vodka and dr. zchivago

Viola is Russian. Her lips are dark, her nails and clothing exclusively black. She has warm blonde hair and a small frame. Her teeth are not perfect. The incisors overlap the laterals and they retain a warm yellow color, due mostly to the coffee and cigarettes she ingests daily. But Viola does not see her teeth as a flaw. In fact, she barely notices them.

This is because Viola is obsessed with her eyebrows.

Everyday, Viola wakes up two hours before work. She showers. She dries her hair. She eats a Nutri-grain bar. She brushes her teeth. She gargles. She applies her mahogany lipstick. She walks naked toward the mirror to check for patches of cellulite. Still dimple-free. Depending on her mood, she may make her bed. She dresses. And she sits.

She lights a cigarette, turns on Bette Midler's Greatest Hits and flips the switch to employ the 150 watt bulbs above her mirror. She takes in the moment with a deep inhale and a puff outward. She often inches her face so close to the mirror that her nose bumps into it and she has to angle slightly sideways. With the hand that isn't clutching the Pall Mall, she picks up her 200 dollar pair of Shu Uemura tweezers, and she removes them from their plastic case. (They originally came in a metal one, but Viola worried that the metal would dull the tip). And everyday, she spends an hour and thirteen minutes looking for non-existent eyebrows to pluck.

She knew it was getting bad when her eyebrows started resembling Whoopi Goldberg's, but she couldn't stop. She would pull a single one out, then tap the mirror with the blade of the tweezer, leaving a remnant brow behind, clinging to the mirror by its root. Instead of satisfaction at having removed a stray, she felt she needed to remove another. And another. And another. Until, of course, the point came when there were none to remove.

So now Viola has had to invest in a very expensive eyebrow pencil. While very expensive, Viola has not quite mastered the art of the color-in, so usually one of her eyebrows looks slightly more arched than the other. Her appearance is rather off-kilter.