, I am hunkered down in a one-bedroom apartment with my daughter and, predictably, I am wearing lashes, though I work from home and so most days do not leave the place. Nor does anybody ever get close enough to enjoy the benefit of their effect. I am also wearing red lipstick, though only I know it is there under my mask.
My daughter has learned by now that her mother is eccentric, and particularly so about this one matter. I was wearing them when she was born, on the day her father left me for the first of four subsequent wives, and throughout nearly all of her milestones as well as my own.
Like most people. I have both a deep and a shallower side. My profound self has an insatiable appetite for knowledge, answers, insights. While other teens partied, I gorged on Marx, Kant, Arendt, Buber, Jung, de Beauvoir. Today, I ponder, in the way of a humanities major, the cosmos — the infinite and the quantum; the mysteries of life and time and matter. I feel deep empathy toward my fellow creatures, including insects, plants and even euglenas because who am I to hold myself above anything?
My other side, however, floats somewhere out beyond Alpha Centauri. I can squander hours of my dwindling cognitive lifespan contemplating false eyelash styles, application techniques, and effects.
My preoccupation started, as do so many, with sibling jealousy: I couldn’t help but notice all the fussing and cooing over my sister, two years younger: “Just look at those eyelashes!” Peeking through the gaggle of perfumed, bejeweled, effusing aunties, I glimpsed my tiny sister’s dark, curling sweep across her flushed cheeks. She soon learned that dropping them in a pout turned adults instantly to wax and softened their features into silly grins. When I tried to emulate her tactic, I was told to snap out of it.
My own lashes were functional but uninspiring. They were competent enough to keep out most foreign matter and provide a domicile for those horrifying little mites that live exclusively on human eyelashes. But their impact was nil.
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As I grew older, I bought mascaras that all promised dramatic transformation but delivered only my own stubs, darker and gooier.
In time, I learned to apply makeup with a precision that hopefully attends all heart transplants. But I inevitably ended up like myself: a tall, storklike nail biter with bad hair, flailing limbs, a goofball sense of humor and a penchant for unrequited love.
The stigma branding false eyelashes as ludicrous fakery had initially deterred me from trying them; they were blatant deception; an index of moral deficiency — a mask! — and a rejection of the innate, natural self. Lashes were a big cheat: you weren’t meant to look like that. Work on inner beauty instead.
I was seventeen when I splurged on a pair from a beauty supply store. I stood in the ladies room at school and worked the hairy millipede loose from its plastic platform. It took a couple of tries to situate it on its assigned real estate above my own lashes, where it settled in at last with gluey finality.
Instantly, a fundamental truth became apparent: I was actually two people — one of them a sloe-eyed ingenue; the other a plain Jane. The lashed eye looked about twice the size of its naked twin. It wasn’t only about size either; the lash added depth, breadth and Cleopatra-esque allure. It elongated my eye and created a dramatic shadow around its periphery, tilting the outer edge upwards. I had fairly large eyes, but their relative baldness and faded brown hue had made them quintessentially nondescript. (Their perfect vision was, in my teenage assessment, irrelevant, serving only to better reveal my deficits.)
Now, with my lashed eye expanded to a Keane-sized supernova; the coal black of the lashes contrasted with my eye color for exotic impact. I applied the other lash and walked into my music appreciation class to the strains of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which was fitting: I was indeed, and from then on would be, an exhibition.
Sure it was phony, an optical illusion bought for a few bucks from a shop crammed with products engineered to enhance and deceive. But it worked. Absent the lashes, I lapsed back like Superman dosed with Kryptonite — back into my plainness, my unobtrusiveness, my powerlessness.
Lashes could make me into a winsome nymphet, a vamp, a Gibson Girl, a Maxfield Parrish dreamer or a Sixties arch-kook like Twiggy. The eyes may be windows to the soul, but the window dressing was what mattered.
In my lashes, I was still myself — but nearly everyone else in the world seemed different. These hairy fringes on my ocular perimeter magically made others more attentive, chivalrous, desirous. People took me more seriously. I took myself more seriously.
I was soon able to apply my lashes so precisely that it would take an MRI to reveal the deception. I discovered glue that would withstand a Category 4 hurricane and remain fixed throughout a drunken crying jag or a post coital shower.
My application mastery earned respect verging on awe from my formerly dismissive roommates. Trying to emulate my transfiguration earned them either eyes glued shut or lashes at risk of detaching and landing on a sandwich. I expanded my dexterity to apply them on others, and became a go-to for everybody’s romantic encounters.
By now, the lashes have became such an integral part of me that my original issue eyes seem to be a mere starting point. Where does this end? The question yanks me back to the pandemic and the infinite uncertainties that swirl around our mortal husks. And for that reminder alone, I guess the lashes serve a purpose.
