by John Rechy
“Whore! Like her! With them!” Enid shouted.
“I’m sorry!” Normalyn pleaded the despised words.
Enid held her, sheltering her, kissing her, crying with her. “I love you, I love you!”
3
In the cemetery now, the tall young man named Gonzales stopped a few feet away from Normalyn.
She stood up and faced him defiantly before Enid’s grave.
He took off his cowboy hat. “Please don’t run away,” he said softly. “I swear I won’t hurt you.” He made a cross with his thumb and index finger and kissed it, swearing.
She brushed dirt off her body. Renewed wind pushed into the cemetery. She would not cry—not in fear or sadness! “Let me by!” she said firmly.
Gonzales squatted to show he would not advance. He lowered his head. “I want to apologize for that ugly afternoon. I’ve hated myself since then.”
“Apologize! You son of a bitch! You started it!”
“I stopped it!” he reminded her—as he reminded himself over and over. “I did.”
“Because one of them called you a spic!” Normalyn shouted.
“No,” he protested, “it was when you said ‘I’m sorry’—that’s when I saw how ugly it all was.” But he wasn’t entirely sure. He constantly had to reconstruct those simultaneous events to locate the sequence of his decision.
“Filthy liar!”
“I kicked their asses—fuckin’ aggie cowboys!”
“You’re one of them!” she said. He did look like the other agricultural students who came into Gibson, except that he was as dark as the Mexicans who worked in the outlying fields.
“Not any more,” he rejected.
“I take it back. You want to be like them, but they reminded you you’re not,” she flung at him.
“I wanted to be,” he said. That afternoon he and the two others had seen Normalyn heading for the river. He had bragged about how she had smiled at him, to impress these men he had just started running around with. The prodding began, the challenging into the ugly initiation to prove he was as mean as the two white aggies. “But I don’t want to be like them any more,” he reassured her now, sure of it himself. That night had been one of the darkest of his life, a night of harsh questioning, facing his denial of the Mexican part of him, even his Mexican name—and a night of hearing Normalyn’s pleading, Please don’t! I’m sorry!
Normalyn despised him, felt ugly. She pushed her hair closer to her face, to conceal herself.
He took a step toward her. “Please tell me how I can prove I’m not going to hurt you!”
“Keep away from me!”
He looked down at the ground. He said, “I’ve tried to talk to you before, and—”
She bent down and clutched the soft earth, to fling at him if he moved, just moved.
A figure appeared near the small chapel beyond rows of graves. An old man, he was limping toward them. “Gotta close the gates, dust storm’s cornin’, gotta drive home, y’all gotta leave now,” he said.
Repeating, “I am sorry, really sorry,” to Normalyn, Ted Gonzales walked away. He felt dirty, futile. The old man waited for Normalyn to leave, too.
Under a sun turning gray in what would soon be another wind-swept sky, Normalyn felt inundated by loneliness and fear. Dust sliced across Enid’s grave. Normalyn looked down at the newly scraped earth where Enid’s body was buried. She would not cry!
4
Normalyn heard the cemetery gates clang shut behind her.
Clutching his hat away from the rising wind, Ted Gonzales waited a short distance away. He had to convince her he had changed. Standing there, just standing, she looked lost, scared. And afraid of him, he reminded himself. But he had stopped the assault, he clung to that for courage.
Normalyn did feel lost and scared as she faced the windy landscape. Familiar blocks of well-kept neighborhoods surrounding the old business section with the plaza at its center aroused a hundred altered memories.
She crossed the street to avoid Gonzales. She was safe in this neighborhood. Gleeful children fought the wind that had released them early from school to their parents. Normalyn moved into the street, against a traffic light. A tumbleweed clasped another, becoming one, scratching along the street. A car swerved to avoid it. The tumbleweed tangled under it. It freed itself in a clutch of dried splinters. Normalyn put her hands to her mouth to keep from screaming.
Ted led her to the sidewalk. She jerked away from his touch. He released her. A film of dust on her glasses blurred her vision, and she removed them. Wind shoved her hair back.
“You’re so pretty—prettier!” Ted blurted, regretting words that would augment her fear.
She turned away from him, restoring her glasses. He was ridiculing her! Normalyn walked toward an open gas station. Parked there was the despised white truck she remembered. She turned her face in disgust.
Ted called out to her, “I left it here so it wouldn’t frighten you, I swear it.”
For a moment she believed him, didn’t want to believe him—wanted to believe him!—because she felt so lonesome. He approached her slowly. For an instant she saw him as she had first seen him, so handsome—no, not quite, almost—with jagged features, an angular face, nose slightly crooked, light eyes, thick eyebrows. He did not look like what she thought of as “Mexican” except for the deep brown color of his skin, and he— Her disgust resurged. She hurried into the plaza. Near the memorial statue—the “hero” indomitable against attacking wind—she stopped. In the whipping wind, other people scurried past to their destinations. Exhausted, Normalyn sat on one of the benches.
Ted stood, not too near. If he rushed words, he might convince her he had changed: “I’m not studying agriculture any more, I’m in pre-law!” He had to shout to be heard over the howls of wind. “Because there’s so much damn injustice in Texas—like making people ashamed of who they are, what they are.” He had to hurry to present evidence of his changed self. “I’m Mexican, on my father’s side—” He stopped himself from telling her his mother was Irish because that might compromise his words. “—and I used to be so ashamed of it that I never even learned Spanish!” Embarrassed by the abrupt confession yelled over the rampage of wind, and noticing that Normalyn was staring at the memorial, he blurted, “I hate that damn statue.”
“I do, too,” Normalyn said automatically. It was secretive, like Gibson. She let herself look at Ted Gonzales again. He sounded different, but that afternoon she had heard only his growled words. She stood up. “You’re a damn bastard, that’s all. And a coward!”
A coward. “Yes, I was,” he said. “But now I—”
She ran for blocks. He did not follow. The white walls of her house—Enid’s house—looked gray in the windstorm. A silenced voice would be there, still calling. She heard the roaring of a car engine over gasps of wind.
It was Ted Gonzales in his pickup. As he was about to drive back to Langsdon, his shame deepened. He had only increased her fear. He had to try again! He drove to her house, the way he had another time, imagined walking up, knocking, apologizing! Now he saw her through sheets of dust. Her steps slowed. She didn’t want to go in alone. The only reason she had spoken even angry words to him was that she had no one. So damn sad! He shouted out the window, “I’ll just park my pickup across the street so you won’t feel so alone.”
“I don’t need you, bastard! If you try to come in, I’ll shoot you—I’ve got a gun inside the house!” That was not true, but she wanted to convey the extent of her rage. She ran into the house, locked the door.
She held her breath. She looked at Enid’s soft chairs, the muted haloes of her shaded lamps. She did not let herself see the “peacock” mosaic like Valentino’s.
Enid’s absence was everywhere, everywhere!
Something else was present, the letter that announced the birth of two restless ghosts. Lies! All made up! Normalyn told herself.
She stood alone in the quiet house left empty, and she asked the powerful
presence, Why do you want me to believe you’re not my mother?
Four
Only later, when Normalyn began trying to locate the point at which Enid’s love turned to anger, did it seem to her that there had been traces of it from the very beginning, but, then, flashes of anger were quickly smothered by love.
Those early years of Normalyn’s life had been full of joy. There were spontaneous trips in Enid’s sporty M-G to “faraway cities” like San Antonio and El Paso. As they drove along the sweep of sun, sky, desert, Enid taught Normalyn “beautiful movie songs.” At home, she invented games: “We’ll play movie-scenes; I’ll be Scarlett, then you be her! We’ll do the scene where she swears never to be hungry again!” There were sudden “birthday celebrations”: “Why, it’s your birthday, Normalyn!” She would deny an earlier one. “This is the real one.” Ice cream, presents, a dazzling ordered cake, hugs, kisses: “I love you, I love you, Normalyn!”
“And I love you, Mother.” Normalyn would hug Enid.
“Do you, do you, my darling? Do you? Say it!”
“I love you, Mother!”
A trip to Dallas turned somber when Enid took her to Dealy Plaza. “This is where they killed him.” At the site of John Kennedy’s assassination, Enid’s face clouded. She had held Normalyn’s hand so tightly it hurt and the girl pulled away.
Sometimes Normalyn thought she located the anger even in her most distant memory, a first memory, which shaped only at times, only in fragments. It was a time when Enid took her, hardly a child, to meet “a woman who yearns to see you but must remain secret. Shhh!” On the dark beach where they were to meet the woman, Enid said, “Look at the ocean, Normalyn, look into the darkness, very carefully, because you’ll never see it all as clearly as now. Remember it—exactly.” She disappeared just as a blonde woman, luminous even at night, took Normalyn’s hand gently and kissed her. Closely, they walked along the darkened beach. At that point, Normalyn’s memory of that time jumped ahead. She heard a Click! and saw the sudden flickering flame of Enid’s cigarette lighter. She had followed, hiding. She yanked Normalyn away from the blonde woman. “You’re mine!” Enid yelled against crashing waves, dissolving the memory.
A time later, at breakfast, Enid eased away the newspaper. Normalyn saw what she had just reacted to, an announcement that tonight a station would air a documentary of highlights from the lives of the legendary stars. A spectral glow about the extravagant body, one figure dominated the advertisement, obscuring images of Bogart, Lombard, Valentino, Harlow. Only at the last did Enid allow Normalyn to watch with her.
Silver satin dress like ice burning on sensual curves! Lips bleeding a rose of glossy lipstick!—the dazzling creation of Marilyn Monroe appeared on the screen. “She’s beautiful!” Normalyn breathed—and recognized the woman on the shoreline. The narrator of the documentary announced the date of the movie star’s death, August 5, 1962, the year of Normalyn’s birth. Then it wasn’t possible for Normalyn to have seen the movie star—unless Enid had altered the year of her birth also, as she had the date. No. None of what she thought she remembered of the dark beach had happened, Normalyn assured herself. All had been hallucination, part dream, shaped out of a glimpsed photograph and from pieces of Enid’s recollections, all rearranged into one strange imagined meeting, a child’s way of explaining Enid’s constant assertion of closeness with the movie star.
At the end of the documentary segment, Enid made a prayerful fist with both her hands. “We were as close as two friends can get. We came to feel like each other. I loved her. She lost what she wanted most. Loss is a terrible thing. The world dies,” she gave mysterious words to her sudden despair.
The next day Enid appeared on the stairs, made up glamorously, with a dark slanted hat, its veil specked with velvet dots, a dress that cut a triangle of white flesh into her firm breasts, one low strand of pearls. “Am I beautiful, too?” she asked Normalyn, who nodded yes, in awe. “They said I was a woman of mystery. I never smoked, just clicked my silver lighter for attention. Like this!” She clicked the flameless lighter until her hands were shaking and her face was wet with tears.
Assertions about Marilyn Monroe, about Norma Jeane, might dominate a whole day. Enid pushed away a book with the Technicolored face of the movie star on a glossy jacket. “More lies about her. She contributed to the lies herself. Why, some of what she said happened to her happened to me. She even tried to look like me—she wasn’t a natural beauty.” Enid pronounced all that with affection, the last without vanity, an observation. Later, accusation would taint the warmth: “She tried to conceal Norma Jeane, but Norma Jeane is strong.” She spoke as if the subject of her remembrances were still alive. Then that book, like all the others, was discarded, kept away from Normalyn as if the life explored or the lies claimed— even the photographs of the gorgeous movie star—could affect the girl. Enid continued to remember, softly: “I was always there, through her troubles, even at the last, the most dangerous times, but it was too late.”
Secluded in the handsome white-columned house in Gibson, Normalyn came to think of her own existence as a slow current winding through the flood of Enid’s past, her “many lives—more than a cat’s”—recalled as if she were willing them to her in place of a life of her own:
“I was born in the angels’ city, all flowers, Technicolor, crushed dreams. I was baptized by that banshee Aimée Semple McPherson in her damn Temple of Divine Love.” Enid was proud of that odd fact. “Now there was a star, that McPherson; she flew into her temple like an angel—sweet chariot attached to wires. Hypocrites, all of them, talking about good, doing ill—just look at the messy world.” That was Normalyn’s only lesson in religion, a fact she was grateful for whenever she heard snatches from the crazy rantings of preachers on the radio.
Enid’s mother, Grace, also roamed through Enid’s reminiscences, a figure now cruel, now loving, often courageous: “Why, at the MGM lab, Normalyn, Grace led the women who worked under her to safety when the building burned.” Grace was in and out of mental institutions, like her own mother before her, a woman who had attempted to strangle Enid as a child. These stories frightened Normalyn even when Enid added admiration: “Grace kept walking out of those institutions, as if she was a guest there.” Normalyn marveled at her grandmother’s cruelty as she surrendered Enid to detested orphanages, temporary homes.
It was in one such orphanage, when they were both nine, that Enid’s close friendship began with Norma Jeane, at first in spirited competition, soon inseparable closeness. The longest interruption in this friendship—“stormy, cherished!”—occurred when Enid was “illegally adopted—bought—and carted to Dallas”—a fact she claimed had enabled her to “blackmail” the wealthy Texas couple into giving her total freedom at eighteen.
At times, Normalyn suspected embellishment—the stories might alter from one telling to another. Enid would dismiss all her questions with a testy “I told you, don’t you remember?” Normalyn stopped wondering early about a father. She assumed he was “that bastard Stan.” “He took off on his motorcycle to San Francisco when I was pregnant. But I paid him back—and back, and back!—the way I knew would hurt the son of a bitch most.” Those dark words were followed by a sorrowful sigh, as if a memory of loss or pain had linked with that of revenge. There was another man evoked from her life, a man never named, a man remembered softly; he gentled her thoughts of betrayal and revenge: “He was an outlaw from life, like me. He loved me and couldn’t love me.”
That was from a time of near-stardom in Hollywood. Enid would speak about “glittery nights, premieres with an actor groomed for stardom, like me. There were Enid, Tony, Mitzi, Peter, and Monroe. We were ‘the young crop.’” She severed her own laughter. “That was before I rejected it all, the corruption of it all.”
Why Enid had come to Gibson, why she stayed, Normalyn did not know; but it seemed to her that Gibson enclosed them both in protection. From what?
In Gibson, Enid was a gorgeous figure of glamour. Thought
“haughty,” an “outlaw”—she used that word often—she welcomed her separation from the “Gibsonites,” with one exception: Mayor Wendell Hughes—“a good man,” she always added.
“The owner of Gibson and chunks of Texas,” some called Mayor Hughes. The Texas Grand Hotel—where he lived in one whole wing; banks in Gibson, Langsdon, Dallas, Houston; acres of green land; concrete blocks and buildings on them— all of these were his, along with a strong voice in the politics of the State of Texas.
During his regular visits to Enid’s graceful home, he entertained with stories of his powerful associations: “Why, without me that vulgar Lyndon wouldnuh been elected anythin’! D’you know that in his first big campaign he swore he’d have a map of Texas tattooed on his stomach if elected: ‘The fatter I grow, the bigger the State of Texas gits,’ he promised.” Mayor Hughes courted Enid’s appreciated laughter. Then she would talk about her “starlet days, scarlet days”: “Zanuck always glowering and conniving . . . Crawford whispering lies about Monroe to that evil columnist at Chasen’s.”
Sometimes Mayor Hughes would bring an expensive bottle of champagne—“from Dallas, of course!” Enid would say, “It’s never too early for champagne!” Normalyn, then in her first grades of school, watched in delight the stately older man and the glamorous woman. Enid made sure she was always present during the Mayor’s entire visits, even if that meant she must stay up past her bedtime. Then Mayor Hughes returned to his wife, Clarinda, who never came with him.
Normalyn liked Mayor Hughes. He was kind to her, always brought her a present. “Why, you’re getting almost as pretty as your dear mother,” he told her once. Enid marched over to Normalyn. She held her shoulders, to assert attention to her words: “Don’t fill her with fantasies, Mayor Hughes, she’ll believe you because you’re a good man.” She teased Normalyn’s hair closer to her face. “She’ll have to wear glasses soon—she’s been squinting, she reads so much.”
Normalyn was fitted with glasses. Enid adjusted them firmly when Normalyn said she hated them. “Don’t be a vain little thing—you need them. Be grateful you’re plain,” Enid instructed. “And don’t you dare cry.”
