Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  They were sitting in Haring’s car on an unpaved road at the edge of town, a five-minute drive from the Pirigs’ ramshackle house on Reseda Street. In the near distance were railroad tracks and farther away the hazy foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. Roused by opposition, for the first time Norma Jeane seemed truly to see him. She was breathing quickly and her eyes were fixed on his and the impulse to take hold of her to calm her, to pull her against himself and hold her still, was almost overwhelming. Wide-eyed she whispered, “Oh! I hate you, Mr. Haring. I don’t like you at all.”

  Haring laughed and turned the key in the ignition.

  After he dropped Norma Jeane at her home he would discover he’d broken out in sweat; his undershirt was damp, his head steamy. Out of his scrotum his penis throbbed angry as a fist.

  But I didn’t touch her, did I! I might’ve, and I didn’t.

  Next time they saw each other the emotional outburst would be forgotten. Neither would mention it, of course. Their conversation would be limited to books, poetry. The girl was his student; he was her teacher. Never again would they speak to each other in such a way and a damned good thing, Haring thought; he wasn’t in love with this fifteen-year-old girl but there was no point in taking risks. He could lose his job, he could damage his already shaky marriage, and there was his pride.

  If I did touch her. What then?

  She’d written her poems for him—hadn’t she? Sidney Haring was the you she adored—wasn’t he?

  Suddenly then, and mysteriously, Norma Jeane dropped out of Van Nuys High School in late May. With three weeks to go in tenth grade. She would leave no word for her favorite teacher. One day she simply failed to appear in English class, and the following morning Haring was notified by the principal’s office, like her other teachers, that she had officially withdrawn “for personal reasons.” Haring was stunned but dared not show it. What had happened to her? Why would she have dropped out at such a time? And without any word to him?

  Several times he picked up the telephone to call the Pirigs and ask to speak with her but lost his courage.

  Don’t get involved. Keep your distance.

  Unless you love her. Do you?

  At last one afternoon, obsessed by thoughts of the girl now absent from his life as from his classroom, he drove to Reseda Street hoping for a glimpse of Norma Jeane, a sign of her, staring at the wood-frame bungalow badly in need of repair, the grassless front yard and the eyesore of a junkyard beyond, a stink of burning trash. What children, you would wonder, might be “fostered” here? In the stark noon sunshine the Pirig house was defiant in its shabbiness, and its peeling gray paint and rotted roof seemed to Haring charged with meaning, an emblem of the fallen world that it was an innocent girl’s fate to inhabit by an accident of birth and from which she could not be delivered except by the brave intervention of one like himself. Norma Jeane? I’ve come for you, to save you.

  It was then that Warren Pirig emerged from the garage beside the house, headed for a pickup truck in the driveway.

  Haring pressed down on the gas pedal and quickly drove past.

  6

  Easy as pitching headfirst through a pane of glass.

  But she’d had two beers that afternoon, and was nursing one now.

  Saying, “She has to leave.”

  “Norma Jeane? Why?”

  Elsie didn’t reply at first. Smoking her cigarette. The taste was bitter and exhilarating.

  Warren said, “Her mother’s taking her back? That’s it?”

  They weren’t looking at each other. Nor even toward each other. Elsie understood that Warren’s good eye was shuttered against her and his damaged eye was cloudy. Elsie was sitting in her chair at the kitchen table with her cigarettes and a lukewarm bottle of beer from which she’d picked most of the Twelve Horse label. Warren, who’d just come inside, was on his feet, in his work boots. There was a fearful momentum in the man at such times, as in all large men only just entering a constricted and overheated and femalesmelling place. Warren had removed his soiled shirt and tossed it onto a chair and was in his thin cotton undershirt and gave off an air of bristling heat, a powerful sweat smell. Pirig the Pig. Once they’d been that intimate, playful as kids. He was Pirig the Pig who was crazy for burrowing, rooting, ramming, snorting, and squealing. His fatty-muscled sides like slabs of raw meat in his young wife’s grasping hands. Oh! oh! oh! oh! War-ren! Jesus God. That was years ago, longer ago than Elsie wished to recall. In the succeeding years her husband had grown into an even bigger man: shoulders, chest, belly. His massive forearms, his looming head. Wiry tufts of graying-black hair everywhere you could see. Even on his upper back, his sides, the backs of his big ruined hands.

  Elsie wiped her eyes, turning the gesture into a negligent wiping of her nose.

  Warren said loudly, “I thought the mother was nuts. She’s better? Since when?”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “It isn’t Norma Jeane’s mother.”

  “Who’s it, then?”

  Elsie considered how to say this. She wasn’t a woman who prepares words yet she’d prepared these—so many times they now seemed flat, phony. “Norma Jeane has to leave. Before something happens.”

  “What the hell? What’s gonna happen?”

  This wasn’t going as well as she’d hoped. He was such a big man, looming over her. Without his shirt, his furred body was larger than the kitchen could accommodate. Elsie fumbled for her cigarette. You bastard. You’re the one. That afternoon she’d gone downtown and she’d rubbed rouge on her cheeks, picked at her hair with a comb, but last time she’d glanced into the mirror she looked sallow-skinned, tired. And there was Warren contemplating her from the side; Jesus, she didn’t like to be scrutinized from the side, chin pudgy and nose like a pig’s snout.

  Elsie said, “She’s got boyfriends. And older guys. Too many.”

  “Older guys? Who?”

  Elsie shrugged. She wanted Warren to see she was on his side.

  “I don’t ask names, hon. These kind of guys, they don’t come to the house.”

  “Maybe you should ask names,” Warren said aggressively. “Maybe I should. Where is she now?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  Elsie was fearful of looking at her husband’s face. That glaring blood-veined eye.

  “I think just driving. Where those guys get gas, I don’t know.”

  Warren made a blowing noise with his lips. “A girl her age,” he said, in the slow way of a man in a speeding vehicle drifting off the road, “she’d have boyfriends; it’s only natural.”

  “Norma Jeane has too many. And she’s too trusting.”

  “Too trusting how?”

  “She’s too nice.”

  Elsie let that sink in. If he’d done anything to Norma Jeane when they’d been alone together it would only have been because Norma Jeane was too nice, too sweet, too docile, and too obedient to shove Warren away.

  “Look, she’s not in any trouble, is she?”

  “Not yet. Not so far as I know.”

  Yet Elsie knew Norma Jeane had only just had her period the week before. Paralyzing cramps, a pounding headache. Poor kid bled like a stuck pig. Scared to death but refused to admit it, praying to Christ Jesus the Healer.

  “‘Not yet’—what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Warren, we have our reputation to think of. The Pirigs.” As if he needed reminding of his own name. “We can’t take chances.”

  “Reputation? Why?”

  “With the county. With Children’s Welfare.”

  “They’ve been nosing around? Asking questions? Since when?”

  “I’ve had some calls.”

  “Calls? From who?”

  Elsie was getting nervous. Flicking ash from her cigarette into a putty-colored ashtray. It was true she’d had calls, though not from L.A. County authorities, and she was beginning to worry that Warren could read her thoughts. A great boxer like Henry Armstrong, Wa
rren claimed, whom he’d seen fight in L.A., could read his opponent’s thoughts; in fact, Armstrong knew what his opponent was going to do, or try to do, before his opponent knew. There was that shrewd, mean look in Warren Pirig’s good eye that, when he made it a point to actually look at you, you knew he was dangerous.

  Looming over her, close now. The bulk of him. Gritty-sweaty smell of him. And there were his hands. His fists. If she shut her eyes she could recall the force of the blow against the right side of her face. And her face swollen, lopsided. Something to think about. Brood upon. You’re never lonely that way.

  Another time, he’d hit her in the belly. Made her puke all over the floor. The kids who’d been living with them at that time (scattered now, long out of touch) had run like hell, laughing, into the backyard. Of course, Warren hadn’t hit Elsie hard by his standards. If I wanted to hurt you, I would. I didn’t.

  She had to admit she’d asked for it. Talking in a loud whining voice, which Warren didn’t like, and while he was getting ready to answer her she’d started to walk out of the room, and Warren didn’t like that either.

  Then afterward, not immediately but possibly the next day, the next night, he’d be loving. Not apologetic in so many words but wanting to make it up. His hands, his mouth. What strange uses of the mouth. Not saying much to her because what’s there to say at such times?

  He’d never told her he loved her. But she knew—anyway, she guessed she knew—he did.

  I love you the girl had said. Those damp frightened eyes. Oh Aunt Elsie I love you don’t send me away.

  Carefully Elsie said, “We just have to think about the future, hon. We’ve made mistakes in the past.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I mean, mistakes were made. In the past.”

  “Fuck the past. The past ain’t now.”

  “You know young girls,” Elsie said, pleading. “Things happen to them.”

  Warren had gone to the icebox, yanked open the door and taken out a beer, and slammed the door and was now drinking deeply. He leaned against the kitchen counter beside the stained sink, picking at the caulking with the big blunt dirt-edged thumbnail he’d injured years ago. The caulking he’d put in himself only that winter and already, God damn it, was coming loose. And tiny black ants in the cracks.

  Warren said uncomfortably, like a man trying on clothes that didn’t fit, “She’ll take it hard. She likes us.”

  Elsie couldn’t resist. “Loves us.”

  “Shit.”

  “But you know what happened last time.” Elsie began then to talk rapidly of a girl who’d lived with them a few years before—Lucille, who’d lived in that attic room and gone to Van Nuys High and gotten into “trouble” at the age of fifteen and hadn’t even known with certainty who the baby’s father was. As if this departed Lucille had some bearing upon Norma Jeane. Warren wasn’t listening, distracted by his own thoughts. Elsie herself was scarcely listening. Yet this was a speech that seemed to her required at this point.

  After Elsie finished Warren said, “You’re gonna send the poor kid back to County? Back to—what?—the orphanage?”

  “No.” Elsie smiled. Her first true smile of the day. This was her trump card and she’d been saving it. “I’m going to get that girl married and out of here and safe.”

  She flinched as Warren turned abruptly from her and without a word slammed out of the house. She heard the pickup motor start in the driveway.

  Returning then late, sometime after midnight, after Elsie and the others had gone to bed. She woke from a thin agitated sleep to his heavy footsteps and the bedroom door shoved open and his harsh labored breath and the smell of alcohol. It was nearly pitch-dark in the bedroom and Elsie expected him to fumble for the wall switch but he didn’t and by the time she managed to lean over to reach for the bedside lamp it was too late. He was on her.

  Uttering no word of greeting or even of acknowledgment. Hot, heavy, swollen with need of her, or of any woman, grunting and grappling with her, tugging at her rayon nightgown and she was so astonished she neither thought to protect herself nor (for after all she was this man’s wife) arrange herself in the sagging bed to accommodate him.

  They had not made love—in how long?—in months; making love wasn’t maybe the terminology she used, doing it was more likely, for always between them there had been a strange verbal shyness however sexually demanding and voracious and appreciative Warren had been as a young husband, and Elsie too was reticent, joking and teasing, an awkward way of speech, but to utter love, to say I love you, was difficult. How strange she’d always thought it that there were things you did every day of your life like going to the bathroom, picking your nose, scratching your body, and touching yourself and other people (if there were other people in your life for you to touch and be touched by), yet these were things you didn’t talk about, things for which there were no adequate words.

  Like what he was doing to her now, what word, how to speak of it or even to comprehend it, an assault, a sexual assault except she was this man’s wife so it was all right and she’d provoked him so there was justice in it, wasn’t there? Before climbing onto the bed Warren had unzipped and unbuckled his trousers and kicked them off, but he still wore his smelly undershirt. She would suffocate in the coarse hairs of his body. She would be crushed beneath his heaving bulk. Never had he weighed so much and never was his weight so dense, so furious. His penis was a thick squat rod that prodded against her belly, blindly at first. With his knees he shoved her flaccid thighs roughly apart and seized his penis to push it into her as she’d many times seen him attack a wrecked car with a rod to pry it apart, taking pleasure in overcoming resistance. Elsie tried to protest, “Oh, Jesus, Warren—oh, wait—” but his forearm was jammed against the underside of her jaw and desperately she tried to squirm free of its pressure against her throat for what if in his drunken obliviousness of her he suffocated her, smashed her windpipe or her neck? Taking hold then of Elsie’s wrists and stretching her flailing arms perpendicular to her sides as if crucifying her, nailing her to the bed, pumping himself with furious yet methodical strokes and she could see in the dark his sweaty face contorted, lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace as often she saw him while he slept, moaning in his sleep, reliving the fights of his youth when he’d been beaten badly but had also beaten other men. I handed out my share of hurt. Was that a kind of happiness, a man’s happiness, to know I handed out my share of hurt, uttered not even boastfully but matter-of-factly? Elsie tried to position herself in such a way as to blunt the force of Warren’s attack, but he was too strong and too shrewd. He’ll kill me if he can. Fuck me to death. Not Norma Jeane. She was able to endure it, not scream or cry for help or even sob though she was gasping for breath, and tears and saliva leaked from her face as contorted as his. Between her legs she believed she must be torn, bleeding. Never had Warren been so big. Blood-engorged, demonic. Wham!—wham!—wham!—Elsie’s poor head thudding against the headboard of the bed they’d had all their married life and the headboard in turn thudding against the wall and the very wall vibrating and shuddering as if the earth beneath were quaking.

  She was in terror he’d break her neck, but that didn’t happen.

  7

  “What’d I tell you, sweetie? It’s our lucky night.”

  Seeming to know beforehand the bittersweet fact that it would be their last movie night together. Elsie took Norma Jeane to the Thursday night movies in town at the Sepulveda Theater, where Stage Door Canteen and Caught in the Draft were playing plus previews of a new Hedy Lamarr film and after the last showing there was a drawing for prizes and what a whoop Elsie Pirig let out when the second-prize number was called and it was Norma Jeane’s ticket. “Here! We’re here! We got the number here! My daughter’s ticket! We’re coming!”

  The incredulous joyous cry of a woman who’s never won anything before in her life.

  Elsie was so excited, so childlike, the audience laughed good-naturedly at her and applauded and there we
re scattered wolf whistles directed at the daughter as the two shuffled onto the stage with the other prizewinners. “Too damned bad Warren isn’t here to see this,” Elsie whispered in Norma Jeane’s ear. She was wearing her good rayon navy-and-white polka-dot dress with prominent shoulder pads and her last good pair of stockings and she’d rubbed rouge onto her cheeks and her cheeks were now aflame. The mysterious bruises and welts on the underside of her jaw she’d managed to disguise, or almost disguise, with face powder. Norma Jeane in a schoolgirl pleated skirt and red sweater worn with a strand of glass beads, dark-blond curly hair tied back in a scarf, was the youngest person onstage and the person at whom the audience stared most intently. She wore no rouge but her lips were very red, matching her sweater. Her fingernails were very red. Though her heart was beating wildly like a bird trapped in her rib cage she managed to stand straight and tall while the others, including Elsie, slouched self-consciously, nervously touched their hair, their faces, hid their mouths behind their fingers. Norma Jeane held her head at a subtly tilted angle and smiled as if this was the most natural thing in the world for her on a weekday evening, climbing up onto the stage of the Sepulveda Theater to shake hands with the middle-aged manager and accept her prize. At the Los Angeles Orphans Home years ago there’d been a frightened little girl hauled onto a lighted platform by the Dark Prince’s white-gloved hands and she’d stared stupidly beyond the lights into the audience, but now she knew better. Now she resisted looking out into the audience, knowing there were faces she would recognize, individuals who knew her, some of them from Van Nuys High. Let them look at me, look at me. No more than voluptuous Hedy Lamarr would Norma Jeane break the movie spell and acknowledge those whose role it was to stare at her.