Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Flush-faced, Bucky began to stroke Norma Jeane again, more forcibly; most times if they’d been arguing and Bucky touched her, she immediately softened and acquiesced like a rabbit you could put into a trance by petting rhythmically and firmly. Bucky kissed her, and she began to kiss him back. But when Bucky tugged at the bra and panties, Norma Jeane pushed him away. She yanked off the synthetic-smelling glamour wig and threw it onto the floor and wiped away some of the makeup on her face, leaving her lips pale and puffy. Thin rivulets of mascara tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Bucky! This makes me so ashamed. It makes me not know who I am. I thought you loved me.” She began to shiver. Bucky, crouching over her, Big Thing dangling now at half mast and the goddam condom bunched at the tip, glared at her as if he’d never seen her before. Who the hell did this girl think she was? Right now she wasn’t even that pretty, her face damp and smudged. An orphan! A castoff! One of the Pirigs’ white-trash foster kids! Her mother was a certified nut, whatever tales Norma Jeane told of her, and no father existed, so where’d she get her prissy airs, imagining herself superior to him? It came to Bucky in a flash how he’d disliked her the other evening at the movies when they’d seen Abbott and Costello in Pardon My Sarong and Bucky’d laughed so hard he nearly wet his pants, making the entire row of seats shake, and Norma Jeane cuddling against his shoulder stiffened and objected in this little-girl voice she didn’t see what was so funny about Abbott and Costello—“Isn’t the little fat man retarded? Is it right to laugh at a retarded person?” Bucky was pissed as hell but just shrugged off his wife’s query. Wanting to yell at her What’s so funny about Abbott and Costello is they’re funny for Christ’s sake! Listen to this audience laughing like hyenas!

  “Maybe I’m tired of loving you. Maybe I’d like a little change once in a while from you.”

  In a fury of hurt and deflated masculinity Bucky climbed off the bed, stumbled into his trousers and threw on a shirt, and left the apartment, slamming the front door so that any of their nosy neighbors who wished could overhear. There were three sex-starved servicemen’s wives next door cutting their eyes at Bucky Glazer whenever they saw him and no doubt standing with ears pressed against the bedroom wall at this very moment, so let them hear. Norma Jeane, panicked, called after him, “Bucky! Oh, honey, come back! Forgive me!” But by the time she’d slipped on a robe to run after him, he was gone.

  Driving away in the Packard. The gas gauge was almost at empty but what the hell. He’d have gone to see his old girlfriend, Carmen, except he’d heard she’d moved and he didn’t know her new address.

  Yet the snapshots were a surprise. Bucky stared in astonishment. This was Norma Jeane, his wife? Though she’d been squirming in embarrassment as Bucky hung over their bed, clicking away, a few of the snapshots suggested a bold, complicitous girl with a sly, teasing smile; though Bucky knew very well that Norma Jeane had been miserable, he persuaded himself that she looked, in several of the snapshots at least, as if she’d been enjoying the attention—“Exhibiting her body like a high-priced whore.”

  It was the “after” poses that most intrigued Bucky. In one of these Norma Jeane lay sidelong on their bed, red-blond hair tumbling sensuously across the pillow, eyes sleepily half closed and the tip of her tongue showing between lips that had been made luscious and swollen by Bucky’s little cosmetic brush. Like a clit showing between the lips of the vagina. Norma Jeane’s erect nipples showed through the transparent black bra and her raised hand was blurred, passing across her stomach as if she were about to caress herself lewdly or had just done so. With a part of his mind Bucky knew the pose was an accident, he’d pushed Norma Jeane down into this seductive position and she was about to push herself back up, yet—what did that matter?

  “Je-sus.”

  Bucky felt a stab of desire imagining this exotic, beautiful girl, a stranger to him.

  He selected a half-dozen snapshots showing Norma Jeane at her sexiest, and these he proudly passed around to his buddies at Lockheed. Amid the near-deafening factory din he had to raise his voice to be heard—“This is strictly confidential, OK? Not to go beyond us.” The men nodded agreement. The looks on their faces! They were impressed. The snapshots were all of Norma Jeane in the red-blond Rita Hayworth wig and black lingerie. “This is your wife? Your wife?” “Your wife?” “Glazer, you’re a lucky man.” Whistles and envious laughter. Just as Bucky had anticipated. Except Bob Mitchum didn’t respond the way he’d expected at all. Bucky was stunned when Mitchum leafed quickly through the snapshots, scowling, and said, “What kind of S.O.B. shows pictures like these of his wife?” Before Bucky could stop him, Mitchum tore the snapshots into pieces.

  There would have been a fight if their foreman hadn’t been close by.

  Bucky skulked off, mortified. And furious. Mitchum was just jealous. A would-be Hollywood actor who’d never get further than assembly-line work. But I have the negatives Bucky gloated. And I have Norma Jeane.

  9

  Unknown to Norma Jeane, he’d taken to dropping by his parents’ home on the way to his own. His raw aggrieved boy’s voice echoed familiarly in the kitchen he knew so well. “Sure I love Norma Jeane! I married her, didn’t I? But she’s so needy. She’s like a baby that always has to be held or she’ll cry. It’s like I’m the sun and she’s a flower that can’t live without the sun and it’s—” Bucky searched for the word, his forehead furrowed in pain—“tiring.”

  Mrs. Glazer nervously chided him. “Now, Bucky! Norma Jeane is a good sweet Christian girl. She’s young.”

  “Hell, I’m young too. I’m twenty-two, for God’s sake. What she needs is some older guy, a father.” Bucky glared at his parents’ concerned faces, as if they were responsible. “She’s sucking me dry. She’s driving me away.” He paused, on the brink of saying that Norma Jeane wanted to cuddle and make love all the time. Kissing and hugging in public. Sometimes Bucky liked it fine, and other times he didn’t. And the weird thing is, I don’t think she feels much, in her actual body. The way a woman is supposed to feel.

  As if reading her son’s thoughts, Mrs. Glazer said anxiously, a rashlike blush rising into her face, “Bucky, of course you love Norma Jeane. We all love Norma Jeane, she’s like a daughter to us, not a daughter-in-law. Oh, that beautiful wedding!—it seems like it was only last week.”

  Indignantly Bucky said, “And she wants to start a family too. In the middle of this war. World War Two and the world’s going to hell and my wife wants to start a family. Je-sus!”

  Mrs. Glazer said weakly, “Oh, Bucky, don’t be profane. You know how that upsets me.”

  Bucky said, “I’m upset. When I go home, there Norma Jeane is. Like she’s been cleaning house and making supper all day long waiting for me to come home. Like without me she doesn’t exist. Like I’m God or something.” He paused in his pacing, breathing hard; Mrs. Glazer had spooned cherry cobbler onto a plate, and he began to eat hungrily. Mouth full, he said, “I don’t want to be God, I’m just Bucky Glazer.”

  Mr. Glazer, who’d been quiet until now, said flatly, “Well, son, you’re staying with that girl. You were married in our church—‘Till death do you part.’ What d’you think marriage is, a merry-go-round? You ride around a few times, then get off and go back to playing with the other boys? It’s for life.”

  Eating cherry cobbler, Bucky made a noise like a wounded animal.

  Maybe your generation, old man. But not mine.

  10

  “Baby, I have to go.”

  Almost, she couldn’t hear. Newsreel machine-gun fire. Newsreel music. The March of Time. They were at the movies. Every Friday night, at the movies. It was the cheapest entertainment; they could walk downtown holding hands like high school sweethearts. Gas was too expensive now. If you could get it. A low near-inaudible rumble as of distant thunder out of the mountains. A dry wind that scorched your eyeballs and nostrils. You wouldn’t want to walk far in such dry aching air. Downtown to the Mission Hills Capitol was far enough. Maybe they were seeing Confession
s of a Nazi Spy—suave sophisticated George Sanders and Edward G. Robinson with his stricken bulldog face. Robinson’s liquidy dark eyes shimmering with emotion. Who could so swiftly summon hurt, rage, outrage, terror, and futility as Edward G. Robinson did? Except he was a smallish man, unconvincing as a lover. Not the Dark Prince. Not a man you’d die for. Or maybe, that night, they were seeing Action in the North Atlantic with Humphrey Bogart. Coarse-skinned pouchy-eyed Bogart. Always a cigarette between his fingers, smoke drifting across his battered face. Yet Bogart was handsome. In uniform, on the giant screen, all men were handsome. Or maybe, that evening, they’d gone to see The Battle of the Beaches or Hitler’s Children. Bucky wanted to see them all. Or another Abbott and Costello comedy, or Bob Hope in Caught in the Draft. It was Norma Jeane’s choice to see musicals: Stage Door Canteen, Meet Me in St. Louis, All About Lovin’ You. But Bucky was bored with musicals, and Norma Jeane had to concede they were frothy and silly, as phony as the Land of Oz. “People don’t break into song in real life,” Bucky grumbled. “People don’t start dancing, for Christ’s sake, there’s no music.” Norma Jeane didn’t want to point out that there was always music in the movies, even in Bucky’s war movies, even in The March of Time. Norma Jeane didn’t want to disagree with Bucky, who’d grown so thin-skinned lately. Edgy and irritable like a big handsome dog you’d want to stroke but dared not.

  She knew but didn’t know. For months. Before the wig and the black lace underwear and the click! click! of the camera she’d known. She’d heard the things Bucky muttered, the hints he made. Listening to war news on the radio every night during supper. Urgently reading Life, Collier’s, Time, the local papers. Bucky, who read with difficulty, pushing his fingers beneath rows of print and sometimes moving his lips. He took down outdated newspaper maps from the walls of the apartment and taped up new maps. A new configuration of colored pins. He was distracted and impatient, making love. No sooner beginning than ending it. Hey, Baby, I’m sorry! G’night. Norma Jeane held him as he sank swiftly into sleep like a rock sinking to the soft mucky bottom of a lake. She knew he would go soon. The country was hemorrhaging men. It was fall 1943 and the war had lasted forever. It was winter 1944 and high school boys were worrying that the war would end before they could sign up. Sometimes, though less often now, Norma Jeane drifted into her old dreamy dreams of being a Red Cross nurse or a girl pilot.

  A girl pilot! Women who were qualified to fly bombers weren’t allowed to fly them. Women who died in service weren’t allowed funerals with military honors like men.

  Norma Jeane could understand: men had to have rewards for being men, for risking their lives as men, and these rewards were women. Women at home, waiting for their men. You couldn’t have women fighting alongside men in the war, you couldn’t have women-men. Women-men were freaks. Women-men were obscene. Women-men were lesbians, “lezzies.” A normal man wanted to strangle a lezzie or fuck her till her brains spilled out and her cunt leaked blood. Norma Jeane had heard Bucky and his friends ranting about lezzies, who were worse, almost, than fairies, fags, “preverts.” There was something about these sick, sorry freaks that made a normal healthy man want to lay hands on them and administer punishment.

  Bucky, please don’t hurt me, oh please.

  Ol’ Hirohito’s skull on the console radio in the living room, Bucky no longer saw. As often, it seemed to Norma Jeane, Bucky no longer saw her. But Norma Jeane was aware of the “souvenir” and shuddered when she removed the scarf. I didn’t kill and behead you. I’m not the one to blame.

  Sometimes in her sleep she saw the gaping eye holes of the skull. The ugly nose hole, the grinning upper jaw. A smell of cigarette smoke, the sound of hot angry water rushing from a faucet.

  Gotcha, Baby!

  In one of the rear rows of the Mission Hills Capitol, Norma Jeane slipped her hand into Bucky’s hand sticky from buttered popcorn. As if the movie-house seats were a wild ride that could precipitate them both into danger.

  Strange how, since she’d become Mrs. Bucky Glazer, Norma Jeane didn’t care so much for the movies. They were so—hopeful. In the way that unreal things are hopeful. You bought a ticket, took your seat, and opened your eyes to—what? Sometimes during the movies her thoughts wandered. Tomorrow might be laundry day, and what was she going to make Bucky for supper? And Sunday: if she could get Bucky to go to church instead of sleeping in. Bess Glazer had made a veiled allusion to the “young couple” not attending Sunday services, and Norma Jeane knew her mother-in-law was blaming her for not getting Bucky to church. Bess Glazer had seen her pushing little Irina in her stroller the other afternoon and called her right afterward to express surprise—“Norma Jeane, how do you have time? For another woman’s baby? I hope she’s paying you, that’s all I can say.”

  That evening The March of Time thundered. The marching music was so loud and thrilling your heartbeat quickened. This was real-life footage. This was real. For the war news Bucky sat bolt upright, staring at the screen. His jaws ceased their popcorn grinding. Norma Jeane watched with fascination and dread. There was brave crusty “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, unshaven, muttering, “We got a hell of a beating.” But the music soared and zoomed. The screen flashed with hurtling planes. Grainy-gray skies, a foreign soil below. Duels in the air above Burma! The fabulous Flying Tigers! Every man and boy in the Capitol yearned to be a Flying Tiger; every woman and girl yearned to love a Flying Tiger. They’d painted their old Curtiss P-40s to resemble cartoon sharks. They were daredevils, they were war heroes. They pitted their planes against the faster, more technically advanced Jap Zeros.

  In a single dogfight over Rangoon, Tigers downed twenty of seventy-eight Japanese fighters—and lost none!

  The audience applauded. There were isolated whistles. Norma Jeane’s eyes filled with tears. Even Bucky wiped at his eyes. It was astonishing to see such action in the sky. Spurts of antiaircraft fire, stricken planes dropping to the ground streaming fire and smoke. You would think this was forbidden knowledge. The knowledge of another’s death. You would think that death was sacred and private, but the war had changed all that. The movies had changed all that. It wasn’t just that you gazed with detachment at another’s death but you were granted a vision the dying didn’t have of themselves. The way God must see us. If God is watching.

  Bucky was gripping Norma Jeane’s hand so hard it was all she could do to keep from wincing. In a low urgent voice he said what sounded like, “Baby, I got to go.”

  “Go—where?”

  The men’s room?

  “I have to join up. Before it’s too late.”

  Norma Jeane laughed, knowing he must be joking. Fiercely she kissed him. They’d always necked on their movie dates, just getting to know each other. The Flying Tigers were gone from the screen; now it was G.I. weddings. Grinning soldiers on furlough and abroad at bases. “The Wedding March” was being played loudly. So many weddings! So many brides—of all ages. The rapidity with which the wedding couples flashed upon the screen and vanished suggested comedy. Church ceremonies, civil ceremonies. Lavish surroundings, stark surroundings. So many radiant smiles, so many vigorous embraces. So many passionate kisses. So much hope. The audience tittered. War was noble but love, marriage, weddings were funny. Norma Jeane’s hand was a scrambling little mouse in Bucky’s crotch. Taken by surprise Bucky mumbled, “Mmmmm, Baby, not now. Hey.” But he turned to her, kissing her hard. Opened her mock-resisting lips to push his tongue deep into her mouth, and she sucked at him whimpering and clutching. He gripped her right breast in his left hand as he’d have gripped a football. Their seats rocked. They were panting like dogs. Behind them, a woman thumped at their seats, whispered, “You two go home if that’s what you want to do.” Norma Jeane turned on her, furious. “We’re married. So leave us alone. You go home. You go to hell.”

  Bucky laughed; suddenly his sweet-tempered wife was a spitfire!

  Though afterward realizing That was the beginning, I guess, that night.

  11

 
“But—where? Where did she go? Why don’t you know!”

  With no warning, Harriet disappeared from Verdugo Gardens. In March 1944. Taking Irina with her. And leaving behind most of their shabby belongings.

  Norma Jeane was panicked: what would she do without her baby?

  It seemed to her, confused as in a dream, she’d taken her baby to Gladys and received Gladys’s blessing. But now there was no baby. There would be no blessing.

  A half-dozen times Norma Jeane knocked on her neighbors’ door. But Harriet’s apartment mates were baffled too. And worried.

  No one seemed to know where the depressed woman had gone with her little girl. Not back to her family in Sacramento, and not to her in-laws in Washington State. Her friends told Norma Jeane that Harriet had left without saying goodbye and without leaving a farewell note. She’d left having paid her share of the rent through March. She’d been thinking of “disappearing” for a long time. She “wasn’t cut out to be a widow,” she’d said.

  She’d been “sick” too. She’d tried to hurt Irina. Maybe in fact she had hurt Irina in some way that didn’t show.

  Norma Jeane backed away, eyes narrowed. “No. That isn’t true. I would have seen it. You shouldn’t say such things. Harriet was my friend.”

  It made no sense that Harriet would leave without saying goodbye to Norma Jeane. Without having Irina say goodbye. She would not. Not Harriet. God would not let her.

  “H-hello? I w-w-want to report a m-missing p-person. A m-mother and a b-b-baby.”

  Norma Jeane telephoned the Mission Hills police department but stammered so badly she had to hang up. Knowing it would do little good anyway, for Harriet had obviously left of her own volition. Harriet was an adult woman and Harriet was Irina’s birth mother, and though Norma Jeane loved Irina more than Harriet loved her, and believed that love was reciprocated, there was nothing, there was absolutely nothing to be done.