Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Big Hair ESTHER FRIESNER

Esther Friesner lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters. She is the author of twenty-nine novels and over one hundred short stories, in addition to being the editor of four popular anthologies. She is also a published poet, a playwright, and once wrote an advice column. Besides winning two Nebula Awards in succession for Best Short Story (1995 and 1996), Friesner won the Romantic Times Award for Best New Fantasy Writer in 1986 and the Skylark Award in 1994. She is currently working on an epic fantasy and is also editing the third in the Chicks in Chainmail anthology series, called Chicks and Chained Males.

Mama took her to all the pageants, Mama kept the boys away. No one got near Ruby except the judges and the newspaper folks and the TV people unless Mama said. Even then, not too many of those got through. Mama told Ruby that a woman’s greatest attraction was staying just out of reach, and she was there to see to it that Ruby learned that lesson even if she had to keep her locked up in her hotel room the whole time to make sure she did.

Ruby disagreed, especially about the reporters. “What’s wrong with a little extra publicity?” she asked Mama that night as they drove down the mountain, headed for Richmond and the next competition.

Mama’s skinny fingers knotted tight on the wheel. She didn’t answer Ruby’s question, not directly, not at all. “Who you been talking to?” she wanted to know.

Ruby mumbled something under her breath, tucking her sweet, round little chin down into the collar of the buttoned-up trench coat Mama always made her wear, hot or cold, rain or shine. Mama pulled the car over to the side of the road and killed the engine and the headlights too, even though there was a storm following them down out of the mountains, roaring and grumbling at their backs like a hungry bear.

“What did you say?” Mama demanded.

“Other girls.” Ruby still mumbled, but she got the words out loud enough to be heard this time.

“I thought so.” Mama sat back stiff and tall against the driver’s seat, making the old plastic covers creak and groan. There weren’t any lights on this stretch of road except what the car carried with it, and those were out, but there were little licks of lightning playing through the cracks in the sky. One of them dashed across heaven to outline Mama’s face with silver, knife bright, her chin like a shovel blade, her nose like a sailing ship’s prow.

“Now you listen to me, little girl,” Mama said out of the pitch-black that always followed mountain lightning. “Anything those other girls tell you is a lie. Don’t matter if it’s got two bushel baskets full of facts behind it, don’t matter if they say the sun rises up in the east or that air’s the only thing fit to breathe, it’s still a lie, lie, lie. And why? Because it came out of their mouths, God damn ’em to hell. Which is the place I’ll toss your raw and bloody bones if I ever again hear you mouth one word those ‘other girls’ say. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“‘Yes, Mama.’” Mama mocked the soft, mechanical way that Ruby spoke. “Don’t you even want to know the proof behind what I’m telling you?”

“No, Mama. You told me. That’s good enough.”

Mama reached over and jabbed her finger into Ruby’s hip, a place where the bruise wouldn’t show even in the bathing suit part of the competition, not even if the suit was one of those near-indecent high-cut styles. That place was already pretty mushed over with blues and greens and yellows, generations of hard, deep finger-pokes done by an expert hand. Mama knew her merchandise.

“You lie,” she said. “You want a reason. You always do, these days, whether you come right out and say so, like an honest soul, or whether you follow your blood and lie. Ever since you grew titties, you’ve changed. Used to be you’d take my word and all, no questions, no doubts, but not now. You’re getting to be more like your mother every day, so I know what’s coming, if I let it come.”

Ruby didn’t say anything. Ruby didn’t know quite what to say. Whenever Mama talked about Ruby’s mother, it was like she was daring Ruby to find the breath to speak. Ruby couldn’t, though. It was like cold wax was clogging up her throat, coating the roof of her mouth with its crackling shell. Sometimes the silence was enough to make Mama let go and give Ruby back her breath.

Sometimes it was enough, but not now.

“Your mother.” Mama said the words like a curse woven out of dead things and dark places. “All her pretty promises about how we’d be more of a family with a child to raise, and the hell with what folks’d say. No more sneaking, no more lies about two old maids keeping house together to save on costs like we’d been saying. Even said how she’d be the willing one, glad to make the sacrifice of lying under as many men as it took to stick you in her belly. And when you rooted and grew, what didn’t I do for her when she was carrying you? Anything she asked for, any whim that tickled that bubble she called a brain, I broke my back to fetch it. I gave up all the sweetness of the woods and the brightness of the stars for a set of overpriced rooms in a city I hated, just so she could stay in walking distance of fancy restaurants, movies, stores. The night her pains came on, who was it drove her to the hospital? I held her hand, made her breathe, caught your slime-streaked body, cut the birth cord. When she looked at you that first time, all wrinkly red, and turned her head away because you weren’t pretty enough to suit her, I held you close and felt you nuzzle into my chest looking for what she wouldn’t give you, and I wept because I would’ve given it to you if I could.”

In the dark, Ruby heard Mama’s voice catch on a dry, half-swallowed sob. Tears were smearing her own face, but she never made a sound. This was the longest Mama’d ever gone on about Ruby’s mother. Usually all she harped on was the night that woman had run off, never to return, leaving the two of them behind. Mama was saying some things Ruby knew, but there was fresh knowledge jutting itself up out of the dark like a sprouting hedge of thorns. Each new revelation drew a drop of blood from somewhere that would never show, not even during the part of the contest where the judges asked you things. Ruby let the tears flow down. It wasn’t like they’d hurt her makeup; she never wore any between pageants. Mama said not to. Ruby sat tight and bruised and bleeding, waiting in silence for Mama to be done.

“There is one decent road out of these mountains, and I’ve put your feet on it,” Mama said. She wasn’t talking over tears anymore. She was in charge of everything and heaven. “One road that won’t lead you into treachery or shame, like the one she chose, the whore. All the things you want, all you hope to own, all waiting for you to call them in just like magic, once you’ve won your proper place in this world. Beauty’s place, with no limits to it. People pay attention to looks. People give up the earth for beauty.”

“Yes, Mama,” said Ruby, small. Mama didn’t even hear. Mama was too taken up treading the word-web of her own weaving.

“God knows you could get by with less, but I’d be lying if I told you I believed that’d content you,” Mama said. “I know you too well. I’ve known you from the womb. You’re a hungry one, greedy like she was, only difference being now I know how deep the greed runs in your guts. I’m not losing you too, girl. She took too much from me. You’re mine, now till it’s over and beyond. I’m too old and homely to find someone new, and I’m damned if I’m dying alone. I’ll feed your hungers until you haven’t a one left, and then you’ll stay. You’ll have to. What’d there be left to lure you off if you got everything?”

“I ain’t going anywhere, Mama,” Ruby said, soft and pleading, the way she’d learned the judges liked to hear a girl speak.

The key turned in the ignition, the car stuttered to life. “So you say.” Mama’s face flashed grim in a shot of lightning, but then it vanished as the dark clapped down.

They drove out of the mountains and into the city, right up to the door of the big hotel where all the contestants were supposed to stay. Mama made Ruby sit in the car in the garage under the hotel until after she got them registered and had the key to the room in her hand. Then she went down to the car and had Ruby ride up in the service elevator so no one’d get to see her.

That’s how she always did it. That’s how it’d always worked before.

This time he was watching, and Mama, who always seemed to know everything, never even knew.

He’d heard about Ruby, seen the tapes of all the other pageants. At first he told himself he was just doing it for the story—“Secrets of Mystery Glamour Queen Revealed!”—but the splinter of his soul that still believed he was a real writer told him another story.

He’d seen the tapes: the judges, almost evenly divided between the ones who looked ready to let their next yawn send them all the way off to dreamland and the ones who devoured the girls with their eyes; the audience, papered over with politic-perfect neutral smiles, playing no favorites, putting their own faces on the runway bodies or else imagining those bodies in their own beds; the girls themselves, shining, bouncing, gleaming for their lives. And her.

No hope, once she took the stage, no hope for anyone at all to take it back again. She’d always come in wearing whatever it was the contest demanded — bathing suit or business suit, evening gown or kitschy cowgirl outfit, furs, sequins, fringes, fluff, leather, lotion, vinyl, sweat — it didn’t matter. She wore them all, always with that one accessory that didn’t belong but that she could no more forget to wear than her bright bloodred lipstick.

All it was was a scarf. Just a wispy chiffon scarf the color of a summer garden’s heart, a scarf she wore wrapped tightly around her head like a turban.

Not for long. He’d seen the tapes. She’d make her first appearance in the pageant with the scarf tied around her head, go one-two-three across the stage to deadliest center, reach up, give the tag end of it the merest twitch, the slightest tug, and then …

BAM! Hair. Roils and curls and seething clouds of hair erupting anywhere you’d think it could be and a whole lot of places you never imagined. Down it came, all the waves of it, the golden spilling wonder of it, the flash flood of thick, endless, unbound tresses that drenched her from head to toes in impossible glory, bright as a polished sword. Hair that mantled her in the ripples of a sun-kissed sea, remaking her in the image of a new Venus, born from the heart of the foam. Hair that boiled down to hide the swell of her breasts, the jut of her ass, and every tantalizing curve of her besides just enough to say, It’s here, baby, but you can’t have it, and oh my, yes, I know that only makes you want it more.

Hair that was the sudden curtain rung down over the beauty of her body, a sudden, sharp HANDS OFF sign that made the half-slumbering judges wake up to the realization that they’d missed out, made the ravenous ones howl for the feast that had been snatched away from their eyes. And while they all gasped and murmured and scribbled their thwarted hearts out on the clipboards in their hands, she did a quick swivel-turn, flicked her trailing mane neatly, gracefully aside, out from under spike-heeled foot, and made her exit, clipping a staccato one-two-three from the stage boards, each jounce of her hair-swathed hips nothing more than a whisper, a promise, a deliriously wicked little secret peeping out from under the glimmering veil.

Sometimes the other contestants raised a fuss, but what could they do? Nothing in the rules against a girl wearing a scarf in, on, or over her hair; let them wear their own if they wanted.

As if that’d give them more than a butterfly’s prayer in hell! He knew. He’d seen the tapes, and once — just once, by the sort of accident that slams a man’s legs out from under him and smashes a fist through his heart — he’d seen her. A reporter’s supposed to cover police calls, but when it’s a false alarm about a stickup at the box office of the auditorium where the pageant’s happening, well, what’s a man to do? Toss it all up and go home when there’s something else worth seeing? Of course he stayed to see her. He’d seen the tapes, but this was something else again.

And how. Seeing her pull that stunt with the scarf in person burned all the tapes to ash in his memory. He stood there, at the back of the auditorium, and felt the air conditioner dry his tongue as he gaped, blast-frozen in an impact of hair and hair and hair. Down it came, every strand taking its own tumbling path through spotlight-starred air, even the tiniest tendril of it lashing itself tight around his heart.

That night he dreamed about her and woke up in a tangle of love-soiled sheets. That morning he went in to see his editor and asked to leave the crime beat for just the shortest while to dog a different sort of story.

He pitched it hard and he pitched it pro. Human interest, yeah, that’s the ticket! Everyone knew about this girl but nobody really knew a goddamn thing. Shame if the state’s next Miss America shoo-in got to hold onto her secrets. There were no secrets anyone could hold onto once she headed for the big-time, the biggest pageant of them all, and wouldn’t it be a shame if the honest citizens of this great state got left with egg on their faces in case this girl’s secrets were of the sort that smeared the camera lens with slime?

His editor bought it and bit down hard. He set his hook and ran before second thoughts could intrude. That was how he’d come to be down there, waiting in the shadows of the hotel’s underside, standing watch over the elevators in a borrowed busboy uniform, pretending to fix the cranky wheel of a food service cart. He’d done his homework, he’d checked out all the talk about how no one ever saw her before the pageant. He knew she had to get into the hotel somehow, that you couldn’t just pluck that much woman out of thin air. Simple, really, the way it was done. He didn’t waste much time thinking over why it was done at all.

Her mama never even noticed him when she came down in the service elevator to fetch Ruby from the garage. He was the “help,” invisible to her until called for. Women of a certain age would sooner give a nod of recognition to a potted plant than to the man he was pretending to be. When the two women came out of the garage and he managed the supposed miracle of fixing the food service cart just in time to share a ride up with them, he saw the old bitch’s mouth go a tad tight, but she never so much as acknowledged his presence in the elevator.

He punched the button for five, she punched twelve. “Oops.” He grinned and punched fifteen. That prune pit mouth hardened even more, but that was as far as the hag would go to admitting his existence. A fat lot he cared! He’d seen what he’d come to see … nearly.

Braids. God damn it all to hell, she was wearing braids.

Mama hung up the phone and snorted, mad. “Of all the nerve.”

“What is it, Mama?” Ruby came out of the bathroom, dewy and glowing from a hot shower, her wet hair trailing down her back, a golden serpent sinking into the sea.

“Can you believe the gall of those petty-minded creatures?”

“Who?” Mama was so upset she didn’t even bother yelling at Ruby to put a towel around her nakedness.

“The judges. They want to know why you can’t room with one of the other contestants.”

Ruby’s big blue eyes opened wide and melting-sweet with hope. She looked just like a dog that sees a house door left just a crack ajar and all the wide world beckoning sunlit beyond. “Room with …? Oh! That a part of the official rules, Mama? I wouldn’t mind doing it, if that’s so. I wouldn’t want to get disqualified just for—”

“I know what you wouldn’t mind.” Mama was a thin slice of steel, edged, flying down straight to cut off all foolish notions. “I’ve made it my business to study the contest rules. There is no such a one. Most likely one of the judges has a favorite — some little chippy who’s not too particular about who she does to win what’s your rightful crown. Only thing is, the judge must’ve seen your past wins, he knows his pet whore hasn’t got a prayer going up against you honestly, how she can’t begin to compete with what you’ve got to show. So he wants the two of you shoved together so she can check out your weak spots.”

“Do I have any weak spots, Mama?”

“None that show with your mouth shut.” Mama had a look that could shoot cold needles right through Ruby’s put-on innocence. “But then, what’s to stop the bitch from making you some? Accidents happen. Hair doesn’t bleed.”

Ruby’s mouth opened, red and wet, but she could hardly breathe. “You mean …?” She hugged her damp hair to her breasts, a mother cradling her babe out of sight while the monster passes by. “Oh! You mean one of them would actually — actually—” She couldn’t say it. She could only make scissors of her fingers and tremble as they snipped the air.

Mama nodded. “Now you’re getting smart.” She headed for the door. “Don’t worry, child. I’ll soon set them right. Could be all they’re fretted up about is me sharing this room for free. Stingy old badgers. I’ll pay my share, if that’s what it takes, but I’ll never leave you to anyone’s keeping but mine.” She touched the door. “And put on a robe!” Then she was gone.

Ruby was still alone in her room when he knocked on the door. “Room service!” She hadn’t ordered anything, but she figured maybe Mama’d done it while she’d still been in the shower.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, the TV on to Seinfeld, Ruby didn’t know what to do. Mama always told her not to open the door for anyone or anything. The knock came again, and the voice. She stole across the room to peer out through the peephole. Such a good-looking young man!

Ruby told herself that if Mama came back and didn’t find her room service order laid out and waiting for her, she’d be mad. Mama’d been mad enough all the long drive here, mad over the message from the judges, no sense in riling her more. Ruby reasoned that a bite of food would be just what Mama’d need when she came back from setting those judges straight, but all the little angels blushed to know that Ruby only conjured up those kindly reasons for letting that young man inside well after she’d opened the door.

He almost died when he saw her. His hands clenched tight to the handle of the room service wagon he was pushing, his face abruptly hot with more than just the steam rising from the two steak dinners he’d brought up with him to complete his disguise. She was wearing the old-lady-style nightie and robe set Mama’d bought her for her birthday — plain blue cotton the color of a prisoner’s sky — but she owned the power to turn such stuff indecent just by slipping it on. He saw her and his breath turned to broken glass in his throat and suddenly he knew he wasn’t here for just the story.

Things moved fast after that. So long alone, so long instructed in her own unworthiness to be anything but Mama’s beautiful, dutiful daughter, Ruby had never dreamed she’d ever hear another human being tell her she was all things lovesome. First thing he did was beg her pardon for having sent her mama off on a wild goose chase — the judges didn’t give two shits about how Ruby roomed; he’d been the one to make the call that cleared the way in here for all his desires, known and unknown both. Almost in the same breath that he confessed his subterfuge, he turned it from a journalist’s ruse to a masquerade of the heart.

“I saw you and I fell in love.” It was too simply said for someone like her to do anything but believe it.

“I think …” she began. “I think I kind of love you too, I guess.”

He didn’t seem to care about how many qualifiers she tacked on to her declaration. He had her in his arms and time was flying faster than the hands he plunged into the damp warmth of her hair.

She let him. All her life she’d lived walled up behind a thousand small permissions. For once it felt so good, so very good to strike out against them all, sweep them away, deny they’d ever had any power to keep her in. He asked, she gave, and giving split her high stone tower wide open to the sun. And if the swiftness of it all seemed to smack of once-upon-a-time implausibility, the fact that it did happen just that fast wasn’t anything a rational body could deny. He was handsome and in love, she was beautiful and alone, and neither one of them knew when her mama might return. Things that happened that fast fell out the way they did because what other choice did they have? Anyhow, it takes longer to make lunch than to make love.

He didn’t leave it at her hair, but he was skilled and gentle and she was flying way too high to feel the pain when he broke her somewhere that the judges wouldn’t see the blood but the chambermaids would. He laughed, then he moaned over her, falling away still tangled in her hair. That was the only time he hurt her, when he yanked it like that, never meaning to, too caught up in his own sweet joy to pay anything else any mind.

Maybe that was how Mama managed to come in on them like that, with neither one of them able to hear the click of the door opening or see her standing over them, the lightning flash from the mountain storm frozen across her face.

They heard her scream all right, though. It gurgled up out of her from deeper than her throat and smashed itself shrill against the ceiling. Then it wound itself up into a banshee’s howl that went on so long they neither one of them had the power left to notice that she’d got one of the steak knives in her hand.

Down it came, sharp and clean, slicing across the hand he held up to fend it off. His cry wasn’t much more than a yelp from a kicked dog, and she did kick him, hard and where he’d remember it. She had to jab him off the bed, off Ruby, to do it, but it was a lesson to see how easy an old woman could herd a young man where she’d have him go as long as she held a knife. She only let him stand beside the bed a second before she jerked her foot up sharp between his legs and laid him down.

He was curled up on the floor at her feet, holding himself tight, blood from his hand striping him, belly and balls, when she went after Ruby. Ruby’s screams brought folks, but by that time it was much too late. By the time anyone came from the other rooms on that floor or from the front desk or from the pageant authorities, Mama’d got her forearm wrapped with as much of Ruby’s hair as she could twist ’round it, until it looked like she’d grown herself a shining gold cocoon from elbow to wrist. Then she sawed down with the blade.

It was thick hair but easy cutting, almost like such a mane was spun of dreams and had only been allowed to exist in the real world on the sufferance of someone with a witch’s power over impossible things. It cut right off clean at the touch of the steak knife and it trailed down limp from Mama’s arm while she stood there panting and the newspaper man lay there groaning and Ruby sobbed and sobbed into the stained sheets of her bed.

They were asked to leave the hotel right after that, all three, no surprise. Mama didn’t even raise a peep of protest. She was satisfied. As soon as they told her to get out, she just started packing up her stuff, smug, and snapped at Ruby to do the same. Hotel security came to urge the newspaperman back into his clothes and down to the nearest police station to answer charges. Ruby was so taken up in too many different colors of grief that it was an hour at least before she found the strength to look after packing her things. The room door was closed but she could still hear the elated whispers of the other girls out in the hall, their giggles of delight. Even if she’d been able to deafen her ears to those sounds, there was still Mama.

“Happy?” the old witch hissed in her ear, and oh, her breath was cold on the back of Ruby’s naked neck! “Was it worth it, what you did, what you threw away? Don’t tell me your answer now, little girl; not just yet. We’re going home. You can wait to tell me then, after you’ve taken any job you can find, waiting tables at the diner, standing on your feet all day at the Wal-Mart, packing boxes full of car parts at the factory. Or maybe what you’ll have to do is spread your legs again and land a man who’ll stuff you full of his brats and slap you around when you won’t mind him just the way he wants. And you can all come visit dear old Granny at Christmastime. Oh yes, that’ll do for me if you wait til then to tell was it worth it tonight.”

And she kept on like that at Ruby until …

In all the fuss, in all the screaming and running and calling for the police to come, no one thought to call Room Service back and have them take away the cart. There were two steaks on that cart, two steak knives. Ruby didn’t have any trouble laying her hands to the second one when Mama turned her back on her and had herself a good, long laugh.

That, too, happened fast.

Ruby’s man got himself all bailed out in time to hear the story come in to Police HQ; he stuck around to see them bring her in. He was waiting for her there, threw himself into her arms so quick that the arresting officers couldn’t shoulder him off before he whispered urgently in her ear for her to shut up, say nothing, hold on until his paper scared her up a lawyer. Crime of passion, that’s what it was, and they played up that angle big at the trial. Provocation more than any human soul could bear. All it took was one look into those big, teary eyes of hers, one glance at the sawed-off ruin of her hair, and the jury was at her feet. It didn’t hurt any that she still knew how to work a crowd.

They let her off with a light sentence, and she married her man before she went through the prison doors. It wasn’t the kind of prison a mama’d fear to let her daughter go in, not that Ruby had anything like that to worry about anymore. She got her high school diploma while she was inside, and she got an agent to book her on all the right talk shows when she got out and her husband got a book out of it and her hair grew back — maybe not as long or thick, but still pretty as you please. She thought it was pretty enough, anyhow.

When it was halfway down to her ass again, she went back on the pageant circuit, took the Mrs. America crown like it’d been waiting for her in a bus station locker all that time. Then she retired, sold Mary Kay, had kids — Bobby, Jim, and Angel — lived happily ever after even if her man sometimes did stare at her hair and say how it’s too bad it never did grow back all the way to how it was. Ruby was kind of sad that she couldn’t please her man as much as she’d done that first time. Mama never did think she was too smart, but Ruby knew that if she put her mind to it, she’d think of something.

Angel’s got her mama’s hair; Angel’s three. Angel goes to all the pageants, Daddy keeps the boys away. Ruby runs a brush through Angel’s hair and tells her daughter that if she’s beautiful, everything will be just fine.

Esther Friesner says that “Big Hair” is the product of the fairy tale “Rapunzel” and one too many attacks of being extremely fed up with stage mamas and beauty pageants. And oddly enough, she was not thinking of the JonBenet Ramsey murder when she wrote the story.