Another couple of people come running up to me. Don’t ask me what they look like, because I’m not paying much attention at this point. What I do notice is that one of them picks up the chair and scoots it back into the cubicle, and the other one leads me to a comfy sofa next to the window. The research librarian runs up and hands me a cup of water, which I gulp down in one go.
“I’m OK,” I say, waving them all away. “Sorry. I just…”
“Where’s your mother?” the librarian asks.
“Over there by the magazines. But don’t call her, please. I’m OK, I promise. I only felt a little dizzy for a second.” I point at the cubicle. “I need to get back to my research.” I stand and move to the cubicle.
The librarian stares at me and nods, then marches in the direction of the magazine section, which means he’s going to get Momma. I grab the newspaper and read really fast about how Marilyn died: Her maid called Marilyn’s doctor at three in the morning because she thought something was wrong with her. The doctor went there right away and found Marilyn dead on her bed, totally naked with empty bottles of sleeping pills on the floor. They figure she died just after midnight and had been lying boobs-up in bed for a couple of hours.
I push aside the newspaper and close my eyes. I feel so bad for poor Marilyn. Some people think it was an accident. But I know it wasn’t. She was just sad, really sad. Even though she was famous, and lots of people loved her, nobody knew how sad she really was, and that she just wanted it all to be over. But I know.
“What time was I born, Momma?” I ask, clutching my book bag against my chest as she speeds home.
Momma looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Why on earth did you do that back there, baby?” She swerves to avoid hitting a boy on a scooter and guns it down Marengo. “You nearly scared me to death!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose! It just happened.” I kick the glove box a couple of times.
“Stop that!” Momma slaps my arm really hard, and I pull back my foot.
“What time was I born?”
“I don’t remember.” Momma glares at me really mean-like and quickly looks back at the road as she reaches the traffic signal, which is turning red.
“Was it in the morning?”
Momma pulls her big Jackie O sunglasses out of her purse, slips them on, and looks away from me.
“It’s night-time, Momma. Take those off.”
The light changes back to green and Momma speeds down the road, still wearing her stupid sunglasses. Tears roll down her cheeks.
“Fine! I’ll ask Auntie Doreen.”
Momma swerves to the right, pulls to the side of the road, and yanks up the parking brake. “Ask her what exactly?”
“What time I was born. She was there, wasn’t she?”
“Who told you that?”
“She did! She told me she was in the delivery room with you when I was born because Father wasn’t there. And she told me the midwife screamed when she saw me.”
Momma yanks off her sunglasses, shoves them back in her purse, and lowers her forehead to the steering wheel.
“Is it true, Momma?”
Momma lifts her head from the steering wheel and nods.
“Why did the midwife scream?”
Momma sits up and clears her throat. “She apologised for that.” She turns her head and looks straight at me. “She came by the house a few days later and apologised. She said you’d stared at her with knowing eyes, not the eyes of a newborn baby, and that scared her. But she said she was sorry.”
“I remember that, Momma.”
Momma squints at me, and her mouth turns down at the sides. “You remember what?”
“I remember someone screaming, a lady, real loud. I hear her all the time, especially when I dream.”
“That’s nonsense. Nobody remembers anything from when they were born.”
“What time was I born, Momma?”
“Early in the morning.” Momma shakes her head. “I don’t remember exactly. But it was very early. Why?”
“Was it before three in the morning?”
“I was admitted around midnight, and you came almost right away. So, yes, before three. What’s this all about?”
I reach into my book bag and pull out the newspaper from the library and hand it to her. She switches on the reading light and looks at the front page and at the big letters above the picture of Marilyn that say Marilyn Dead.
“Look at the date.”
She peers at the date under the words Daily News.
“It says Sunday, August 5, 1962,” I say.
Momma nods.
“That’s the day I was born, isn’t it?”
Momma nods again.
I take the newspaper out of her hands and turn over the page to the main story and point to where it says they think Marilyn died after midnight, and that they found her dead body at three in the morning. “See that?”
Momma pulls the newspaper closer to her face, because the letters are small, and reads for a couple of minutes. Then she hands it back to me.
“It’s not Hiro whose spirit is inside me, Momma.”
Momma’s head snaps in my direction when I say Hiro’s name.
“It’s not Hiro.” I stick the newspaper back into my book bag. “It’s Marilyn.”
Chapter 11
All of us clap when Spencer finishes his speech about Sandy Koufax, a handsome baseball hero who used to pitch for the Dodgers. Sandy Koufax is Jewish and left-handed like Spencer, which are a couple of the reasons Spencer picked him. Spencer’s a great speaker and a super good actor too, and everyone loves that he played out bits of Sandy Koufax’s life.
As Spencer makes his way back to his desk, slapping our hands as he Gumbies down the aisle, Miss Johnson calls me to the front of the classroom to make my presentation. At the last minute, I decide to give my speech as if it’s Marilyn who’s talking, the way Spencer sort of did with Sandy Koufax, which I think will make it a lot more interesting.
I skip to the front of the room and plop my book bag down on a table. Then I pull out the newspaper and walk from one side of the classroom to the other, all swishy like, holding it up so everyone can see Marilyn’s face on the front page. After that, I crawl up on the stool next to the table, put aside the newspaper, grab my notes, and cross my legs the way Marilyn does on the cover of the book about her life. A few of the kids giggle, and Ryo blows a raspberry, which makes Miss Johnson snap her fingers in the air and say, “Now everyone, please quiet down,” or something adulty like that.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” I say with as breathy a voice I can make, trying to sound the way Marilyn does in her movies.
“Good afternoon!” Ryo blurts out like a dumbhead. Miss Johnson claps her hands at him, and he sits up straight in his chair and salutes her as if she were an army sergeant. “Sorry, chief,” he says with a quick shrug.
“Anyway…” I say, “you all know me as Marilyn Monroe, the movie star. But my real name, the name my crazy Momma gave me when I was born, is Norma Jean Mortenson. Mortenson was my Momma’s second husband’s last name. He dumped her before she got preggie with me. But she stuck me with his name anyway and just pretended that Mortenson was my father. I think she did that because she didn’t want people to know who my real father was. The truth is, I don’t think Momma had any idea who my real father was.”
A few kids giggle, but less than before.
“Before I was born, and before she married Mortenson, Momma was married to another man whose last name was Baker. She had two kids with him. But he ended up dumping her, too, and took their two kids with him back to Kentucky, which was where he was from.
“It would have been nice to know I had a half-brother and half-sister, but Momma never told me about them. She just kept all that stuff secret from me, and I had to find out about it after I grew up. One day, out of the clear blue sky, Momma announced she wanted people to start calling me Norma Jean Baker instead of Norma Jean Mortenson, which
was totally confusing, being that I didn’t know who Baker was at the time. But that’s the name that eventually stuck for a while.”
I glance up from my notes. Most of my classmates are leaning forward now and listening to me, which makes me feel a little less self-conscious. Even Ryo is leaning forward, squeezing his eyebrows together and making his eyes small, which I guess means he’s interested, too.
“Anyway, Momma eventually went completely bonkers, and I was taken away from her by, um, the police, I guess. They locked her in the big nuthouse in Norwalk, the same place they put away Clyde’s brother, Hiro. And they stuck me in an orphanage, which made me feel super sad, like nobody wanted me. After a while, they decided to send me to a bunch of different foster homes all around Los Angeles. Most of them were awful, and I cried all the time because I didn’t have a real family like regular kids.
“The worst foster home they sent me to was one where the foster dad was a total perv and did naughty stuff to me, which I hated. He said I’d get in trouble if I told the police, so I didn’t. Instead, I asked the social worker to move me to a different foster home, which took a while for her to arrange. But it eventually happened, and that’s how I got away from the perv. Finally, as soon as I turned sixteen, I married a twenty-one-year-old guy named Jimmy who lived next door, just to get away from all the bouncing around from home to home.
“A year after we got married, they shipped Jimmy off to fight in the war, and he dumped me on his parents, which I didn’t like. It was like being in foster care again, only worse. So I ran away from them and decided to support myself by modelling since I was pretty. At first, nobody paid much attention to me. Then a girlfriend of mine convinced me to straighten my hair and dye it blonde, which looked a lot better than the curly dark brown hair I was born with. And that’s when everybody started noticing me.
“My name changed a few more times before I became famous, but finally, some boss from the movie studio told me I had to stick with one name because it was better for my career. So he picked the name Marilyn Monroe for me because it sounded nice and, according to him, was way easier to remember than Norma Jean, being that both the first name and last name started with the same letter. Once that was agreed, the studio bosses didn’t let me change my name anymore. Even though I married, like, a gazillion guys, including the baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, the studio bosses wouldn’t allow me to take their last names the way most American ladies get to, and this made my husbands mad and eventually leave me.
“So, fast forwarding to the important bit, I made a bunch of Hollywood movies and became super famous because I was the prettiest and most perfect lady in the whole world. People invited me to eat in the best restaurants, and I got to travel to the best cities like London and Paris and Miami for free, and famous designers like Chanel and Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent sent their latest outfits for me to wear whenever I went out (even though I preferred to throw on cut-off blue jeans and boy’s shirts at home), and everyone loved me. Even President Kennedy’s movie star brother-in-law Peter, uh”—I glance at my notes—“—Lawford, he loved me for a while when I was between husbands. After he was finished loving me, he introduced me to President Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, who also loved me for a while. Finally, Bobby introduced me to his big brother, President Kennedy himself, who I really really loved because he was, like, totally handsome and more famous than me.
“President Kennedy and I became secret friends. Not even his wife, Jackie, knew about us, being that President Kennedy was good at keeping secrets and had a few best friends who helped cover up for him so Jackie wouldn’t find out. Everything was going so nicely between us that after a while I imagined maybe he would leave Jackie and marry me instead so I could become First Lady. But some bad people found out about our secret friendship and were really mad about that, especially the spies in the CIA, the same spies who were trying to kill Fidel Castro in Cuba. They forced President Kennedy to stop being my secret friend, which made me super sad, as if all the sadness I ever felt in my whole life were suddenly bundled all together in one place and just exploded in my heart, like the A-bombs that wasted Hiroshima and Nagasaki and everyone who lived there, only worse. I just couldn’t take it.
“So”—I hop off the stool and grab the newspaper from the table—“on August fifth, nineteen sixty-two, at around midnight, I washed down a bunch of sleeping pills with a bottle of whiskey to try and kill myself.” I hold the newspaper high in one hand.
“What do you mean she tried to kill herself?” Susie Meier yells out from the back of the room. “She did kill herself, didn’t she?”
Melissa Anderson, who is sitting in the front row, points at the newspaper and says, “She definitely did! It says Marilyn Dead right there.”
Tony Lopez raises his hand and blurts out, “My dad told me the CIA killed her.”
I bring my forefinger in front of my mouth, bend toward them, and make a shhh sound, and they all quiet down.
“All things are recycled,” I say. “That’s what the monk from the temple in J-Town says.”
I reach into my book bag, pull out an official-looking blue document, and hold it high. “I tried to kill myself. But karma didn’t let me go.” I move from one side of the classroom to the other, shaking the document at them. “This is the proof.”
“What is it?” Spencer asks.
“It’s a birth certificate for somebody who was born on the same day, at the same time, as the day and time I supposedly died.”
“Whose birth certificate?” Miss Johnson asks.
“Yeah, whose it is?” Ryo calls out.
“This”—I shake the blue certificate at them again—“is Clyde Koba’s birth certificate.” I bring the newspaper and the birth certificate together and hold them up in one hand. “Like I said, I tried to kill myself. But as my spirit was leaving my body, karma recycled it into Clyde’s body, right as he was being born. And that’s how I got here today.”
When I finish, the room goes quiet for what feels like a million years. Some of the kids look at each other and throw little glances my way, others whisper, and others stare at me like I’m some kind of weird space alien, all of which makes me hot and sweaty, the way I feel when Momma catches me doing something wrong. Then Spencer stands up and starts to clap and say yes yes yes, and the rest of them follow along. Some of them even whistle and cheer. Miss Johnson smiles too, nodding her head, and writing down something in her notebook while saying, “Excellent, Clyde, excellent!”
So I flutter my eyelashes and curtsy like a girl, which makes the kids laugh, and I take a bow like a boy, shove all my stuff back in my bag, and sashay to my desk blowing kisses at everyone.
Ryo slaps my back as I lock my book bag in my desk. “That was great, dude. Really good,” he whispers.
“Thanks, Ryo.” I can’t stand it when Ryo touches me. But since he’s been less of a jerk to me lately, and since Kevin wants us to be friends, I let him. But it’s not easy. Whenever I feel his hand dancing on my shoulder, it makes me want to jump right out of my chair.
“You’re still coming over for my birthday party on Sunday, right?”
“What, this Sunday?”
“Yeah, remember? You told me you’d come.”
“Um, I don’t know. That’s the same day Kevin’s coming back. Plus, I haven’t asked my Momma yet.”
“Boys, please pipe down,” Miss Johnson says. “It’s Marianne’s turn.”
I look up and see Marianne Leatherall standing at the front of the classroom dressed in a potato sack and holding a guitar. I have no idea who she’s going to talk about, but it doesn’t look very interesting, so I plaster on a fake smile and pretend to listen to her so she doesn’t feel bad. But Ryo keeps nattering on behind me in a loud, annoying whisper.
“Dude, you have to come. It’ll be fun.”
“Maybe,” I say out of the corner of my mouth.
“Now that I know you’re into Marilyn Monroe, I have a bunch of stuff to show you. Collectables from m
y dad’s shop.”
I whip around in my seat. “Do you have a signed picture?”
Chapter 12
Momma stays quiet when she drives me to Ryo’s place for his birthday party on Sunday. She doesn’t turn on the radio to sing along to the music the way she usually does, she drives slowly on side streets instead of on the main roads, and she doesn’t say a word. It’s not like she’s mad at me, or anything like that. When she’s mad at me, she gets this deep crease between her eyebrows and presses her lips together until they turn white, and she looks away from me. Oh, and she also plays the radio blaringly loud, which is her way of yelling at me. But today she’s just quiet and sighing a lot.
“What’s wrong, Momma?”
Momma looks at me and shakes her head. I think back to earlier that morning to try and figure out why she’s acting this way. I guess she was a little quiet at breakfast, too, but not as much as now. The only thing I remember is the telephone rang late last night as I was dozing off, and I heard Momma talking to someone for a while, even though I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“Who called last night, Momma?”
Momma pulls up in front of Ryo’s house, leans over, and kisses me. “Don’t worry about anything, baby. Momma’s fine. Everything will be fine.”
Now I’m sure Momma is hiding something. But I figure I can find out about it later. Right now, Ryo is waving at me from his front porch. “Pick me up at three, Momma.” I grab Ryo’s birthday present and jump out of the car without waiting for her to answer.
Even though I’m keen to see Ryo’s dad’s collection of Marilyn stuff, I’m way more excited about Kevin coming home later today. I’ve been missing him so much for the past few weeks. When he first went away, it was like someone ripped my heart from my body, especially since Auntie Doreen wouldn’t let us talk to each other after she caught me coming out of his room that last night. At first, I cried a lot and wasn’t sleeping very well. Then I had nightmares about my father and about Hiro and about the screaming lady. The only thing that saved me from going mad was my Marilyn project. Once I figured out that her spirit is inside me, and once I found out she tried to kill herself because of how sad she got from missing President Kennedy (the way I was missing Kevin), I decided I had to be strong for both of us—for Marilyn and for me—so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to her again.
The Death of Baseball Page 8