Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Dr. Mittelstadt regarded the eight-year-old ward of the County of Los Angeles Children’s Services through wavy bifocal lenses. She said, not cruelly, perhaps kindly, with a sigh that for a moment lifted her prominent bosom, “Child, save your tears! You may need them.”

  THE LOST ONE

  If I was pretty enough, my father would come and take me away.

  Four years, nine months, and eleven days.

  Through the vast continent of North America it was a season of abandoned children. And nowhere in greater numbers than in southern California.

  After hot dry winds blew out of the deserts for days, unrelenting and pitiless, there began to be discovered infants blown with sand and debris into parched drainage ditches, into culverts and against railroad beds; blown against the granite steps of churches, hospitals, municipal buildings. Newborn infants, bloody umbilical cords still attached to their navels, were discovered in public rest rooms, in church pews, and in trash bins and dumps. How the wind wailed, days on end—yet this wailing, as the wind subsided, was revealed as the wailing of infants. And of their older sisters and brothers: children of two or three wandering dazed in the streets, some with smoldering clothes and hair. These were children lacking names. These were children lacking speech, comprehension. Injured children, many badly burned. Others even less lucky had died or been killed; their little corpses, often charred beyond recognition, were hastily swept off Los Angeles streets by sanitation workers, collected in dump trucks to be buried in unmarked mass graves in the canyons. Not a word to the press or radio! No one must know.

  “The lost ones,” these were called. “Those beyond our mercy.”

  Heat lightning had flashed in the Hollywood Hills and a firestorm came rolling down like the wrath of Jehovah and there was a blinding explosion in the very bed Norma Jeane and her mother shared, and next thing she knew, her hair and eyelashes singed, her eyes seared as if she’d been forced to stare into a blinding light, she was alone without her mother in this place for which she had no name other than this place.

  Through the narrow window beneath the eaves, how many miles away she could not calculate, if she stood on the bed assigned to her (barefoot, in her nightgown, in the night), she saw the pulsing-neon lights of the RKO Motion Pictures tower in Hollywood:

  RKO RKO RKO

  Someday.

  Who had brought her to this place the child could not recall. There were no distinct faces in her memory, and no names. For many days she was mute. Her throat was raw and parched as if she’d been forced to inhale fire. She could not eat without gagging and often vomiting. She was sickly-looking and sick. She was hoping to die. She was mature enough to articulate that wish: I am so ashamed, nobody wants me, I want to die. She was not mature enough to comprehend the rage of such a wish. Nor the ecstasy of madness such rage would one day stoke, a madness of ambition to revenge herself upon the world by conquering it, somehow, anyhow—however any “world” is “conquered” by any mere individual, and that individual female, parentless, isolated, and seemingly of as much intrinsic worth as a solitary insect amid a teeming mass of insects. Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love was not then Norma Jeane’s threat, for she knew herself, despite the wound in her soul, lucky to have been brought to this place and not scalded to death or burned alive by her raging mother in the bungalow at 828 Highland Avenue.

  For there were other children in the Los Angeles Orphans Home more wounded than Norma Jeane. Even in her hurt and confusion, she perceived this fact. Retarded children, brain-damaged children, handicapped children—you could see at a glance why their mothers had abandoned them—ugly children, angry children, animal children, defeated children you would not wish to touch for fear the clamminess of their skin would permeate your own. There was the ten-year-old girl whose cot was next to Norma Jeane’s in the girls’ third-floor dorm whose name was Debra Mae who’d been raped and beaten (what a hard, harsh word “rape” was, an adult word; Norma Jeane knew instinctively what it meant, or almost knew: a razor sound and something shameful to do with between-a-girl’s-legs-which-you-are-never-supposed-to-show, where the flesh is soft, sensitive, easily hurt, and it made Norma Jeane faint to think of being struck there, let alone something sharp and hard pushed in); and there were the five-year-old boy twins found nearly dead of malnutrition in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, where they’d been left tied up by their mother as “a sacrifice like Abraham in the Bible” (as the mother’s note explained); and there was an older girl who would befriend Norma Jeane, an eleven-year-old called Fleece, whose original name might have been Felice, who told and retold with lurid fascination the story of her year-old sister who’d been “banged against a wall until her brains spilled out like melon seeds” by their mother’s boyfriend. Norma Jeane, wiping her eyes, conceded she hadn’t been hurt at all.

  At least, not that she could remember.

  If I was pretty enough, my father would come and take me away had to do somehow with the neon-flashing RKO sign miles away in Hollywood Norma Jeane would see from the window above her bed and, at other times, from a roof of the orphanage, a beacon out of the night she would have wished to believe was a secret signal except others saw it as well and perhaps even interpreted it as she did. A promise—but of what?

  Waiting for Gladys to get out of the hospital so they could live together again. Waiting, with a child’s desperate hope overlaid with a more adult fatalist knowledge she will never come, she has abandoned me, I hate her, even as she was obsessed with worrying that Gladys wouldn’t know where she’d been taken, where this red-brick building behind the eight-foot mesh-wire fence was—the barred windows, steep stairs, and endless corridors; the dorm rooms in which cots (called “beds”) were crowded together amid a mix of odors in which the acid stink of pee was predominant; the “dining hall” with its mix of equally strong odors (rancid milk, burnt grease, and kitchen cleanser) in which, tongue-tied and shy and frightened, she was expected to eat, to eat without gagging and vomiting, to “keep her strength up” so she wouldn’t become ill and be sent to the infirmary.

  El Centro Avenue: where was that? How many miles from Highland?

  Thinking If I went back there. Maybe she would be there, waiting.

  Within a few days of her new status as a ward of Los Angeles County, Norma Jeane had wept away all the tears she’d had. Used them up too soon. No more could she cry than her battered blue-eyed doll, unnamed except as Doll, could cry. The ugly-friendly woman who was director of the orphanage, whom they were instructed to call “Dr. Mittelstadt,” had warned her. The heavyset flush-faced matron in the coverall had warned her. The older girls—Fleece, Lois, Debra Mae, Janette—had warned her. “Don’t be a crybaby! You’re not so special.” You could say, as the shiny-faced joyous minister at Grandma Della’s church had said, that the other children in the orphanage, far from being strangers she feared and disliked, were in fact sisters and brothers of hers unknown until now and the vast world populated by how many more, countless beyond reckoning as grains of sand, and all possessing souls and all equally beloved by God.

  Waiting for Gladys to be discharged from the hospital and come and get her but in the meantime she was an orphan among one hundred forty orphans, one of the younger children, assigned to a girl’s third-floor dorm (ages six to eleven) with her own bed, an iron cot with a thin lumpy mattress covered in stained oilcloth that smelled nonetheless of pee, her place beneath the eaves of the old brick building in a large rectangular and crowded room that was dimly lit even by day, airless and stifling on hot sunny days, and chill, drafty, and damp on sunless rainy days, which constituted much of the Los Angeles winter; she shared a chest of drawers with Debra Mae and another girl; she was allotted two changes of clothing—two blue cotton jumpers and two white cotton batiste blouses—and much-laundered “linen” and “underthings.” She was allotted towels, socks, shoes, galoshes. A raincoat and a light wool coat. She’d attracted a flurry of attention, but it
was a fearful attention, brought into the dorm on that first terrible day by the matron hauling Gladys’s suitcases with their semblance of glamour (if you didn’t examine them too closely), packed with strange, fanciful items of clothing, silk dresses, a ruffled pinafore, red taffeta skirt, plaid tam o’-shanter and satin-lined plaid cloak, little white gloves and gleaming black patent-leather shoes, and other things gathered up in guilty haste by the woman who’d wished Norma Jeane to call her “Aunt Jess”—or was it “Auntie Jess”—and crammed into the suitcases, and most of these items, despite stinking of smoke, were stolen from the new orphan within days, appropriated even by those girls who gave evidence of liking Norma Jeane and would come, in time, to befriend her. (As Fleece explained unapologetically, it was “every man for himself” in the orphanage.) But no one wanted Norma Jeane’s doll. No one stole Norma Jeane’s doll, which was bald now, naked and soiled, her wide-open glassy-blue eyes and rosebud mouth frozen in an expression of terrified coquetry; this “freaky thing” (as Fleece called it, not unkindly) with which Norma Jeane slept every night and hid in her bed during the day like a fragment of her own yearning soul, weirdly beautiful in her eyes though laughed at and ridiculed by others.

  “Wait for the Mouse!”—so Fleece cried to her friends, and indulgently they waited for Norma Jeane, youngest and smallest and shyest of their circle. “Come on, Mouse, shake your cute li’l ass.” Long-legged scar-lipped Fleece with the coarse dark hair, coarse olive skin, restless sharp-green eyes, and hands that could hurt, she’d taken on Norma Jeane out of pity maybe, out of big-sisterly affection if frequent impatience, for Norma Jeane must have reminded her of her lost baby sister whose brains had been so spectacularly spilled “like melon seeds running down a wall.” Fleece was the first of Norma Jeane’s protectors at the orphanage and, along with Debra Mae, the girl she would recall with most emotion, a kind of anxious infatuation, for with Fleece you never knew how she’d react, you never knew what cruel, coarse words might spring to Fleece’s lips, and how her hands, quick as a boxer’s, might leap out as much to call attention as to hurt, like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. For when at last Fleece coaxed out of Norma Jeane a few stumbling, stammered words and a measure of trust—“I’m not an orphan really, my m-mother is in the hospital, I have a mother, and I have a f-father, my father lives in a big mansion in Beverly Hills”—Fleece laughed in her face and pinched her arm, so hard the red mark would show for hours like a pernicious little kiss on Norma Jeane’s waxy-pale skin. “Bullshit! Li-ar! Your mother and father are dead like everybody else. Everybody is dead.”

  THE GIFT GIVERS

  The night before the night before Christmas they came.

  Bringing gifts to the orphans of the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society. Bringing two dozen dressed turkeys for Christmas Day dinner and a magnificent twelve-foot Christmas evergreen erected by Santa’s elves in the visitors’ room of the Home, where it transformed that musty-smelling space into a shrine of wonder and beauty. A tree so tall, so full, lighted, alive; smelling of the forest far away, a sharp odor of darkness and mystery; sparkling with glass ornaments, and on its topmost branch a radiant blond angel with eyes uplifted to heaven and prayerful clasped hands. And beneath this tree, mounds of gaily wrapped presents.

  All this amid a blaze of lights. Amid amplified Christmas carols from a sound truck in the drive out front: “Silent Night,” “We Three Kings,” “Deck the Halls.” Music so suddenly loud, you felt your heart kick into its rhythm.

  The older children knew, they’d been so blessed at previous Christmases. The younger children and the children new to the Home were mystified, frightened.

  Quiet! quiet! keep to your row! Briskly the children were marched out of the dining hall, where they’d been made to wait without explanation for more than an hour following their evening meal, marched in double columns. Yet this was not a fire drill, it seemed, and it was too late in the day for playground recess. Norma Jeane was confused, jostled by children pushing from behind—what was happening? who was here?—until she saw, on a raised platform at the far end of the visitors’ room, a sight that stunned her: the darkly handsome Prince and the beautiful blond Princess!

  Here, at the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society!

  At first I thought they’d come for me. Only for me.

  Here was a confusion of cries, amplified voices, and laughter, Christmas music played to a cheery staccato beat so you had to breathe more quickly just to keep up. And everywhere glaring blinding lights, for there was a camera crew in attendance upon the royal couple as they handed out gifts to the needy, and there were numerous photographers with flash cameras crowding and jostling for position. There was the sturdy-bodied director of the Home, Dr. Edith Mittelstadt, accepting a gift certificate from the Prince and the Princess, her raddled face caught by camera flashes in an awkward smile, an unrehearsed smile, as the Prince and the Princess, on either side of the middle-aged woman, smiled their beautiful rehearsed smiles so you wanted to stare and stare at them and never look away. “Hel-lo, children! Mer-ry Christmas, children!” the Dark Prince cried, lifting his gloved hands like a priest giving a blessing, and the Fair Princess cried, “Hap-py Christmas, dear children! We love you.” As if these words must be true there came a roar of happiness, a waterfall of worship.

  How familiar the Dark Prince and the Fair Princess looked!—yet Norma Jeane could not identify them. The Dark Prince resembled Ronald Colman, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.—yet was none of these. The Fair Princess resembled Dixie Lee, Joan Blondell, a bustier Ginger Rogers—yet was none of these. The Prince wore a tuxedo with a white silk shirt and a sprig of red berries in his lapel, and on his stiffly lacquered black hair a jaunty Santa’s cap, red velvet trimmed in fluffy white fur. “Come get your presents, children! Don’t be shy.” (Was the Dark Prince teasing? For the children, especially the older ones, pushing forward, determined to get their gifts before the supply ran out, were anything but shy.) “Yes, come! Wel-come! Dear children—God bless you.” (Was the Fair Princess about to burst into tears? Her painted eyes shone with a glassy gaze of utmost sincerity and her glossy crimson smile slipped and slid like a creature with its own wayward life.) The Princess wore a brilliant red taffeta dress with a full shimmering skirt, a tiny cinched-in waist, and a red-sequined bodice that fitted her ample bosom like a tight glove; on her stiffly lacquered platinum-blond hair was a tiara—a diamond tiara?—for such an occasion, at the Los Angeles Orphans Home? The Prince wore short white gloves, the Princess white gloves to her elbows. Behind and beside the royal couple were Santa’s elves, some with white whiskers and bristly white paste-on eyebrows, and these helpers passed presents to the royal couple in a continuous stream from beneath the Christmas tree; it was wonderful, like magic, how the Prince and the Princess were able to snatch presents out of the air without so much as looking for them, let alone stooping to pick them up.

  The mood in the visitors’ room was merry but frantic. The Christmas carols were loud; the Prince’s microphone emitted sparks of static that displeased him. In addition to the presents, the Prince and Princess were giving away candy canes and candied apples on sticks, and the supply of these was running low. Last year, it seemed, there hadn’t been enough presents for all, which accounted for the older children pushing forward. In your places! Keep to your places! Briskly the uniformed matrons were yanking troublemakers out of line to send away upstairs to the dormitories, giving them vigorous shakes and cuffs; it was lucky that the royal couple took no notice of this, or the camera crew and photographers, or if they noticed they gave no sign: whatever isn’t in the spotlight isn’t observed.

  At last it was Norma Jeane’s turn! She was in the line to receive a gift from the Dark Prince, who, up close, looked older than he’d looked from a distance, with a strangely ruddy, poreless skin like Norma Jeane’s doll had once had; his lips appeared rouged, and his eyes as glassily bright as the Fair Princess’s. But Norma Jeane had no time to concentrate as she s
tumbled in a haze of excitement, a roaring in her ears, someone’s elbow in her back; shyly she lifted both hands for her present, and the Dark Prince cried, “Lit-tle one! Precious lit-tle one!” and before Norma Jeane knew what had happened, as in one of Grandma Della’s fairy tales, he’d seized her hands and lifted her up onto the platform beside him! Here, the lights were truly blinding; you could hardly see at all; the roomful of children and adult staff members was no more than a blur, like agitated water. With mock gallantry the Dark Prince gave Norma Jeane a red-striped cane and a candied apple, both terribly sticky, and one of the red-wrapped gifts, and turned her to face a barrage of camera flashes smiling his perfect, practiced smile. “Mer-ry Christmas, little girl! Mer-ry Christmas from San-ta!” Nine-year-old Norma Jeane must have gaped in utter panic, for the photographers, who were all men, laughed at her in delight; one cried, “Hold that look, sweetheart!” and it was flash! flash! flash! and Norma Jeane was blinded and would not have a second chance, unable to smile for the cameras (for Variety, the Los Angeles Times, Screen World, Photoplay, Parade, Pageant, Pix, the Associated Press News Service) as she might have smiled, as watching her Magic Friend in the mirror she smiled in a dozen special ways, secret ways, but her Friend-in-the-Mirror had abandoned her now, so taken by surprise and I would never be surprised again I swore. In the next moment hauled down from the platform, the only place of honor, and again an orphan, one of the younger, smaller orphans, and a matron shoved her rudely along with a shuffling column of children headed upstairs for the dormitories.

  Already they were tearing open their Christmas presents, scattering tinsel paper in their wake.

  It was a stuffed toy, for a child of maybe two, three, four years old; Norma Jeane was twice that age yet deeply moved by the “striped tiger”—kitten-sized, made of a soft fuzzy fabric you would want to rub against your face, you would want to hug, hug, hug in bed, golden button eyes and a funny flat nose and springy tickly whiskers and orange-and-black tiger stripes and a curving tail with a wire inside so you could move it up, down, into a question mark.