Elsie and Norma Jeane were given their prize: a twelve-piece set of plastic dinner and salad plates in a fleur-de-lis pattern. The five prizewinners, all women save for one plump, elderly man in a tattered U.S. Army fatigue hat, were generously applauded. Elsie hugged Norma Jeane right up there onstage and nearly burst into tears, she was so happy.
“Not just plastic plates! This is a sign.”
Elsie hadn’t told Norma Jeane, but the boy she hoped to introduce her to, the twenty-one-year-old son of a woman friend from Mission Hills, was to be in the audience that night. The plan was, he could see Norma Jeane with Elsie at a discreet distance and give it some thought, whether he’d like to date her. There was the age difference, only six years, which would mean nothing to adults—in fact, it would be in the girl’s favor to be six years younger—but at his age, his mother told Elsie, six years seemed almost too much. “Give my girl a chance. Just look at her,” Elsie begged. She hadn’t any doubt that if he’d been in the audience the boy must have been impressed with Norma Jeane up there onstage like a beauty queen. And it would be a sign for him too.
This girl brings good luck!
Out front beneath the darkened marquee Elsie lingered with Norma Jeane, expecting her woman friend and the boy to come up to them. But this didn’t happen. (Elsie hadn’t seen them anywhere in the audience. God damn, if they hadn’t been there!) Maybe because too many other people were milling around wanting to talk to them. Some were acquaintances and neighbors but most were total strangers. “Everybody loves a winner, eh?” Elsie nudged Norma Jeane in the ribs.
By degrees the excitement subsided. The interior of the lobby was darkened. Bessie Glazer and her son Bucky hadn’t showed up and what did that mean? Elsie was too elated to think much about it. She and Norma Jeane drove back toward Reseda Street, the box of plastic plates in the backseat of Warren’s 1939 Pontiac sedan.
“We’ve been putting it off, hon. But tonight we’d better talk about you-know-what.”
Norma Jeane said, in a quiet, resigned voice, “Aunt Elsie, I’m just so afraid.”
“Of what? Of getting married?” Elsie laughed. “Most girls your age are afraid of not getting married.”
Norma Jeane said nothing. She was picking at her thumbnail. Elsie knew the girl had wild notions of running away to join the WACs or some nurses’ training program in L.A., but the fact was she was too young. She wasn’t going anywhere except where Elsie intended her to go.
“Look, sweetie. You’re making too much of it. You’ve seen a boy’s—a man’s—thing, haven’t you?”
Elsie was so crude and blunt, Norma Jeane laughed, startled.
She nodded, just barely.
“Well, you know—it gets bigger. You know that.”
Again, just barely, Norma Jeane nodded.
“It has to do with them looking at you. It makes them want to—you know—‘make love.’”
Norma Jeane said, naively, “I never really looked, Aunt Elsie. I mean—at the Home, the boys would show us their things to sort of scare us, I guess. And here in Van Nuys, on dates. They wanted me to touch it, I guess.”
“Who was this?”
Norma Jeane shook her head. Not evasively but with an air of genuine confusion. “I’m not sure. I mean, I mix them up. There was more than one of them. Different dates. And different times. I mean, if a guy was fresh with me one time he’d apologize and ask me to give him another chance and I always do, and the next time he’s on his good behavior. Most guys, they can be gentlemen if you insist. It’s like Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert: It Happened One Night.”
Elsie grunted. “If they respect you.”
Norma Jeane said earnestly, “But the ones who wanted me to touch their—things—I wasn’t disgusted with them or mad because I can see that’s how guys are, they’re born like that. But I’d get scared and skittish and start giggling like I do, like I’m being tickled!” Norma Jeane giggled now, uneasily. She was sitting on the edge of the car seat as if on eggshells. “One time, this was at the beach at Las Tunas, I was in a guy’s car and I jumped out and ran to this other guy’s car parked a little ways away where he was with his date—we all knew one another, we’d come out together—and I asked the couple please to let me in and I rode back to Van Nuys with them, and the other guy, my date, was driving close behind us trying to ram us with his bumper! I made more of a fuss than I’d meant to, I guess.”
Elsie smiled. She loved it, this teenage sexpot of hers making the horny bastards squirm. “Kid! You’re too much. When was this?”
“Last Saturday.”
“Last Saturday!” Elsie chuckled. “So he wanted you to touch it, eh? Smart girl, not to. That just leads to the next step.” Elsie paused suggestively, but Norma Jeane didn’t inquire about the next step. “The word for it is ‘penis’ and it’s to make babies, as I guess you know. On the order of a hose. The ‘seed’ shoots through it.”
Norma Jeane giggled suddenly. Elsie laughed, too. In a way, if you’re talking about hydraulics, there’s not much to say. Another way, there’s so much you’re paralyzed to begin.
Over the years Elsie had had to instruct her foster daughters about sex (the boys she didn’t, figuring they knew already), and each time she abbreviated the telling more. Some girls looked shocked and scared when she told them; some burst into hysterical giggles; some stared at Elsie in disbelief. Others were only just embarrassed because they already knew more than they wanted to know about sex.
One girl who, it later turned out, had been raped by her own father and uncles, shoved Elsie and shouted into her face, “Shut up, you old bat!”
By age fifteen, and being a smart inquisitive girl, Norma Jeane surely knew a lot about sex. Even Christian Science had to acknowledge it existed.
Elsie was too edgy and excited to return home right away so she drove past Reseda toward the edge of town. Warren wouldn’t be home, probably, and when Warren wasn’t home you kept waiting for him to come home not knowing what mood he’d be in.
Elsie felt Norma Jeane quicken in anticipation, like a little girl. She’d told Elsie that years ago before her mother had gotten sick she’d taken Norma Jeane for long dreamy Sunday rides that were the happiest memories of her childhood.
Elsie persisted. “When you’re married, Norma Jeane, and it’s OK to do it, you’ll feel different. Your husband will show you.” She paused, unable to resist. “I’ve got him picked out and he’s a nice sweet kid, he’s had a number of girlfriends, and he’s a Christian.”
“You have him p-picked out, Aunt Elsie? Who is he?”
“You’ll see soon enough. It isn’t one hundred percent certain. Like I say, he’s a normal red-blooded kid, a high school athlete, and he knows the score.” Elsie paused. Again she couldn’t resist. “Warren knew the score, or thought he did. Boy oh boy.” She shook her head vehemently.
Norma Jeane saw Elsie stroke the bruised underside of her jaw. Elsie had asked Norma Jeane to help her disguise the bruises, claiming she’d gotten them from banging into the bathroom door in the middle of the night. Norma Jeane had murmured, “Oh, Aunt Elsie. That’s too bad.” And not another word. As if knowing damned well what had caused the bruises. And Elsie’s stiff limping around the house like somebody’d shoved a broomstick up her ass.
Knowing, too, a deeper female wisdom, not to speak of it.
These past several days, Warren had avoided looking in Norma Jeane’s direction. If he had to be in the room with her he’d turn the blind side of his face toward her. A wounded tenderness was in his eyes when Norma Jeane spoke to him unavoidably but even then he wouldn’t look directly at her, which must have puzzled and hurt her. He’d stayed away from evening meals lately, eating supper at one of his taverns or going without.
Elsie was saying, “On your wedding night, you could maybe get a little drunk. I don’t mean drunk, but high on champagne. The man usually lies on the woman and pushes his thing in, and she’s ready for him, or should be. So it doesn’t hurt.”
/> Norma Jeane shuddered. She was looking sidelong at Elsie, doubtfully.
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“Not always.”
“Oh, Aunt Elsie! Everybody says it hurts.”
Elsie relented. “Well. Sometimes. In the beginning.”
“But a girl bleeds, doesn’t she?”
“A virgin might.”
“It must hurt, then.”
Elsie sighed. “I guess you are a virgin, eh?”
Norma Jeane nodded solemnly.
Elsie said, awkwardly, “Well. Your husband sort of prepares you. Down there. You get wet and ready for him. Haven’t you ever?”
“Ever what?” Norma Jeane’s voice quavered.
“Wanted to. ‘Make love.’”
Norma Jeane considered this question. “I like them to kiss me, mostly, and I love to cuddle. Like with a doll. Except I’m the doll.” She giggled in her high-pitched, startled, squeaky way. “If my eyes are closed I don’t even know who it is. Which one it is.”
“Norma Jeane, what a thing to say!”
“Why? If it’s only just kissing and cuddling. Why’s it so important which guy you’re with?”
Elsie shook her head, mildly shocked. Why was it important? Damned if she knew.
Thinking how Warren would’ve murdered her. If she’d so much as kissed another man, let alone had an affair. Sure, he’d been unfaithful to her plenty of times and she’d been hurt and mad as hell and she’d showed him what she thought of him, jealous and tearful, and he’d denied any wrongdoing but obviously liked it, his wife’s reaction. That was part of it, part of marriage, wasn’t it? When you’re young, at least.
Elsie said, with a pretense of indignation, “You’re supposed to be faithful to one man. ‘In sickness and in health till death do us part.’ It’s a religious thing, I guess. They want to make sure that if you have kids it’s your husband’s kids, not somebody else’s. You’ll be married in a Christian ceremony, I’ll make sure of that.”
Norma Jeane bit at her thumbnail. Elsie, cruising the car, reached over to slap lightly at her hand. At once Norma Jeane dropped her hands into her lap and clasped them tightly together.
“Oh, Aunt Elsie! I’m sorry. I guess I’m just—scared.”
“Hon, I know. But you’ll get over it.”
“What if I have a baby?”
“Well. That won’t come till a little later.”
“Not if I get married next month! I could have a baby inside a year.” This was true, though Elsie hadn’t wanted to consider it just yet.
“You could ask him to use protection. You know—one of those rubber things.”
Norma Jeane crinkled her nose. “One of those things like a little balloon?”
“They’re nasty,” Elsie agreed, “but the other’s worse. His age, your husband would be going into the army or navy or whatever, maybe he’s already signed up, and he wouldn’t want his wife to get pregnant any more than you’d want it. And if he’s overseas, you’re safe.”
Norma Jeane brightened. “He might go overseas? Yes. He’d be in the war.”
“All the men are going.”
“I wish I could go! I wish I was a man.”
Elsie had to laugh at this. Norma Jeane, looking the way she did, with her pretty face and childlike ways, and so easily upset by hurtful things—wishing she was a man!
Don’t we all. No such luck. Play the hand you’re dealt.
Elsie had driven into the dead end of an unpaved road. In the near distance, though you couldn’t see it in the dark, there were raised railroad tracks. The year before, the bullet-riddled body of a man from out of town had been found somewhere around here. A “gangland assassination,” the papers called it. Now wind blew through the tall grass like the spirits of the dead. What men do to one another. Everybody’s share of hurt. Elsie was thinking how, if this was a movie scene, her and Norma Jeane in the car in this desolate place, something would happen: there’d be a signal that something would happen in the movie music. In actual life, there was no music and there were no cues. You drifted into a scene not knowing if it was important or unimportant. If you’d remember it all your life or forget it within the hour. Just people alone together in a movie, and the camera watching them, it meant something crucial would happen; the fact of the camera meant that something would happen. Maybe it was the excitement of winning the plastic plates (which she could use, and Warren would be impressed) but her thoughts were flying in all directions tonight and she was having to suppress the urge to take hold of Norma Jeane’s hand and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. She said, as if they’d been talking about this, “Movies like the ones tonight are OK and make you feel good but they’re a bunch of lies, y’know? Bob Hope’s funny as hell but he’s not, y’know, real. The movies I liked were Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Scarface—Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni. Mean, sexy men that get theirs in the end.” Elsie backed the car around and drove to Reseda. There was no forestalling returning to the house; it was getting late and she was thirsty for a beer, not in the kitchen but she’d take it into the bedroom with her and drink it slowly to put her in the mood for sleep. She said, in a brighter voice, as if in fact this was a movie scene but its tone was shifting, “You might actually get to like your hubby, Norma Jeane! And want kids. I did at one time.”
Norma Jeane’s tone, too, had shifted. She said suddenly, “I’d maybe like kids. It’s the normal thing, isn’t it? An actual baby. Once it’s born and out of your body. Once it couldn’t hurt you. I love cuddling with babies. It wouldn’t have to be my own, even. Just any baby.” She paused, breathless. “But if it was my baby, I’d have the right. Twenty-four hours of the day.”
Elsie glanced at the girl, surprised at her change of mind. Yet this was like Norma Jeane: you’d see her brooding and turned in upon herself, then it was like a switch was thrown when she saw you and she became perky and sunshiny and quivering with good feelings as if a camera had been turned on her.
More emphatically, Norma Jeane said, “Yes! I’d like to have a b-baby. Maybe just one? Then I wouldn’t ever be alone—would I?”
Elsie said sadly, “Not for a while.” Sighing. “Not till she goes away and leaves you.”
“‘She’? I don’t want a girl baby. My mother had girl babies. I want a boy baby.”
Norma Jeane spoke with such vehemence that Elsie glanced at her in alarm.
A strange, strange girl. Maybe I never knew her?
Elsie was relieved to see that Warren’s battered pickup wasn’t in the driveway; except this meant he’d be coming in late, no doubt drunk, and if he’d lost at cards as he’d been doing lately he’d be in a rough mood, but Elsie put off thinking about that just now. The buttercup-yellow plastic plates she would set prominently on the kitchen table for Warren to discover and wonder—what the hell? She could imagine the quizzical look on his face. And he’d like being told the good news. He’d smile, maybe. Anything you win for nothing, anything that falls into your lap, it’s all gravy, right? Elsie kissed Norma Jeane good night. In a low voice saying, “All that I told you tonight, Norma Jeane—it’s for your own good, hon. You need to be married because you can’t stay with us and, God knows, you don’t want to go back to—that place.”
This revelation that had so stunned Norma Jeane only a few days before seemed now to have been calmly absorbed by the girl. “I know, Aunt Elsie.”
“You have to grow up sometime. None of us can avoid it.”
Norma Jeane laughed that sad squeaky little laugh. “I guess if my number’s up, Aunt Elsie, it’s up.”
THE EMBALMER’S BOY
“I love you! Now my life is perfect.”
There came the day, it wasn’t quite three weeks after Norma Jeane’s sixteenth birthday, June 19, 1942, a day when she exchanged sacred wedding vows with a boy she’d loved at first sight, as he’d loved her at first sight, gazing at each other in tender astonishment—Hi! I’m Bucky and I’m N-norma Jeane—as at a discreet distance Bess Glaz
er and Elsie Pirig looked on smiling and already teary-eyed, foreseeing this very hour. It’s a fact, every woman at the wedding in the First Church of Christ, Mission Hills, California, was crying that day at the sight of the beautiful young bride looking perhaps fourteen years old as her bridegroom towered over her at six feet three, one hundred ninety pounds, appearing himself no older than eighteen, an awkward yet gallant boy, good-looking like a full-grown Jackie Coogan with spiky dark hair trimmed short to expose his protruding, pinkening ears. He’d been a high school champion wrestler and a football player and you could see how he’d protect that little girl who’d been an orphan. Love at first sight on both sides. Hardly engaged a month. It’s the times, the war. Everything speeded up.
Just look at their faces!
The bride’s face shone luminous-pale as mother-of-pearl except for her delicately rouged cheeks. Her eyes like dancing flames. Her gleaming dark-blond hair like captured sunshine framing her perfect doll face, part in ringlets and part braided by the bridegroom’s own mother and twined with lily-of-the-valley upon which the gossamer bridal veil floated weightless as a breath. Everywhere in the small church the sweet aching innocence of lily of the valley that scent I will recall through my life the scent of happiness fulfilled. And the terror that my heart would stop and God would gather me into His bosom.
And the wedding gown, so beautiful. Yards of shiny white satin, a tight-fitted bodice, and long tight-fitted sleeves with ruffled cuffs, yards and yards of eye-dazzling satin, white folds and pleats and ribbons and lace and tiny bows and tiny white pearl buttons and a five-foot train and never could you guess the gown was secondhand belonging to Bucky’s sister Lorraine; of course it had been altered to fit Norma Jeane’s height and figure, dry-cleaned and spotless and lovely, and the bride’s white satin high-heeled sandals spotless, too, though purchased at a Goodwill shop in Van Nuys for only five dollars. The bridegroom’s oyster-shell dinner jacket fitted his broad shoulders tightly, you could see he was a strong, husky no-nonsense boy, scraped through at Mission Hills High, Class of ’39, though he’d been absent many days hating textbooks, classrooms, blackboards, and having to sit, sit, sit in desks too small for him listening to old-maid teachers of both sexes drone on and on like they had some secret of life, which obviously they didn’t, for sure. Bucky Glazer was offered sports scholarships from UCLA, Pacific University, San Diego State, and elsewhere but he’d turned them all down, preferring to earn some money and be independent, got a part-time job as an embalmer’s assistant at the oldest most prestigious funeral home in Mission Hills so the Glazers went around boasting their boy was the next thing to an actual embalmer and an embalmer is the next thing to the medical doctor who does autopsies, a pathologist; but also Bucky worked night shifts at Lockheed Aviation on the assembly line, manufacturing miracle bombers like the B-17 destined to bomb the hell out of America’s enemies.