Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Norma never worried that her in-laws, who weren’t intellectuals, might laugh at her.

  In the kitchen in Manhattan, and at the Captain’s House. Miriam chattering away, and Norma murmuring agreement. Miriam instructed Norma in preparing chicken soup with matzoh balls and in preparing chopped liver with onions. The Playwright had no great craving for bagels and lox, but these “favorites” of his turned up frequently at Sunday brunch. And borscht.

  Miriam made borscht with beets, but sometimes with cabbage.

  Miriam prepared her own beef stock. She would claim it was “just as easy” as opening a dozen cans of Campbell’s.

  Miriam served borscht hot or chilled. Depending on the season.

  Miriam had an “emergency borscht” recipe using Berber’s canned sieved beets for infants. “Not much sugar. Lemon juice. And vinegar. Who’s to know?”

  Their borscht was delicious as any borscht in memory.

  13

  THE OCEAN

  I broke a mirror

  & the pieces

  floated to China.

  Goodbye!

  14

  There came the terrible July evening when Norma returned from a trip into town and he, her husband, saw Rose in her place.

  Rose, the adulterous wife of Niagara.

  He was only imagining it of course!

  She’d taken the station wagon to drive to Galapagos Cove, unless it was to Brunswick. She was going to buy groceries, fresh fruit, or items from the drugstore. Vitamins. Cod-liver oil capsules. To strengthen her white blood cells, he’d thought she said. She talked frequently of her condition; in a sense, it was her only subject. A baby growing in the womb. Preparing to be born. What happiness! There was a Brunswick obstetrician she’d begun seeing every other week, a professional acquaintance of her Manhattan obstetrician. Or maybe she’d gone to have her hair “done,” or her nails. Rarely did she shop for clothes (in Manhattan, she was always being recognized and would then flee the store), but now that she was pregnant and beginning to show, she spoke wistfully of needing new things. Maternity smocks, dresses. “I’m afraid you won’t love me, Daddy, if I don’t look nice? Or will you?” She’d driven away after preparing lunch for him and hadn’t returned by 3 P.M.

  The Playwright, lost in his writing, in a trance of inspiration (he who rarely managed to write more than a page of dialogue a day, and that provisional, crabbed, and grudging) had scarcely noticed his wife’s absence until the phone rang.

  “Daddy? I know I’m l-late. I’m on my way home, though.” She was breathless and contrite and apologetic. He said, “Dearest, don’t hurry. I was a little concerned, of course. But drive carefully.” The coastal highway was narrow and curving and sometimes even in daylight swaths of fog drifted languidly across it.

  If Norma had an accident, at such a time!

  She was a cautious driver, so far as the Playwright knew. Behind the wheel of the old Plymouth station wagon (which seemed to her big and unwieldy as a bus) she hunched forward, frowning and biting her lower lip. She tended to apply the brakes too quickly, and jarringly. She tended to overreact to the presence of other vehicles. She had a habit of stopping for traffic lights well out of the intersection, as if she feared hitting the pedestrians even when her car was stationary. But she never drove more than forty miles an hour even on the open highway, unlike the Playwright, who drove much faster, and absentmindedly, with a certain New York masculine swagger, talking as he drove, sometimes lifting both hands from the steering wheel as he gestured. It was his belief that Norma was far more to be trusted behind the wheel than he!

  But now he’d begun consciously to wait for her. Impossible for him to return to work. He would wait for another two hours and twenty minutes.

  The drive from Galapagos Cove to the Captain’s House took no more than ten minutes. But had Norma called from Brunswick? In his confusion he couldn’t recall.

  Several times he imagined he could hear her turning up the steep graveled drive to the house. Driving into the garage in that cautious way of hers. The crunching of the gravel. The slam of the car door. Her footsteps. Her whispery voice lifting through the floorboards—“Daddy? I’m back.”

  Unable to resist, he hurried downstairs to check the garage. Of course, the Plymouth wasn’t there.

  On his way back he passed the cellar door, which was ajar. He slammed it shut. Why was that damned door always open? The latch caught securely, it must have been that Norma left it open. Up from the dirt-floored cellar lifted a rich, sickish odor of decay; of earth, rot, and Time. He shuddered, smelling.

  Norma said she hated the cellar—“It’s so nasty.” It was the one thing about the Captain’s House she disliked. Yet the Playwright had the idea she’d explored the cellar, with a flashlight, like a willful child determined to seek out the very things that frighten her. But Norma was a woman of thirty-two, hardly a child. To what purpose, scaring herself? And in her condition.

  He could never forgive her, he was thinking. If she brought harm to their happiness.

  At last, after 6 P.M., the phone again rang. He fumbled to lift the receiver at once. That faint breathy voice. “Ohhh, Daddy. You’re m-mad at me?”

  “Norma, what is it? Where are you?”

  He couldn’t keep the fear out of his voice.

  “I got kinda stuck with these people . . . ?”

  “What people? Where?”

  “Oh, I’m not in any trouble, Daddy. Just I got kind of—What?” Someone was speaking to her and she answered, holding her palm over the receiver. The Playwright, trembling, heard raised voices in the background. And loud thumping rock-and-roll music. Norma came back onto the line, laughing. “Ohhhh, it’s wild here. But these are real nice people, Daddy. They kinda speak French. There’s these two girls? Sisters? Identical twins.”

  “Norma, what? I can’t hear you. Twins?”

  “But I’m on my way home now. I’m gonna make us a supper. I promise!”

  “Norma—”

  “Daddy, you love me, huh? You’re not mad at me?”

  “Norma for God’s sake—”

  At last, at 6:40 P.M., Norma drove the station wagon up into the drive. Waving at him through the windshield.

  He was waiting for her and his face was taut with waiting. It would seem to him that he’d been waiting a full day. Yet much of the sky was still bright, summery. Only at the eastern horizon, at the ocean’s distant edge, dusk had begun like a dark stain rising into thick wedges of cloud.

  There came Norma hurrying. This was The Girl Upstairs. Unless it was Rose masquerading as The Girl Upstairs.

  In her wide-brimmed straw hat that tied demurely beneath the chin. In a maternity blouse embossed with pink rosebuds, and a pair of somewhat soiled white shorts. She slung her arms around the Playwright’s stiffened neck and kissed him wet and hard on the mouth. “Oh, gosh, Daddy. Am I sorry.”

  He tasted something ripe and sweet. There were stains at the corners of her mouth. Had she been drinking?

  She was fumbling for grocery bags in the rear of the Plymouth and the Playwright took them from her without a word. His heart beat in fury that was in fact the aftermath of dread. If something had happened to Norma! And their baby! She’d become the center of his life without his realizing.

  How he’d been bemused, pitying. Having heard tales of Norma’s previous husband. The Ex-Athlete hiring private detectives to spy on her.

  Now she was home and unharmed and laughing and apologetic. Watching him, her frowning husband, sidelong. Telling him a lengthy disjointed story he could not be expected to unravel of having picked up girl hitchhikers out on the highway and driving them into Galapagos Cove where they were headed, and from there to somebody’s house and they’d talked her into staying for a while. “See, they all knew who I am, they called me ‘Marilyn,’ but I kept saying ‘No, no, I’m not her, I’m Norma’—it was like a game, I mean we were laughing a lot—like my girlfriends back in Van Nuys, in high school, I miss.” These twin sisters
were “real pretty” and lived with their divorced mother in a “sad, ratty old trailer” in the country and one of the girls, Janice, had a three-month baby named Cody—“the father, he’s in the merchant marine and wouldn’t marry her, just sailed off into the blue.” Norma spent some time at the trailer and then they all went somewhere else in the station wagon and then—“Daddy, know what? We ended up at that big Safeway store, you know? All of us including the baby. ’Cause they needed so many things just to eat. I spent every penny.” She was apologetic, telling this story; yet she was defiant. She was a contrite little girl, yet she wasn’t contrite in the slightest, she was in fact proud of her little escapade. Not saying It’s Marilyn’s money, Daddy. I’m gonna do with it what I want.

  Sighing, as if in wonder. “Every last penny in my wallet. Gosh!”

  The Playwright was being made to think how deeply and helplessly he loved this woman. This strange, mercurial woman. Now she was pregnant with his child. And he had not truly wanted another child. In Manhattan, at the New York Ensemble and in theater circles, he’d seemed to know her; now, he wasn’t so sure. At the start of their love affair she’d seemed to love him more than he’d been prepared to love her; now, they loved each other equally, with a terrible hunger. But never until today had the Playwright considered there might be a time when he loved Norma more than she loved him. How could he bear it!

  Putting things away in the kitchen, Norma was watching him sidelong. In a play, as in a film, such a scene would contain a powerful subtext. But life rarely conformed to art, especially the forms and conventions of art. Though Norma painfully reminded him of Rose in Niagara, leading her besotted husband Joseph Cotten by the nose. (Or by another part of his male anatomy.)

  Norma told her story, her soft breathy voice quavering with excitement. Was she lying? He didn’t think so. It was such an innocent, guileless story. Yet her excitement was such, she might as well be lying. It would be an identical thrill. She’s been unfaithful to me. She’s gone outside the marriage. He saw with a stab of horror that her white shorts were stained, smears of what might be menstrual blood, oh, God, did that mean a miscarriage was beginning?—and Norma didn’t seem to know?—except, seeing his face, she looked down at herself and laughed, embarrassed. “Oh, gosh! We were eating raspberries. We all made pigs of ourselves, I guess.” Still the Playwright was stricken. His lean face, tanned from summer, had gone ashen. His thick-lensed glasses slipped on his nose. Norma had removed a quart of raspberries from a bag and now gave some of the berries to the Playwright to eat, lifting them to his mouth. “Oh, Daddy, don’t look so sad, just taste. They’re delicious, see?”

  It was true. The raspberries were delicious.

  15

  It wasn’t enough to underline these prophetic words in Civilization and Its Discontents. Norma was compelled to copy them into her notebook.

  We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

  16

  THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA

  There was once a Beggar Maid

  In a Kingdom by the Sea.

  A spell was cast over her—

  “The Fair Princess must you be.”

  Oh but the Beggar Maid cried,

  “This is a cruel curse.”

  The wicked godmother laughed,

  “Yet things will get worse.”

  A Prince spied the Princess

  A-walking in the glen.

  He said to her, “Are you lonely?

  Are you needful of a friend?”

  The Prince courted the Princess

  Through many a night and a day.

  The Princess loved the Prince

  And yet—what could she say?

  “I am not a Fair Princess,

  I am but a Beggar Maid.

  Would you love me if you knew?”

  The Prince smiled at her, and said . . .

  Curled up in a window box in Baby’s Room at the top of the stairs, dreamy, so happy, wiping tears from her eyes, and the vast cavernous sky looming above her and the dirt-floored cellar so far below she could hear nothing of its murmurous muffled speech, Norma Jeane tried, and tried, so hard!—but was never to complete the rhyme.

  17

  Baby’s Room. She knew of course that the baby would be born in Manhattan. In Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. If all went as scheduled. (December 4 was the magical date!) Still, here in the Captain’s House in Galapagos Cove, Maine, so much solitude and such dreamy happiness through the summer, she’d created a fantasy nursery into which she placed items purchased in local antique shops and roadside flea markets. A wicker rocking cradle for Baby, creamy-white and decorated with blue morning glories. (Wasn’t it nearly identical to Gladys’s cradle for her?) Little stuffed toys, hand-sewn. A “genuine American Shaker” baby’s rattle. Old children’s books, fairy tales, Mother Goose, talking animals, in which she could lose herself for long entranced hours. Once upon a time . . .

  In Baby’s Room, Norma Jeane curled up in the window box and dreamt her life. He will write beautiful plays. For me to act in. I will mature into these roles. I will be respected. When I die, nobody will laugh.

  18

  Sometimes there came a knock at the door. She had no choice but to invite him in. Already he’d have opened the door and stuck his head inside. Smiling. In his eyes such love! My husband.

  In Baby’s Room she wrote in her schoolgirl journal that was her secret life. Jottings to herself, poem fragments. Vocabulary lists. In Baby’s Room, Norma Jeane curled up in the window box, reading Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and the fascinating (if true!) testimonies of The Sentinel; reading books she’d brought to Maine from Manhattan, though knowing the Playwright didn’t always approve of these books.

  The Playwright believed that a mind like Norma’s (“susceptible, sensitive, easily influenced”) was like a well. Precious, pure water. You don’t want to contaminate it with toxic elements. Never!

  The knock at the door, and already he’d have opened it, smiling at her but his smile faded when he saw (she didn’t dare try to hide it from him) what she was reading.

  One afternoon, The Shame of Europe: A History of the Jews of Europe. (At least it wasn’t one of Norma’s Christian Science publications, which her husband truly abhorred!)

  The Playwright’s response to such books, her “Jewish” books, was complex. His face would twitch in a reflexive smile, almost a smile of fear. Certainly a smile of annoyance. Or hurt. It was as if unwittingly (oh, she didn’t mean this! she was so sorry) she’d kicked him in the belly. He would come to her and kneel beside her and leaf through the book, pausing at certain of the photographs. Her heart beat quickly. She saw in the faces of the photographed dead the features of her own living husband; even, at times, his quizzical expression. Whatever emotions this man was feeling, which were beyond her ability to imagine (if she were a Jew, what would she feel at such a time? she believed she could not have borne it), he would hide from her. True, his voice might quaver. His hand might shake. But he’d speak to her calmly in the tone of a man who loved her and only wished her, and their baby, well. He would say, “Norma, do you think it’s a good thing, in your condition, to upset yourself with these horrors?”

  She would protest, faintly. “Oh, but I w-want to know, Daddy. Is that wrong?”

  He would say, kissing her, “Darling, of course it isn’t wrong to want to ‘know.’ But you already know. You know about the Holocaust, and you know about the history of pogroms, and you know about the blood-drenched soil of ‘civilized’ Christian Europe. You know about Nazi Germany and you even know how indifferent Britain and the U.S. were about saving the Jews. You know generally, if not in exhaustive detail. You already know, Norma.”

  Was this true? It was true.

  The Playwright was the master of words. When he entered a room, words flew to him like iron filings to a magnet. Norma Jeane, faltering and stammering, hadn’t a c
hance.

  He might speak then of “horror pornography.”

  He might speak of “wallowing in suffering”—“wallowing in grief.”

  Cruelly he might speak of “wallowing in others’ grief.”

  Oh, but I’m a Jew too. Can’t I be a Jew? Is it only how you’re born? In your soul?

  She listened. She listened gravely. Never did she interrupt. If this were acting class she’d hold the offensive book against her breasts and her quickened heart, it wasn’t acting class but she might hold the offensive book against her breasts and her quickened heart; better yet she might shut the book and push it from her across the worn plush cushion of the window seat. At such times contrite and humbled and hurt but not wounded for she knew she had no legitimate right to be wounded. No, I’m not a Jew. I guess.

  It was only that her husband loved her. More than love, he adored her. But he feared for her, too. He was becoming possessive of her emotions. Her “sensitive” nerves. (Remember what “almost happened” in England?) He was her elder by eighteen years, of course it was his duty to protect her. At such times he was touched by the magnitude of his own feeling. He saw tears glistening in her beautiful slate-blue eyes. Her quivering lips. Even at this intimate moment he would recall how the director of Bus Stop who’d been in love with her had marveled at Marilyn Monroe’s ability to cry spontaneously. Monroe never asked for glycerine. The tears were always there.

  Swiftly now the scene became an improvisation.

  She was saying, stammering, “But, Daddy—if nobody does? I mean, now? Shouldn’t I have to?”

  “Have to—what?”

  “Know about it? Think about it? Like, on such a beautiful summer day? Up here, by the ocean? People like us? Shouldn’t I l-look at the pictures, at least?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Norma. You don’t ‘have’ to do anything.”

  “What I mean is, there should always be somebody seeing these things, see what I mean? Somewhere in the world. Every minute. Because what if—they’re forgotten?”