by John Rechy
Feeling increasingly unattractive, warned by Enid to “shelter” herself, Normalyn tried to make herself “invisible” at school. She moved very quietly, softly. Soon girls mimicked the way she walked. When boys whistled at her, she knew they were making fun of her. Considered “strange” now, she had no friends. Considering herself strange, she wanted none. She wrote secret poems and one-page stories, all titled Life.
“Invited courteously” by the principal to discuss the girl’s inattention and poor grades, Enid stormed into his office, fox fur piece tossed over one shoulder. “My Normalyn is the smartest girl in your damn hick school,” she informed him. “I don’t doubt it, ma’am. I believe she just don’t care to show it,” the man said. Outside, Enid announced to a hall full of gaping children and teachers, “I hate injustice and ignorance, and they are rampant in this school!” Normalyn felt wonderful as she walked out; she even tried to imitate Enid’s sexy gait and drew new whistles.
That night, Enid chastised: “You’re so awkward. And dreamy, strange. Like her.” By then, “her” had become “Monroe.” “I’m sorry, Mother,” Normalyn spoke the words that now came often, automatically. She had begun to feel that she was disappointing Enid, who seemed to react to her as if she were two people, the one she wanted her to be, the one she was.
Mayor Hughes brought Normalyn a book of myths!
“Why, Mayor Wendell Hughes,” Enid chided flirtatiously, “I didn’t know a man of all your accomplishments was also a literary man.”
“Well, I am not,” the Mayor did not hesitate to deny firmly. “I simply asked one of the smart youngmen on my staff what a bright young lady like Normalyn would enjoy and—”
“Norma Jeane gave presents on Thanksgiving.” Enid’s sigh caressed a sudden memory. “She thought that was when you thank people! She did that even when she was Monroe.”
Normalyn loved the Mayor’s present, marveled at Helen of Troy, Ulysses, Icarus—who could just fly away!—and marveled at the angry gods who might be coaxed to intervene in harsh destinies.
After school now, she was allowed by Enid to go to the Public Library. She roamed the stacks, leafing through books, putting away those that didn’t interest her. She concentrated on the Great Books section. There, she picked out Huckleberry Finn because of the funny name.
I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. When Normalyn read Huck confess that, she closed her eyes for a moment. She felt dead sometimes, unborn. This would be her favorite book—“forever,” she swore. Huck so entranced her, made her laugh aloud, that she decided to become like him—as a girl, of course. They already had a lot in common. Huck was an “outlaw” from society—like her! That was why she had no friends. And he wanted to run away! Did she? She imagined herself on a raft on the Rio Grande.
The library became her “real” world. She would sit in an aisle of the library, on the floor, to read. It was there that she discovered Jane Eyre. Jane was plain and didn’t care!—brave enough to go off and be on her own. Mrs. Rochester, locked within her dark madness, frightened Normalyn. Pip in Great Expectations annoyed her, but she was instantly fascinated by proud Estella—and by Miss Havisham, hurt so cruelly that she raised Estella to avenge her. Had Enid been hurt that deeply by the despised Stan? Normalyn read more of Dickens, quickly a favorite, and imagined asking him how it was possible that his characters were realer than her life. Dickens was puzzled.
When she did not understand a character, she did not hesitate to invent another in clarification. She conjured up a fabulous messenger, a wise old man, to explain to Tom Jones that he didn’t need a father. Huckleberry Finn didn’t want one. And neither did she. None. Ever. Then she was able to finish reading Tom Jones, impressed that beautiful Sophia went off to London alone. But this Tom was just a grown Tom Sawyer.
On her fourteenth “birthday”—she wasn’t sure it was the right day but she felt fourteen—Normalyn pleaded with Enid to let her make herself up. All the girls in school except her wore some makeup. “My mother let me make myself up one time, like a movie star,” Enid remembered. “And I loved her forever for it,” she seemed to barter, with a smile.
“And I’ll love you forever,” Normalyn swore.
Enid allowed Normalyn to use her special “movie makeup,” kept in a pretty box in her bedroom. She waited downstairs to be surprised. When she saw Normalyn with darkened lashes, powdery rouge, gleamy lips, hair brushed into waves, her dress tucked tightly at her waist, Enid shouted, “You tried to look like her on purpose!”
Had she? Normalyn wondered. Guided by the face on the television screen, the shadowed one on the distant beach?
Enid wiped the girl’s face into violent smears of paint. “Now go look in the mirror and tell me what the hell you see!” she commanded with a new fury. “And if you cry, I’ll—!”
In the hallway mirror, Normalyn saw a sad face grotesquely distorted by makeup. “I’m ugly,” she said to Enid.
Enid washed the streaked face. Then she traced the girl’s features. The fingers paused tenderly on the tilt of her nose.
Normalyn lived increasingly in her imagination, nurtured by the hooks she read. To challenge her courage, she envisioned herself in situations of grave danger—to force herself to push away fear, prepare herself for when she had a life. Once she fantasized that in the dead of night—a windy, ominous night—she was coaxed—cunningly—to join a band of dangerous—but wondrous—people who had an abundance of life, daring experiences, not just memories. She matched her cunning against theirs.
These imaginary dangers allowed Normalyn to escape the one real danger of her life, the quiet danger of Enid’s possessive love, entangling daily. She attempted to unknot it. When a boy asked her out, she forced herself to say yes. Nervous, she waited for him at the agreed time. Enid met him at the door. “You’re at the wrong house.” The bewildered boy faced Normalyn behind Enid. “Yes, ma’am,” he said hurriedly.
“You shouldn’t have, Mother,” Normalyn managed to say.
“Don’t dare cry over that!” Enid warned. “And don’t ever let filth touch you.”
It was an icy Texas night chilled by cold stars shivering at the window. “Normalyn, you come get in bed with me, child—wear your warmest gown, we’ll sleep together. Every mother sleeps with her daughter—it makes them closer. I slept with mine.” Normalyn huddled against her. “I have an inheritance, Normalyn. Not the one from the rich Texans, this one’s been in my family very long. My grandmother passed it on to Grace, and sometimes I think Grace tried to pass it on to me.” Normalyn felt Enid’s body shiver. Then Enid named the inheritance: “The madness—the darkness, the blackness. Even that I shared with Norma Jeane.” She stopped. “We were both so terrified to pass it on further!” She looked startled that she had spoken that aloud. At the same moment, she had taken her hand away from Normalyn’s. She closed her eyes. “I love the real blackness, the blackness of the ocean at night, its natural beauty. ‘The deep wet,’ that’s what Norma Jeane called it.” Enid held Normalyn’s face, speaking words directly to her: “When I die, that’s where you’ll find me, in the darkness at the edge of the shoreline. Remember that.”
With lunch, Enid had always cherished iced tea—with a wedge of lemon, sometimes lime, a decorative sprig of mint; “so civilized, even in winter,” she said. Now her tea was replaced by a glass of wine, two, another at dinner. Soon she drank more, earlier and later. “It softens the darkness—gray, just gray.” Increasingly moody, she took drives alone in the daytime. After dinner she would face the television screen, another glass of wine beside her. She would fidget with the silver lighter retained from one of her “many lives,” clicking it absently. Sometimes she would call Normalyn out of her bedroom to watch the news, the documentary programs she favored. Tonight she had insisted Normalyn watch with her.
The announcer informed that they would be “going back in time to that fatal day in June of 1968.”
Normalyn saw: A crowded ballroom, cheering people, a lanky smiling
man being reached for in adulation. Shots! The man fell. Screams swept the hall. The announcer said, “And that is how it happened, that June night in 1968 when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles—”
“Filthy!” Enid clicked off the television. She gulped the full glass of wine. She held Normalyn close to her. “Nobody will ever hurt you.”
Soon the afternoon librarian—a sexy woman with astonishing auburn hair and knit dresses—Miss Stowe—began to suggest books to Normalyn: “Have you read this one?”
Tess of the D’Urberuilles!—the beautiful woman driven to revenge. The Mayor of Casterbridge!—the drunken man selling his wife and daughter. The Scarlet Letter!—proud Hester raising her child in solitude, blurring her origin, the child who forces her father to recognize her. The Tales of Poe!—the powerful pursuit of real and imagined ghosts. In all these books Normalyn looked for something that would illuminate her own life—make sense of it. In some, she thought she caught glimpses of Enid. It was possible to be “bought” by rich Texan parents, possible to be driven by great revenge, to be trapped by circumstances, controlled by ghosts.
Normalyn discovered Wuthering Heights on her own. She read it in one day, a Saturday. As evening approached, Miss Stowe, tiptoeing in order not to upset her deep concentration, relocated a lamp so she could read on. Catherine Earnshaw became Normalyn’s favorite heroine, willing to reject even heaven if it kept her from living! . . . And there was Heathcliff.
Enid threatened to lock the door if she was late again: “I’ve been sick with worry!”
I m sorry.
That night, Normalyn imagined she was Catherine walking on the moors with Heathcliff. In the morning, it embarrassed her, pretending to be beautiful, passionate Catherine. Her embarrassment was assuaged later that day when she discovered in The Concise Biography of Great English Novelists that Emily Brontë was plain, lived an isolated life. And yet out of that isolation on the dank moors she was able to conjure up the wondrous Catherine and Heathcliff!
On a breezy day, almost spring, when she was sixteen, Normalyn “saw” Heathcliff! He was wearing a cowboy hat and boots and he was leaning against a white pickup truck across the school grounds. Dark, broody, so handsome in a jagged way. A “gypsy cowboy”!
School was out and Normalyn was hurrying away from the chatter of adolescent boys and girls with silly drawls, their giggles probably directed at her. Later, she would be shocked by what she did then. She took off her glasses and walked past the tall youngman. She suspected she might have smiled, because she had a feeling of warmth on her face. Did he touch his cowboy hat to tilt at her? She wasn’t sure because she was already running away, clutching her glasses against her face all the way to the library.
A few days later she saw him again!
He was driving by in his white pickup. This time she was sure he smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back because he was with two other “aggies”—“cowboys” from the nearby agricultural college—and she didn’t want them to think she was smiling at them.
After that, she began wearing makeup she applied only after leaving the house. She rubbed it off carefully before she returned. Once she forgot. When she would not apologize, Enid ordered, “Wipe your face. And if you cry—”
“I don’t intend to cry, Mother, you’ve warned me enough. And I don’t intend to take off the makeup.”
“Are you going to change, too, Normalyn?” There was no anger in her voice when Enid asked that. Her face darkened the way it did when she was about to be conquered by one of her moods of “blackness.”
With a slightly sad smile, Miss Stowe told Normalyn, “I think you will like this book especially.”
And Normalyn loved Billy Budd. She felt a sad closeness with him. She understood the enraged silence that led him to strike out at the demonic master-at-arms. For days, Billy Budd, doomed by his very innocence, haunted her.
Abruptly, Miss Stowe was replaced by a fat, menacing man with tiny rimless glasses. “I don’t know anything about that woman,” was all he said in answer to Normalyn’s question. Grudgingly he handed her a note. It was from Miss Stowe! “I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye,” it said. “Thought you might like these.” Under those words she had jotted the names of several books— with asterisks next to some. At the bottom the asterisks clarified: “Not ready for?” Below that was added: “And the plays of William Shakespeare, the greatest writer of all time.”
Normalyn hurried to find the books with the asterisks. They were not on the shelves.
Soon after, a stark, locked glassed bookcase appeared behind the new librarian’s desk. Normalyn asked him what it contained. “Books you shouldn’t read and some you shouldn’t have read,” he snapped.
“Why are you so sulky, Normalyn?” Enid asked her that night. “You haven’t even noticed there’s lime for your iced tea.” For herself, she had added a scotch to settle her nerves.
Normalyn told her about the forbidden books.
“Oh.” Enid seemed uninterested. Later she said, “You can look at one of my movie books. Here.”
Normalyn knew there would not be anything about Marilyn Monroe. She gasped. She saw a photograph of Hedy Lamarr.
“A natural beauty.” Enid was leaning over her and the book. She smoothed her graying hair, touched her lips with a delicate finger.
Normalyn imagined later that she asked Hedy Lamarr what it was like to be so incredibly beautiful. “You get used to it,” said Hedy Lamarr.
The next day Enid was waiting for Normalyn outside the high school. All the young people stared at the dramatic, glamorous woman. Normalyn was proud to be seen driving away with her. Facing the glowering librarian soon after, Enid asked Normalyn, “Which of those hidden books do you want?” Normalyn recited titles from the books with asterisks on the list Miss Stowe had bequeathed her.
“A minor can’t have those.” The librarian locked his arms before him.
“I am not a minor,” Enid said. “Get the books you want, Normalyn.” Normalyn finally decided on one, to give it full attention because not only had Miss Stowe placed an asterisk by it, she had underlined it. Enid announced to the entire library, “I saw good people in Hollywood destroyed for their decent beliefs by reactionaries like this bigot.”
In a wistful mood that night over another scotch, Enid told Normalyn about “a cherished man” who was driven out of the movie studios for what he upheld. She stared away, then sighed.
In her room later, Normalyn encountered another world in The Grapes of Wrath. The book moved her, saddened her—and depressed her so much that she decided she would return it to the library without finishing it. But she resumed reading it the next day and wanted to protest for Ma Joad and Tom and Casy and— . . . Was there still that much cruel injustice? She didn’t want to believe it—and didn’t welcome remembering that on their trips, now over, she and Enid had driven past weedy shacks to which Negroes and “illegal” Mexican laborers were banished. “An outrage,” Enid had said, but did not connect it to Mayor Hughes—“a good man.”
When Mayor Hughes came to visit, grand as ever, he walked into the house, flourishing a new cane. He hugged Normalyn, kissed her on the cheek, gave her a present—The Arabian Nights—“recommended by my reliable intellectual clerk.” The Mayor would never take advantage of anyone; he was like Judge Thatcher, who befriended Huck, invested his money. But the “faces” of Ma Joad, others so full of outrage, haunted Normalyn.
Her next times at the library she followed Miss Stowe’s P.S. and thrilled to the conspiracies of Macbeth, the romantic sacrifices of Antony and Cleopatra—she imagined Cleopatra would make a good friend because, although she would be intimidatingly beautiful and exotic, she came from another country, a strange world, and so knew what it was like to be an outlaw—like her. The elaborate plot to save Juliet by having her pretend to be dead! Normalyn did not believe two people could fall in love that powerfully as quickly as Romeo and Juliet did. She remembered when she first saw �
��the gypsy cowboy.” Quickly, she thought of asking Shakespeare, “Is there any subject you haven’t written about?” He answered honestly, “I don’t think so.”
“What will I do after I graduate?” Normalyn finally asked Enid a question she had been asking herself for some time.
Enid frowned over her fourth glass of wine. “What do you want to do?”
“Go to college.”
“You can’t go away.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d be in danger.”
Each day Normalyn returned from the library to the reality of Enid’s moods, which now numbed whole days. Times of feared “darkness, blackness” lengthened—times of silence. Enid took pills to put her to sleep. “The damn demons won’t rest any more.” She added pills to wake her up. There would be eruptions within drunken slurs: “Why are you looking at me like that, Normalyn, accusing me with your sad eyes? I’ve done everything for you! What more can I do? Tell me, tell me!”
Then Normalyn was pulled into the brutal reality of the assault by the Rio Grande, the despised “gypsy cowboy” and the two other men over her—and Enid’s accusation: “Whore! Like her! With them!” The incident was buried in silence. Normalyn felt that she would never forgive Enid, that she would never be able to smile again at anyone, nor at anything, that she would never again feel even a spark of joy.
She put away the makeup she had continued to use. She took the books she had begun to collect—to duplicate the ones she cherished reading at the library, where she had discovered them—and she put them into a drawer of her dresser. She would never be seduced into reading them again.
When she graduated, she did not wait for the ceremony to end. She clutched her diploma and walked away. Then she noticed that Enid was there, in the back of the old auditorium, hidden in the shadows, a somber presence now, gaunt, frail, but still wearing her glamorous hat. “Thank you for being here, Mother,” she managed to say. Then she took Enid’s unsteady hand and the two walked silently home.