Already the pain throbbing in her body was becoming remote—as if belonging to another, weaker girl. She was climbing up out of it by an exertion of her will! Climbing up the steep roof and into the sky, where clouds were banked like steps, steps leading upward, ridged with light from the sun setting in the west at the very edge of the horizon. A misstep, a moment of doubt, and she might fall to the ground limp as a broken doll but this would not happen, it was my will that it would not happen and so it did not. She foresaw that her life from this point onward would be hers to direct, so long as Divine Love flooded her heart.
By Christmas, she’d been promised. In which direction, Norma Jeane’s new home?
The Girl
1942–1947
THE SHARK
There was the shape of the shark before it was the shark. There was the silence of the deep green water. The shark gliding in deep green water. I must’ve been underwater and out of the surf though not swimming, my eyes were open and stinging from the salt—I was a good swimmer in those days, my boyfriends took me to Topanga Beach, to Will Rogers, Las Tunas, Redondo, but my favorites were Santa Monica and Venice Beach, “Muscle Beach,” where the good-looking body-builders and surfers hang out—and I was staring at it, at the shark, the shape of the shark poised, gliding in dark water, so I could not have guessed its size or even what it was.
When you least expect it, the shark lunges. God has granted it great tearing jaws, rows of fiery razor teeth.
Once we saw a shark strung up still living, streaming blood on the pier at Hermosa. My fiancé and me. We’d just gotten engaged, I was fifteen years old, just a girl. God, was I happy!
Yes, but the mother, you know the mother’s at Norwalk.
I’m not marrying the mother, I’m marrying Norma Jeane.
She’s a good girl. She seems so. But it doesn’t always show itself when they’re that young.
What doesn’t?
What might happen later. To her.
I didn’t hear! I wasn’t listening. Let me tell you I was in seventh heaven, engaged at fifteen and the envy of every girl I knew, and I’d be married just after my sixteenth birthday instead of returning to high school for two more years and with the U.S. at war, like The War of the Worlds, who knew if there’d be a future?
“TIME TO GET MARRIED”
I
“Norma Jeane, know what I think? It’s time for you to get married.”
These happy surprised words just sprang out, like switching on a radio and there’s a voice singing. She hadn’t planned them exactly. She wasn’t a woman to plan utterances. She knew what she’d meant to say when she heard herself say it. Rarely did she regret anything she said, for simply to say it was what she’d meant to do. Wasn’t it? And then once it’s said it’s said. Pushing open the screen door to the back porch, where they’d set up the ironing board and the girl was ironing, most of the laundry basket emptied out and Warren’s short-sleeved shirts on wire hangers overhead, and there was Norma Jeane smiling up at Elsie, not hearing her exactly, or if hearing not absorbing, or if absorbing assuming it was one of Elsie’s jokes, Norma Jeane in short shorts, polka-dot halter top showing the pale tops of her chubby breasts, barefoot, a glow of perspiration on her skin, blond down on her legs and fuzz at her underarms and her curly-frizzy dirty-blond hair pulled back from her face in one of Elsie’s old scarfs. What a sunshiny good-natured girl this one was, unlike others who, when you approached them even with a determined smile on your face, stared and flinched as if they were expecting to be walloped, yes, there’d been some, younger ones, boys and girls both, who’d wet their pants when you came up on them unexpectedly. But Norma Jeane wasn’t one of these. Norma Jeane wasn’t like anyone they’d ever taken in before.
That was the problem. Norma Jeane was a special case.
Eighteen months with them sharing a second-floor attic room with Warren’s girl cousin, who was working at Radio Plane Aircraft. And from the first they’d liked her. Almost you could say, maybe it’s an exaggeration, but almost you could say they loved her. So different from the usual run of kids sent up by the county. Quiet but paying attention and quick to smile, laugh at jokes (and there were plenty of jokes in the Pirig household, you bet!), and never failed to do her chores and sometimes other kids’ chores, kept her half of the attic room neat and her bed made the way they’d been taught at the Home and lowered her eyes to say grace to herself before meals if nobody else said it, and Warren’s cousin Liz laughed at her, saying she was down on her knees by her bed praying so much, you’d think whatever it was she was praying for would’ve showed up by now. But Elsie never laughed at Norma Jeane. This girl so fainthearted, if there was a mere mouse struggling in a trap in the kitchen dragging itself across the floor, or Warren squashed a roach beneath his foot, or Elsie herself hauled off and whacked a fly with the swatter, she’d look like it was the end of the world, not to say how she’d run from the room if there was talk of something hurtful (like certain details of the war news, men buried alive on the death march after Corregidor), and naturally she was squeamish helping Elsie pluck and clean chickens, but Elsie never laughed. Elsie was the one always wanted a daughter and Warren hadn’t ever been one hundred percent sold on taking in foster kids except the money came in handy, Warren was the kind of man wanted kids of his own or no kids but he’d had only good things to say about Norma Jeane too. So how to spring this on her now?
Like wringing a kitten’s neck! But God knows it had to be done.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking. It’s time for you to get married.”
“Aunt Elsie, huh? What?”
There was somebody bawling out of the little plastic radio on the porch railing, sounded like—who was it?—Caruso. Elsie did what she never would do, switched the radio off.
“Ever think about it? Getting married? You’ll be sixteen in June.”
Norma Jeane was smiling at Elsie, perplexed, the heavy iron poised upended in her hand. Even in surprise, the girl knew enough to lift the hot iron from the board.
“I was married, almost that young. There was special circumstances there too.”
Norma Jeane said, “M-married? Me?”
“Well”—Elsie laughed—“not me. We’re not talking about me.”
“But—I don’t have any steady boyfriend.”
“You have too many boyfriends.”
“But no steady. I’m not in l-love.”
“Love?” Elsie laughed. “You can get in love. Your age, you can get in love fast.”
“You’re teasing, aren’t you? Aunt Elsie? I guess you’re teasing?”
Elsie frowned. Fumbling for her cigarettes in her pocket. She was barelegged, pale vein-splotched legs fat at the knees but still shapely below, and her bare feet in house slippers. Her housedress was front-buttoned, cheap cotton and not too clean, straining at the buttonholes. Sweating more than she liked, and her underarms smelly. She wasn’t accustomed in this household to having her word questioned except by Warren Pirig, so now her fingers twitched dangerously. How about I slap your face you sly little bitch looking so innocent?
There was so much rage in her so suddenly! Though she knew, sure, she knew, Norma Jeane wasn’t the one to blame. Her husband was the one to blame, and even that poor bastard was halfway innocent.
So she believed. Judging from what she’d seen. But maybe she hadn’t seen everything?
What she’d seen, what she’d been seeing for months till finally she couldn’t not see it any longer and still respect herself, was Warren watching the girl. And Warren Pirig wasn’t one to watch anybody. Talking to you, he’d swerve his eyes off into a corner, like you weren’t worth his looking at because he’d seen you before and knew who you were. Even with the drinking buddies he liked and respected he’d be looking somewhere else half the time like there was nothing to see, exactly, nothing that warranted the effort. And this was a man with damaged vision in his left eye, from amateur boxing days in the U.S. Army in the Philippines, and twenty-twenty
vision in his right eye, so he refused to wear glasses saying they “got in the way.” To be fair to Warren, you had to grant he didn’t look at himself either, not with care. In too much of a hurry to shave half the time, or put on clean shirts, unless Elsie laid them out for him and tossed the soiled shirts into the laundry where he couldn’t fish them out; for a man who was a salesman, even if it was scrap metal and used tires and a few secondhand cars and trucks, he wasn’t what you’d call concerned for the impression he made on others. Good-looking when he’d been young and lean and in uniform when Elsie first set eyes on him at age seventeen up in San Fernando, but he hadn’t been young and lean and in uniform for a long time now.
Maybe if it was Joe Louis standing in front of him, or President Roosevelt, they’d get Warren Pirig’s attention. But no ordinary person, and for sure no fifteen-year-old kid.
Elsie saw this man’s eyes follow the girl like ball bearings moving in their sockets. She saw this man staring like he’d never stared at any other county kids except if one of them was making trouble or gave a hint of intending to make trouble. But Norma Jeane, this man was looking at her.
Not at meals. Elsie noticed that. Wondering, was it deliberate? The only time they were all seated together, facing one another in close quarters. Warren was a big man, a heavy eater, and meals were for eating, not gabbing as he called it, and Norma Jeane was likely to be quiet at the table, giggling at Elsie’s jokes but never saying much of her own, she had little-lady table manners they’d taught her at county that were sort of comical, Elsie thought, in the Pirig household, so she’d stay sort of still and shy, though eating about as much as anybody excepting Warren. So, in these close quarters, Warren seemed never to look at Norma Jeane as he never looked at anybody, often reading the paper he’d folded back to a vertical strip; it wasn’t rudeness exactly but just Warren Pirig’s way. At other times, though, even with Elsie close by, Warren would watch that girl like he didn’t know what he was doing, and it was this helplessness in him, a kind of sick drowning look in his face—and that face a banged-up face, a face like mountain terrain on a map—that lodged deep in Elsie so she began to brood on it and found herself thinking about it when she didn’t realize she was thinking about anything at all, and Elsie wasn’t the brooding type, there were relatives she’d been feuding with for twenty years and old ex-woman friends she’d cut dead on the street, but it was correct to say she never brooded over any of these persons; she simply didn’t think about them at all. But now there was a smudged space in her brain that was her husband and this girl, and she resented it because Elsie Pirig wasn’t the jealous type and never had been because she was too proud for such yet now discovered herself checking through the girl’s things in her attic room hot as an oven already in April and wasps buzzing beneath the eaves, and all she found was Norma Jeane’s red-leather diary the girl had already shown her, proud of this gift from the director at the L.A. orphanage; Elsie had leafed through the diary, her hands actually shaking (her! Elsie Pirig! this wasn’t her!) in dread of seeing something she didn’t want to see, but there was nothing of special interest in Norma Jeane’s diary or in any case nothing that Elsie in her haste had time to ponder. There were poems, probably copied out of books or things she’d been assigned at school, carefully written in Norma Jeane’s schoolgirl hand:
There was a bird flown so high
He could no longer say, “This is the sky.”
There was a fish in the ocean so low
He could no longer say, “There is nowhere else to go.”
And:
If the blind man can see
What about me?
Elsie liked that one but could make no sense of others, especially when they didn’t rhyme the way a poem should.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Even less comprehensible were Christian Science prayers, Elsie guessed they were. The poor kid seemed actually to believe this stuff she’d copied out, a single prayer to a page:
Heavenly Father
Let me join Your perfect being
In all that is Eternal—Spiritual—Harmonious
And let Divine Love resist all Evil
For Divine Love is Forever
Help me to love as You love
There is no PAIN
There is no SICKNESS
There is no DEATH
There is no SORROW
There is only DIVINE LOVE FOREVER.
How could anybody make sense of this, still less believe it? Maybe Norma Jeane’s mentally sick mother was Christian Science and that’s where the girl had picked it up; you had to wonder whether stuff like this had pushed the poor woman over the edge or whether, already over the edge, you grabbed on to stuff like this to save your life. Elsie flipped another page and read:
Heavenly Father
Thank You for my new Family!
Thank You for my Aunt Elsie I love so!
Thank You for Mr. Pirig who is kind to me!
Thank You for this new Home!
Thank You for my new school!
Thank You for my new friends!
Thank You for my new life!
Help my Mother to become Well again
And Perpetual Light shine upon her
All the days of her life
And help my Mother to Love me
In such a way she will not wish to hurt me!
Thank You Heavenly Father AMEN.
Quickly Elsie shut the diary and thrust it back into Norma Jeane’s underwear drawer. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the gut. She wasn’t the kind of woman to go through anybody’s things and she hated a snoop and, God damn, she resented it that Warren and the girl had pushed her to this. Descending the steep stairs, she was so rattled she nearly fell. She’d made up her mind to tell Warren the girl would have to go.
Go where?
I don’t care where the hell. But out of this house.
Are you crazy? Sending her back to the orphanage for no reason?
You want me to wait till there’s a reason, you bastard?
Call Warren Pirig a bastard even if you’re teary-eyed with hurt and you’d be in danger of getting whacked across the face with his closed fist; she’d seen him once (Warren was drunk and provoked; these were special circumstances for which she’d forgiven him) smash through a door locked against him. Warren weighed two hundred thirty pounds last time the doctor weighed him, and Elsie, five foot two, weighed just under one hundred forty. Figure the odds!
Like they say in boxing, a mismatch.
So Elsie decided to say nothing to Warren. Keeping her distance from him like a woman already wronged. Like that song by Frank Sinatra you heard a lot on the radio, “I’ll Never Smile Again.” But Warren was working twelve hours a day hauling rotted tires over to East L.A. to a Goodyear plant, where they were buying scrap rubber that, on December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, wasn’t worth five cents a pound. (“So how much are they paying you now?” Elsie asked, excited, and Warren looked somewhere over her head and said, “Just enough to make it worthwhile.” They’d been married twenty-six years, and Elsie had yet to know how much Warren made a year in actual cash.) This meant that Warren was out of the house all day and when he returned for supper he wasn’t in any mood for chitchat, as he called it, washed face and hands and arms to the elbow and got a beer from the icebox and sat down to eat and ate and pushed away from the table when he was through and a few minutes later you could hear him snoring, flat out on their bed with only his work boots off. If Elsie was keeping her distance from Warren, purse-lipped and indignant, Warren took no notice.
And the next day was laundry day: meaning that Elsie kept Norma Jeane out of school for part of the morning to help her with the leaky Kelvinator washing machine and the wringer that was forever getting stuck and toting baskets of clothes outside to hang them on the backyard lines (admittedly,
it was against county regulations to keep a child out of school for such a purpose but Elsie knew she could trust Norma Jeane never to breathe a word, unlike one or two other ungrateful little bitches who’d tattled to authorities in bygone years), and it wasn’t the right time to bring up such a grave subject, not when Norma Jeane, cheerful and sweaty and uncomplaining as usual, was doing most of the work. Even singing to herself in her sweet, breathy voice, top tunes of the week from Your Hit Parade. There was Norma Jeane lifting damp sheets with her slender, surprisingly muscled arms and pinning them to the line while Elsie in a straw hat to protect her eyes from the sun, a Camel burning between her lips, panted like a worn-out old mule. Several times, too, Elsie had to leave Norma Jeane to go inside the house to use the bathroom, or have some coffee, or make a telephone call, leaning against the kitchen counter watching the fifteen-year-old hanging laundry on her tiptoes like a dancer: that sweet little ass of hers, even Elsie who was no lezzie could appreciate.
Marlene Dietrich they said was a lezzie. Greta Garbo. Mae West?
Staring at Norma Jeane out in the backyard struggling with laundry. Ratty-looking palm trees, and crap from their leaves underfoot. The girl taking care as she hung Warren’s billowing sports shirt up to dry. And Warren’s shorts big enough, when the breeze caught them just right, to practically wrap around the girl’s head. God damn Warren Pirig! What was there between him and Norma Jeane? Or was it all just in Warren’s head, in that dumb-ass sick yearning look Elsie hadn’t seen from him, or from any man, in twenty years? Pure nature it was, a man stumbling unconscious. You can’t blame him, can you? Can’t blame yourself. Yet: she was the man’s wife, she had to protect herself. A woman would have to protect herself against a girl like Norma Jeane. For there was Warren approaching the girl from behind in that strangely graceful way of his you didn’t expect from a man of that size except if you recall he’d been a boxer and boxers have to be quick on their feet. Warren cupping the girl’s ass like twin melons in his big hands and she turns to him astonished and he buries his face in her neck and her long curly dirty-blond hair falls like a curtain over his head.