Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Enid answered quickly, “Yes, just one—but that one has a lot of them in it.” She touched her stomach, her heart—

  —locating the “pit,” Norma Jeane knew suddenly.

  Sandra continued to feel that Enid and Norma Jeane would become friends, even though a fierce competition developed between them. Sandra retained her loyalty to both.

  The Number One Bed in the dormitory was a place of prestige, earned by “merit points” for excellence in home activities, crafts, drawing, playground performance, occupational skills. The real reasons for its desirability was its location, nearest the fire exit—fear of fire haunts unwanted children. The still night was often broken by screams out of a nightmare of consuming flames.

  When Enid was placed three beds ahead of her, Norma Jeane began working earnestly, even in sewing class, which she detested. She earned enough merits to gain a place two beds ahead of Enid.

  “You want to be Number One?” Those were Enid’s first words to Norma Jeane.

  “I am Number One.” Norma Jeane spoke her first words to Enid.

  Stanley watched with his crooked smile. Sandra thought, Well, at least they’ve talked to each other.

  That weekend, when afternoon shadows tumbled on the playground, Norma Jeane knew Gladys would not come for her as she had promised. That meant she had gone away into the “blackness.”

  In the recreation room she saw Stanley with Enid. And Enid was wearing a glittery blue necklace exactly like the one he had given her!

  Sandra gasped when she saw Norma Jeane dash toward Enid, who stood firm, waiting. Stanley removed himself. Whatever Norma Jeane had intended doing, it was interrupted by a monitor paging her into Miss Kline’s office.

  Miss Kline arranged her features into a smile, keeping a finger in the middle of her brow to smooth the frown. Sitting beside her, Mrs. Travers said to Norma Jeane, “Your mother called and said she had to go away; she asked us to let you make yourself up the way she did last week when she made you a ‘movie star.’”

  “It’s an odd request, but we’re granting it because your mother said it was important to you,” Miss Kline said.

  Norma Jeane was ecstatic! “Some rouge, please, and some powder. Please, some mascara,” she kept requesting. Miss Kline would nod, and Mrs. Travers would bring forth yet another implement of magic from her makeup box.

  Concentrating on exactly how she wanted to look, Norma Jeane made herself up in the light of the window.

  Miss Kline looked startled by the transformation. Mrs. Travers smiled. “Very pretty.”

  Norma Jeane looked eagerly at Miss Kline: “Would you please touch my face—lightly so the makeup won’t smear? That’s what Gladys did when she saw me look so pretty.”

  Miss Kline removed the finger from her brow and took a step away from the girl. Then—with Miss Kline’s smile encouraging her—she allowed herself to touch the girl’s face, her features, tenderly. Trying not to show how deeply moved she was, she drew back her hand and said, “There. We’ve granted your mother’s request. Now you must wash the makeup off.”

  Norma Jeane’s hurt burst. For a moment, the “pit” had been soothed. “Oh, please! Just for a few minutes so they can see me. I’ll even walk silly so nobody will take it seriously. I’ll walk with a wiggle. P-p-please!” She took out of her pocket the necklace Stanley had given her. “For you, from me, forever.” She gave it to Miss Kline.

  Miss Kline’s fingers embraced it.

  Norma Jeane returned to the recreation room for the allowed rationed minutes. True to her promise, she did walk with a slight “wiggle”—a sexy one; she parted her lipsticked lips. “Hel-lo,” she greeted everyone, putting a breath between the two syllables. She collected stunned stares and whistles from the boys. She was not even aware of “the empty pit.”

  “Who the hell are you, baby,” Stan approved in his odd way.

  “A movie star. A beautiful movie star.” Norma Jeane almost hugged herself, and imagined Gladys applauding.

  “It’s just makeup,” Enid said, not meanly. “Underneath it’s still you, and it always will be.”

  “No,” Norma Jeane rejected. That would mean that as she grew the “pit” would deepen. In substitute anger she said to Stan, “I threw your necklace away in the garbage, where you found it.” She looked at Enid’s. “Just cheap glass.”

  It was cheap glass, Enid had known that all along. But it was also the first present anyone had ever given her. She touched the five blue beads of her necklace. Angrily she accused Norma Jeane, “You made yourself up to look like me.”

  “Goddamn if that ain’t the fuckin’ truth,” Stanley blurted.

  It was true, Sandra realized. Norma Jeane had made herself up to look the way Enid did naturally. Heavy, dark eyelashes, a full mouth, angular cheeks.

  “I’m a natural beauty,” Enid said to Norma Jeane. It was startling the way she said that. There was no boasting. It was the only reason so many foster parents chose her immediately. None came to love her enough to keep her. She was soon returned because she was “rebellious”—blamed because “it hadn’t worked out.”

  The way she said what she just did meant she didn’t think being beautiful was necessarily good, Sandra evaluated, and she thought about it all day.

  Norma Jeane said, “We’ll see who’s beautiful!”

  Norma Jeane won the bed of honor—for one night only. The following night, she was demoted to the last bed. Tossed on it was the necklace she had given Miss Kline. One of the girls had informed Miss Kline that Norma Jeane said it was found in the trash and that she hated it. Norma Jeane thought of explaining to Miss Kline what had happened. Instead, saddened by the whole thing, she threw the necklace away.

  One late afternoon both Enid and Norma Jeane claimed the bench near the forlorn angel. Neither would budge even when the bell ended playground time. Sandra watched apprehensively.

  A lost breeze rustled past the angel and stirred a jacaranda tree. Its frail blossoms fell in petals like—

  “Lavender snow!”

  Both girls said that at the same time. They looked startled at each other. Sandra rushed to them, took one hand of each, and linked them. “Now you have to make a wish because you said the same words at the same time.” The two girls closed their eyes. Sandra wished, too—that their wishes would come true, that they would both become movie stars.

  When Enid and Norma Jeane opened their eyes, Enid said, “We’re both liars, Norma Jeane, we’re both orphans. No one’s looking for us, we’re all alone.”

  Norma Jeane agreed sadly. “Sometimes I even feel I’ve got an empty pit inside me.”

  “Right here.” Enid touched her stomach. Then her hand rested on her heart. “It feels cold—”

  “—at the same time you’re perspiring,” Norma Jeane finished. She sighed. “That means you have an empty pit inside you, too.” Of course, she had known it.

  They told each other about their real lives—the powerful fragments of love from desperate mothers pursued by black desolation. Missing fathers, fears, rejections, violations.

  Her heart breaking, Sandra listened. She could not keep in order which details belonged to whom because one would tell a part of her life, and a few seconds later the other would tell it as her own, as if they were constructing a single terrible existence they had both managed to survive.

  That night, the two girls attempted to run away. Miss Kline found them at the edge of the playground, too terrified to cross the street.

  Around the others, Enid and Norma Jeane still upheld their fabulous stories of “rich, famous parents.” Then they extended their stories into the future, when they would both be “great movie stars,” loved by their mothers and the whole world. Soon the two began telling the stories together, interchangeably, embellishing the other’s detail.

  Once, Norma Jeane slipped badly down the stairs—and bled. “If she needs a transfusion,” Enid offered, “I’m sure we have the same blood.” And it was true. An honor student always, Sandr
a was often given “special tasks.” In the office, she had looked up their medical records. “I’m not sure anything that drastic will be needed for a nosebleed,” Miss Kline said.

  With only Sandra allowed to witness it, Norma Jeane and Enid started playing the game one afternoon after a hurried, giggled rehearsal. Sandra too, laughed with delight.

  “I am not a lonesome orphan any more,” Norma Jeane would say.

  “Why?” Enid would ask.

  “Because a lonesome orphan always feels unwanted and has a deep, ugly empty pit inside.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “A movie star.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a movie star is loved by everyone, including her mother. . . . And millions of fans.” The last was Norma Jeane’s addition, and she hugged herself with the thrill of it.

  “How did you become a movie star?”

  “I’m not sure.” Norma Jeane couldn’t remember suddenly. “How?”

  Enid reminded her emphatically of the next line they had agreed to: “The orphan taught me to be strong.”

  Norma Jeane said it very quickly.

  Then it became Enid’s turn. “I am not a lonesome orphan,” she emphasized.

  “Why?” Norma Jeane would ask her. And the game proceeded.

  That first day, the angel cast a long shadow, as if stretching the guarded wing. That’s when Norma Jeane named the Norton County Home “The Wing of the Angel”—because “that makes it all seem better, like a movie with Jean Harlow.” For Enid, Sandra suspected, the name evoked something else: As Enid passed the statue that day, she furtively touched the sheltered wing of the angel, gently.

  Then Sandra began to detect that the game was changing.

  On a moody day when Norma Jeane and Enid were eleven— an age when being adopted becomes almost impossible and when childhood is completed—the two girls played their game over and over while Sandra listened and watched with mounting alarm. At first the game would end in conspiratorial laughter as before, but the laughter soon began to diminish and they were playing it relentlessly, fiercely, without a pause.

  It was Norma Jeane’s turn to start: “I am not an orphan.”

  Enid stopped her: “You have to say, I am not a lonesome orphan.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Norma Jeane said testily.

  “No, it isn’t,” Enid insisted. “It changes the whole game. What it means is that you are an orphan and you’re strong. Let’s start it again, clearer this time: I am a strong orphan,” she prodded, tense.

  Norma Jeane crossed her arms over her chest, which was becoming lush. “I’m not going to be an orphan any more— period. I’m going to be only a movie star,” she said in a new voice. She started to walk away, a new walk she had been learning.

  Enid stood up. “Norma Jeane!”

  “I’m even going to change my name,” the new voice said.

  “You’ll still be you,” Enid said.

  “I don’t want to be me!”

  “Norma Jeane!”

  “Don’t call me that!” Marilyn Monroe put her hands to her ears.

  Enid forced them away. “Norma Jeane’s been abandoned again and again and again, remember?” Her voice was frantic, pleading. “You want to abandon her, too?”

  “Yes!”

  Sandra wanted to run away in fear when she heard Enid’s words.

  “All right! Norma Jeane will be the orphan,” Enid said in a precise, clear voice, “half you, half me. I won’t abandon her, and I won’t let you abandon her, and if you try, she’ll kill you.”

  Forty-Four

  Early evening shadowed the playground.

  And so “Norma Jeane” was the strong, elusive figure that commanded the game. . . . In discovering that, Normalyn saw yet another Enid, a tortured little girl hiding her fears behind proud pretensions—but always upholding the strength of her dark beginnings, finally sharing her secrets with Norma Jeane.

  Throughout Sandra’s recitation, Normalyn had withheld questions, not wanting to interrupt the delicate string of memories. Now she said, “You started calling Norma Jeane ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ and she didn’t become that until much later.”

  “Did I? I guess that’s because when I look back, I see that’s when she became her, that time when they were playing the game over and over—and, you know, in truth she was Norma Jeane many more years than she was Marilyn Monroe.”

  Sandra was quiet for moments.

  “Then they all went away except me. Norma Jeane’s mother came for her again and later put her in another home; Enid was adopted by Texas millionaires she hated. And then Norma Jeane became Marilyn Monroe! Stanley, of course, became a petty crook. And Enid— We heard she kept seeing Stanley. I don’t know why.”

  Because he gave her her very first present, Normalyn knew, establishing a bond as fragile as that, as powerful as that. “Enid is dead now,” Normalyn told Sandra.

  Sandra sighed. “I suppose I knew it, when I learned you were here, but it’s just as sad to hear it.” She looked about the playground, as if to locate where they had all once been, so real, removed now. “Rest in rest.”

  “What?” Normalyn felt at the edge of discovery.

  “Rest in rest,” Sandra repeated, tugged back into memory. “That’s what Enid and Norma Jeane decided when we took a tour of the big cemetery on the hill, with all the swans and—” She paused, concealing a smile. “—and all those naked statues.” She hurried on: “Mrs. Travers took us, because—”

  * * *

  —Miss Kline said she had too many ghosts in her life to go to a cemetery.

  In the minibus provided by a charitable group for such occasions, about a dozen of the older children were driven up the roads of Forest Lawn, past swans that primped for them, past sensual statues that Stan kept whistling at, nudging Norma Jeane and Enid to notice. In a double column—Sandra managed to walk alongside Enid and Norma Jeane—they went to the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Chapel. Outside was a stone bench to sit on, make a wish. Norma Jeane and Enid held hands and wished aloud that they would become “adored movie stars.” Stanley plopped between them and wished, “And make me a petty crook!”

  Inside the chapel, Mrs. Travers told them to say a prayer for “unfortunate children,” and they all bowed their heads, except Norma Jeane, who whispered that they were the unfortunate children. They didn’t go to the great hall housing the panoramic painting of the crucifixion, because the performance had already started. Instead they went to the curio shop next to it. Enid bought a small figurine of an angel. She said it looked like the one at the home—“but I’ll teach this one to fly.” Norma Jeane laughed, the way she was beginning to, a breathy laughter.

  Too late for Mrs. Travers to lead them away, they had come to the Court of David, with its enormous statue of a naked David looming in an alcove of sculpted greenery that opens into the Garden of the Mysteries of Life. Norma Jeane and Enid couldn’t control their giggles at the sight of the nude statue. Sandra didn’t have a chance to close her eyes. Stan said the man was “sure hung small.” No one understood except Mrs. Travers, who gave a spirited “whoop!” they’d never heard before. Then she reprimanded Stan, gathered them all, and marched them to the Hall of Patriots.

  Norma Jeane’s voice was tense: “What does R.I.P. mean?”

  Enid saw the designation on a stone. “It spells ‘rip’!” Her voice instantly touched panic.

  “It means ‘Rest in Peace,’” Mrs. Travers explained.

  “Rest in pieces!” Norma Jeane heard and repeated.

  “Ripped in pieces!” Enid thought of the terrible hurt inside her and Norma Jeane. “That would mean that even after you die, von go on hurting,” she rejected.

  Mrs. Travers tried to soothe the girls. “‘Rest in Peace’ is just a kind wish that you rest quietly after you donate your soul to God.”

  But the two girls were already running back in tears to the minibus. The other children started to cry when Stanley yelled meanly at them, “
Rip, rip, rip—chop, chop!”—to hide his own fear.

  Only Sandra didn’t cry, because she knew all about ugly death.

  Mrs. Travers ushered them all into the minibus. She joined them in their tears.

  On the way back to the home, Norma Jeane said to Enid, “It should say, ‘Rest in Rest.’” Enid agreed: “Rest in rest.”

  That same day—and only that one time—they ended their game forlornly with those words.

  * * *

  Rest in Peace. Rest in Rest. Norma Jeane, rest in rest. N.J.R.I.R. Rest in Peace, Norma Jeane. . . . That easily it had come, the answer to the initials Enid had written on her letter. That had been one of her last thoughts and she had left it as a new message to her, Normalyn, joining the two parts of the letter. Normalyn could not explore that further now because Sandra had just said excitedly:

  “Then the limousine did come for them!” Instantly she was serious: “But not really.” She looked beyond the grounds, “That ugly gray limousine with those darkened windows did come and—”

  * * *

  —the children saw it as it drove up. “The detectives found you, and your rich parents have sent the limousine for you!” one of the astonished girls said to Norma Jeane and Enid. Others joined the excitement: “The chauffeur’s going to talk to Miss Kline!” “You’d better run and pack!” “Quick or they’ll lose you again!”

  Both Enid and Norma Jeane—puzzled—had to pretend the limousine had really come for them. Stiffly, they walked to their bed areas, the others following. The two girls folded their clothes, slowly, hoping the gray limousine would leave. Then they’d claim they hadn’t been ready, prepare another story.

  “Hurry, hurry!”

  The two girls walked down the stairs together, with their few clothes bunched. Leaving Miss Kline’s office, the haughty chauffeur walked past them on his way out.

  “He didn’t even look at you!” a girl laughed at the two girls. The excitement turned into mockery when they all realized the sumptuous limousine had come on other business. “You’d better run after it before it leaves,” a girl taunted now, joined by another, then another.