Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yes, Bucky planned to join up with the U.S. armed forces to fight for his country, and this he’d made clear to his fiancée, Norma Jeane, from the start.

  Everything speeded up! It’s the times.

  It was commented on: most of the wedding guests were from the groom’s side. The Glazers and their many relatives were big-boned pleasant-faced healthy Americans who resembled one another despite profound differences of age and sex and who gave the impression, seated together in pews in the small stucco church, of having been herded in. At a signal, they would rise together and be herded out. Many belonged to the First Church of Christ and were very much at home, nodding throughout the nuptial ceremony. On the bride’s side were just her foster parents the Pirigs and two rawboned mismatched boys described as foster brothers and a scattering of high school girlfriends with bright made-up faces, and a stocky frizz-haired woman in blue serge who’d introduced herself before the ceremony as “Doctor” and who began to cry hoarsely when the Church of Christ minister sternly inquired of the bride, “Do you, Norma Jeane Baker, take this man, Buchanan Glazer, to be your lawfully wedded husband, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do you part in the name of our Lord God and His Only Begotten Son Jesus Christ?” and the bride swallowed hard and whispered, “Oh!—yes sir.”

  The orphan’s quavering voice. For life.

  Dr. Edith Mittelstadt gave the newlyweds a “family heirloom” sterling silver tea service—heavy ornamental teapot, cream and sugar bowls, and matching tray—which Bucky would pawn in Santa Monica for a disappointing twenty-five dollars.

  And he’d have to suffer the indignity of being fingerprinted, too, as Norma Jeane looked on giggling and crimson with embarrassment.

  Like I’m a crook or something. Gosh, that makes me mad!

  Where was the bride’s mother? Why wasn’t the bride’s mother at her own daughter’s wedding? And where was the father?—no one wished to inquire.

  Was it true, the bride’s mother was committed to a state mental asylum? Was it true, the bride’s mother was incarcerated in a state women’s prison? Was it true, the bride’s mother had once tried to kill her when she was a little girl? Was it true, the bride’s mother had killed herself in either the mental asylum or the prison? No one wished to inquire on such a happy occasion.

  Was it true, there actually was no father? No Baker? The bride was illegitimate? On her birth certificate the damning words FATHER: UNKNOWN?

  Among these good-hearted Christian Americans on this happy occasion, no one wished to inquire.

  As Bucky had said to his bride-to-be on the eve of their wedding, there was no shame to her circumstances. Don’t give it another thought, honey. Nobody in the Glazer family looks down on anybody else for such a reason that can’t be helped, I promise you. I’ll punch ’em in the nose if they do.

  Now Norma Jeane had grown pretty enough, a man had come for her.

  Love at first sight to be treasured all our lives but maybe this wasn’t one hundred percent true?

  Fact was, Bucky Glazer hadn’t much wanted to meet this girl Norma Jeane Baker. Seeing her at the Sepulveda Theater with that witchy Elsie Pirig, the two called up onstage, the girl looked to Bucky’s hard-to-please eye like just another high school tart—plus too young—so he’d upset his mom by slipping out of the movie house and waiting for her in the parking lot, breezily lounging against the hood of his car smoking a cigarette like a character in a movie. Poor Mrs. Glazer, lurching in her high heels and scolding as if Bucky wasn’t a grown-up twenty-one but a kid of twelve.

  “Buchanan Glazer! How could you! So rude! Humiliating your own mother! What can I tell Elsie? She’ll be calling me in the morning. I had to hide so she wouldn’t see me! And that girl is perfectly sweet.”

  It was Bucky’s maddening strategy to let his mother fuss and fume and blow her nose, assuming she’d get her way eventually like most of the women in the Glazer family. She had with Bucky’s older brother and both his older sisters, coercing them into marrying young, the wisest course of action, otherwise you invite trouble; it’s as dangerous for boys as for girls and poor Bess was frantic with wanting to break up Bucky’s scandalous romance with a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée he’d met working nights at Lockheed, mother of a young child and a glamorous hard-faced woman who’d “got her hooks in my boy,” as Bess lamented to anyone who would listen. Bucky had gone out with girls through high school and he was “dating” a number of girls at the present time, including the daughter of the funeral home director, but to Bess the divorcée was a serious threat.

  “What’s wrong with Elsie Pirig’s girl? Why don’t you like her? Elsie swears she’s a good Christian girl who doesn’t smoke or drink and she reads the Bible and she’s a born homemaker and shy around boys and you know, Bucky, you should think about settling down. With a girl you can trust. If you have to go overseas, you’ll need someone to come home to. You’ll need a sweetheart to write to you.”

  Bucky couldn’t resist. “Hell, Carmen can write to me, Mom. She’s already writing to a couple of guys.”

  Bess began to cry. Carmen was the glamorous divorcée who’d gotten her hooks in Bucky.

  Bucky laughed and repented and hugged his mother, saying, “Mom, I’ve got you to come home to, don’t I? And write to me? Why would I need anybody else?”

  Not long afterward Bucky scandalized a roomful of female relatives when he’d overheard his mother saying in her mournful martyr’s voice, “My boy deserves a virgin, at least—” and leaned into the doorway to say loudly, with a deadpan expression, “What’s a virgin? How’d I recognize one if I saw one? How’d you, Mom?” and continued on his way again, whistling. That Bucky Glazer, isn’t he something? Sharpest one in the family.

  Yet somehow it happened. Bucky agreed to meet this Norma Jeane. Easier to give in to Bess than endure her nagging or, worse yet, her sighs and put-upon looks. He’d known Norma Jeane was young but they hadn’t informed him she was only fifteen, so it was a shock seeing her close up. The stumbling way like a sleepwalker she moved toward him, then stopped stricken with shyness, half smiling, stammering her name. Just a kid. But Jesus, look at her. That figure! Even as he’d been preparing to joke about this “date” afterward with his buddies, he now felt so powerful an attraction to the girl his thoughts flashed ahead to the time when he’d be bragging about her. Showing her snapshot. Better yet, showing her off. My new girl Norma Jeane. She’s kind of young but mature for her age.

  The looks on his friends’ faces, Bucky could imagine.

  He took her to the movies. He took her dancing. He took her canoeing, hiking, and fishing. She surprised him by being an outdoor kind of girl, despite her looks. Amid his friends who were all his age she sat quiet and alert and sharp-eyed and smiling in appreciation of their jokes and horsing around, and it was clear as the nose on your face that Norma Jeane was just about the prettiest girl anybody’d ever seen outside the movies with her heart-shaped face and widow’s peak and darkish blond hair spilling in curls down her shoulders and the way she carried herself in her little sweaters, skirts, pleated pants—now “pants” were allowed for women in public places.

  Sexy like Rita Hayworth. But a girl you’d want to marry like Jeanette MacDonald.

  It was a time of things-happening-fast. Ever since the shock of Pearl Harbor. Every day now was like an earthquake day you wake up wondering what’s next. Headline news, radio bulletins. Yet it was exciting too.

  You had to pity old guys past forty or whatever who’d had their chance in the armed forces and didn’t get called upon to truly fight. Defend their country. Or if they had, like in World War I, it was so long ago and boring nobody even remembered. What was happening in Europe and in the Pacific was now.

  Norma Jeane had a way of leaning toward him, almost shivering in anticipation of what he’d say; touching his wrist and her blue eyes lifting dreamy and unfocused and her breath quickened as if she’d been running, asking him what did he think the future wou
ld bring? Would the U.S. win the war and save the world from Hitler and Tojo? How long would the war last and would bombs ever fall on this country? on California? And if so, what would happen to them? What would be their fate? Bucky had to smile; nobody he knew would say such a strange word—fate. But here was a girl to make him think, and he appreciated that. Surprised sometimes to hear himself talking like somebody on the radio. He comforted Norma Jeane, telling her not to worry: if the Japs tried to bomb California or any of the “territorial United States” they’d be blasted out of the sky by antiaircraft weapons. (“Secret missiles we’re making at Lockheed, if you want to know.”) If they ever tried to land troops, they’d be sunk off the coast. And if they ever succeeded in getting on U.S. soil, every able-bodied American man would fight them to the death. It just couldn’t happen here.

  One strange conversation they had. Norma Jeane spoke of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, which she said she’d read, and Bucky explained to her no, it was a radio program and it was by Orson Welles, a few years ago. Norma Jeane went quiet, saying she must’ve mixed it up with something else. Bucky saw the connection, the way it would figure in the girl’s head. “You didn’t hear it, I guess? Maybe you were too young. We heard it at our house. Oh boy, was that something! My grandpa thought it was real and just about had a heart attack and my mom, you know what she’s like, she kept hearing Orson Welles saying it was a ‘simulated newscast’ yet still she was scared, everybody was panicking, I was just a kid and thought, sort of, it could be real though I knew it wasn’t, it was just a radio program. But, hell”—Bucky smiled to see Norma Jeane gazing at him so urgently, like the next syllable he uttered was precious—“anybody who lived through that, that program that night, even if it wasn’t real you came away thinking it could be; so when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor a few years later it wasn’t that different, was it?” He’d sort of lost the thread of what he was saying. He had a point to make and he believed it was an important point, but with Norma Jeane so close to him, and smelling like soap or talcum powder or whatever it was, something flowery, he couldn’t concentrate. Nobody was near so he leaned quickly forward and kissed her mouth, and immediately like a doll’s her eyes shut and a sensation like flame passed through his body, chest to groin, and he placed his outstretched fingers behind her tilted head, bunching up her curly hair, and he kissed her a little harder, his eyes, too, now shut; he was lost in a dream inhaling her fragrance and like a girl in a dream she was soft, docile, unresisting, and so he kissed her harder, prodding at her primly pursed lips with his tongue, knowing that one of these days Norma Jeane was going to open her mouth to him, and Jesus! he hoped he wouldn’t come in his pants.

  Love at first sight. Bucky Glazer was coming around to believe.

  Already telling guys at Lockheed he’d first glimpsed his girl onstage at the movie theater. She’d won a prize, and boy oh boy was she a prize climbing up into the spotlight and the audience clapping like crazy for her.

  “A guy deserves a virgin to marry. Out of self-respect.”

  Thinking about Norma Jeane a lot. They’d been introduced in May and her birthday was June 1; she’d be sixteen years old. Girls could get married at sixteen, there were examples in the Glazer family. Now, Bucky, you don’t want to do anything in haste, his mother cautioned him but he perceived this as one of Bess’s ploys: telling Bucky what not to do, knowing that’s the very thing Bucky will want to do. Still he was thinking about Norma Jeane the way he’d rarely thought about any of his other girls. Even when he was with Carmen. Especially when he was with Carmen and making comparisons. Face it, she’s a slut. Nobody you could trust. Thinking about Norma Jeane afternoons at the funeral home helping Mr. Eeley the embalmer prepare a corpse for the “viewing room.” If the corpse happened to be a female, and halfway young. He was seized with a sense, new to him, of the brevity of time, of mortality; as the Bible said, Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Every week in Life there were photos of the injured and the dead, G.I. corpses half-buried in sand on some godforsaken Pacific island you’d never heard of before, stacks of dead Chinese killed in Japanese bombing raids. Everybody was naked in death. What would Norma Jeane look like naked? He was almost overcome, needing suddenly to bend over to lower his head between his knees as Mr. Eeley, a droll mustached bachelor with eyebrows thick as Groucho Marx’s, teased him for being “weak.” During his night shift at Lockheed, amid the earsplitting din, he brooded over Norma Jeane, wondering if she’d had a date that evening though she’d promised him she would stay home and think of him. Guys only a few years older than Bucky on the line eager to get home to their wives, climb into bed at 6 A.M. The kinds of things they said, rubbing their hands. Rolling their eyes and smirking. Some of them showed snapshots of their young, pretty wives, girlfriends. One of them passed around a snapshot of his wife posed Betty Grable-style, back to the camera and peeking over her shoulder, wearing not a swimsuit like Betty Grable but just lacy underpants and high heels. Jesus. Bucky just about ground his teeth. She wasn’t half so sexy as Norma Jeane would be in that pose. Wait’ll you see my girl.

  Was he falling in love? Well—God damn! Maybe he was. Maybe it was time. He wouldn’t want to lose her to another guy.

  In Bucky Glazer’s opinion there were two categories of female: the “hard” and the “soft.” And he was a sucker for the soft, he knew. Here was this sweet little girl looking up to him wide-eyed and trusting and agreeing with virtually everything he said; naturally he knew a lot more than she did, so it was only logical for her to agree, and he admired that; he didn’t care for combative girls who thought it was the sexiest kind of flirting, getting on a guy’s nerves like Katharine Hepburn in the movies. Maybe that did charge Bucky up, but this soft, pliant little Norma Jeane charged him up in a different way, so he found himself whispering to her in his sleep, shaping his arm around her in the bedclothes, kissing and stroking her. It won’t hurt, I promise! I’m crazy about you. Waking in the middle of the night stricken with desire in the bed he’d been sleeping in since, God knows, age twelve, he’d outgrown it a long time ago, ankles and size-fourteen feet hanging over the edge of the mattress. Time to get a bed of your own. A double bed.

  So that night it was decided. Three weeks after they’d been introduced. Well, it was a time of things-happening-fast. One of Bucky’s young uncles had been reported missing on Corregidor. His closest friend from the Mission Hills wrestling team was starting out on solo bombing flights in southeast Asia, a navy pilot. Norma Jeane wept, saying yes she would marry him, she would accept his engagement ring, yes she loved him; if that wasn’t enough she did next the strangest thing any girl had ever done, in the movies or out: took his big-knuckled chafed hands in her small soft hands, no matter that they smelled (he knew, couldn’t get the stink scrubbed off) of the embalmer’s fluid that was formaldehyde, glycerine, borax, and phenol alcohol, and lifted his hands to her face and actually inhaled the odor, as if it was a balm to her, or recalled to her an odor that was precious, her eyes shut and dreamy and her voice just a whisper. “I love you! Now my life is perfect.”

  Thank you God, thank you God, O thank you God. Never will I doubt You ever again in my lifetime I vow. Never will I wish to punish myself for being unwanted and unloved.

  At last the solemn ceremony in the First Church of Christ, Mission Hills, California, was ending. Not only every woman in the church but a number of the men were dabbing at their eyes. The tall blushing bridegroom stooped to kiss his girl bride, shyly eager like a boy on Christmas morning. He seized her so tightly around the ribs, the satin dress bunched up at the small of her back and the bridal veil fell back at an awkward angle from her head.

  Kissing the bride who was now Mrs. Buchanan Glazer full on the lips, and tremulously her lips parted for him. Just a little.

  LITTLE WIFE

  1

  “No wife of Bucky Glazer’s is going to work. Ever.”

  2

  She meant to be perfect. He deserved nothing less.

&n
bsp; In ground-floor apartment 5A of Verdugo Gardens, 2881 La Vista Street, Mission Hills, California.

  In the early dreamy months of marriage.

  First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don’t know it at the time.

  Once upon a time, a young bride. Young housewife. Stealing time to write in her secret journal. Mrs. Bucky Glazer. Mrs. Buchanan Glazer. Mrs. Norma Jeane Glazer.

  No “Baker” remaining. Soon there would be no memory.

  Bucky was only five years older than Norma Jeane but from the first, cuddling in his arms, she called him Daddy. Sometimes he was Big Daddy, proud possessor of Big Thing. She was Baby, sometimes Baby-Doll, proud possessor of Little Thing.