Harriet and Irina had vanished from Norma Jeane’s life as if they had never been. Irina’s father was still officially “missing in action.” His bones would never be found. Maybe the Japs had taken his head? When Norma Jeane concentrated with all her strength she saw a story taking place in a faraway room, unless it was a dream Norma Jeane couldn’t see clearly, in which Harriet was bathing Irina in scalding water and Irina was screaming in pain and terror and there was no one but Norma Jeane to save Irina but Norma Jeane ran helplessly, trying to locate the room, up and down a doorless steamy corridor grinding her teeth in desperation and fury.
Waking, Norma Jeane crept into the cubbyhole of a bathroom, the blinding light overhead. She was so scared she crawled into the tub. Her teeth were chattering. Her skin tingled and smarted from the hot, hot water. This was where Bucky would discover her at 6 A.M. He’d have lifted her in the crook of his muscular arm and carried her off to bed except the way she was looking at me, her eyes all pupil like an animal’s, I knew not to touch her.
12
“It’s history, now. The time we’re in.”
There came then the day. Norma Jeane was prepared, almost.
Bucky informed her he’d enlisted that morning in the merchant marine. He informed her he’d probably be shipped out within six weeks. To Australia, he thought. Japan would soon be invaded, and the war would end. He’d been wanting to enlist for a long time, as he guessed she knew.
He told her this didn’t mean he didn’t love her because he did love her like crazy. He told her it didn’t mean he wasn’t happy, he was happy. He was the happiest he’d ever been. Except he wanted more from his life than just a honeymoon.
You’re living in a time of history; if you’re a man you have got to do your share. You have got to serve your country.
Hell, Bucky knew this sounded corny. But that’s the way he felt.
He could see the pain in Norma Jeane’s face. Her eyes swelling with tears. He felt sick with guilt yet triumphant too. Elated! He’d done it, and he was going; he was almost free! It wasn’t just Norma Jeane but Mission Hills, where he’d lived all his life, his folks breathing down his neck, the Lockheed factory, where he was stuck in the machine shop, the sour stink of the embalming room. I sure wasn’t going to wind up being an embalmer! Not this boy.
Norma Jeane surprised him with her composure. Saying only, sadly, “Oh, Bucky. Oh, Daddy. I understand.” He grabbed her and held her, and suddenly they were both crying. Bucky Glazer, who never cried! Even when his ankle was broken on the football field, senior year. They knelt on the bumpy linoleum floor of the kitchen Norma Jeane kept so polished and clean and they prayed together. Then Bucky lifted Norma Jeane and carried her into the bedroom sobbing, her arms tight around his neck. That was the first day.
Out of a deep exhausted sleep after his Lockheed shift he was wakened by a child’s clumsy fingers stroking his cock. In his dream the child laughed at him, the look of disgust on his face, for Bucky was in his football jersey, and his buttocks were naked, and they were in a public place, plenty of people were watching, so Bucky shoved at the child and managed to shake himself free and to his astonishment there was Norma Jeane panting beside him in the dark, stroking and pulling at Big Thing, her warm thigh over his as she pushed her belly and groin against him, moaning Oh, Daddy! Oh, Daddy! It was a baby she wanted, the hairs stirred on the back of Bucky’s neck, the naked moaning female beside him single-minded in her desire, an impersonal desire chill and pitiless as any force bearing him onward to his possible death in the unimaginable dark waters of what he knew no better than to call history. Bucky pushed Norma Jeane roughly away, telling her to leave him alone, let him sleep for Christ’s sake, he had to get up at 6 A.M. Norma Jeane seemed not to hear. She clutched at him, kissing him wildly; he shook her off, now like an animal in heat, a naked animal in heat, repulsive to him. His cock, erect while he’d been dreaming, was wilting now; Bucky shielded his groin, swung his legs off the bed, and switched on the lamp: 4:40 A.M. He cursed Norma Jeane again. The light exposed her hunched over, panting, her left breast hanging out of her nightie, face flushed and eyes dilated as he remembered them from the other night. As if this was her night self. Her night twin I wasn’t supposed to see. That she herself didn’t see, knew nothing of.
He was groggy, and he was shaken, but Bucky managed to say almost reasonably, “God damn, Norma Jeane! I thought we went through this yesterday. I’m in. I’m going.” Norma Jeane cried, “No, Daddy! You can’t leave me. I’ll die if you leave me.” “You aren’t going to die any more than anybody else is going to die,” Bucky said, wiping his face on a sheet. “Just calm down and you’ll be OK.” But Norma Jeane didn’t hear. She was clutching at him, moaning, her breasts pressed against his sweaty chest. Bucky shivered in disgust. He’d never liked aggressive, sexy women, he’d never have married one; he’d thought he was marrying this sweet shy virgin—“And look at you.” Norma Jeane then tried to straddle him, smacking her thighs against his, not hearing him or, if hearing, ignoring him, coiled tense and quivering, and he was yet more disgusted, shouting in her face, “Stop it! Stop it! You sad, sick cow.” Norma Jeane ran from him and into the kitchen; he heard her sobbing, banging around in the dark; dear Christ he had no choice but to follow her, switching on the light and there she was with a knife in her hand, like a deranged girl in a melodramatic movie, except she didn’t look like anyone you’d see in any movie, and the way she was stabbing at herself, at her bare forearm, wasn’t what you’d see in any movie. Bucky rushed at her, fully awake now, and grabbed the knife out of her fingers. “Norma Jeane! Je-sus.” She’d been serious: she’d cut her arm, it was bleeding, a bright bracelet of blood, astonishing to Bucky, he’d remember it as one of the horrific revelations of his civilian life, until that moment an American boy’s life, innocent and seemingly inviolable.
So Bucky stanched the blood with a kitchen towel. Half carried Norma Jeane into the bathroom, where tenderly he washed the shallow, smarting wounds, a surprise it seemed to someone who was accustomed to chill bodies that could not bleed no matter how stuck or jabbed or lacerated; he soothed Norma Jeane as you’d soothe a small distressed child and Norma Jeane wept quietly now, the wildness drained from her; she leaned against him murmuring, “Oh, Daddy, Daddy, I love you so, Daddy, I’m sorry, I won’t be bad again, Daddy, I promise, do you love me, Daddy? Do you love me?” and Bucky kissed her, murmuring, “Sure I love you, Baby, y’know I love you, I married you, didn’t I?”—putting iodine on the cuts, and gauze bandages, and tenderly then he half carried her unresisting back to their bed of churned sheets and creased pillows, where he held her in his arms, soothing and comforting her until by degrees like an exhausted child she sobbed herself to sleep and Bucky lay open-eyed, nerves jangling with misery yet in a kind of fearful elation, until it was 6 A.M. and time to slip away from her—who would continue to sleep slack-mouthed, breathing thickly as if comatose, and what a relief to Bucky! what a relief to shower her smell off him, the stickiness of her body! to shower and shave and take himself in the chill invigorating twilight of early morning to the merchant marine facility on Catalina Island to report to his assignment amid a world of men like himself. And that was the beginning of the second day.
13
“Bucky, darling—goodbye!”
On a balmy day in late April the Glazers and Norma Jeane saw Bucky off on the freighter Liberty bound for Australia. The precise terms of Bucky’s first assignment were classified, and it wasn’t yet known when he might be furloughed back to the States. Eight months at the earliest. There was talk of an invasion of Japan. Now she would have a blue star to place proudly in her window like other servicemen’s wives and mothers. She smiled and was brave. She was looking “very sweet and very pretty” in a blue cotton shirtwaist, white high-heeled pumps, and a white gardenia in her curly hair so that Bucky, hugging her repeatedly, tears spilling down his cheeks, could inhale the sweet fragrance and would recall it, aboard the freighter amid m
en, as Norma Jeane’s own.
It’s history. What happens to us. No one to blame.
It wasn’t Norma Jeane but Mrs. Glazer who was most emotional that morning, weeping and sniffing and complaining in the car as Mr. Glazer drove them from Mission Hills to the boat for Catalina. In the backseat Norma Jeane sat awkwardly wedged between Bucky’s older brother Joe and his older sister Lorraine. The Glazers’ words swirled about her head like gnats. Norma Jeane, numbed, faintly smiling, wasn’t required to listen to most Glazer talk and wasn’t required to respond. She was sweet but practically a dummy. Except for her looks nobody’d have known she was there. Norma Jeane was thinking that in a normal family there is rarely silence such as the silence that existed between Gladys and her. She was thinking calmly that she’d never belonged to any true family and it was being revealed now that she’d never belonged to the Glazers, though there was the polite pretense and she meant to be polite in return. The Glazers would praise her, in her hearing, for being “strong,” “mature.” For being “a good wife to Bucky.” Possibly from Bucky they’d been hearing about her emotional episodes in the recent past, what Bucky was cruel enough to call female hysteria. But as actual eyewitnesses scrutinizing her carefully, the Glazers had to approve of Norma Jeane. That girl grew up fast! Her and Bucky both.
Saying goodbye to Bucky Glazer in his merchant marine uniform, his hair trimmed brutally short so that his boyish face looked almost gaunt. His eyes glistened with excitement and fear. He’d nicked himself shaving. He’d been away at the training camp only a short while but already he seemed older, different. Self-consciously he hugged his weeping mother, and his sisters, and his father, and his brother, but mostly he hugged Norma Jeane. Murmuring almost in anguish, “Baby I love you. Baby, write to me every day, OK? Baby, I’m gonna miss you.” In her ear hotly he whispered, “Big Thing’s gonna miss Little Thing, for sure!” Norma Jeane made a startled sound like giggling. Oh, what if the others overheard! Bucky was saying that, when the war was over, when he came home, they’d start their family—“As many kids as you want, Norma Jeane. You’re the boss.” He began kissing her the way a boy might kiss, hot wet smacky kisses, anxious kisses. The Glazers edged away to allow the young couple privacy, not that there was much privacy on the pier at Catalina that balmy morning in April 1944 as the freighter Liberty was preparing to ship out to Australia, one of a convoy of merchant marine freighters. Norma Jeane was thinking what good luck, the merchant marine wasn’t a branch of the U.S. Armed Services as most people probably thought. The Liberty wasn’t a warship and didn’t carry bombers and Bucky would not be armed, Bucky would never be sent “into action” or “into combat.” What had happened to Harriet’s husband and to so many other husbands could not happen to him. That merchant marine freighters were continually being attacked by enemy submarines and planes was a fact she seemed not to acknowledge. She would say to whomever inquired, “My husband isn’t armed. The merchant marine just carries supplies.”
On the way back to Mission Hills, Mrs. Glazer sat in the backseat with Lorraine and Norma Jeane. She’d removed her hat and her gloves and gripped Norma Jeane’s icy fingers, understanding that her daughter-in-law was in a state of shock. She’d ceased weeping but her voice was hoarse with emotion. “You can move in with us, dear. You’re our daughter now.”
WAR
“I’m nobody’s daughter now. I’m through with that.”
She didn’t move in with the Glazers in Mission Hills. She didn’t remain in Verdugo Gardens. The week following Bucky’s departure on the Liberty she got an assembly-line job at Radio Plane Aircraft fifteen miles to the east in Burbank. She rented a furnished room in a boardinghouse near the trolley line and she was living alone by the time of her eighteenth birthday when the thought came to her as she lay exhausted, sinking into a dreamless sleep, Norma Jeane Baker is no longer a ward of L.A. County. The following morning the thought came to her yet more powerfully, like a flash of heat lightning illuminating a dark bruise of a storm sky above the San Gabriel Mountains, Was that why I married Bucky Glazer?
Amid a thunderous clatter of machinery at the aircraft factory beginning then to tell herself the story of why she’d become engaged at fifteen and dropped out of high school to marry at sixteen. And why in terror and exhilaration she was now living by herself for the first time in her life at eighteen, perceiving that her life would only now begin. And this she knew to be because of the War.
If there is no Evil
yet there is War
is War not-evil?
Is Evil not-War?
There came the day at Radio Plane when she who rarely read newspapers out of superstition overheard some of her female co-workers in the lunchroom talking of an event reported in the L.A. Times, one of the smaller front-page headlines below the usual war headlines, and a small accompanying photograph of an ecstatically smiling woman in white, and she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the paper one of the women was holding and must have looked stricken for the women asked what was wrong and she stammered a vague reply nothing was wrong, the women’s eyes sharp as icepicks upon her, scrutinizing and judging and not liking this young married girl so secretive-seeming and her shyness mistaken for aloofness and her fastidiousness about hair, makeup, clothes mistaken for vanity and her desperate zeal not to fail at her job mistaken for a predatory female wish merely to ingratiate herself with the male foreman, and she retreated in confusion and embarrassment knowing the women would laugh cruelly as soon as she was out of earshot, mimicking her stammer and hushed little-girl voice, and that evening she bought a copy of the Times to read in fascinated horror—
EVANGELIST McPHERSON DIES
CORONER RULES DRUG OVERDOSE
Aimee Semple McPherson was dead! Founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles where eighteen years before Grandma Della had taken the infant Norma Jeane to be baptized in the Christian faith. Aimee Semple McPherson, who’d long since been exposed and humbled as a fraud, her fortune of millions of dollars built upon hypocrisy and venality. Aimee Semple McPherson, whose very name was now notorious where once she’d been one of the most famous and admired women in America. Aimee Semple McPherson, a suicide! Norma Jeane’s mouth had gone dry. She was standing at the trolley stop, hardly able to concentrate on the article. I would not think that it meant anything, that the woman who baptized me had taken her own life. That the Christian faith might be no more than an item of clothing hastily slipped on, to be hastily slipped off and discarded.
“But you’re Bucky’s wife. You can’t just live alone.”
The Glazers were shocked. The Glazers were severely disapproving and angry. Norma Jeane shut her eyes, seeing a dreamlike succession of hypnotic days in her mother-in-law’s kitchen amid gleaming utensils and a spick-and-span linoleum floor, smelling the rich odors of simmering stews and soups, roasting meats, baking bread and cakes. The comforting chatter of an older woman’s voice. Norma Jeane, dear, will you help me with this? Onions to be chopped, baking pans to be greased. Stacks of dirtied plates after Sunday dinner to be scraped clean, rinsed and washed and dried. She shut her eyes, seeing a girl smiling as she washed dishes, arms sunk to her elbows in sparkling Ivory suds. A girl smiling lost in concentration running a carpet sweeper carefully over the living room and dining room carpets, dumping bundles of soiled laundry into the washing machine in the dank-smelling cellar, helping Mrs. Glazer to hang clothing on the line, to remove clothing from the line, to iron, to fold, to put away in drawers, in closets, and on shelves. A girl in a pretty starched shirtwaist dress, a hat and white gloves and high-heeled pumps, no silk stockings but carefully with an eyebrow pencil she’d drawn “seams” on the backs of her legs to simulate stocking seams in this time of war deprivation. Entering the Church of Christ with her in-laws, so many of them. The Glazers. Is that—? Yes, the younger son’s wife. Living with them while he’s overseas.
“But I’m not your daughter. I’m nobody’s daughter now.”
You sad, sick cow.
Except living alone in her furnished room in Burbank in even such cramped shabby quarters and having to share a bathroom with two other boarders, living alone in this place new and strange to her where no one knew her, sometimes Norma Jeane laughed aloud in startled happiness. She was free! She was alone! For the first time in her life truly alone. Not an orphan. Not a foster child. Not a daughter, or a daughter-in-law, or a wife. It was a luxury to her. It felt like theft. She was a working girl now. She brought home a weekly salary, she was paid by check, she cashed her checks in a bank like any adult. Before she’d been hired at Radio Plane Aircraft she’d applied to several other small nonunion factories and they’d turned her down for lack of experience and being too young and even at Radio Plane they’d initially turned her down, but she’d insisted Please give me a chance! Please. Terrified, and her heart hammering, yet stubbornly insisting standing on tiptoe and straight-backed to display her healthy young capable body I k-know I can do it, I’m strong and I don’t get tired ever. I don’t! And they’d hired her, and so it was true: quickly she learned the mechanics of assembly-line work, robot-mechanical work, for how like the routine of housework it was except amid a clamorous exterior world of other people, a world in which if you worked hard you would be perceived as more efficient, more intelligent, and therefore more valuable than your co-workers, the watchful eye of the foreman upon you, and beyond him the plant manager, and beyond him the bosses known only by name, and those names never uttered by machine-shop workers like Norma Jeane. And returning home by trolley after her eight-hour shift, staggering with exhaustion yet like a greedy child counting up in her head the money she’d earned, less than seven dollars after taxes and social security but it was hers, to spend or to save if she could. Returning then to her quiet room, where no one awaited her except her Magic Friend in the mirror, a faint headache; very hungry, she was required to prepare no elaborate enormous meal for a famished husband but most evenings just Campbell’s soup heated out of a can, and how delicious this hot soup, and maybe a piece of white bread with jelly, a banana or an orange, a glass of warmed milk. Falling then into her bed, which was a narrow cot of a bed with a mattress an inch thick, a girl’s bed again. She hoped to be too tired to dream and often this was the case, or seemed so, yet sometimes she wandered confused through the unexpectedly long and unfamiliar corridors of the orphanage to find herself swinging on a swing in the sandy playground she would have said she’d forgotten, and a presence on the far side of the wire-mesh fence, was it him? the Dark Prince coming for her? and she hadn’t seen him at the time, had not acknowledged; wandering then on La Mesa only partly clothed in her underpants, seeking the apartment building in which she and Mother were living yet unable to find it, unable to utter aloud the magic words that would bring her to it—THE HACIENDA. She was a child in the time of Once upon a time. She was Norma Jeane looking for her mother. Yet she was not a child truly for she’d been made a married woman. The secret place between her legs had been rent and bloodied and claimed by the Dark Prince.
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