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SALLY COULD OUTRUN the boys twice her age without ever breaking a sweat. She preferred to run without shoes. She thought they slowed her down. Her long red hair came down to her waist and was permanently in a state of wild disarray. She picked sticks and leaves out of the mangled knots after every summer sunset. Once, after a day of barefoot racing, she pulled an entire bouquet out. She scrounged some twine to bind the dandelions and wildflowers.
Her neighbour, Jake, had a wooden castle playground the size of a small house. She spent her days and some of her nights there. She would stay late to capture lightning bugs and then pass out in a play tunnel until dawn. Her father had a job where he was gone all the time, but he kept the fridge full. That was all Sally needed.
Sally’s mother was a model. She learned from Jake’s mom that a model was a pretty lady who wore pretty clothes. Sally did not understand how being pretty kept her mother gone all the time. Sally’s mother visited the house, but always had a packed suitcase by the front door. Always prepared to grab it and dash at the ring of the telephone.
Sally swung by her house early one afternoon to grab her tennis racket. Upon opening the door, she was gagged with a cloud of smoke. This smell came with her mother. Sally turned the corner and there she was, face down on the dining room table. Glass bottles of varying sizes littered the once tidy room. Cigarettes lay crumpled in piles over the table, the floor and in her mother’s hair. Her mother moaned and dropped a lit one onto the rug. Sally rushed to stamp it out with her bare feet.
‘Mommy, why are you here?’
This startled her mother who hurled a bottle at the wall behind Sally, who ducked from the glass shards. ‘The director thinks I’m too old!’ she roared into the dim room.
Sally started wiping the glass off her arms and began her retreat. ‘Sorry, Mommy. I was just getting my tennis racket.’
Sally’s mother dragged her face sideways to look at her daughter. Her mouth and teeth were purple and her face was stained with black tears. It occurred to Sally that she didn’t know what colour her mother’s eyes were… They were black now.
‘What’s that? On your face?’ Sally’s mother slurred. Sally lifted her hand to her face to feel for sand or mud.
‘Nothing Mommy.’
‘It’s on your hand too.’
Sally searched her hand. ‘Nothing is there Mommy.’
‘No, no, it’s everywhere. All over your face, neck, arms, hands. What have you done to yourself?’ she interrogated.
Sally’s mother had never spoken to her this much. ‘Are you talking about my freckles, mommy? I got a lot this summer. Jake’s mom says they are just little spots of beauty!’
‘They are horrible. You look like a homeless animal that rolled around in sewage,’ Sally’s mother growled.
Confused and afraid, Sally eyed the door. ‘Mommy? Why are you here?’
‘You are not to go outside again without a hat and an umbrella. And if I see another freckle appear, I will remove it myself. Do you understand?’ her mother threatened.
‘Yes, Mommy.’
‘Go get me another bottle of wine.’
‘Suck in your gut! You’re too bloated.’ Sally’s mother had her suspended from the straps of her dress. Her feet were hovering off the ground. Sally went back and forth between hanging limp from the noose of the dress and trying to kick her way to freedom. Her mother had been trying to get the red evening gown on her for two hours.
After Sally’s mother got fired from modelling, she decided to put Sally in beauty pageants. Her mother began to drag her around the country to various ones. Sally despised all of them. The sweltering lights gave her migraines, the cheap makeup stung her eyes and the constant hunger made her faint. She missed Jake and his wooden castle. Sally would rather live in Jake’s wooden castle than be wrestled into another dress by her mother.
‘I don’t know how,’ Sally whined.
‘Try harder. I haven’t raised a fatty.’ Sally’s mother yanked her arms, neck and torso around to manoeuvre Sally’s body into the dress. Sally thought her mother liked it when bruises would emerge after she manhandled her too hard. Black and purple bruises had become a recurring accessory to Sally’s pageant wardrobe. The woman at the makeup table had a permanent pallet set aside to cover her bruises.
Sally scanned the room and found herself in similar company. Sweaty, desperate mothers scolded their daughters for having allergic reactions to the clothes they were shoving them into. Spray tans used carelessly while the girls cried the bronze off to begin the cycle again. Sally thought there should be a pageant for the mothers. They wanted it more.
‘Ugh! It’s like shoving sausage back into the roll.’ Her mother’s insults got more food related the longer it took Sally to fit into the dress. Her mother would be the one to rent the dresses, shouldn’t she know Sally’s size?
Sally winced at her mother’s latest contortion, ‘Mother, do I have to?’
‘Yes, you have to. I did it, your grandmother did it and now you will too. It’s the only way for you to be successful someday,’ she explained.
‘Why? I’m not going to win. I don’t want to win. I don’t care about this. It’s dumb!’
Sally’s mother plopped her to the ground, and Sally rolled her ankle in the landing. Her mother rose and smacked her across the cheek. Hard. Then again across the other. The room silenced. The mothers ogled with approval and the girls gawked at Sally’s swelling cheeks. A new accessory introduced.
‘Enough of that. You will shut up, put the dress on and make something useful of yourself.’ She yelled at Sally in a hushed whisper.
‘Get over to makeup to cover that.’ Her mother shoved her away. ‘And have the lady in makeup cover up those freckles again. The judges do not like them.’
Sally turned her back and let a few tears escape. Not enough to ruin her mascara, but enough to blanket her swollen cheeks. As she limped towards makeup, she saw another girl and her mother in a similar fight. The girl ripped bows out of her hair and threw them at her mother. The girl roared and howled how she hated the dress, the pageant, her mother.
The mother caught Sally staring at them from the corner of her eyes. As if Sally’s presence was a reminder it was now acceptable to hit the girls, the mother smacked her daughter across the face. Her daughter crashed onto the floor and didn’t get up.
‘How many times have you puked today?’ her mother yelled through the bathroom door.
‘Twice,’ Sally hollered from the toilet bowl.
‘We gotta get those numbers up if you are going to get third place in Tallahassee.’ Her voice muffled through the door.
‘Get it to three times?’ How was Sally going to puke that many times a day?
‘Four would be best. To make sure the water weight is gone.’ Sally laid her head on the toilet and took a moment. If she didn’t agree with her mother, she couldn’t leave the bathroom or worse.
Sally conceded, ‘I can try four.’
‘Good. All the models I used to know would puke four times a day.’
As Sally washed her mouth out, she noticed the circles under her eyes were nearly black and her cheeks had grown hollow. Her freckles were barely visible. This was fantastic news. Her mother said her freckles were the reason she would lose often. She said they would poke their way through her foundation and disgust everyone. She would be beautiful once they had vanished.
Her daydreaming abruptly ended when blood oozed from her mouth. She opened her mouth and looked for any sores that would bleed from the puking. Nothing. She went further and found one of her back molars hanging on by a small piece of her gums. She reached in and poked it. It fell out immediately, and she nearly swallowed it. She held the molar in her palm. Would more fall out? Could she put it back? How would it affect her smile for the judges? She opened the bathroom door to her mother and held up the tooth.
‘This fell out. What should I do?’
‘Nothing, this is progress.’
‘I can’t believe you kept it.’ Sally didn’t look at her mother, but she could feel her looming presence from the corner of the delivery room. Her mother emitted a black hole of disappointment that made Sally reach for her child. Erica, Sally’s daughter, was born that morning. She was not premature, but weighed like it.
‘Mother, we talked about this dozens of times. I wanted to be a mom.’
‘You just wanted to eat more.’ Her mother snarled.
Sally, still pale and weak from the labour, turned to her mother.
‘She’s beautiful. Right?’ she begged her mother.
Sally’s mother got up from the chair and approached the infant. She stood over the baby and peered down in stoic judgement. Mother’s pedestal glare. Sally recognised this glare from all the pageant dressing rooms she grew up in. Her mother lifted the beanie off the girl’s head.
‘She has red hair,’ she stated.
‘Like me.’
‘Like you.’
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Sally pleaded.
‘She looks like you as a baby.’ Her mother rolled her eyes.
‘Beautiful?’
Sally’s mom looked at her as if she had two heads. Sally dropped it. Sally was nearly nineteen years old, and her mother had never told her she was beautiful.
‘Have you heard from the baby’s father?’
‘No, he left when I said I was going to keep the baby.’ Sally had had a brief romance with a judge right after she turned eighteen. He left when Sally got pregnant. He said he was not ready to be a father.
‘Hm.’ Her mother was losing interest.
‘I heard there was a pageant in Louisiana. The contestants need to be twelve to eighteen months old. Would you want to come with us?’
‘You need to keep her from the sun earlier than I did with you. You wouldn’t have got so many freckles. That was my failure.’
‘I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna!’ Erica screamed. She tore the sleeves off her gown, kicked her heels off and curled into a foetal position. They had been at this for two hours. Sally crawled to her daughter’s level.
‘Erica, please get dressed. The pageant starts in fifteen minutes.’
‘No. I don’t wanna. I want to go home. I hate it here,’ she cried.
Their ritual never altered. Erica refused to get ready and Sally would plead with her for hours. Sally would pull out the big guns often.
‘Do I need to call in your grandmother?’ Erica’s red curls popped up out of her makeshift cocoon. Her green eyes glared straight into her mother’s tired ones. When Erica made that face, she looked exactly like her grandmother. Sally’s stomach dropped.
‘Go ahead,’ Erica challenged, and she reverted back into her ball on the stained dressing room floor. Sally collapsed on the floor next to her daughter. Exhausted and envious. Sally was twenty eight and was still afraid of her mother. Erica was nine. Feral and fearless. What was she to do with her? Her mother would smack her several times across the cheek if Sally ever spoke like that. Her cheeks grew sore at the memory. Sally could not bring herself to do it, but she was running out of options.
‘Mother, can you come in here? I need you to help Erica into her dress.’ The curtain immediately flew open and her mother slithered in.
‘This one is more stubborn than you ever were.’
‘I need help. Nothing is working. How did you get me dressed when I was like this?’
‘I don’t want to do pageants anymore,’ Erica cried from the ground.
‘But honey, we need to do these. Your grandmother did them, I did them and now you are following in our footsteps. It’s our family tradition.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s important. We go out there and people see us. When people see us, admire us, envy us, then we are beautiful. It is the only way we can be special.’
‘It’s stupid. I want to go to the park and play on the slides,’ Erica cried.
‘Surely you recall the methods I used.’ Her mother circled them. ‘They were not always pleasant, but they were effective.’
‘Erica, you know you can’t play at the park anymore. The sun will give you freckles and then you will lose more pageants.’
Erica lifted her head up again. ‘I like my freckles. They are my little spots of beauty.’
Sally glanced up at her mother and her statuesque face nodded. Things would have to change if Erica was ever going to win. Sally smacked her across the left cheek. Then the right. Then it got quiet.
Erica was more open to her grandmother’s methods once she went to the hospital with a busted lip. Erica was twice as stubborn as Sally, so there was an adjustment period. Sally and her mother had to wear wrist braces from training Erica.
‘Put her in room five,’ Sally’s mother ordered. In most states, it was illegal to put a minor in a tanning bed so Sally and her mother came up with a plan. Sally’s mother would go to the front desk, book a room and then let Sally and Erica in the back door.
Sally dragged Erica through the backdoor. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow! Stop!’ Erica yelled.
‘Stop whining! You lost the Benet Beauty pageant because you are too pale and sickly looking. I started going to tanning salons when I was your age and then I started winning more.’
‘I don’t want to win! I don’t care!’ Erica started to kick her.
‘Shut her up, Sally! Otherwise we have wasted a tanning session,’ Sally’s mother scolded them. Sally leaned down and pinched her daughter’s nose. Hard. Once the nose turned red, she let go and got two inches from her face.
‘Yes, you do. You want to win these pageants. You need to win so you can show the whole world and your mother that you are worth a damn.’ Erica nodded.
Sally surveyed the hallway. The numbered doors were all shut and she could hear the blaring hum of the beds.
‘Hurry! Let’s go.’ She yanked Erica to room five and shut the door. Erica’s skin was even paler than Sally feared in the red reflection of the tanning bed.
‘Take off your clothes and get on the tanning bed.’ Erica moved too slow for Sally’s liking.
‘Hurry! We don’t have that much time. Don’t open your eyes.’ Sally picked up her daughter, threw her on the bed and slammed the top down. Sally set it on the longest and darkest setting. Sally’s mother stood guard outside the door.
Twenty minutes later Erica called out. ‘Mom, how long do I have to stay here? It’s too hot.’
‘Until you have the skin of a first place winner.’
Ten more minutes later, Erica started to scream. ‘Mom! Let me out! It’s too hot!’
‘Hush! You’ll grab someone’s attention.’
‘It’s too hot!!!’ Erica shrieked.
‘Shut up, Erica!’
Sally’s mother scolded her from the crack in the door. ‘Sally, you need to take her out. We will do another session tomorrow.’
Sally shut the door in her mother’s face and lodged it with the trash can. Erica needed ten more minutes.
‘I need out.’ Erica began to emerge from the bed when Sally slammed the top down and held over her ten year old daughter. Sally pressed harder when she felt Erica beating on the inside.
‘You need ten more minutes. Then you can get out.’ Erica ignored her and kept hitting the inside of the bed and screaming her lungs out.
‘Sally, she’s been in long enough. Her skin will burn.’
She hollered back, ‘We just need eight more minutes.’ Sally climbed on top of the tanning bed, putting her whole weight on top of her daughter.
‘IT’S TOO HOT!’ Erica bellowed.
‘Sally! Let her out now or I will get someone.’
‘No! No! Erica needs more time if she’s going to win.’ A few minutes later Sally heard several men start to beat on the door. A man’s voice yelled.
‘Ma’am, open this door. There is a child in danger.’
‘No! No! She needs this.’ Sally’s balance on the tanning bed began to fade.
‘HELP ME! IT HURTS!’ Erica roared. The door burst open and two tan men came in followed by her mother. One man grabbed Sally off the bed and the other plucked Erica from the bed. The man held a limp Erica in his arms. ‘Oh my God! She’s just a kid.’
Sally lay on the ground when her mother came in and saw Erica. Erica’s face and body were burnt crimson. Her hair was frayed and crispy. Her arms were spotted orange and magenta and peeling at the elbows. Her face stained red from her blood tears.
‘That was too much, Sally.’
Pageant moms knew that male judges preferred the girls that looked the most childlike. For the next pageant, contestants were chosen based on glamour shots. Erica needed new ones that appealed to their tastes, so Sally and her mother were taking her to a salon that all the other moms recommended.
‘You’re late.’ Sally’s mother was waiting outside the salon.
‘Erica wouldn’t get out of the car.’ Erica was thirteen, and every bit of the promised teenage menace.
‘This is stupid.’ Erica sulked.
‘Don’t you use that tone with me. I will smack it out of you.’
‘You’ll just do what you want anyway,’ Erica sassed.
‘I am doing this all for you. Don’t you think you could pretend to be a little grateful?’
Sally’s mother intervened. ‘Enough. Let’s get on with this.’
Sally’s mother led them inside and took Erica to the chair. The salon was shiny and intimate. Three beauty chairs faced a wall of beauty and hair products. The hairdresser came out to Erica’s chair.
‘So what are we doing today?’
‘I don’t know. Ask her,’ Erica huffed.
‘Mom, what are we doing today?’ Sally came up behind Erica and peered down. ‘We need a retinol treatment, moisture treatment, an exfoliating mask and a chemical peel. After that we need her makeup and hair done for the glamour shots she’s getting done in a few hours.’
‘Sally, all that exfoliating will make her skin peel,’ her mother whispered where only Sally could hear, ‘We don’t need a repeat of the tanning bed incident.’
‘This is how she will win,’ Sally whispered back.
The hairdresser put the smock over Erica. ‘I would recommend a moisture treatment, but not much else. All those masks and peels could irritate your face.’
‘She’s thirteen, and she’s been on a rigorous retinol treatment for two years now. Her skin can handle it.’
‘Three years,’ Sally’s mother stated.
‘What?’ Sally said.
Erica piped in. ‘Three years. I’ve been on those stupid retinol treatments since I was ten. You made me start doing it after the burns from the tanning bed healed.’ The hairdresser gave a nervous smile to the trio.
‘You won’t have that tone when you have no frown lines at my age.’ Sally leaned towards the hairdresser and glared at her mother. ‘Do the retinol treatments.’
The hairdresser’s voice went higher, ‘Come on, Erica, let’s get started.’
The salon was empty except for the four of them. The hairdresser took Erica to the back to wash her hair. Sally took a walk of the salon, while her mother lingered. The salon flashed Sally back to her own humid makeshift dressing rooms of her own childhood. The roar of several hairdryers going off in the background and the huffing of her mother as she rubbed foundation on her chafed face to cover all the freckles.
‘We both know Erica is finished,’ her mother declared.
‘Her appointment just started, mother.’
‘That is not what I mean and you know it. Erica’s been done since you locked her in that coffin of heat.’
‘Mother, just because she’s not winning much doesn’t mean she will never. She just needs more routine, structure, discipline.’
‘Erica is not a pageant winner and she never will be. I fear that I may have made some mistakes regarding how I brought you up, and in turn, how I encouraged you to bring Erica up.’
‘We are this close to victory! And your big plan is to quit? To bail on Erica because you don’t think she’ll ever be beautiful.’
‘Sally, it’s over. After these glamour shots, Erica is going to live with me.’
‘No! You can’t do that! She is my daughter ‘
‘Oh my goodness!’ the hairdresser exclaimed.
Sally and her mother ran over. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, absolutely nothing! The water melted the makeup she was wearing, and Erica has the most beautiful freckles I have ever seen.’
Sally glared at her daughter’s face in the mirror. Freckles. Freckles everywhere. Her cheeks, forehead, nose and even a few on her lips. Sally had no idea they were there. Erica’s eyes met Sally’s with satisfied defiance.
‘How long?’ Sally said.
‘How long what?’ Erica sassed back.
She gasped, ‘How long have you had these monstrosities?’
‘I’ve been covering them for years. Grandmother showed me how.’
Sally spun towards her mother. ‘You have been covering up her freckles for years? Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Erica asked me not to. Like I said earlier, Sally, she’s done.’ Her mother said.
‘Who cares anyway, Mom? I only did this because I knew you would act like this!’ Erica flopped her body in the chair. ‘This pageant stuff is yours. I’ve been telling you for years that I hate it.’
‘I think we should all take a moment.’ The hairdresser attempted to intervene.
‘We do these pageants to show people how beautiful and valuable we are. We do it for opportunities and jobs and men. It’s tradition, it’s our family, without it we are nothing!’ Sally’s mascara oozed onto her cheeks. Her face was stained with black tears.
‘I don’t care if we are nothing. I hate it! I know Grandmother said you lost pageants because of all freckles, but no. You lost pageants because you were never beautiful enough!’
Sally reached down and took the scissors off the salon table and stabbed her daughter in the chest. The hairdresser screamed and lunged at Sally to grab the scissors. In the tangle with the hairdresser, Sally stabbed the woman in the neck. She bled out on the salon floor.
Sally’s mother ran to Erica. She tried to stop the bleeding. This was the first time Sally had seen her mother cry since that drunken day in the dining room.
‘Sally, what have you done?’
Sally picked up a straight razor from the other table. ‘Mother, tell me I’m beautiful.’
‘Y you are beautiful.’ Her mother wept over Erica’s body, shielding her.
‘Now say it like you mean it.’
‘You are beauti-’ Sally shoved the straight razor in her once menacing eyes. Sally’s mother went limp and fell at Sally’s feet.
Sally turned back to Erica. She grasped her chest trying to stop the bleeding.
‘Mommy…. Help,’ her child begged.
‘You are my daughter and you will be beautiful.’
The police were called when a couple walking past the salon saw the blood in the front window. They told the 911 operator that a woman was sitting in blood on the salon floor with three other bodies. The police came to the scene and found the owner of the salon with a stab wound in her neck. She had bled out. They found a woman in her late thirties holding a straight razor lying between the body of a child and a middle aged woman. The woman had a straight razor sticking out of her eye. The child had been stabbed in the chest and her face mutilated.
Witnesses said the cuts started at the top of her eyebrows and went up to her hair. It had bled into her hair, giving her the appearance of a crown made of blood. The razor cuts resumed at her cheek bones and went in a diagonal direction towards her mouth. These were deeper. Teeth poked out of a hole made in her cheek and a slice of flesh was draped over her mouth. As if to silence her.
The woman sat facing the mutilated child as the police came.
‘Ma’am, do you know what happened here?’
She appeared to be catatonic, but then suddenly burst into tears. The woman began laughing and laughing.
‘Ma’am, what happened here?’ the police said again.
‘My daughter is now beautiful.’
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