Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She’s not thinking such a thought! Not her.

  She’s an American girl healthy and clean as a Band-Aid. She’s never had a soiled or a sulky thought. She’s never had a melancholy thought. She’s never had a savage thought. She’s never had a desperate thought. She’s never had an un-American thought. In the papery-thin sundress she’s a nurse with tender hands. A nurse with luscious mouth. Sturdy thighs, bountiful breasts, tiny folds of baby fat at her armpits. She’s laughing and squealing like a four-year-old as another updraft lifts her skirt. Dimpled knees, a dancer’s strong legs. This husky healthy girl. The shoulders, arms, breasts belong to a fully mature woman but the face is a girl’s face. Shivering in New York City midsummer as subway steam lifts her skirt like a lover’s quickened breath.

  “Oh! Ohhhhh.”

  It’s nighttime in Manhattan, Lexington Avenue at 51st Street. Yet the white-white lights exude the heat of midday. The goddess of love has been standing like this, legs apart, in spike-heeled white sandals so steep and so tight they’ve permanently disfigured her smallest toes, for hours. She’s been squealing and laughing, her mouth aches. There’s a gathering pool of darkness at the back of her head like tarry water. Her scalp and her pubis burn from that morning’s peroxide applications. The Girl with No Name. The Girl on the Subway Grating. The Girl of Your Dreams. It’s 2:40 A.M. and glaring-white lights focus upon her, upon her alone, blond squealing, blond laughter, blond Venus, blond insomnia, blond smooth-shaven legs apart and blond hands fluttering in a futile effort to keep her skirt from lifting to reveal white cotton American-girl panties and the shadow, just the shadow, of the bleached crotch.

  “Ohhhhhh.”

  Now she’s hugging herself beneath her big bountiful breasts. Her eyelids fluttering. Between the legs, you can trust her she’s clean. She’s not a dirty girl, nothing foreign or exotic. She’s an American slash in the flesh. That emptiness. Guaranteed. She’s been scooped out, drained clean, no scar tissue to interfere with your pleasure, and no odor. Especially no odor. The Girl with No Name, the girl with no memory. She has not lived long and she will not live long.

  Love me! Don’t hit me.

  At the edge of the floating white lights as at the edge of civility there’s a crowd, mostly male, a rogue-elephant crowd restless and aroused, gathered behind NYPD barricades since shooting began at 10:30 P.M. Traffic has been blocked off, you’d think this was official business—Oh, what? a movie being shot? Marilyn Monroe?

  And there, with the other men, anonymous like them, there the Ex-Athlete, the husband. Watching with the others. Excited aroused staring men. Men in a pack. Men through whom, massed, sexual desire passes like an agitated wave through water. There’s a smoldering mood. There’s an angry mood. There’s a mood-to-do-hurt. There’s a mood-to-grab-and-tear-and-fuck. There’s a festive mood. A celebratory mood. Everybody’s been drinking! He, the husband, is one of the pack. His brain is on fire. His cock is on fire. Angry-smoldering blue flames. Knowing how the female will touch and kiss and stroke him with those fingers. Soft breathy guilty voice. Ohhh Daddy gosh I’m sorry keeping you waiting so long why didn’t you wait for me back at the hotel gosh why didn’t you? Until the white lights are extinguished and the men-with-no-faces are gone and as in a cinematic quick cut they’re alone together in the suite at the Waldorf-Astoria with quivering crystal chandeliers overhead and a guarantee of privacy and then she’ll back away from him begging. That same baby breath. The doll eyes shiny with fear. No. Daddy, don’t. See, I’m working? Tomorrow? Everybody will know if—But his hand, the husband’s hand, will leap out. Both hands. Balled into fists. These are big hands, an athlete’s hands, practiced hands, hands with fine black hairs on the backs. Because she’s resisting him. Provoking him. Shielding her face against the justice of his blows—Whore! Are you proud? Showing your crotch like that, on the street! My wife!—with the force of his final blow sending The Girl with No Name staggering against the silk-wallpapered wall, sweet as any home run.

  “MY BEAUTIFUL LOST DAUGHTER”

  She would hold it in her trembling hand for some time before opening it. A Hallmark card with a red rose embossed on its cover and the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAUGHTER. Inside, a single sheet of paper, typed.

  June 1, 1955

  My Dear Daughter Norma Jeane,

  I am writing to you on your birthday, to wish you a Happy Birthday & to explain I have been ill, but you are in my thoughts often.

  It is your 29th birthday! Now you are an adult woman & truly no longer a girl. The career of “Marilyn Monroe” will not continue much beyond age 30 I suppose?

  I did not see your “new movie”—the vulger title & publicity attending it, giant billbords & posters, & the crude likeness of you posed with your dress lifted for all the world to see your private parts did not make me wish to purchase a ticket.

  But I would not criticize you Norma Jeane, for you have your own life. It is a Postwar Generation. You have survived your sick mother’s curse to make a career for yourself, for this you are to be commended.

  I will say, I had hoped to meet your husband! I have been an admirer of his for many years. Though not a die-hard baseball fan like some. Norma Jeane, I was very disappointed (yet not surprised) that your marriage to this steller athlete ended in divorce & such ugly prying publicity. At least there were no children to reap the shame.

  Still I hope to have a grandchild. Someday! Before it is too late.

  There is the rumor that “Marilyn Monroe” has been investigated for dealings with Communists & fellow travelers. I hope to God, my dear Daughter, that there is nothing incriminating in your past. Your Hollywood life must have many crevices hidden from the light of day. The “overthrow of the U.S. Government” is a sober threat. If the Red Communists strike a nuclear blow before we can man our weapons, how can our civilization survive? Jew spies like the Rosenbergs would betray us to the enemy, & deserve their death by Electrcution. It is wrong to defend “freedom of speech” as you have done while knowing nothing of the harsh realities of life. Everyone has seen how such traitorous individuals once heralded as “great”—Charlie Chaplin & the Negro Paul Robeson are examples—behave when cornered. But no more of this! My Daughter, when I speak with you in person, I will hope to persuade you of your folly.

  Soon I will contact you, I promise. Too many years have slipped away. Even your Mother begins to emerge in my memory as more sick than evil. In my recent illness I began to see that I must forgive her. And I must see you, my beautiful lost Daughter Norma. Before I “embark upon a long journey” across the sea.

  Your tearful Father

  AFTER THE DIVORCE

  “One ticket.”

  The ticket seller in her booth at the Sepulveda Theater, Van Nuys, chewing spearmint gum, a chunky peroxide blonde with a cast in one eye, like a doll whose head has been playfully shaken, pushed the ticket to Norma Jeane without a second glance.

  “This movie is doing pretty well, I guess?”

  The ticket seller, chewing spearmint gum, nodded briefly.

  “Marilyn Monroe is from Van Nuys, somebody said? Went to Van Nuys High?”

  The ticket seller, chewing spearmint gum, shrugged her shoulders. Saying, bored, “Yeah, I guess. I graduated in 1953. She’s a whole lot older.”

  An evening in July 1955. At the suburban movie house where fourteen years before, in her lost girlhood, she and a boy named Bucky Glazer had first “dated.” Holding sweaty hands and “necking” in the back of the theater amid odors of greasy popcorn and men’s hair oil and women’s hair spray. Where Norma Jeane and Elsie Pirig won a twelve-piece set of pale green plastic dinner and salad plates in a delicate fleur-de-lis pattern. The shock of having a winning ticket! Being called up on stage, and everybody applauding! What’d I tell you, sweetie? It’s our lucky night. Aunt Elsie had been so thrilled she’d hugged Norma Jeane and left a lipstick smear on Norma Jeane’s cheek, but it would be the last time Norma Jeane and her Aunt Elsie went to the Sepulveda Theater together.r />
  You broke my heart. No husband ever hurt me that much.

  And how many times in this movie house alone or with companions years ago she’d gazed enthralled upon the Fair Princess and the Dark Prince. Her heart yearning for that beautiful fated couple. Yearning to be them. Yet somehow to be loved by them. To be taken up into their perfect world, basking in their beauty and their love, and never was there silence in that world but always music, mood music; never were you in danger of flailing about as in a choppy sea in terror of drowning.

  Now above the movie marquee out front there loomed a ten-foot plasterboard blow-up of Marilyn Monroe in her notorious Seven-Year Itch pose. Laughing blond Marilyn standing legs apart, her pleated ivory skirt flying up to reveal legs, thighs, snug white cotton panties.

  Look at you! Cow. Udders and cunt in everybody’s face.

  Even Norma Jeane glanced up at the marquee. Seeing and not-seeing in the same instant. No wife of mine. You hear? She’d heard. Her ears ringing where he’d hit her and she could hear that ringing still, faintly. Mixed with the quickened pulsing of her blood.

  “But he’ll never hit me again. No one will.”

  This was a good time for her. This month. Last month hadn’t been so good, and the preceding months. Since the separation and the divorce in October. She’d moved several times. She’d had her telephone number changed even more frequently. Her former husband had threatened her. Her former husband followed her. Telephoned her. She told no one. She could not betray him further. HEARTBREAK OF A NINE-MONTH MARRIAGE. MARILYN’S TRUE STORY. She’d told no one the true story. She was not in possession of the true story. EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF “BADLY BEATEN” MARILYN IN NYC HOSPITAL. There’d been no eyewitnesses. Not even the fated couple. She hadn’t been taken to a hospital in New York City or anywhere else. The hotel physician had treated her. Ninety minutes later at five o’clock in the morning Whitey had come silently to the luxury suite from which the Ex-Athlete had departed and with his magical hands he’d disguised bruises and even a welt above her left eye. She’d kissed Whitey’s hands in gratitude. Seeing her blond beauty restored in the mirror.

  If not in her heart, in the mirror. And here was her Magic Friend blond and triumphant looming above the marquee of the Sepulveda Theater laughing as if nothing ugly had ever happened to her, and never would.

  “. . . went to Van Nuys High. Class of ’forty-seven.”

  “You sure? I heard it was later.”

  But I never graduated. I got married instead.

  Making her way through the lobby, and maybe there were glances in her direction—she was a stranger after all, and Van Nuys was a small town—but no one recognized her, and would not. No one ever recognized Norma Jeane when she didn’t wish to be recognized, sometimes not even troubling to wear a wig for when she wasn’t Marilyn, she wasn’t Marilyn. But tonight in her curly dark brunette poodle-cut wig, in red plastic harlequin sunglasses and no makeup not even lipstick, in a navy-blue rayon housewife dress with cloth-covered belt and buttons, bare feet in cheap straw ballerina flats. Walking with buttocks pinched together as if she’d had a shot of Novocain in her rear. Unrecognized by the very patrons who were staring at Marilyn Monroe in lobby posters and movie stills and talking of her, the Van Nuys High School girl of the mid-forties, yes but her name hadn’t been “Marilyn Monroe” then, what was it?—“She was adopted by some local couple. That guy owns the junkyard over on Reseda. Pisig? But she ran away from home. Pisig maybe raped her, it was all covered up.”

  Norma Jeane wanted to turn on these strangers and protest You don’t know anything about me, or Mr. Pirig. Leave us alone!

  In fact it was none of Norma Jeane’s business what strangers said. No more what they said about her than what they said about anyone or anything else.

  The lobby of the Sepulveda hadn’t changed much. How vividly she recalled the red fake-velvet walls, the gilt-framed mirrors and red-plush carpeting, a grimy plastic runner from the box office booth to the entrance. The “present features” and the “coming attractions” posters and stills were in identical places on the walls. Sometimes Norma Jeane had slipped into the lobby just to study stills and coming attractions. The world held so much promise! Always new movies, always a double bill. Except if a movie was a colossal hit (like The Seven-Year Itch) the bill changed every Thursday. Something to look forward to. You wouldn’t ever want to kill yourself, would you!

  The ticket taker was a teenage boy in an usher’s uniform, with mournful eyes and acne-raw cheeks. Norma Jeane felt sorry for him, no girl would want to kiss him. “It’s busy tonight. For a week night?” she said, smiling. The ticket taker shrugged and tore her ticket in two and handed her the stub. He mumbled what sounded like “Yeah. I guess.”

  He was an usher, in the employ of the movie house. He’d seen The Seven-Year Itch many times. It had been playing here since mid-June. Glancing at Norma Jeane he’d seen a woman he might’ve believed to be old enough to be his mother. Why should she be hurt by his indifference? She wasn’t.

  She was happy! Relieved. That no one recognized her. That she could make her way alone in the world like this. An unmarried woman. A woman alone. Her left hand was bare of rings. The mark of her engagement ring and wedding band on her third finger had faded. She’d removed them that night at the Waldorf-Astoria, with cold cream. Twisting and tugging at the rings until she could force them over her knuckle. Strange that her fingers were puffy, like her face. As if she’d had an allergic reaction.

  The hotel physician had given her a Seconal shot to “settle her nerves,” for she’d been hysterical and had talked wildly of injuring herself. In the early afternoon of the next day, solicitous Doc Bob had given her another injection of Seconal.

  That had been months ago. She hadn’t had Seconal injected into her bloodstream since last November.

  She didn’t need drugs! Sometimes just to sleep. But this was a good time for her. She’d come to understand there must always be good times in life to balance the bad. And this was a good time, for she was settled at last in a rented house at the southeast edge of Westwood and she had friends (not connected with the movies) who cared for her and whom she could trust. Oh, she believed this! And the executives at The Studio loved her again. And forgave her. For the new movie was making even more money for them than Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And her salary was frozen at $1,500. But she would accept this for now. She was grateful to be alive, for now. Maybe I should kill us both. We’d be better off. But he hadn’t killed her and would not. She was free of him now. She loved him, but she was free of him. She’d never been pregnant with him. He’d never known about Baby. Even if she’d wept in her sleep he’d never known. He’d held her in his arms and she’d called him Daddy and he’d comforted her but he’d never known. In October at last he’d agreed to the terms of the divorce and he’d promised not to harass her but she had reason to believe he sometimes followed her. He was watching her house in Westwood. Or he’d hired somebody. Or there were more than one of them. Unless she was imagining them! Yet she certainly hadn’t imagined the man-with-no-face in the metallic-gray Chevrolet coupe who’d driven slowly behind her on her residential street in Westwood, keeping another car between them, then on Wilshire he’d sped up to keep her in view, and she’d tried to remain calm, breathing deeply and counting her breaths as she maneuvered her car through traffic, and seeing an opportunity she cut swiftly into the lot of a drive-in bank and a few seconds later she was executing a U-turn in a side street and she pressed down on the gas pedal not seeing the metallic-gray Chevrolet in her rearview mirror yet easing through a traffic light as it changed from yellow to red and then, laughing, elated as a little girl speeding north on the San Diego freeway, she headed for Van Nuys. “Can’t catch me! None of you.”

  She drove to Van Nuys in a state of exhilaration. She exited the freeway and she drove past Van Nuys High School, which had been enlarged since the war, and she felt nothing, no emotion, unless a small stab of hurt that Mr. Haring had nev
er contacted her after she’d quit school as in a frequent dream of hers she’d imagined her English teacher arriving at the Pirig home and ringing the doorbell and asking an astonished Elsie Pirig if he could speak with Norma Jeane, and there he was sternly admonishing Norma Jeane, asking why she’d quit school without telling him? and so young? with so much promise—“One of my best students, in all my years of teaching.” But Mr. Haring hadn’t come to save her. He hadn’t written to her when she’d become Marilyn Monroe; wasn’t he proud of her? Or was he, like her former husband, ashamed of her? “I was in love with you, Mr. Haring. But I guess you didn’t love me!” It was a movie scene, yet not an original or convincing one, for there were no adequate words and in her adolescent despair Norma Jeane had been incapable of discovering them.

  She drove on. Wiping tears from her eyes, and her heart beating hard. Through the town of Van Nuys, which looked more prosperous than it had been in wartime, more residential housing, more businesses, Van Nuys Boulevard and Burbank and there was Mayer’s Pharmacy with a new white slick-tile facade (and was the beautiful beveled mirror still inside?) and in a state of exhilaration and dread Norma Jeane drove to Reseda and past the Pirig house—that house!—covered now in asphalt siding meant to resemble red brick but otherwise unchanged. There, Norma Jeane’s attic window! She wondered if the Pirigs still took in foster children. Her nostrils contracted; there was a smell of burning rubber in the air. A hazy discoloration of the air. She smiled to see that Warren Pirig’s business had spilled out into a side yard. Junked cars, a pickup truck, and three motorcycles FOR SALE. Norma Jeane had been thinking that the Pirigs, too, had abandoned her, but in fact Elsie Pirig had written to her in care of The Studio and in hurt and anger she’d ripped up the letters. How sweet, her revenge!—“I’m driving past your ugly house right now. I’m ‘Marilyn Monroe’ now. You’re inside, it’s suppertime, and I’m not going to stop and visit you. You’d love to see me now, wouldn’t you! You’d look at me now, Warren, wouldn’t you! You’d offer me a beer out of the icebox, like an adult. You’d be respectful. You’d ask me please to sit down and you’d stare and stare and I’d say, ‘Didn’t you love me, Warren, just a little? You must have seen how I was in love with you.’ And I’d be polite to Elsie too. Oh, I’d be gracious! Sweet as The Girl Upstairs in The Seven-Year Itch. As if nothing had come between us. I wouldn’t stay long, explaining that I had another engagement in Van Nuys; I’d go away promising to send you comp tickets to my next premiere in Hollywood and you’d never hear from me again. My revenge!”