Sinking then in Norma Jeane’s arms, into a deep, damply snoring sleep. Norma Jeane winced with pain and tried to maneuver into a more comfortable position. The bed was too small. Yet it was a double bed. Tenderly she stroked Bucky’s sweat-glistening forehead, his muscled shoulders. The bedside lamp was on and the light hurt her tired eyes but she wasn’t able to reach it without disturbing Bucky. Oh, if only she could take a bath! That was all she really wanted, a bath. And doing something practical about the tangled sheet that was so wet beneath them. Several times during the long night that yielded at last to June 20, 1942, and a nearly opaque morning fog, Norma Jeane woke from a thin headachy sleep and always there was Bucky Glazer, naked and snoring, pinning her to the bed. She tried to lift her head, to see the long length of him. Her husband. Her husband! Like a beached whale he was, naked, his hairy legs sprawled across the bedclothes. She heard herself laugh, a frightened little-girl laugh, reminded of her long-lost doll she’d loved so, the doll-with-no-name, unless the name was “Norma Jeane,” the doll with the floppy boneless legs, the feet.
6
Tell me about your work, Daddy. But it wasn’t Bucky’s Lockheed-factory work she meant.
Curling up like a cat on Bucky’s lap in her short nightie, no panties beneath, her arm around his neck and her warm breath in his ear distracting him from the new issue of Life, photo spreads of haggard G.I.s in the Solomon Islands, and in New Guinea there was General Eichelberger and his even more haggard men, gaunt and unshaven and some of them wounded, and there was a photo spread of Hollywood entertainers visiting troops abroad, “boosting morale”: Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Marie McDonald, Joe E. Brown, and Bob Hope. Norma Jeane flinched from looking too closely at the war photos, but she studied the other feature more carefully, then grew restless as Bucky continued to read the magazine. Tell me about your work with Mr. Eeley, she whispered, and Bucky felt a shiver of both dread and excitement, not that he was shocked exactly, not that he was a prude, for sure Bucky Glazer was no prude and he’d told plenty of grisly hilarious stories about his work as an embalmer’s assistant to his buddies; but no girl or female relative of his had ever inquired, definitely you got the point that most people didn’t want to know, no thanks! But here was this child wife of his wriggling on his lap, whispering in his ear Tell me, Daddy! like she had to know the worst, so Bucky spoke as lightly as he could manage, not going into much detail, describing a body they’d been working on that morning in preparation for a viewing: a woman in her mid-fifties who’d died of liver cancer, her skin such a sickish yellow color they’d had to cream it several times, applying layers of cosmetic tint with a little brush, and then the layers dried unevenly, so the poor woman looked like a wall peeling paint and they had to begin over again; her cheeks were so sunken they had to firm up her lower face from inside her mouth with cotton batting and they’d had to stitch the corners of her mouth shut and fix them into a peaceful expression—“Not a smile but an ‘almost smile’ Mr. Eeley calls it. You wouldn’t want a smile.” Norma Jeane shivered but wanted to know how they’d prepared the dead woman’s eyes, did they “make up” the eyes? And Bucky said they’d mostly had to inject a solution with a syringe to fill out the hollows and cement the eyelids shut—“You don’t want a dead body’s eyes to pop open at a viewing.” Bucky’s basic job was to drain out blood and start the embalming fluid pumping through the veins. It was Mr. Eeley who did the artistic work once the body was firmed up—“restored”—primping the eyelashes, coloring the lips, manicuring nails that in some cases hadn’t ever been manicured in life. Norma Jeane asked whether, when they’d first seen her, the dead woman had looked frightened or sad or in pain, and Bucky lied a little, saying no, she looked “like she was just asleep—they mostly all do.” (In fact, the woman had looked as if she were trying to scream, her lips drawn back from her teeth and her face twisted like a rag; her eyes had been open, the focus clouded with mucus. Already, only hours after her death, she’d begun to emit a nostril-piercing smell as of rancid meat.) Norma Jeane hugged Bucky so tight he could hardly breathe but he didn’t have the heart to dislodge her grip. He didn’t have the heart to shift her off his lap and onto the sofa, though her warm fleshy weight on his left thigh was putting his nerve endings to sleep.
So needy. He couldn’t breathe. He did love her. It was the formaldehyde smell absorbed into his skin, his hair follicles. If he wanted to escape, where?
She was asking him another time how the dead woman had died, and Bucky told her. She asked him how old the dead woman was, and Bucky picked a number out of the air—“Fifty-six.” He felt his young wife tense as if counting out numbers in her head, subtracting her age from fifty-six. Then she relaxed a little, saying, as if thinking out loud—“It’s a long way off then.”
7
She laughed, it was so easy. A fairy-tale riddle, and she knew the answer. What is it I am? A married woman is what I AM. What is it I’m not? A virgin is what I’m NOT.
Pushing the squeaky-wheeled stroller through the scrubby little park. Or maybe it wasn’t a park exactly. Palm-tree debris underfoot, and other litter. But she loved it! Her heart swelled with happiness knowing this is what I am, what I am doing is what I am. This early-afternoon routine she’d grown to love. Singing to little Irina strapped into the stroller. Popular songs, snatches of Mother Goose lullabies. Elsewhere it was the terrible season of Stalingrad, Russia: February 1943. A human slaughter. Here it was just winter in southern California: cool dry eye-aching sunshine most days.
What a beautiful baby! the faces would exclaim. Norma Jeane would murmur, smiling, blushing, Why, thank you. Sometimes the faces would say Beautiful baby, and beautiful mother. Norma Jeane only smiled. And what is your little girl’s name? they would ask and Norma Jeane would say proudly Irina—aren’t you, honey? leaning over the baby, stooping to kiss her cheek or catch at her flailing pudgy fingers that closed so swiftly and tightly around her own. Sometimes the faces would say pleasantly Irina—that’s an unusual name, is it foreign? and Norma Jeane might murmur I guess so. Nearly always they would ask how old the baby was and Norma Jeane would tell them Almost ten months, she’ll be a year in April. The faces would smile brightly. You must be very proud. And Norma Jeane would say Oh, yes, I am—I mean, we are. Sometimes, pushy, inquisitive, the faces would ask Is your husband—? and quickly Norma Jeane would say He’s overseas. Far away—in New Guinea.
It was true, Irina’s father was somewhere in a place called New Guinea. He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. In fact, he was “missing.” He’d been officially “missing in action” since December. Of this, Norma Jeane was able not to think. So long as she could sing “Little Baby Bunting” and “Three Blind Mice” to Irina, that was what mattered. So long as the beautiful little blond girl smiled up at her, chattered, and squeezed her fingers, called her “Ma-ma” like a young parrot just learning to speak, that was what mattered.
In you
the world is born anew.
Before you—
but there was none.
. . .
Mother stared at the baby. For a long moment she could not speak and I was afraid she would burst into tears or turn away and hide her face.
Then I saw that her face was radiant with happiness. And the astonishment of happiness after so many years.
We were in a grassy place. The lawn behind the hospital, I think.
There were benches, there was a small pond. Most of the grass was burnt out. All the colors were hues of brown. The hospital buildings were blurred with distance, I couldn’t see them clearly. Mother was so improved she had ground privileges, unsupervised. She would sit on a bench and read poetry, shaping the precious words to herself, whispering them aloud. Or she would walk for as long as they allowed. Her “captors” she called them. Yet not bitterly. She acknowledged she’d been sick, the shock treatments had helped. She acknowledged she had some distance to go before she was well.
Of course, there was a high wall around the hospi
tal grounds.
It was a bright windy winter day when I arrived, to show Mother my baby. I trusted her with my baby. I placed my baby firmly in her arms.
At last Mother began to cry. Hugging the baby to her flattened breasts. But these were tears of happiness, not sorrow. Oh my darling Norma Jeane Mother said this time it will be right.
In Verdugo Gardens there were a number of young wives whose husbands were overseas. In Britain, in Belgium, in Turkey, in northern Africa. In Guam, in the Aleutian Islands, in Australia, in Burma, and in China. It was sheerly a lottery, where a man was sent. There was no logic to it and certainly no justice. Some men were stationed at bases permanently, in intelligence, in communications, or maybe they worked in hospitals, or as cooks. Maybe they were assigned to postal services. Maybe they were assigned to stockades. As the months and eventually the years passed it would become clear that there were two divisions of men in the armed services in World War II: those who actually fought in the war and those who did not.
It would become clear that there were two divisions of human beings in the wake of the war: those who were lucky and those who weren’t.
If you were one of the unlucky wives you could make an effort not to be bitter or downcast and that would be to your credit. It would be said warmly of you Isn’t she brave? But Norma Jeane’s friend Harriet was beyond that. Harriet wasn’t brave, and Harriet wasn’t making any effort not to be bitter. Much of the time, when Norma Jeane took Irina out in the stroller, Irina’s mother lay exhausted on the shabby sofa in the living room she shared with two other servicemen’s wives, the shades drawn and no radio playing.
No radio! Norma Jeane couldn’t bear to be alone in her apartment for five minutes without a radio playing. And Bucky no more than three miles away at Lockheed.
It was Norma Jeane’s task to call out cheerfully, “Harriet, hi! We’re back.” And Harriet would make no audible reply. “Irina and I had a really nice walk,” Norma Jeane would report, in the same determinedly upbeat voice, lifting Irina out of the stroller and carrying her inside. “Didn’t we, honey-bun?” She would take Irina to Harriet, lying immobile and heavy on the sofa dampened with tears of rage and anger if not actual sorrow, for perhaps she was beyond sorrow; Harriet, who’d gained twenty pounds since December, her skin puffy and chalky and her eyes bloodshot. In the unnerving silence, Norma Jeane heard herself chatter—“We did! Yes, we did. Didn’t we, Irina?” At last Harriet took Irina (who was now beginning to fret, to whimper and kick) from Norma Jeane as she might have taken from her friend’s hands a bundle of damp laundry to be tossed into a corner.
Let me be Irina’s mother if you don’t want her?
Oh, please.
Maybe Harriet wasn’t Norma Jeane’s friend any longer. Maybe in fact she’d never been Norma Jeane’s friend. She was estranged from the “silly, sad” women with whom she shared the apartment, and often she refused to speak with her family, or her husband’s family, on the phone. Not that Harriet had quarreled with them—“Why? There’s nothing to quarrel about.” Not that she was angry with them or distressed by them. She was just too exhausted to deal with them. She was bored with their emotion, she said. Norma Jeane was worried that Harriet might do something hurtful to herself and to Irina, but when she brought the subject up, hesitantly, elliptically, to Bucky, he scarcely listened, for this was “women’s stuff” and of no interest to a man, and she didn’t dare bring the subject up to Harriet herself. It was dangerous to prod Harriet.
Following a stuffed-toy pattern from Family Circle, Norma Jeane sewed a little striped tiger for Irina out of orange cotton socks, strips of black felt (for stripes), and cotton batting stuffing. The tiger’s tail was cleverly made of coat-hanger wire covered with cloth. The eyes were shiny black buttons and the whiskers were pipe cleaners from Woolworth’s. How Irina loved her baby tiger! Norma Jeane laughed excitedly as Irina hugged the little creature and crawled around on the floor with it, squealing as if it were alive. Harriet looked on indifferently, smoking a cigarette. You could at least thank me, Norma Jeane thought. Instead, Harriet remarked, “Well, Norma Jeane. Aren’t we domestic! The perfect little wife and mother.” Norma Jeane laughed, though this stung. With an air of gentle reproach, like Maureen O’Hara in the movies, she said, “Harriet, it’s a sin to be unhappy when you have Irina.” Harriet laughed loudly. She’d been sitting with half-shut eyes and she opened her eyes with exaggerated interest now and stared at Norma Jeane as if she’d never seen her before and didn’t much like what she saw. “Yes, it’s a sin, and I’m a sinner. So why don’t you leave us now, Little Miss Sunshine, and go straight home to hell?”
8
“There’s this guy I know, develops film? ‘Strictly confidential,’ he says. Over in Sherman Oaks.”
In the hot, oppressive summer of 1943, Bucky had become restless. Norma Jeane tried not to think what it meant. Every day the big headline news was of U.S. Air Force bombing raids against the enemy. Heroic nighttime missions into enemy territory. A classmate of Bucky’s from Mission Hills High was posthumously decorated for valor, flying a B-24 Liberator on a raid of German oil refineries in Romania, shot down in action. “He is a hero,” Norma Jeane conceded, “but, honey, he’s dead.” Bucky was staring at the pilot’s photo in the paper with a vacant, brooding expression. He surprised her, laughing so harshly—“Hell, babe, you can be a coward and wind up dead too.”
Later that week Bucky acquired a secondhand Brownie box camera and began taking pictures of his trusting young wife. At first it was Norma Jeane in dressy Sunday clothes, white pillbox hat and white eyelet gloves and white high-heeled pumps; Norma Jeane in shirt and blue jeans, leaning on a gate with a leaf of grass held reflectively between her teeth; Norma Jeane on the beach at Topanga in her two-piece polka-dot swimsuit. Bucky tried to get Norma Jeane to pose Betty Grable-style, peeking coyly over her right shoulder and displaying her cute little rear, but Norma Jeane was too self-conscious. (They were on the beach, Sunday midday, people were watching.) Bucky tried to pose Norma Jeane catching a beach ball, with a big happy smile, but the smile was as forced and unconvincing as the almost smile of one of Mr. Eeley’s cadavers. Norma Jeane begged Bucky to get someone to take pictures of both of them together—“It’s no fun all alone here. Bucky, come on.” But Bucky shrugged, saying, “What do I care about me?”
Next, Bucky wanted to take pictures of Norma Jeanne in the privacy of their bedroom, “Before” and “After” pictures.
“Before” was Norma Jeane as herself. First fully clothed, then partly unclothed, then naked—or, as Bucky called it, “nude.” Nude in their bed with a sheet drawn up teasingly to hide her breasts, and by degrees Bucky would tug the sheet from her, taking pictures of Norma Jeane in awkward, kittenish poses. “C’mon, Baby. Smile for Daddy. You know how.” Norma Jeane didn’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed, thrilled or ashamed. She was overcome by an attack of giggling and had to hide her face. When she recovered, there was Bucky waiting patiently, aiming the camera at her click! click! click! She pleaded, “Daddy, come on. That’s enough. It’s lonely here in this big old bed by myself.” But when Norma Jeane opened her arms to her husband to entice him to her, he just clicked away with the camera.
Each click! a sliver of ice entering her heart. As if seeing her through the camera lens he wasn’t seeing her at all.
But “after” was worse. “After” was humiliating. “After” was when Norma Jeane had to wear a sexy red-blond wig, Rita Hayworth-style, and lacy black lingerie Bucky brought home for her. To her alarm, he even made her up with cosmetics, exaggerating her eyebrows, her mouth, even “enhancing” her nipples with cherry-pink rouge applied with a tiny ticklish brush. Norma Jeane sniffed uneasily. “This makeup, is it from the funeral home?” she asked, with dread. Bucky frowned. “No, it is not. It’s from an adult novelty store in Hollywood.” But the makeup had that unmistakable smell of embalming fluid overlaid with something sweetish like overripe plums.
Bucky didn’t t
ake “after” pictures for very long. He quickly became aroused and excited, set the camera aside, and pulled off his clothes. “Oh, Baby. Baby-Doll. Je-sus.” He was as breathless as if he’d just emerged out of the surf at Topanga. He wanted to make love, and to make love fast, fumbling with a condom while Norma Jeane looked on in dismay like a patient contemplating her surgeon. It was as if her entire body was blushing. The thick, wavy, red-blond wig that fell to her bare shoulders, the sexy black bra and panties hardly more than wisps of fabric—“Daddy, I don’t like this. I don’t feel right.” She’d never seen such a look on Bucky Glazer’s face as she saw now. It was like that famous still of Rudolph Valentino as the Sheik. Norma Jeane began to cry, and Bucky said, annoyed, “What’s wrong?” Norma Jeane said, “I don’t like it, Daddy.” Bucky said, stroking the wig hair, pinching her tumescent-pink nipple through the transparent lace of the bra, “Yes, you do, Baby. You do like it.” “No. It isn’t what I want.” “Hell, I’ll bet you Little Thing is ready. I’ll bet you Little Thing is wet.” With rough prying fingers he touched her between the legs and Norma Jeane flinched and pushed at him. “Bucky, no. That hurts.” “Oh, come on, Norma Jeane. It never hurt before, you love it! You know you do.” “I don’t love this now. I don’t like this at all.” “Look, it’s just fun.” “It isn’t fun! It makes me ashamed.” Bucky said, exasperated, “But we’re married, for Christ’s sake. We’ve been married for over a year—we’ve been married forever! Guys do lots of things with their wives, there’s no harm in it.” “I think there is! I think there is harm in it!” “I’m telling you,” Bucky said, losing patience, “it’s just what people do.” “We’re not other people. We’re us.”
Blonde Page 21