“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.