Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The event passed in a blur. But it was not a swift blur. For some time before the ceremony began, the Blond Actress was photographed for the orphanage “archive.” She was photographed with beaming Porky Pig, who removed his bifocals for the shot, and she was photographed with members of the staff, and finally she was photographed with a few children. One of the girls so reminded her of Debra Mae as she’d been at the age of ten or eleven. . . . The Blond Actress wanted to stroke the girl’s unruly carroty-red hair. “What is your name, sweetie?” the Blond Actress asked. The girl mumbled a syllable or two, grudgingly. The Blond Actress couldn’t quite hear. Donna, maybe? Or Dunna?—“don’t know.”

  The ceremony was held in the dining room. This vast ugly space, the Blond Actress recalled. Children were marched in, in orderly rows, and made to sit at tables staring at her as if she were an animated Disney creature. As the Blond Actress stood at the microphone reciting her prepared speech her eyes darted about the hall seeking familiar faces. Where was Debra Mae? Where was Norma Jeane? Maybe that was Fleece?—a lanky sullen child, unfortunately a boy.

  It would be reported that the Blond Actress, contrary to the expectations of most of the orphanage staff, was a “sweet, kind, sincere-seeming” woman. In the eyes of many she was “almost ladylike.” “Not glamorous like her publicity but very pretty. And built.” She was perceived to be “kind of nervous, with almost a stammer sometimes. (We hoped she didn’t overhear some of the kids mimicking her!)” She was admired for her patience with the children who’d gotten overwrought and excited about the Easter baskets and restless and noisy, “especially the Hispanic kids who don’t know English.” Some of the older boys were rude and leering, moving their tongues in their mouths suggestively, but the Blond Actress, it was believed, “wisely ignored them. Or maybe she loved it, who knows?”

  Despite a painful throbbing in her head the Blond Actress enjoyed giving Easter baskets to the children, who passed before her one by one by one. An infinity of orphans. An eternity of orphans. Oh, she could do this forever! Take Doc Bob’s magic medicine and you can do anything forever! Better than sex. (Well, anything was better than sex. Hey, just kidding!) Oh, this was a rewarding and expanding and joyous experience, she’d tell the world if queried. And she would be queried. Interviewed. Her every syllable made worthy by newsprint or film. Wouldn’t tell them the girl orphans interested her much more than the boy orphans, though. The boys had no need of her. Any female would do for them, any female body, wanting to define themselves as male, therefore superior, one body is like another, but the girl orphans were staring at her, memorizing her, would long remember her. The girl orphans who’d been wounded like Norma Jeane. She saw that. Girl orphans requiring a touch, a quick stroking of the hair, a caress of the cheek, even a feathery kiss. Saying, “Aren’t you sweet! I love your braids”—“What’s your name? What a nice name!” She told them, with the air of one imparting a secret, “My name, when I lived here, was ‘Norma Jeane.’” One of the girls said, “‘Norma Jeane’—oh, I wish that was my name.” The Blond Actress framed this girl’s face in her hands and astonished everyone who watched by bursting into tears.

  She would inquire afterward, What was that girl’s full name?

  She would send a check to the Home, for a “special clothes and book allowance” for that girl.

  If the check, for two hundred dollars, was in fact ever used for this purpose, and not rather dissolved into the Home’s budget, she would not learn. For she would have forgotten.

  A disadvantage, yet also an advantage, of Fame: you forget so much.

  And the check for five hundred dollars she’d made out, impulsively, to Dr. Mittelstadt? This the Blond Actress would not remove from her handbag.

  The new director of the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society was, in fact, the middle-aged man with the Porky Pig face. And a nice if somewhat garrulous and self-important man he was. The Blond Actress listened to him for some patient minutes before interrupting to ask, now emphatically, what had happened to Dr. Mittelstadt?—and was met with a flutter of eyelids and a pursed mouth. “Dr. Mittelstadt was my predecessor,” Porky Pig said, in a neutral voice. “I had nothing to do with her at all. I never make comments on my predecessors. I believe we all do the best we can. Second-guessing isn’t my game.”

  The Blond Actress sought out an older matron, a familiar face. Once-young and now stoutly middle-aged with bulldog jowls yet an eager smile. “Norma Jeane. Sure I remember you! The shyest, sweetest little girl. You had some kind of—was it allergy? Like asthma? No. You’d had polio, and a little limp? No? (Well, you sure don’t have any limp now. I saw you dancing in that last movie, as good as Ginger Rogers!) You were friends with that wild girl Fleece? Yes? And Dr. Mittelstadt liked you so much. You were one of her circle.” The matron chuckled, shaking her head. It was a movie scene, the Blond Actress returning to the orphanage in which she’d been incarcerated for much of her childhood, and being dealt revelations like playing cards, but the Blond Actress couldn’t determine what the mood music was. During the Easter basket ceremony, “Easter Parade” crooned by Bing Crosby had been piped into the dining hall. But now there was no music.

  “And Dr. Mittelstadt? She retired, I guess?”

  “Yes. She retired.”

  A furtive look in the matron’s eye. Better not ask.

  “W-where is she?”

  A sorrowful look. “I’m afraid poor Edith is dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “She was my friend, Edith Mittelstadt. I worked with her for twenty-six years, I’ve never respected anyone more. She never tried to foist her religion on me. She was a good, caring woman.” The pursed mouth twisted downward. “Not like certain of the ‘new breed.’ The ‘budget-minded.’ Giving us commandments like the Gestapo.”

  “How did Dr. Mittelstadt d-die?”

  “Breast cancer. So we learned.” The matron’s eyes grew moist. If this was a movie scene, and certainly it was, it was also vividly real, and painful; and the Blond Actress would have to command the Frog Chauffeur to stop at a pharmacy on El Centro so that she could hurry inside, plead with the pharmacist to telephone Doc Bob’s emergency number, and acquire an emergency Demerol capsule to swallow on the spot. That was how real it was, mood music or not.

  The Blond Actress winced. “Oh. I’m so sorry. Breast cancer. Oh, God.”

  Unconsciously, the Blond Actress pressed both forearms against her breasts. These were the famous jutting breasts of “Marilyn Monroe.” Today, at the orphanage, as Easter visitor, the Blond Actress was not displaying her breasts in any conspicuous way. Her costume was subdued, tasteful. She’d even worn an Easter hat, with a row of cornflowers and a veil. A sprig of lily of the valley on her lapel. Dr. Mittelstadt’s breasts had been larger than the Blond Actress’s breasts, but of course they weren’t of the same genre as those of the Blond Actress, which were, or had become, works of art. On her grave marker, the Blond Actress joked, just her vital statistics should be engraved: 38-24-38.

  “Poor Edith! We knew she was sick, she’d been losing weight. Imagine, Dr. Mittelstadt almost thin. Oh, the poor woman must have lost fifty pounds while she was right here in our midst. And her skin like wax. And eyes shadowed. We’d urge her to see a doctor. But you know how stubborn she was, and brave. ‘I have no reason to see a doctor.’ She was terrified but would never admit it. Maybe you know that Christian Scientists have people who pray over them when they’re sick. Or whatever they are, I guess they don’t get ‘sick.’ These people pray, and you pray. And if you have faith, you’re supposed to be healed. And this was Edith’s way of handling the cancer, you see. By the time we realized the circumstances, what was actually wrong with her, she was already on sick leave. She refused to go to a hospital until the very end. Even then, it wasn’t her wish. The tragedy was, Edith felt her faith was inadequate. With cancer eating up her body, her very bones, still that poor stubborn woman believed it was her own fault. The word ‘cancer’ never crossed her lips.” The matro
n took a deep breath, wiping at her eyes with a tissue. “They don’t believe in ‘death,’ you see. Christian Scientists. So when it happens to them, it must be their own fault.”

  Bravely, the Blond Actress asked, “And Fleece, what happened to Fleece?”

  The matron smiled. “Oh, that Fleece. Last we heard, she’d signed up with the WACS. She got to be a sergeant, at least.”

  “Oh, Daddy. Please hold me.”

  In his warm muscled arms. He was startled, a little uneasy, but sure he loved her. Crazy for her. More now than he’d been at the outset.

  “I just feel so . . . weak, I guess. Oh, Daddy!”

  He was embarrassed, not knowing what to say. Mumbling, “What’s wrong, Marilyn? I don’t get it.”

  She shivered and burrowed into him. He could feel her heart beating rapidly as a bird’s heart. How to figure her? This gorgeous sexy woman who could talk better in public than he could, any day, one of the most famous females in the United States and maybe the world, and she’s . . . hiding in her husband’s arms?

  He loved her, that was settled. He’d take care of her. Sure.

  Though puzzled by this behavior, which was becoming more frequent.

  “Honey, what the hell? I don’t get it.”

  She read to him from the Bible. In an eager yearning voice. He guessed it was her girl’s voice, rarely heard.

  “‘And Jesus spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the spittle, and the blind man’s eyes were opened.’” She looked up at him, her own eyes strangely shining.

  What was he to say? What the hell?

  She read to him some poems she’d written. For him, she said.

  In her eager yearning girl’s voice. Her nostrils were reddened from a lingering cold, and she was sniffling; with a childlike lack of self-consciousness she wiped her nose on her fingers, so strangely breathless as if poised on the edge of a precipice.

  “In you

  the world is born anew.

  As two.

  Before you

  there was but one.”

  What was he to say? What the hell?

  She was learning sauces. Sauces! Puttanesca (with anchovies), carbonara (with bacon, eggs, heavy cream), bolognese (with ground beef, ground pork, mushrooms, cream), gorgonzola (cheeses, nutmeg, cream). She was learning the pastas and these were words, like poems, that made her smile: ravioli, penne, fettuccine, linguine, fusilli, conchigli, bucatini, tagliatelle. Oh, she was happy! Was this a dream? And, if a dream, was it a good dream or not-so-good? The kind of dream that can shift subtly to nightmare? Like pushing open an unlocked door and stepping into an empty elevator shaft?

  Waking in an overheated, unfamiliar kitchen. Rivulets of sticky perspiration on her face, between her breasts. She was clumsily chopping onions as someone chattered fiercely at her. Her eyes stung and watered from the onions. Hauling a large iron skillet out of a cupboard. Children running in and out of the kitchen screaming. These were her husband’s little nephews and nieces. She couldn’t remember their faces and she certainly couldn’t remember their names. Minced garlic and olive oil smoking in the skillet! She’d turned the flame too high. Or, thoughts flying skyward out the window, she hadn’t been watching the stove.

  Garlic! So much garlic. Their food was saturated with it. The smell of garlic on her in-laws’ breaths. On the mother-in-law’s breath. And bad teeth. Momma leaning close. Momma not to be avoided. A short jiggling little sausage of a woman. Witchy hook nose and sharp chin. Bosom collapsed into her belly. Yet she wore black dresses with collars. Her ears were pierced, she always wore earrings. Around her fatty neck, a gold cross on a gold chain. Always she wore stockings. Like Grandma Della’s cotton stockings. The Blond Actress had seen photographs of her mother-in-law when she’d been a young woman in Italy, not beautiful but good-looking, sexy as a Gypsy. Even as a girl she’d been sturdy. How many babies had that rubbery little body produced? Now it was food. All was food. For the men to devour. And did they devour it! The woman had become food and loved eating, herself.

  Years ago in Mrs. Glazer’s kitchen, she’d been happy. Norma Jeane Glazer. Mrs. Bucky Glazer. The family had taken her in as a daughter. She’d loved Bucky’s mother and had married Bucky to acquire both a husband and a mother. Oh, years ago! Her heart had been broken but she’d survived. And now she was an adult and had no need of a mother. Not this mother! She was nearing twenty-eight and no longer an orphan girl. Her husband wanted her to be a wife, and a daughter-in-law to his parents. He wanted her to be a glamorous woman in public, in his company; but only in his company, under his close supervision. Yet she was an adult; she had her own career if not an identity. Unless to be “Marilyn Monroe” was the entire career. And possibly the career would not last long. There were days that passed with excruciating slowness (these San Francisco days at her in-laws’ for instance), yet years passed rapidly as a landscape glimpsed from a speeding vehicle. No man had a right to marry her and wish to change her! As if to claim I love you was to claim I have the right to change you. “Why am I any different from him, in his prime? An athlete. You have only so many years.” She saw the knife slip from her wet fingers and bounce on the floor. “Oh!—I’m sorry, Momma.” The women in the kitchen stared at her. What did they think, she’d tried to stab their feet? Their fat ankles? Quickly she held the knife under running water at the sink and dried it on a towel and returned to her task of chopping. Oh, but she was bored! Her Grushenka heart raged with boredom.

  Time for frying chicken livers. That rich sour smell that made her gag.

  Every girl and woman in the U.S. envied her! As every man envied the Yankee Slugger.

  At the Pasadena Playhouse, she’d known she was in the presence of a great talent. The Playwright whose poetry entered her heart. His was a vision of tragic suffering in the near-at-hand. “Ordinary” life. You give your heart to the world, it’s all you have. And then it’s gone. These words spoken at a man’s gravesite, at the very end of the play, suffused with an eerie blue light that slowly faded, had haunted the Blond Actress for weeks.

  “I could act in his plays. Except there’s no role for ‘Marilyn.’” She smiled. She laughed. “That’s good. I’ll be someone else for him, then.”

  They were watching her, frying chicken livers. Last time, she’d practically set the kitchen on fire. Was she talking to herself? Smiling? Like a three-year-old, inventing stories. Almost, you didn’t want to interrupt. You could scare her, she’d drop the frying fork on your feet.

  Feverish and heavy-limbed since she’d given up Doc Bob’s prescription drugs. Vowing she’d never take anything stronger than aspirin again; she’d had a close call unable to wake or be wakened for fifteen hours of stuporous sleep, until her desperate husband had been about to call an ambulance and he’d made her promise him never again! and she’d promised, and she meant to keep that promise. So the Ex-Athlete would see how serious she was. Not just she was saying no to The Studio, no more Marilyn sex films, but she was a devoted wife, a good woman. The Ex-Athlete would see how she’d been a damned good sport this weekend. Even gone to mass with them. The women. Oh, the Sacred Heart of Jesus! There at a side altar of the cavernous incense-smelling old church. That lurid exposed heart like a part of the body you shouldn’t see. Take of my heart, and eat.

  The Ex-Athlete, the celebrity ballplayer, had been excommunicated for marrying the Blond Actress, yet the archbishop of San Francisco was a family friend and a baseball fan and “maybe, somehow” things would work out. (How? This marriage annulled?) She’d gone to mass with the women. They’d seemed delighted to take her, pretty Marilyn. The only blonde in their dark-haired olive-skinned midst. Taller than Momma by a head. She hadn’t brought a suitable hat so Momma gave her a black lace mantilla to cover her hair. Plenty of hot dark Italian eyes drifting onto her and snagging though she’d worn nothing provocative, clothes dull as a nun’s. Oh but so bored in church! The Latin mass, a priest’s high droning voice,
interrupted by bell ringing (to wake you?) and so long. But she’d been a good sport, her husband would appreciate it. And in the kitchen preparing enormous meals and cleaning up afterward while he’d been out on the boat with his brothers or tossing a baseball around at the old school with guys from the neighborhood he needed to pretend were his buddies. Signing autographs for kids or their fathers with that shy-startled smile that made you love him, though it was becoming a familiar smile, not so spontaneous as it might seem. In a movie or a play he might say I know it’s hard for you, darling. I know my family can be overbearing. My mother. He might say simply Thank you. I love you! But it wasn’t realistic to expect the man who was her husband to make such a speech, he hadn’t the words, never would he have the words, and she dared not supply them.

  Don’t you condescend to me! Once he’d turned upon her a face of incandescent fury and she flinched before him. And how sexy he was, his blood up.

  Oh, but she loved him! She was desperate with love for him. She wanted to have his babies, she wanted to be happy with him—and for him. He’d promised to make her happy. She needed to trust him. The key to her happiness wasn’t in her keeping but in his. For if he no longer loved her? The stink of frying liver and its steam were making her head spin. She’d tied her hair back to keep it out of her sweaty face. She perceived her mother-in-law and another of the older female relatives watching her with approval. She’s learning! they were saying in Italian. She’s a good girl, this wife. It was a movie scene in a movie of the sort that moves inexorably to a happy ending. She’d seen the movie many times. In this household amid her husband’s big noisy family she wasn’t the Blond Actress and certainly she wasn’t Marilyn Monroe, for no one could be “Marilyn” without a camera to record her. She wasn’t Norma Jeane, either. Only just the Ex-Athlete’s wife.

  It wasn’t in secret that she packed the purple-sequin gown to take with them to Tokyo, though he’d accuse her of this. Oh, she swore! Or if it was, if she’d purposefully hidden it from him, it was a secret meant to please him. Like the open-toed ankle-strap spike-heeled silver sandals. And certain items of black lace lingerie he’d purchased for her. She would also bring a blond wig, an almost exact replica of her platinum blond cotton-candy hair, but this wig would be discarded on the evening of her arrival in Tokyo.