by John Rechy
The next day, he drove Normalyn to the bus depot. She had decided to journey the whole distance to Los Angeles by bus, to be aware of the miles and miles she would travel away from Gibson.
In the lobby of the Texas Grand Hotel, where Enid had first appeared in Gibson, the Mayor gave Normalyn an envelope, with the traveler’s checks. Then he gave her another envelope—“for later.” Feeling apprehensive, Normalyn placed both in her purse, along with the ones Enid had left her, presences guiding her into another world, to other lives. Earlier, she had impulsively wrapped Enid’s chipped angel in tissue and packed it in her suitcase, with Enid’s makeup box.
“Sometimes I’d imagine that you were mine and Enid’s,” Mayor Hughes confessed to Normalyn.
She hugged him and kissed him. She wished she could have told him that she had imagined he was her father. But she hadn’t, did not even want to think about a father.
Ted stared at the Mayor, so kind, so tyrannical.
When she walked back with Ted to the car, Normalyn knew that Mayor Wendell Hughes—“a good man” she would miss— was already moving into her past in Gibson, among ghosts.
At the station, while Ted checked her bags for her, she opened the second envelope the Mayor had given her. It was a copy of her birth certificate, without the markings Enid had added altering her identity. She felt relief, and breathed the cleansed air of this new season. And she missed Enid very much, so much.
They waited outside in the spring greenness until the bus was ready to depart. Then Ted’s hands touched Normalyn’s arms. He leaned toward her. She forced herself not to withdraw. Then it was easy not to. When his lips touched hers, she almost returned his kiss—but she heard the echo of a whisper of a turbulent windstorm persisting from the day of violence at the Rio Grande. She withdrew, slowly, trying to keep her hands from turning into fists.
He kissed her hurriedly before she boarded the bus. He called out, “So long, only so long. Remember!”
Normalyn looked out the window as the bus circled the plaza and its unknown “Texas Hero.” She was leaving a cemetery of ghosts and memories. Ted Gonzales was the one real person alive for her. She glanced back and saw him standing where he had said “so long” just moments earlier. She pressed her palm against the window, extending his continuing reality in her life.
She looked ahead.
Gibson tumbled behind her, all the familiar sights of her life, the shops, the school, the library, the Texas Grand Hotel, and, in a sheltered cul-de-sac, the house, locked now, in which she had lived for the eighteen years of her life.
In the bus taking her to Enid’s ‘city of lost angels,’ Normalyn thought of the woman, almost ghostly in her radiant blonde beauty, whose photograph remained next to Enid’s in the dual frame left behind with the aging lavender flowers on the night table in the faintly glowing starlet’s room.
Part Two
California
One
The ocean! “The deep wetness!” Enid had called it. No, it was “the deep wet”—and it was Norma Jeane who had called it that. Normalyn stood on the sand. Before her, the expanse of water fused with the horizon. She looked at her own shadow, so sharp on the sand. Yes, she was here! In California! In Los Angeles! On the beach! At the edge of the ocean, a new world! She had left Gibson!
In the bus she had collected gathering evidence of that fact as she traveled, looking out of different windows, rejecting sleep, wanting to see everything, grasp everything, new sights, new impressions, all hers, only hers: cities, towns, mountains, desert—people everywhere!—and miles and miles of highways between Gibson and the world!
Soon after the Greyhound bus had entered California, and in a small, hot—already hot—city with fat palmtrees everywhere, Normalyn transferred hurriedly to a bus whose designation indicated “BEACH.” She would see the ocean first. When it appeared in the distance, she knew that as soon as the bus stopped, she would rush to its edge, claim her bags later. And she did that. She walked in as straight a line as she could from the terminal to the beach.
The sea breeze calmed whispering fears. On the sand, she bunched into herself, feeling her own warmth. She was exhilarated, wide awake, not tired at all. Although she did not remember having fallen asleep in the days of travel, she must have slept, oddly comfortably in the cramped seat—that’s how alert she felt.
Under her bare feet now, the water was cool, the sand warm, a welcome dual sensation; she shifted her feet from cool to warm. Did she remember this ocean, a house near it—where Enid had released her to the blonde woman, and then— . . .?
Nearby, among scattered others still on the beach, a youngman and a youngwoman in dancers’ tights made slow ritualistic movements as they faced the advancing mist. Outlining invisible shapes, their hands glided in a dance or a calm exercise. They seemed to signal in welcome to the setting sun, the coming night. Normalyn watched them in fascination. Later—that thought thrilled her: Later!—later she would find a place— . . . A chill crept into the warmth. A gauze of fog swept the sand. She was all alone in a strange city! She walked away from the beach.
The city was bathed in unclouded sunlight. She had not expected that there would be so many sailors on its streets. Tanned, in shorts, other young people whizzed by on bicycles. On a strip of green park, Normalyn sat on one of several benches. She closed her eyes, opened them suddenly to welcome a vision of the new city. Instead, she was terrified.
“Hi, doll, I bet you been looking for me.”
“What?”
She faced a sailor. Light hair pushed from under his cocked white cap. He was young, good-looking—and short.
“You look lost, doll,” the sailor said.
“I am not lost!” Suddenly, she realized the enormity of even routine matters, like picking up her bags— She jumped off the bench. So many people. Where were they going? She started to walk away. In which direction?
“My name’s Jim, what’s yours?” The sailor walked along with her—a bouncing walk, on the balls of his feet.
She did not answer.
“Where you from, then?”
She answered because she wanted to hear her voice say it: “I am from Gibson, Texas. I’ve left it!”
“No shit? I’m from Texarkana—that’s in Texas and Arkansas!”
The streets were more crowded with sailors as evening neared; they were everywhere, idling, moving.
“Why are you so scared?” Jim asked her.
“He bothering you, sweetheart?” an ugly, burly sailor asked her.
“You are.” Normalyn was much more menaced by him.
Jim linked his arm through hers, guiding her past the intruding sailor. “I saved you, babe,” he whispered.
She pulled away. “Stop calling me those stupid names!” The burly sailor lingered; so she did not move too far away from Jim. She had expected the city to be much larger. It all looked different from what she had thought. Rectangular white chrome buildings faced the water beyond rows and rows of tall, slender palmtrees. A long bridge emerged out of clouds. She said to herself, “I thought it would be so much bigger.”
Jim said in amazement, “You’re the first person who ever thought the Pacific Ocean was small.” He felt even shorter.
“Not the ocean,” she said. “Los Angeles.”
He laughed. “This isn’t Los Angeles, doll, it’s Long Beach!”
She felt humiliated, stupid, scared. In substitution, she struck at him: “Why do you walk so damn funny?”
“Because I’m fuckin’ short. I walk on my damn toes to look taller,” he flung back. Actually, he was a proud five feet and six and a half inches.
She was about to apologize, but he had embarrassed her, he was making her feel hopelessly lost. “I know this is Long Beach,” she asserted. “I came here because I’m looking for . . .” Whom? “. . . someone!” To authenticate her ruse, she opened her purse, pretending to search for a noted name, a phone number. Her fingers touched the envelope that had brought her here—no, not here; she was in Lon
g Beach! She shoved the envelope away, closed the purse with a snap. She tried to look perplexed: “I must have forgotten to bring the phone number.” Her words sounded ridiculous even to her.
Jim knew she was lost—and frightened. Each time a sailor looked at her, she turned away. God, she was even putting on glasses, but she was squinting as if she couldn’t see with them! She was strange, yes, but she was pretty, even without enough makeup, even with the glasses. She looked one way, acted another. “You could try looking in the telephone directory. There’s one over there.” He pointed to a red booth along the grassed partition.
She tossed an angry look at him. He was forcing her to prove she was not lost, pushing her into this ridiculous trap of having to convince him. This silly sailor was chipping away at the fragments of her confidence.
“Aw, cummon, admit it, you’re lost.”
His further words led her to the telephone booth. It had become essential to find a motive—any motive—for being here. She riffled through the pages of a fat directory. He stood beside her, peering over her shoulder. “You’re looking under the Z’s,” he offered.
She yanked off her glasses. She had worn them only briefly during the last days and her vision was blurred with them. She forced an emphatic squint, to emphasize her dedication to finding a name. That she had made a ridiculous mistake menaced her increasingly. New fears joined old ones. She had embarked on a journey whose goal she was not entirely sure of—and even that had started wrong! Where would she look? For what? For whom! She ran her fingers down columns of gray print, names, gray names.
“Holland, Holland,” she heard herself say aloud. Holland! The name she was pretending to seek had entered her mind from the news clipping Enid had left her. Alberta Holland! Yes, that was the name. The written markings beside it had given importance to the woman who had left facetious word that she was “fleeing incognito to Long Beach” after the death of Marilyn Monroe. She located further evidence that she had not made a stupid mistake. Mayor Hughes had guided her—ambiguously, yes—to Enid’s “city of long beaches”—and he had mentioned one name then: Alberta! That was why she had taken the bus that had probably said “LONG BEACH,” not just “BEACH,” as she had thought. She felt powerfully triumphant now, vindicated. The very next moment she wasn’t sure her rationale for being here was all that logical. But that didn’t matter now because she had found a name to pretend to be looking for. “Alberta Holland,” she said aloud, defiantly, to Jim. “That’s who I’m looking for in Long Beach.”
“She died years ago,” Jim said easily. “Everyone knows that.”
To keep alarm in abeyance—and it was suddenly as if she had really come here looking for Alberta Holland only to discover that she was dead—Normalyn sought the cleansing ocean. The horizon was almost lost behind gray clouds. She welcomed a ready object for her anger now—the sailor. “How the hell do you know so goddamn much?”
“In the first place, because I ain’t stupid—and in the second, because I got an old friend here who knew her because she knows everything about old Hollywood. That’s why the damn Dead Movie Stars are always trying to trick her into talking to them. But—”
“The dead what!” He was absurdly trying to scare her now— making her feel even more naive and—
Jim laughed. “The Dead Movie Stars—that’s what they call themselves. It’s like a secret club, but not too secret now that they’re on the news; they say they discover all the secrets of the great old movie stars, even try to be like them. My old friend says they’re just malicious weird kids who don’t love the stars. That’s why she won’t talk to them.” He added happily: “She told me about Alan Ladd—know who he was?—a movie star so short they had to dig a small trench for regular-size actresses to walk in so he’d look taller—and James Dean was no giant, either.”
“As short as you?” Normalyn regretted that instantly—he wasn’t that short, about her height—but he was bewildering her with his off-hand knowledgeability.
“Shorter!” he shot back. “And you’re not all that tall.” Being short made him brash with girls—and successful. He saw her looking about her, really confused. His voice lost its cockiness: “My old friend’s just a batty old woman who takes walks along the beach sometimes; she’s full of bullshit about movie stars, but it’s good bullshit.” He clarified what seemed an odd relationship. “Shit, it gets fuckin’ lonesome out here in goddamn Long Beach.” He added loyally, “Calling her batty don’t mean I don’t love her. I do. You wouldn’t want to meet her, would you?
She would return to the bus station! Claim her bags! Fly back on the next plane to—! Return to—! Go back to—! “Yes!” she said quickly to Jim.
“You mean it?” He looked at her in disbelief. But quickly he calculated: A visit with his old friend was always good for a long hour of exciting movie-star bullshit—and he could easily extend it into more. That would allow him time to try to convince this girl that the last bus to Los Angeles had left for the night, and then maybe, just maybe, she’d want to stay over. Maybe with him!
Swiftly he guided Normalyn along a block of scrambled colors—video arcades, surplus stores—sailors everywhere.
They turned into a side street. Normalyn prepared herself to run and scream if he so much as— Suddenly there was a gathering of stately Victorian houses, a change so abrupt that Normalyn looked back at the city, the clouding ocean, to reorient herself.
She and the sailor stood before a house that was aging gracefully, flowers and verdure allowed to grow freely in a garden.
Then Normalyn saw a tree to one side of the house, a tree with sparse feathery leaves and many tiny blossoms—tinted mist—on delicate limbs of mottled white. Some of the blossoms had fallen in careless filigree like—
Lavender snow.
The words, written in Enid’s child’s-scrawl in her sparse notes, entered Normalyn’s mind at the sight of the haunting tree. Yes, and its delicate blossoms were the ones rendered artificially and kept beside the chipped angel on Enid’s night table until she died.
Jim rang the bell of the house. “Have to know your name so I can introduce you.”
“Normalyn.” Even her name sounded as if it belonged to someone else, now that she had left Gibson.
“Damn!” Jim studied her. “Ever since I saw you, I been thinkin’ who you resemble. My friend has pictures of her even before she became a big movie star. That’s who you look like, yeah, you look like—”
Normalyn covered her ears. She saw Jim’s lips begin to form a name, then stop abruptly in response to her sudden rejecting reaction.
Two
“Well, aren’t you the pretty thing!” The old woman stood at the ornate door, which needed oiling. Before Normalyn recoiled from the accusing word “pretty,” she saw a woman in her sixties, no, her seventies . . . older? Her hair was a network of red-dyed swirls. Her cheeks were shaded in an attempt to create highlights on her plump face. Thick glasses enlarged giant artificial eyelashes. She was short, with an ample body. Yet she wore a flowing dress elegantly; it was the color of a dark pearl. She scrutinized Normalyn. “Her hair could stand a bit more curl,” she commented aloud to herself, then resumed addressing Normalyn: “And some more makeup, dearheart.” She puffed out from a small cigarillo, carefully away from Normalyn; a few measured puffs only, before she flicked off its ashes and put it out.
“Hi, doll!” Jim removed his cap and bowed in an exaggerated flourish before the old woman.
“Howya been, Jim? Glad ya brought someone to meet a fat old woman.”
She used a special tone with him, interjecting a gentle parody of his into her own, which was cultured despite its marked casualness; that mutual tone affirmed their closeness, Normalyn recognized and felt cold and alone standing at the door of a stranger’s house in Long Beach with the sun hardly smearing the day.
“Come in, come in,” the woman invited. She said to the misting evening, “You’re starting to get chilly early tonight,” and then to them, �
�I was having a cup of chamomile tea. Now I can share it.”
Normalyn nodded at the prospect. She only considered requesting iced tea. Any anticipation that she might learn something about Alberta Holland from this woman had vanished when she heard her vague mumblings. She suspected Jim had lied to her about this odd friend in order to bring her here. She was too tired to care.
“If you got a beer—” Jim started.
“Keep one for ya.” The woman’s dress sighed as she led them into the house. She carried her weight as effortlessly as a light balloon. “There aren’t too many fat old women who have a good-looking sailor calling.”
“If that’s what you are—and I ain’t agreein’—then you’re the sexiest fat old woman God ever made.” He parodied her with affection.
She chastised him with obvious pleasure: “Can’t resist a pretty girl, can you?”
In the large living room there was a disordered tidiness. Solidly comfortable furniture nestled in no discernible order. Everything was clean. Like the garden, the interior of the house had been allowed to choose its own shape. On top of a grand piano graced with a colorful Spanish mantilla splotched with embroidered flowers, and on top of shelves crammed with books, and on tables, on walls were framed silver and black photographs of the great movie stars of a Hollywood gone.
And!—Normalyn stared at it in disbelief—there was an autographed picture of Jesus, smiling widely! The curious reality of this strange pleasant old woman and her house was exactly what Normalyn needed to provide respite from the assault created earlier by the questioning of this sailor, who was, she had seen in disguised glances, very cute.
Jim introduced her to the old woman: “I want you to meet my new friend. Her name is Normalyn. . . . Normalyn, I want you to meet my old friend, Miss Bertha.”
Miss Bertha! Was Jim extending her ruse of earlier when she had told him she was looking for “Miss Alberta”? The old woman did not react in contradiction of the name. Besides, she had told him she was looking for “Alberta Holland.” It was Mayor Hughes who had mentioned “Miss Alberta” as someone important at the last of Enid’s life. Mayor Hughes had guided her here! Then was it possible that this woman could be—? No, Jim had asserted “everyone” knew Alberta Holland was dead and that his friend had known the powerful woman. . . . Her confusions earlier, her eagerness to find a reason for being in Long Beach instead of Los Angeles—that was why she was here with a sailor she had just met and in the home of a kind, slightly daffy old woman eager to be heard.