Black Heart, Ivory Bones
This one is for Jennifer Brehl, with our heartfelt thanks.
Rapunzel
Not for the first time, a son knew himself to be older than his father.
Urlenn was thinking about this, their disparate maturities, as he rode down through the forests. It was May-Month, and the trees were drenched in fresh young green. If he had been coming from anywhere but a war, he might have felt instinctively alert, and anticipatory; happy, nearly. But killing others was not a favorite pastime. Also, the two slices he had got in return were still raw, probably inflamed. He was mostly disgusted.
It was the prospect of going home. The castle, despite its luxuries, did not appeal. For there would be his father (a king), the two elder sons, and all the noble cronies. They would sit Urlenn up past midnight, less to hear of his exploits than to go over their own or their ancestors’: the capture of a fabulous city, a hundred men dispatched by ten, the wonderful prophecy of some ancient crone, even, once, a dragon. There may have been dragons centuries ago, Urlenn judiciously concluded, but if so, they were thin on the ground by now. One more horror, besides, was there in the castle. His betrothed, the inescapable Princess Madzia. The king had chosen Madzia for Urlenn not for her fine blood, but because her grandmother had been (so they said) a fairy. Madzia had thick black hair to her waist, and threw thick black tempers.
After the battle, Urlenn let his men off at the first friendly town. The deserved a junket, and their captains would look out for them. He was going home this way. This long way home. With luck, he might make it last a week.
After all, Madzia would not like—or like too much—his open wounds. They ran across his forehead and he had been fortunate to keep his left eye. Doubtless the king would expect the tale of some valiant knightly one-to-one combat to account for this. But it had been a pair of glancing arrows.
Should I make something up to cheer the Dad?
No. And don’t call him “the Dad,” either. He’s king. He’d never forgive you.
Urlenn found he had broken into loud, quite musical song. The ditty was about living in the greenwood, the simple life. Even as he sang, he mocked himself. Being only the third son had advantages, allowing for odd lone journeys like this one. But there were limits.
Something truly odd happened then.
Another voice joined in with his, singing the same song, and in a very decent descant. A girl’s voice.
The horse tossed its head and snorted, and Urlenn reined it in.
They sang, he and she (invisible), until the end. Then, nothing. Urlenn thought, She’s not scared, or she would never have sung. So he called: “Hey, maiden! Where are you?”
And a laughing voice—you could tell it laughed—called back, “Where do you think?”
“Inside a tree,” called Urlenn. “You’re a wood-dryad.”
“A what? A dryad—oh, Gran told me about those. No I’m not.”
Urlenn dismounted. There was, he had come to see, something gray and tall and stone, up the slope, just showing through the ascending trees.
He did not shout again. Nor did she. Urlenn walked up the hill, and came out by a partly ruined tower. Sycamores and aspens had rooted in its sides, giving it a leafy, mellow look. A cottage had rooted there, too, a large one; also made of stones, which had definitely been filched from the tower.
Before the cottage and tower was an orchard of pear and apple trees just losing their white blossom. Chickens and a goat ambled about. The girl was hanging up washing from the trees.
She was straight and slim, with short yellow hair like a boy’s. And yes, still laughing.
“Not a dryad, as you see, sir.”
“Maybe unwise, though, calling out to strangers in the wood.”
“Oh, you sounded all right.”
“Did I?”
“All sorts come through here. You get to know.”
“Do you?”
“Sometimes I fetch the animals, and we hide in the tower. Last month two men broke into the cottage and stole all the food. I let them get on with it.” She added, careless, “I was only raped once. I’d been stupid. But he wished he hadn’t, after.”
“That’s you warning me.”
“No. You’re not the type, sir. You looked upset when I told you. Then curious.”
“I am. What did you do, kill him?”
“No, I told him I loved him and gave him a nice drink. He’d have had the trots for days.”
Urlenn himself laughed. “Didn’t he come back?”
“Not yet. And it was two years ago.”
She looked about seventeen, three years younger than he. She had been raped at fifteen. It did not seem to matter much to her. She had a lovely face. Not beautiful or pretty, but unexpected, interesting, like a landscape never seen before, though perhaps imagined.
“Well, maiden,” he said. “I’m thirsty myself. Do you have any drinks without medicine in them? I can pay, of course.”
“That’s all right. We mainly barter, when I go to town.” She turned and walked off to the cottage. Urlenn stood, looking at the goat and chickens and a pale cat that had come to supervise them.
The girl returned with a tankard of beer, clear as a river, and cold from some cool place, as he later learned, under the cottage floor.
He drank gratefully. She said, “You’re one of the king’s men, aren’t you, sent to fight off the other lot?”
The other lot. Yes.
He said, “That’s right.”
“That cut over your eye looks sore.”
“It is. I didn’t want it noticed much and wrapped it up in a rag—which was, I now think, dirty.”
“I can mix up something for that.”
“You’re a witch too.”
“Gran was. She taught me.”
Presently he tethered the horse to a tree and left it to crop the turf.
In the cottage he sat watching her sort and pound her herbs. It was neither a neat nor a trim room, but—pleasing. Flowering plants burst and spilled from pots on the windowsills, herbs and potions, vinegars and honeys stood glowing like jade and red amber in their jars. A patchwork curtain closed off the sleeping place. On the floor there were baskets full of colored yarns and pieces of material. Even some books lay on a chest. There was the sweet smell of growing things, the memory of recent baking—the bread stood by on a shelf—a hint of damp. And her. Young and healthy, fragrant. Feminine.
When she brought the tincture she had made, and applied it to the cuts, her scent came to him more strongly.
Urlenn thought of Madzia, her flesh heavily perfumed, and washed rather less often. He thought of Madzia’s sulky, red, biteable-looking mouth.
This girl said, “That will sting.” It does, he thought, and I don’t mean your ointment. “But it’ll clean the wound. Alas, I think there’ll be a scar. Two scars. Will that spoil your chances, handsome?”
He looked up and straight in her eyes. She was flirting with him, plainly. Oh yes, she knew what she was at. She had told him, she could tell the good from the bad by now.
I don’t look much like a king’s son, certainly. Not anymore. Just some minor noble able to afford a horse. So, it may be me she fancies.
Her eyes were more clear than any beer-brown river.
“If you don’t want money, let me give you something else in exchange for your care—”
“And what would you give me?”
“Well, what’s on the horse I need to keep. But—is there anything you see that you’d like?”
Was he flirting now?
To his intense surprise, Urlenn felt himself blush. And, surprising him even more, at his blush she, this canny, willful woods-witch, she did, too.
So then he drew the ring off his finger. It was small, but gold, with a square cut, rosy stone. He put it in her palm.
“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t take that for a cup of ale and some salve.”
“If you’d give me dinner, too, I think I’d count us quits,” he said.
She said, without boldness, gently, “There’s the bed, as well.”
Later, in the night, he told her he fell in love with her on sight, only did not realize he had until she touched him.
“That’s nothing,” she said, “I fell in love with you the minute I heard you singing.”
“Few have done that, I can tell you.”
They were naked by then, and had made love three times. They knew each other well enough to say such things. The idea was he would be leaving after breakfast, and might come back to visit her, when he could. If he could. The talk of being in love was chivalry, and play.
But just as men and women sometimes lie when they say they love and will return, so they sometimes lie also when they believe they will not.
They united twice more in the night, while the cat hunted outside and the goat and chickens muttered from their hut. In the morning Urlenn did not leave. In the morning she never mentioned he had not.
When she told him her name, he had laughed out loud. “What? Like the salad?”
“Just like. My ma had a craving for it all the time she carried me. So then, she called me for it, to pay me out.”
The other paying out had been simple, too.
“In God’s name—” he said, holding her arm’s length, shocked and angry, even though he knew it happened frequently enough.
“I don’t mind it,” she said. He could see, even by the fire and candlelight, she did not. How forgiving she is—no, how understanding of human things.
For the girl’s mother had sold her, at the age of twelve, to an old woman in the forests.
“I was lucky. She was a wise-woman. And she wanted an apprentice not a slave.”
In a few weeks, it seemed, the girl was calling the old woman “Gran,” while Gran called her Goldy. “She was better than any mother to me,” said the girl. “I loved her dearly. She left me everything when she died. All this. And her craft, that she’d taught me. But we only had two years together, I’d have liked more. Never mind. As she used to say, ‘Some’s more than none.’ It was like that with my hair.”
“She called you Goldy for your hair.”
“No. Because she said I was ‘good as gold and bad as butter.’”
“What?”
“She was always saying daft funny things. She’d make you smile or think, even if your heart was broken. She had the healing touch, too. I don’t have it.”
“You did, for me.”
“Ah, but I loved you.”
After an interval, during which the bed became, again, unmade, the girl told Urlenn that her fine hair, which would never grow and which, therefore, she cut so short, was better than none, according to Gran.
“It wasn’t unkind, you see. But pragmatic.”
She often startled him with phrases, words—she could read. (Needless to say, Gran had taught her.)
“Why bad as butter?”
“Because butter makes you want too much of it.”
“I can’t get too much of you. Shall I call you Goldy—or the other name?”
“Whatever you like. Why don’t you find a name for me yourself? Then I’ll be that just for you.”
“I can’t name you—like my dog!”
“That’s how parents name their children. Why not lovers?”
He thought about the name, as he went about the male chores of the cottage, splitting logs, hunting the forest, mending a scythe. Finally he said, diffidently, “I’d like to call you Flarva.”
“That’s elegant. I’d enjoy that.”
He thought she would have enjoyed almost anything. Not just because she loved him, but because she was so easy with the world. He therefore called her Flarva, not explaining yet it had been his mother’s name. His mother who had died when Urlenn was only six.
Urlenn had sometimes considered if his father’s flights of fantasy would have been less if Flarva had lived. The Dad (Yes, I shall call you that in my head) had not been king then. Kingship came with loss, after, and also power and wealth, and all the obligations of these latter things.
Other men would have turned to other women. The Dad had turned to epics, ballads, myths and legends. He filled his new-sprung court with song-makers, actors and storytellers. He began a library, most of the contents of which—unlike this young girl—he could not himself read. He inaugurated a fashion for the marvelous and magical. If someone wanted to impress the Dad, they had only to “prove,” by means of an illuminated scroll, that they took their partial descent from one of the great heroes or heroines—dragon-slayers, spinners of gold, tamers of unicorns. Indeed, only four years ago the king had held a unicorn hunt. (It was well attended.) One of the beasts had been seen, reportedly, drinking from a fountain on the lands of the Dad. Astonishingly, they never found it. Rumors of it still circulated from time to time. And those who claimed to have seen it, if they told their tale just in that way, were rewarded.
Was the king mad? Was it his brain—or only some avoiding grief at the reality of the brutal world?
“Or is it his genius?” said the girl—Flarva—when he informed her of his father’s nature. “When the dark comes, do we sit in the dark, or light candles?”
How, he thought, I love you.
And strangely, she said then, “There, you love him.”
“I suppose I do. But he irks me. I wish I could go off. Look at me here. I should have got home by now.”
He had not, despite all this, yet revealed to her that the Dad was also the king. Did she still assume his father was only some run-down baron or knight? Urlenn was not sure. Flarva saw through to things.
“Well, when you leave, then you must,” was all she said in the end.
He had been up by now to the town, a wandering little village with a church and a tavern and not much else. Here he found a man with a mule who could take a letter to the next post of civilization. From there it would travel to the king. The letter explained Urlenn had been detained in the forests. He had only one piece of paper, and could not use it up on details—he begged his lordly sire to pardon him, and await his excuses when he could come home to give them.
Afterward, Urlenn had realized, this had all the aura of some Dad-delighting sacred quest, even a spell.
Would he have to go to the king eventually and say, “A witch enchanted me?”
He did not think he could say that. It would be a betrayal of her. Although he knew she would not mind.
There was no clock in the cottage, or in the village-town. Day and night followed each other. The green thickened in clusters on the trees, and the stars were thinner and more bright on the boughs of darkness. Then a golden border stitched itself into the trees. The stars waxed thicker again, and the moon more red.
Urlenn liked going to the village market with Flarva, bartering the herbs and apples and vegetables from her garden plot, and strange patchwork and knitted coats she made, one of which he now gallantly wore.
He liked the coat. He liked the food she cooked. He liked milking the adventurous goat, which sometimes went calling on a neighbor’s he-goat two miles off and had to be brought back. He liked the pale cat, which came to sleep with them in the hour before dawn. He liked woodcutting. The song of birds and their summer stillness. The stream that sparkled down the slope. The gaunt old tower. Morning and evening.
Most of all, he liked her, the maiden named first for a salad. Not only lust and love, then. For liking surely was the most dangerous. Lust might burn out and love grow accustomed. But to like her was to find in her always the best—of herself, himself, and all the world.
One evening, when the lamp had just been lit, she straightened up from the pot over the fire, and he saw her as if he never had.
He sat there, dumbfounded, as if not once, in the history of any land, had such a thing ever before happened.
Sensing this, she turned and looked at him with her amused, kindly, feral eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Flarva?”
“I was waiting to see how long you’d take to notice.”
“How far gone is it?”
“Oh, four months or so. Not so far. You haven’t been too slow.”
“Slow? I’ve been blind. But you—you’re never ill.”
“The herbs are good for this, too.”
“But—it must weigh on you.”
“It—It—”
“He, then—or she, then.”
“They, then.”
“They?”
“Twins I am carrying, love of my heart.”
“How do you know? Your herbs again?”
“A dowsing craft Gran taught me. Boy and girl, Urlenn, my dear.”
He got up and held her close. Now he felt the swell of her body pressing to him. They were there.
She was not fretful. Neither was he. It was as if he knew no harm could come to her. She was so clear and wholesome and yet so—yes, so sorcerous. No one could know her and think her only a peasant girl in a woods cottage. Perhaps it was for this reason, too, he had had no misgivings that he abused, when first he lay down with her. He a prince. She a princess. Equals, although they were of different social countries.
However, what to do now?
“I’ve grasped from the beginning I’d never leave you, Flarva. But—I have to confess to you about myself.”
She looked up into his eyes. She had learned she had two children in her womb. Perhaps she had fathomed him, too.
“Have you? I mean, do you know I am—a king’s son?
She smiled. “What does it matter?”
“Because—”
“If you must leave me, Urlenn, I’ve always left open the door. I’d be sorry. Oh, so very sorry. But perhaps you might come back, now and then. Whatever, love isn’t a cage, or if it is, a pretty one, with the door undone, and the birds out and sitting on the roof. I can manage here.”
“You don’t see, Flarva. Maybe you might manage very well without me. But I’d be lost without you. And those two—greedily, I want to know them as well.”
“I’m glad. But I thought you would.”
“So I must find a way to bring you home.”
“Simple. I shall give this cottage to our neighbor. The goat will like that. The neighbor’s good with fruit trees and chickens, too. As for the cat, she must come with us, being flexible and quite portable.”
“No, my love, you know quite well what I mean. A way to bring you into my father’s castle, and keep you there. And selfishly let you make it home for me at last.”
They sat by the fire—the evenings now were cooler than they had been. Side by side, he and she, they plotted out what must be done. The answer was there to hand, if they had the face, the cheek, for it.
It had been a harsh, white winter. Then a soft spring. Now flame-green early summer lighted the land.
Amazed, the castle men-at-arms, about to throw Urlenn in the moat, recognized him.
“I’m here without any state.”
“In a state,” they agreed.
But then some of the men he had led in the war ran up, cheering him, shaking his hand.
“Where on God’s earth have you been? We searched for you—”
“A wild weird tale. Take me to the king. He must hear first.”
Urlenn had been driving a wagon, pulled by two mules, and his war-horse tied at the back. One or two heard a baby cry, and looked at one or two others.
Prince Urlenn went into the king’s presence just as he was, in workaday colorful peasant clothes, and with two white scars glaring above his shining eyes.
The king (who did not know he was the Dad) had been on a broad terrace that commanded a view of the valleys and the distant mountains that marked his kingdom’s end. The two elder sons were also there, and their wives, and most of the court, servants, soldiers, various pets, some hunting dogs, and Princess Madzia, who, for motives of sheer rage, had not gone away all this while.
Urlenn bowed. The king, white as the paper of Urlenn’s last—and only second—letter, sprang up.
They embraced and the court clapped (all but Madzia). Urlenn thought, I’ve been monstrous to put him through this. But surely I never knew he liked me at all—but he does, look, he’s crying. Oh, God. I could hang myself.
But that would not have assisted the Dad, nor himself, so instead Urlenn said, “Will you forgive me, my lord and sire? I was so long gone on the strangest adventure, the most fearsome and bizarre event of my life. I never thought such things were possible. Will you give me leave to tell you the story of it?”
There followed some fluster, during which Princess Madzia scowled, her eyes inky thunder. But these eyes dulled as Urlenn spoke. In the end they were opaque, and all of her gone to nothing but a smell of civet and a dark red dress. Years after, when she was riotously married elsewhere, and cheerful again, she would always say, broodingly (falsely), “My heart broke.” But even she had never said that Urlenn had been wrong.
Urlenn told them this: Journeying home through the forests, he had come to an eerie place, in a green silence. And there, suddenly, he heard the most beautiful voice, singing. Drawn by the song, he found a high stone tower. Eagerly, yet uneasily—quite why he was not sure—he waited nearby, to see if the singer might appear. Instead, presently, a terrible figure came prowling through the trees. She was an old hag, and ugly, but veiled in an immediately apparent and quite awesome power which he had no words to describe. Reaching the tower’s foot, this being wasted no time, but called out thus: Let down your hair! Let down your hair! And then, wonder of wonders, from a window high up in the side of the tower, a golden banner began unfolding and falling down. Urlenn said he did not for one minute think it was hair at all. It shone and gleamed—he took it for some weaving of metal threads. But the hag placed her hands on it, and climbed up it, and vanished in at the window.
Urlenn prudently hid himself then more deeply in the trees. After an hour the hag descended as she had gone up. Urlenn observed in bewilderment as this unholy creature now pounced away into the wood.
“Then I did a foolish thing—very foolish. But I was consumed, you see, by burning curiosity.”
Imitating the cracked tones of the hag, he called out, just as she had done: “Let down your hair!”
And in answer, sure enough, the golden woven banner silked once more from the window, and fell, and fell.
He said, when he put his hands to it, he shuddered. For he knew at once, and without doubt, it had all the scent and texture of a young girl’s hair. But to climb up a rope of hair was surely improbable? Nevertheless, he climbed.
The shadows now were gathering. As he got in through the window’s slot, he was not certain of what he saw.
Then a pure voice said to him, “Who are you? You are never that witch!”
There in a room of stone, with her golden tresses piled everywhere about them, softer than silken yarn, gleaming, glorious, and—he had to say—rather untidy—the young girl told him her story.
Heavy with child, the girl’s mother had chanced to see, in the gardens of a dreaded, dreadful witch, a certain salad. For this she developed, as sometimes happens with women at such times, a fierce craving. Unable to satisfy it, she grew ill. At last, risking the witch’s wrath, the salad was stolen for the woman. But the witch, powerful as she was, soon knew, and manifested before the woman suddenly. “In return for your theft from my garden, I will thieve from yours. You must give me your child when it is born, for my food has fed it. Otherwise, both can die now.” So the woman had to agree, and when she had borne the child, a daughter, weeping bitterly she gave it to the witch. Who, for her perverse pleasure, named the girl after the salad (here he told the name) and kept her imprisoned in a tower of stone.
“But her hair,” said Urlenn, “oh, her hair—it grew golden and so long—finer than silk, stronger than steel. Was it for this magic, perhaps imparted by the witch’s salad, that the witch truly wanted her? Some plan she must have had to use the hapless maiden and her flowing locks? I thwarted it. For having met the maid, she and I fell in love.”
Urlenn had intended to rescue his lover from the tower, but before that was accomplished, he visited her every day. And the witch, cunning and absolute, discovered them. “You’ll realize,” said Urlenn, “she had only to look into some sorcerous glass to learn of our meetings. But we, in our headstrong love, forgot she could.”
“Faithless!” screamed the witch, and coming upon the girl alone, cut off all her golden hair. Then the witch, hearing the young man calling, herself let the tresses down for his ladder. And he, in error, climbed them. Once in the tower’s top, the witch confronted him in a form so horrible, he could not later recall it. By her arcane strengths, however, she flung him down all the length of the tower, among great thorns and brambles which had sprung up there.
“Among them I almost lost my sight. You see the scars left on my forehead. Blinded, I wandered partly mad for months.”
Beyond the tower lay an occult desert, caused by the witch’s searing spells. Here the witch in turn cast the maiden, leaving her there to die.
But, by the emphasis of love and hope, she survived, giving birth alone in the wilderness, to the prince’s children, a little boy and girl, as alike as sunflowers.
“There in the end, sick, and half insane, I found her. Then she ran to me and her healing tears fell on my eyes. And my sight was restored.”
Love had triumphed. The desert could not, thereafter, keep them, and the prince and his beloved, wife in all but name, emerged into the world again, and so set out for the kingdom of the prince’s father.
He’s crying again. Yes, I should hang myself. But maybe not. After all, she said I might make out her Gran was wicked—said the old lady would have laughed—all in a good cause. A perfect cause. They’re all crying. Look at it. And the Dad—he does love a story.
“My son—my son—won’t this evil sorceress pursue you?”
Urlenn said, frankly, “She hasn’t yet. And it was a year ago.”
The king said, “Where is the maiden?”
Oh, the hush.
“She waits just outside, my lordly sire. And our children, too. One thing …”
“What is it?”
“Since the witch’s cruel blow, her hair lost its supernatural luster. Now it’s just … a nice shade of flaxen. Nor will it grow at all. She cuts it short. She prefers that, you see, after the use to which it was last put. By her hair, then, you’ll never know her. Only by her sweetness and her lovely soul, which shine through her like a light through glass.”
Then the doors were opened and Flarva came in. She wore a white gown, with pearls in her short yellow hair. She looked as beautiful as a dream. And after her walked two servants with two sleeping babies. And by them, a pale stalking cat which, having no place in the legend, at first no one saw. (Although it may have found its way into other tales.)
But the king strode forward, his eyes very bright. Never, Urlenn thought, had he seen this man so full of life and fascinated interest. Or had he seen it often, long ago, when he was only three or four or five? In Flarva’s time …
“Welcome,” said the king, the Dad, gracious as a king or a father may be. “Welcome to the wife of my son, my daughter, Rapunzel.”
Tanith Lee says of her story, “My only other assault so far, on the story of ‘Rapunzel’”—‘The Golden Rope,’ in Red as Blood, 1983—“tried to explore, as I normally do, intricacies within intricacies, the convolutions under already complete knots and windings. This time a preposterous simplicity suggested itself. Perhaps it was just the time for it, for me. Any supernatural myth or folktale could have a similar base, and some maybe do.… What endeared this debunking to me so much was that the deceptions sprang from love. And love, of course, the pivot of so many fairy tales (along with the darker avarice, rage and competitiveness) is itself one of the magic intangibles. Invisible as air, only to be seen by its effects, love remains entirely and intransigently real.”
The Crone
I sit by the side of the road, comfortably planted
On a stone my buttocks have worn silky.
My garments are a peeling bark of rags,
My feet humped as roots, my hands catch
Like twigs, my hair is moss and feathers.
My eyes are a bird’s eyes, bright and sharp.
I wait for sons.
They always come, sometimes twice a day
In questing season, looking for adventure,
Fortune, fame, a magic flower, love.
Only the youngest sons will find it:
The others might as well have stopped at home
For all the good I’ll do them.
It’s the second sons who break my heart,
Anxious at their elder brothers’ failure,
Stuck with the second-best horse, the second-best sword,
The second-best road to disaster. Often I wish
A second son would share his bread with me,
Wrap his cloak around my body, earn
The princess and the gold.
That’s one wish. The second (I’m allowed three)
Is that a daughter, any daughter at all—
Youngest, oldest—seeking her fortune,
A kingdom to rule, a life to call her own
Would sit and talk with me, give me her bread
And her ear. Perhaps (third wish) she’d ask
After my kin, my home, my history.
Ah then, I’d throw off my rags and dance in the road
Young as I never was, and free.
The old crone is a familiar fairy tale figure found in stories around the world. In “quest” and “boy-in-search-of-fortune” fairy tales, the hero encounters an old woman on the road and must treat her with courtesy or suffer the consequences. In courtly French fairy tales she is usually a beautiful fairy in disguise, but in German and French peasant folk lore, the crone sits mysteriously at the edges of the story, encouraging children to be kind to poverty-stricken old ladies.
Big Hair
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