Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  My heart was broken. I cried and cried. When he left I considered how I might injure myself in righteous punishment. For the stab wounds in my arm swiftly healed, I was so healthy. Yet living alone she discovered she had no need to change towels more than once a week, if that frequently. She had no need to change the sheets on her bed more than once a week, if that frequently. For there was no vigorous sweaty young husband to soil them, and Norma Jeane kept herself scrupulously clean washing and bathing as often as she could, frequently washing out her nightie, underwear, and cotton stockings by hand. She had no carpet in her room, therefore no need of a carpet sweeper; once a week she borrowed her landlady’s broom and always returned it promptly. She had no stove, no oven, to be kept scoured and clean. There were few surfaces in the room apart from the windowsills that could collect dust, so she had little need of dusting. (She smiled to recall ol’ Hirohito. She’d escaped him!) When she gave up the apartment in Verdugo Gardens she’d left behind most of the household belongings for the Glazers to take away and keep at their house; the belief was, Bucky’s family was “storing” these things until Bucky returned. But Norma Jeane knew that Bucky would never return.

  At least not to her.

  If you loved me you would not have left me

  If you left me you did not love me

  Except that people were dying and being injured and the world filling up with smoldering rubble, Norma Jeane liked the War. The War was as steady and reliable as hunger or sleep. Always, the War was there. You could talk about the War with any stranger. The War was a radio program that went on and on. The War was a dream dreamt by everyone. You could never be lonely during the War. Since December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, for years there would be no loneliness. On the trolley, on the street, in stores, at work, and at any time you could ask with apprehension or eagerness or in a matter-of-fact voice Did anything happen today? for always something would have happened or might be going to happen. There were battles being “waged” in Europe and in the Pacific continuously. News was either good or bad. You would immediately rejoice with another person, or you would be saddened or upset with another person. Strangers wept together. Everyone listened. Everyone had an opinion.

  After dusk, like an approaching dream, the world dimmed for everyone. This was a magic time, Norma Jeane thought. Car headlights were shuttered, lighted windows were forbidden and lighted marquees. There were earsplitting air raid warnings. There were false alarms, rumors of imminent invasion. Always there were food shortages and other shortages to complain of. There were black market rumors. Norma Jeane in her Radio Plane work clothes, slacks, shirt, and sweater, and her hair neatly tied back in a scarf, found herself talking to strangers with surprising ease. She’d been miserably self-conscious and inclined to stammering with her in-laws, sometimes even with her husband if he was in one of his picky moods, but rarely did she stammer with friendly strangers; and most strangers were friendly. Especially, men were friendly. Norma Jeane could see that men were attracted to her, even men old enough to be grandpappies; she recognized that intense warm staring look in the eyes that signaled desire, and this was comforting to her. So long as she was in a public place. For if they asked would she like to go out to dinner? to the movies? she could quietly indicate her rings. If she was asked about her husband she could quietly say, “He’s overseas. In Australia.” Sometimes she heard herself say he was “lost in action” in New Guinea, and sometimes she heard herself say he’d been “killed in combat” on Iwo Jima.

  But mostly strangers wanted to talk about the ways in which the War had touched their lives. If only the damned war would end they said bitterly. But Norma Jeane thought If only the War would go on forever.

  For her job at Radio Plane depended upon there being a shortage of male workers. Because of the War there were women truck drivers, women trolley conductors, women garbage collectors, women crane operators, and even roofers and painters and groundskeepers. There were women in uniform everywhere you looked. At Radio Plane, Norma Jeane calculated there must be eight or nine women to each man—except on the managerial level, of course, where there were no women. She owed her job to the War, she owed her freedom to the War. She owed her salary to the War and already within three months of working at Radio Plane she was promoted and given a twenty-five-cent-an-hour raise. She’d performed so skillfully on the assembly line, she was selected for more demanding work that involved coating airplane fuselages with a liquid plastic “dope.” The smell was powerful and faintly nauseating. The smell penetrated her brain. Minuscule bubbles in her brain like champagne bubbles. The blood drained out of Norma Jeane’s face and her eyes seemed to lose focus. “You’d better get some fresh air, Norma Jeane,” the foreman said, but Norma Jeane said quickly, “I don’t have time! I don’t have time”—giggling and wiping at her eyes—“I don’t have time.” She was having trouble with her tongue, which seemed too large for her mouth. In terror of failing at her new job and being sent back to the assembly line or fired and sent home. For she had no home. For her husband had left her. You sad, sick cow. She dared not fail, and would not fail. At last the foreman took her arm to escort her out of the “dope” room and Norma Jeane took deep breaths of fresh air at a window but almost immediately returned to her work, insisting that she was fine. Her hands moved deftly with an intelligence of their own that would increase gradually with the hours, days, weeks even as her tolerance for the chemical mixture increased. As she’d been told—“Sometimes you’ll hardly smell the stink.” (Though her hair and clothes smelled of it, she knew. So she had to be extra careful, to wash thoroughly and to air out her clothes.) She did not want to consider that the fumes were permeating her skin, her nasal passages, her lungs, and her brain. She was proud of having been promoted so quickly and of being given a raise, and her hope was to be promoted yet again and given yet another raise. She impressed her foreman as a hard worker, a serious young woman who could be trusted with serious work. She looked like a girl, but she did not act like a girl. Not at Radio Plane! Building navy bombers to be flown against the enemy. She perceived the factory as a kind of race, and she was a runner in this race, and in high school she’d been one of the fastest girl runners, she’d won a medal of which she was proud, though when she sent the medal to Gladys at Norwalk, Gladys never replied. (In a dream she’d seen Gladys wearing the medal pinned to the collar of her green hospital shift. Could it be possible this dream was real? She would not give in and she did not give in.)

  That November morning, spraying dope and combating a sensation of light-headedness, she feared her period coming early for now to keep her job she had to take as many aspirins as she dared for her cramps, knowing it was wrong, knowing she could not heal herself if she succumbed to such weakness, and even then was forced to take one or two sick days, to her shame. That November morning spraying dope and determined not to be sick, or to faint, though the tiny bubbles in her brain were more distracting than usual and suddenly smiling she was able to see a delirious and seductive future.

  The Dark Prince in formal black attire and Norma Jeane who was the Fair Princess in a long white dress of some shimmering material. Walking hand in hand on the beach at sunset. Norma Jeane’s hair blew in the wind. It was the pale platinum-blond hair of Jean Harlow who’d died it was said because her Christian Science mother had refused to call a doctor for her when she was deathly ill only twenty-six years old but Norma Jeane knew better, for you only die out of your own weakness and she would not be weak. The Dark Prince paused to slip his jacket around her shoulders. Gently he kissed her lips. Music began, romantic dance music. The Dark Prince and Norma Jeane began to dance yet soon Norma Jeane surprised her lover. She kicked off her shoes and her bare feet sank into the damp sand and what a delicious sensation Norma Jeane felt, dancing as the surf crashed about her legs! The Dark Prince stared at her in astonishment for she was so much more beautiful than any woman he’d ever known, and even as he stared she eluded him, lifting her arms an
d her arms became wings and suddenly she was a beautiful white-feathered bird soaring higher, higher, higher until the Dark Prince himself was a mere figure on the beach amid crashing frothy waves looking after her in the wonderment of loss.

  Squinting then, Norma Jeane looked up from her gloved hands gripping the dope canister to see a man watching her from the doorway. It was the Dark Prince, a camera in his hands.

  PINUP 1945

  Your life outside the stage is not your accidental life. It will be defined as inevitable.

  —From The Actor’s Handbook

  and the Actor’s Life

  Through that first year of wonders breaking upon her like the harsh stinging surf on the beach at Santa Monica when she’d been a child she would hear the calm metronome of that voice. Wherever you are, I’m there. Even before you get to the place where you are going I’m already there, waiting.

  The look on Glazer’s face! His buddies on the Liberty would rag the kid mercilessly how he’d been leafing through the December ’44 Stars & Stripes with this peeved, bored expression until turning a page he stared, bug-eyed, and his jaw truly dropped. Whatever was in those pulp pages had the effect on Glazer like an electric shock might’ve had. Then this croaking noise from him, “Jesus. My wife. This is my w-wife!” The magazine was snatched from him. Everybody gawking at GIRL DEFENSE WORKERS ON THE HOME FRONT and this full-page photo of the sweetest-faced girl you’d ever seen, darkish curls springing out around her head, beautiful wistful eyes and moist lips in a shy-hopeful smile, she’s wearing a denim coverall snug on her young sizable breasts and her amazing hips, with little-girl awkwardness she’s holding a canister in both hands as if to spray the camera.

  Norma Jeane works a nine-hour shift at Radio Plane Aircraft, Burbank, California. She is proud of her work in the war effort—“Hard work but I love it!” Above, Norma Jeane in the fuselage assembly room. Left, Norma Jeane in a pensive moment thinking of her husband, Merchant Marine Seaman Recruit Buchanan Glaser, currently stationed in the South Pacific.

  Ragging the poor kid, teasing him—the name was printed Glaser not Glazer, how’s he so sure this little girl is his wife?—and there’s a struggle over the magazine, almost it gets ripped, Glazer rushes over glaring-eyed and excited—“You fucks! Cut it out! Gimme that! That’s mine!”

  And there was the March 1945 issue of Pageant confiscated from a sniggering cadre of boys in Sidney Haring’s English class at Van Nuys High, tossed cavalierly into Haring’s desk without a second glance until sometime later that day in private Haring examined it, leafed through it to where the boys, dirty-minded he didn’t doubt, had earmarked a page, and suddenly Haring pushed his glasses against the bridge of his nose to stare, in astonishment—“Norma Jeane!” He recognized the girl at once despite her heavy makeup and sexy pose, head tilted to one side, dark-lipsticked mouth open in a drunken-dreamy smile, eyes half shut in ludicrous ecstasy. She was wearing what appeared to be a near-transparent ruffled nightie to mid-thigh, and high-heeled shoes, and she was clutching beneath her strangely pointed breasts what appeared to be a dumbly smiling stuffed panda: Ready for a cold winter night’s warm cuddle? Haring had begun to breathe through his mouth. His eyesight was blurred by moisture. “Norma Jeane. My God.” He stared and stared. He felt a flush of shame. This was his fault, he knew. He might have saved her. Might have helped her. How? He might have tried. Tried harder. He might have done something. What? Protest her marrying so young? Maybe she’d been pregnant. Maybe she’d had to get married. Could he have married her himself? He was already married. The girl only had been fifteen then. He’d been powerless, and it had been wisest to keep his distance. He’d done the wise thing. Throughout his life, he’d done the wise thing. Even getting crippled was a wise thing; he’d avoided the draft. He had young children, and he had a wife. He loved his family. They depended on him. Every year there were girls in his classes. Foster children, orphans. Mistreated girls. Yearning-eyed girls. Girls who looked to Mr. Haring for guidance. For approval. For love. You can’t help it, you’re a high school teacher, a man, relatively young. The War made it all more intense. The War was a wild erotic dream. If you were a man. Perceived to be a man. He couldn’t save them all, could he? And he’d lose his job. Norma Jeane had been a foster child. There was a doom in that. Her mother had been sick—exactly in what way he couldn’t remember. Her father had been—what? Dead. What could he have done? Nothing. What he’d done, which was nothing, was all he could do. Save yourself. Never touch them. He wasn’t proud of his behavior, but he had no reason to be ashamed either. Why ashamed? He was not. Yet glancing guiltily toward the door of his classroom (it was after school, no one was likely to barge in, yet a stray student or colleague might look through the glass panel in the door) he tore the page out, discarded the copy of Pageant by shoving it into a used manila envelope (so the janitor wouldn’t take notice) and that envelope into his wastebasket. Ready for a cold winter night’s warm cuddle? Haring took care not to wrinkle the full-page photo of his former student but slipped it into a folder kept at the bottom of his bottom drawer, along with a half-dozen handwritten poems the girl had written to him.

  I know that I could never be blue.

  If I could love you.

  And there in February was Detective Frank Widdoes of the Culver City Police Department searching the pigsty trailer home of a murder suspect—to be precise, a suspect in a sensational case of rape-murder, rape-mutilation-murder, rape-mutilation-murder-dismemberment. Widdoes and his fellow cops knew for sure they had their man, the bastard was guilty as all hell; now they needed physical evidence linking him to the dead girl (she’d been missing for several days, then found, dismembered, in a landfill in Culver City, a resident of West Hollywood and a Susan Hayward look-alike under contract to one of the film studios but she’d been recently dropped and somehow met up with this sicko and that was the end of her) and Widdoes was holding his nose with one hand and with the other looking through a pile of girlie magazines, and there in Pix, where the magazine was folded open to a two-page feature he happened to see—“Jesus Christ! That girl.” Widdoes was one of those legendary detectives who in the movies never forgets a face and never forgets a name. “Norma Jeane—what? Baker.” She was posed in a tight-fitting one-piece swimsuit, which showed practically everything she had and left just enough to the imagination, and ludicrous high heels; one of the shots was frontal and the other the Betty Grable pinup stance, the girl peering coyly over her shoulder at the viewer, hands on her hips, with a wink; there were bows on the swimsuit and in the girl’s hair, which was a darkish mass of shellacked-looking curls, and the girl’s still-childlike face appeared hardened with makeup thick as a crust. In the full-front pose she was holding a beach ball provocatively out to the viewer, a silly-simpering expression on her face and lips pursed for a kiss. What’s the best cure for midwinter blues? Our Miss February knows. Widdoes felt a dull pain in his heart. Not like a bullet but like he’d been hit by a blank wadded-up piece of cardboard out of a gun barrel.

  His partner asked him what he’d found over there, and Widdoes said savagely, “What d’you think I’m finding? In a shithole you find shit.”

  The copy of Pix he unobtrusively rolled up and stuck into an inside pocket of his coat for safekeeping.

  And not long afterward in his trailer office back of the smoldering junkyard on Reseda was Warren Pirig, a cigarette burning fiercely in his mouth as he stared at the glossy cover of the new Swank. The cover! “Norma Jeane? Jesus.” There was his girl. The one he’d given up and he’d never once touched. The one he still remembered, sometimes. Except she was changed, older, staring back at him as if now she knew the score. And liked what she knew. She was wearing a damp-looking white T-shirt with the words USS Swank across the front and high-heeled red shoes and that was all: the tight-fitting T-shirt to her thighs. Her darkish-blond hair had been swept atop her head and a few stray curls hung down. You could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra, her breasts were so round and soft-l
ooking. The way the T-shirt clung to her hips and pelvis, you’d conclude she wasn’t wearing panties either. A flush came over Warren’s face. He sat up abruptly at the battered old desk, his feet striking the floor hard. Last he’d heard from Elsie, Norma Jeane was married and moved away to Mission Hills and her husband was overseas. Never had Warren inquired after Norma Jeane since then, nor did Elsie volunteer information. And now this! The cover of Swank and two pages inside of similar shots in the white T-shirt. Showing her tits and ass like a whore. Warren felt a stabbing desire and at the same time a profound disgust, as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “God damn. I blame her.” He meant Elsie. She’d broken up their family. His fingers twitched with the impulse to do hurt.