
Jasmine’s Brows and Cuts
Jasmine doesn’t do advertisements. Since her early 20s, she’s been staunchly anti-capitalist, believes ads are, at best, meaningless propaganda that only serve the ruling class. But she’s a businesswoman now and step one in becoming a #GirlBoss is putting yourself out there. At the Staples Copy and Print counter, she stares at a gloss-finish poster that reads JASMINE’S BROWS AND CUTS in Pinterest-ready cursive. The A in Jasmine and O in brow are substituted with two wonky asters, both missing half their petals. She stayed up till midnight designing the poster in Canva.
“The phrasing is off, right?” she asks the cashier, a short brown woman who wears ruby chandelier earrings. She could easily be Jasmine’s mother.
The woman squints at the print, then at Jasmine. “Ma’am,” she says, “you already paid. We can’t refund you if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Oh,” Jasmine says. Her mother calls her stupidly coy: Once at the movie theatre when she poured too much butter on her popcorn and had to ask the ruddy-faced cashier for a new one, and again at a family potluck when her mother introduced her to a cousin’s friend and all Jasmine could do was stare. Maybe now she is acting the same way—one of her knees veering into the other like a doe’s would, a curl of hair looped around her finger. “That’s not what I meant.” The Staples is suddenly too hot to handle. Is she the only one sweating? “I mean, what do you think it means? I was going for assertive, like HEY, get your hair or eyebrows done by me. Jasmine. Or does it look too much like Josmine? I thought the flowers were a nice touch. Were they?”
The woman ticks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Then she cocks her chin at the next customer in line. “I can help you over here,” she says.
Until now, Jasmine hadn’t considered monetizing her one talent, but perhaps a change is what she needs.
Jasmine hangs the poster on her garage. Well, technically it’s not her garage, it’s her landord’s, Ms. Yadav. When Jasmine was a child, she and her mother dreamed of living in a place like this—a twenty-two-hundred-square-foot-fully-detached-lawn-so-green-it-sparkles type of property. And now Jasmine does, sort of. She rents the basement suite from Ms. Yadav and then, to save money, rents out half the space to another woman, a nutritionist named Rabina. When she found the place, she convinced herself that the thousand-dollar rent wasn’t so bad because at least she was in walking distance to Scarborough Town Centre, and who doesn’t like wandering a mall right at opening, all alone? And at least she stays social by discussing why she should quit eating Cocoa Puffs for breakfast with Rabina every morning. And who doesn’t like unsolicited, but super free health advice? It’s all good. Or, it was all good until two weeks ago, when she got laid off from her job as a cashier at that good-for-nothing FreshCo. She’d seen it coming, sort of—most good things in Jasmine’s life seem to disappear like a groundhog drawn into its pit. Or at least this is what her mother said when Jasmine called her to break the news. “What did you expect?” she said. “You need to find a passion.” So, Jasmine’s taking her advice, putting her business degree to use, and starting a freelance beauty salon on her side of the basement that she and Rabina separate with a sheet. Life is so good. Her business will be successful—she waxes all her cousins’ brows and has been told that “her hands are precise as Frida Kahlo’s” and that she “could make bank” offering her services to the general public. Until now, Jasmine hadn’t considered monetizing her one talent, but perhaps a change is what she needs. Thirty-five isn’t the time for boring. It’s time for risks.
Jasmine steps back from the garage, dusts off her hands. This is pretty much the most she’s accomplished in ten years.
Inside, Rabina, home on her lunch break, eats a goat roll from the Sri Lankan takeout place down the street. She is watching an episode of CSI: Miami on her phone, but when Jasmine shuffles toward her side of the basement, she calls, “Hey, Jazz,” (a nickname that Jasmine feels too old to be called). “You’re doing brow stuff, right?” And Jasmine could say, and also cuts—brows and cuts, despite only having watched YouTube videos on how to cut hair. But Rabina speaks first. “My cousin’s got a wedding.”
Rabina’s cousin’s name is Sada. She’s late for a wedding and in need of a simple brow cleanup, and arrives at the house thirty minutes later in a flurry of fruity perfume and face glitter.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, and takes a seat on the foldout chair that Jasmine snagged off someone’s curb last week.
“You’re not late at all,” Jasmine says. In the time it took Sada to get here, Jasmine’s been practicing possible greetings for her first client. Nonchalant: Hey Sada, ready to get waxed? Or peppy: Hi Sada, I’m Jasmine and I’ve got a passion for waxing! Or professional: Hello Sada, welcome to my studio. Now, she stands in front of Sada who looks like she might also be around thirty-five, the same age as Jasmine, except Sada is sure-footed in bejeweled navy pumps and Jasmine sways nervously in her mother’s old gardening shoes. Though she hoped her business wouldn’t flop, she honestly wasn’t expecting a client the moment she slapped her ad on the front of the house, and definitely not someone as beautiful as Sada. Even in the cheap fluorescents, Sada glints as bronze would. Jasmine glows like this sometimes, too, though she’d more accurately describe what she looks like as sweaty. But not Sada. She really radiates.
“I’m just so easily distracted,” Sada says as Jasmine guides her head over the chair back and toward the fizzling desk lamp she has propped on the TV table to become her makeshift workstation. “This morning I’m out for a run, and mid-run, decide I want a burger. So I run to a Burger King, but when I’m there, I realize I’ve got this wedding at six and I really don’t want to be that bloated for it.”
Jasmine reaches for the filing cabinet that sits next to the table. Within, she’s stacked beauty supplies—makeup remover, cotton pads, and what she’s looking for: a box of gloves. “And did the glitter come before or after your run?” she asks as she slips the gloves on.
“Oh!” Sada says, like she’s forgotten her face is covered in sparkles. “That must be from last night. You caught me. I was out drinking with the gals.” She laughs.
Jasmine snaps her second glove on too tight; her wrist stings at the nitrile’s impact. When she turned twenty, the first thing her mother said was, “Good luck finding a man before, well… you know.” And when Jasmine said she didn’t know, her mother added, “Your twenties are the time to settle down. Find a man, etcetera. Don’t waste your best years in party pumps thinking they’ll get you somewhere.” She poked at her forehead wrinkles that Jasmine had found alluring as a child. She thought they looked like the pleats of a tutu. “Just wait until these hit you. You’ll see what I mean—what’s more important.”
“Rabina says you just started your business? A bunch of my friends are looking for a new brow technician. We should go out for drinks—I’ll introduce you.”
The last time Jasmine went ‘drinking with the gals’ was for her twenty-second birthday, and a) she and the ‘gals’ drank sparkling grape juice in Jasmine’s mother’s apartment, and b) the gals were actually her cousins, Alani and Priya, aged ten at the time. Still, she replies, “Totally,” even though this is not at all what she wants to say. What she wants to say is aren’t you ever going to settle down? What gals are you talking about, and how did you even meet them? Do you ever worry about fine lines? Don’t you feel so, so old? Instead, she reaches for the wax warmer she plugged in ten minutes before Sada arrived, and stirs the popsicle stick around the aqua liquid to ensure it’s the right consistency. Just because Sada wants to party till the room spins and coat glitter to her eyelids in sticky globs, doesn’t mean Jasmine has to, and why should she want to?
Jasmine soaks the cotton pad in cleansing solution, swipes it along Sada’s face to pick up the glitter. Flecks catch in the light like a technicolour disco ball.
Her mother warned her about women like Sada once. Before her thirtieth birthday. They were sitting on the cramped balcony of their apartment sipping green tea. “There are certain ladies,” her mother said, “who never act their age. It’s embarrassing. This is your time to settle down. Get married. Have children. I want grandbabies!” As she reached for her teacup, her red bangles shimmered.
“But Ma,” Jasmine said, covering half her face with her mug, “thirty isn’t that old.”
Her mother waved a hand. In the open air, her bangles almost sounded like windchimes. “Think what you want, Jasmine,” she said, “but don’t come crying to me when you’re old and alone.”
Jasmine soaks the cotton pad in cleansing solution, swipes it along Sada’s face to pick up the glitter. Flecks catch in the light like a technicolour disco ball.
“Do you ever feel old?” Jasmine asks. Her voice is so quiet that she’s unsure if she’s spoken the words aloud.
“Old?” Sada makes a strange sound. It takes Jasmine a moment to realize she’s choked on a laugh. “Honey, what kind of life are you living thinking you’re old? You’re what, twenty-five? Thirty?” Jasmine nearly drops the cotton pad in surprise. She’s unsure if she should feel stung by what Sada’s said, if looking twenty-five or thirty should make her feel embarrassed or confused. Here she is, standing over a woman she barely knows but who she could have been—who she still could be. And okay, maybe Jasmine isn’t who her mother wanted her to be by now, or even who she wanted to be by now. She’s waxing a near-stranger’s eyebrows in half a basement suite she can barely afford. The most interesting thing about her day is price-matching No Frills’ deals at FreshCo or watching Netflix in bed as she pinches sweet potato fries into her mouth. She has a business degree her mother spent fifteen years saving for, and maybe her mother thought she’d have breached six-figure profits selling whatever it is that makes a woman six-figures nowadays, and maybe that’s what Jasmine wanted too, or maybe she doesn’t know what she wants at all. And she’s thirty-five. Thirty-five. In her chest, an old wound spreads like thick ink.
When Jasmine was a little girl, she and her mother cleared out bins of her old toys to donate to Goodwill. Her mother snatched a blonde Barbie from the pile. “Let me show you something,” she said, and pulled out the Sharpie she’d used to label carboard boxes as KEEP and GIVE AWAY. Young Jasmine leaned into her mother, who gripped the doll’s head. “One day,” she said, and slashed the marker in a diagonal line from the doll’s nostril to the corner of her lip. She did it to the other side too, then squiggled lines across the forehead. “You’ll look like this. People don’t like this.” She reached for the pile of dolls and pulled out a similar blonde Barbie whose face was pristine. “Stay like this. Stay like her.” Then she threw the marked-up Barbie into the trash bin. Jasmine didn’t even have a moment to process that that had been her favourite doll. Years ago, when she moved out of her mother’s home, she thought she could shake for good her mother’s words and the image of that marked-up doll that’d haunted her for years. But now, as she judges Sada in her high heels, her melted makeup, she can’t help but realize how, like the doll’s face, her worldview has been permanently marked.
She liked the idea of changing someone’s face so they’d be surprised by the reflection they’d see in the mirror.
“You have to get out there, lady,” Sada is saying. “You’re hotter than ever now. This is literally your moment. That’s what I tell myself every day. Hotter than ever and this is my moment.”
Jasmine turns for the warmer, and quickly pulls up a glop of wax on the popsicle stick. She turns it. Around. Around. Around. She had always thought she’d like to make people beautiful, like she does now to Sada. She liked the idea of changing someone’s face so they’d be surprised by the reflection they’d see in the mirror. As she lays the wax down between Sada’s brows, she tries to remember the last time she felt beautiful, the last time she felt the type of young her mother wanted her to remain. Untouchable. Maybe it was this morning, brushing her teeth in the mirror. Maybe it was five years ago sitting alone at her own New Year’s party, sporting a new lipstick colour. Maybe it was all that time ago, in the moment before her mother marked up her favourite doll. As she twirls the wax on the popsicle stick, she catches a glimpse of her face in her makeup mirror’s reflection. She is a woman not unlike her mother: a round, brown face, deep-set eyes that darken on the lids. She can hear her mother now, commenting on how she should get some rest, try Olay, tea bags, a cold compress every morning—but then there’s Sada’s voice, coming from the chair. “—I know what that’s like,” she says, and closes her eyes as Jasmine holds her skin taut. “But when you get to a certain age, you’ve got to make a choice. It’s either you choose you or get eaten by the wolves, and I’m not a big fan of wolves.”
Jasmine looks at herself again. Something softens in her face or maybe it’s just the way the LEDs hit her jaw, but for a moment, a slow, honeyed moment, she’s tinged gold.
Onto Sada’s skin, Jasmine smooths the aqua wax, as if frosting a cake. She inhales. Applies a pre-cut cotton strip. She rips it off.