Bramhall Square No brow BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

I have nice eyebrows in a Brooke Shields kind of way. They are lush, but I don’t have a uni-brow. They don’t grow up my forehead in gray shadow. I don’t have any other hair on my face except for one that seems to pop out of my chin every six months. Many people have commented on how lush and dark and beautiful my eyebrows are.

Or were.

Last week, in preparation for my brother’s wedding, moved up a whole year to the imminent present, I got really zealous with the tweezers. Cowboy was cooking dinner. I told him I was going in the bathroom to pluck my eyebrows. He claims now that he had a sinking feeling in his stomach. But did he say anything? No. "Never get between a woman and her tweezers," he offered lamely the next day.

Since the whole skinny-eyebrow thing became very popular once again in the late ’90s I’ve been obsessed with finding a way to keep my eyebrows lush and still clean them up a little to affect the natural "eye lift" all the magazines tell you you’ll get from a nice brow job. It has never, for the record, occurred to me to add this to one of the things I actually pay for.

That may have been my mistake.

In the bathroom, lit with two lights and a glass of Gewurtzaminer, I held a warm cloth to my face until my pores were all open and red and then I began. I’m not sure what happened next or why or how quickly, but before long I had a thin line of scraggly hairs jetting across my forehead (and "thin" would be a euphemism). At this point I wasn’t sure this was terrible. I just figured I needed to adjust. Like new-haircut adjust.

Until I came out and Cowboy started laughing. It was one of those cackles that a person does when he’s scared but at the same time cannot control himself. He laughed and laughed while I stood there with an empty wine glass and no more wine anywhere in sight. (He had polished it off, obviously, while I was working hard in the bathroom.)

"Baby, you made a straight line across your forehead like an angry face."

"I did?"

"Yes. And it makes your forehead look even bigger." At this point he’s dissolving on the kitchen floor. "You look like Terrence and Philip." He’s wheezing now. I guess you had to be there (and him) to find this so funny.

"Who the Hell are Terrence and Philip?"

"You know, South Park?"

"No. I have no idea what you’re talking about."

I admit the forehead thing got me. I have more than once bemoaned my Helen Hunt–like dome and the idea that I somehow made it seem larger made me panic.

I ran to the bathroom with Cowboy following me laughing and saying "Don’t . . . you’ll ruin it. Let’s pay someone to fix this."

"How? I have no hair left to fix."

Still, he’s on the floor laughing his ass off.

Did no one teach this guy anything about women? My angry face just got angrier, bucko.

I went to work trying to make them a little more shapely while Cowboy tapped on the door and yelled out helpful suggestions like: "Make sure you leave a few" or "Well, you can always draw them in."

All this for a wedding. It’s amazing to me that one big event can make a person (people) go insane. My mother dissolved into tears on the phone recently, telling me she hated all the clothes she had bought for the wedding. Meanwhile I’m showing up with no eyebrows.

Whatever. I’ll just be like Bono and wear my sunglasses everywhere for the next three months until my brows grow back.

"Bramhall Square" runs every other week, and Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com