Blonde Read online

  How Norma Jeane would love her blond baby doll! One of the great loves of her childhood.

  Except: it made her uneasy that the doll’s arms and legs were so clearly boneless, and loose, and could be made to flop about oddly. If you laid the doll down on her back, her feet just flopped.

  Norma Jeane stammered, “W-what is her name, Mother?”

  Gladys located a bottle of aspirin, shook several out onto her palm, and swallowed them dry. Calling out in her swaggering Harlow voice, and with a droll movement of her plucked eyebrows, “That’s up to you, kiddo. She’s yours.”

  How hard Norma Jeane tried to think of the doll’s name. She tried and tried; but it was like stammering, in her thoughts: she couldn’t think of any name at all. She began to worry, sucking at her thumb. Names are so important!—you must have a name for someone or you couldn’t think of that person, and they must have a name for you, or—where would you be?

  Norma Jeane cried, “Mother, what is the d-doll’s name? Please.”

  More amused than annoyed, or seeming so, Gladys shouted from the other room, “Hell, call the thing Norma Jeane—it’s about as bright as you, sometimes. I swear.”

  So much excitement, the child was exhausted.

  Time for Norma Jeane’s nap.

  Yet: the phone rang. As the afternoon waned into early evening. And the child thought, anxiously, Why doesn’t Mother answer the phone? What if it’s Father? Or does she know it isn’t Father and how does she know this, if this is what she knows?

  In the Grimms’ fairy tales that Grandma Della read to Norma Jeane, things happened that might be dreams, that were strange and scary as dreams, but were not. You would like to wake from such things but you could not.

  How sleepy Norma Jeane was! She’d been so hungry and eaten so much cake, a piggy-piggy eating so much birthday cake for breakfast, leaving her sickish now and her teeth aching and maybe Gladys had poured a bit of her special colorless drink into Norma Jeane’s grape juice—“Just a thimbleful, for fun”—so her eyes wouldn’t stay open, her head lolled on her shoulders like a wooden head, and Gladys had to walk her into the hot, airless bedroom and lay her on the sagging bed, where Gladys didn’t much like her to sleep, on the chenille spread, so Gladys tugged off her shoes and, ever fastidious about such things, placed a towel beneath Norma Jeane’s head, “So you won’t drool onto my pillow.” The pumpkin-colored chenille spread was one that Norma Jeane recognized, from previous visits to other residences of her mother’s, but its color had faded; it was stippled with cigarette burns and mysterious smears and smudges, of the hue of rust or of old faded bloodstains.

  On the wall beside the bureau, there Norma Jeane’s father looked down upon her. She watched him through half-closed eyes. She whispered, “Dad-dy.”

  The first time! On her sixth birthday.

  The first time to have uttered the word: “Dad-dy!”

  Gladys had drawn the blind down over the window, to the top of the sill, but it was an aged, cracked blind, inadequate to keep out the fierce afternoon sun. The blazing eye of God. The wrath of God. Grandma Della had been bitterly disappointed in Aimee Semple McPherson and the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, yet she believed, still, in what she called God’s Word, the Holy Bible—“It’s a hard teaching, and we are mostly deaf to its wisdom, but it is all we have.” (But was this so? Gladys had her own books, and Gladys never mentioned the Bible. What Gladys spoke of with a look of passion and awe was The Movies.)

  The sun had shifted downward in the sky when Norma Jeane was half wakened by the telephone ringing in the next room. That jarring sound, that sound of mockery, that angry-adult sound, that sound of male reproach. I know you’re there, Gladys, I know you’re listening; you can’t hide from me. Until at last Gladys snatched up the receiver in the next room and spoke in a high, slurred voice, half pleading. No! I can’t, not tonight I told you, I told you it’s my little girl’s birthday, I want to spend it with her alone—and a pause and then more urgently in half cries and screams like a wounded animal—Yes I did, I did tell you, I have a little girl, I don’t care what you believe, I’m a normal person, I’m a real mother I told you, I’ve had babies, I’m a normal woman and I don’t want your filthy money, no I said I can’t see you tonight, I will not see you, tonight or tomorrow night, leave me alone or you’ll regret it, if you walk in here using that key I’ll call the police you bastard!

  6

  When I was born, on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital, my mother wasn’t there.

  Where my mother was, no one knew!

  Later they found her hiding and they were shocked and disapproving, saying You have a beautiful baby, Mrs. Mortensen, don’t you want to hold your beautiful baby? It’s a girl baby, it’s time to nurse. But my mother turned her face to the wall. Her breasts leaked milk like pus, but not for me.

  It was a stranger, a nurse, who taught my mother how to pick me up and hold me. How to cup the tender back of the infant’s head with one hand and support the spine with the other.

  What if I drop it.

  You won’t drop her!

  It’s so heavy, and hot. It’s . . . kicking.

  She’s a normal healthy baby. A beauty. Look at those eyes!

  At The Studio where Gladys Mortensen had been an employee since the age of nineteen there was the world-you-see-with-your-eyes and the world-through-the-camera. The one was nothing, the other was everything. So in time Mother learned to perceive me through the mirror. Even to smile at me. (Not eye-to-eye! Never.) In the mirror it’s like a camera eye, almost you can love.

  The baby’s father, I adored. The name he told me, there is no such name. He gave me $225 and a telephone number to GET RID OF IT. Am I really the mother? Sometimes I don’t believe I am.

  We learned mirror-looking.

  There was my Friend-in-the-Mirror. As soon as I was big enough to see.

  My Magic Friend.

  There was a purity in this. Never did I experience my face and body from the inside (where there was numbness like sleep), only through the mirror, where there was sharpness and clarity. In that way I could see myself.

  Gladys laughed. Hell, this kid isn’t half bad-looking, is she? Guess I’ll keep her.

  It was a daily decision. It was not permanent.

  In the blue smoke haze I was being passed about. Three weeks old, in a blanket. A woman cried drunkenly Oh, her head! Careful, put your hand beneath her head. Another woman said Jesus, it’s smoky in here, where’s Gladys? Men peeked and grinned. She’s a little girl, eh? Like a silk purse down there. Smooooth.

  Another, later time one of them helped Mother bathe me. And then herself and him! Squeals and laughter, white-tile walls. Puddles of water on the floor. Perfumy bath salts. Mr. Eddy was rich! Owned three “hot spots” in L.A., where the stars dined and danced. Mr. Eddy on the radio. Mr. Eddy a practical joker leaving $20 bills in joke places: on a block of ice in the icebox, rolled up inside a window shade, in the mutilated pages of The Little Treasury of American Verse, taped to the inside of the lowered filth-splattered toilet seat.

  Mother’s laughter was shrill and piercing like breaking glass.

  7

  “But first you must be bathed.”

  The word bathed was slowly, sensuously drawn out.

  Gladys was drinking her medicated water, unable to sit still. On the turntable, “Mood Indigo.” Norma Jeane’s hands and face were sticky from birthday cake. It was almost night, on Norma Jeane’s sixth birthday. Then it was night. Water from both faucets splashed noisily into the rust-stained old claw-footed tub in the tiny bathroom.

  Atop the icebox the beautiful blond doll stared. Glassy blue eyes opened wide and rosebud mouth always about to smile. If you shook her, the eyes opened even wider. The rosebud mouth never changed. Tiny feet in soiled white booties were turned outward at such a strange angle!

  Mother taught Norma Jeane the words. Humming and swaying.

  You ain’t been blue

/>   No no no

  You ain’t been blue

  Till you got that Mood Indigo

  Then Mother was bored with music, searching now for one of her books. So many books still unpacked. Gladys had had elocution lessons at The Studio. Norma Jeane loved being read to by Gladys because it meant more calm. Not sudden outbursts of laughter, or cursing, or tears. Music could do that. But there was Gladys with a reverent look searching through The Little Treasury of American Verse, which was her favorite book. With her thin shoulders lifted and head raised like a screen actress holding the book above her.

  Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The Carriage held but just Ourselves

  And Immortality.

  Norma Jeane listened anxiously. When Gladys finished the poem she would turn to Norma Jeane with bright glistening eyes. “What’s that about, Norma Jeane?” Norma Jeane didn’t know. Gladys said, “One day when your mother isn’t around to save you, you will know.” Pouring more of the clear strong liquid into a cup and drinking.

  Norma Jeane was hoping for more poems, poems with rhymes, poems she could understand, but Gladys seemed to be through with poetry for the night. Nor would she be reading from The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds, which were “prophetic books”—“books that would soon come true”—as she sometimes did in an intense, tremulous voice.

  “Time for Baby’s baaath.”

  It was a movie scene. Water splashing from the faucets was mixed with music you could almost hear.

  Gladys stooped over Norma Jeane to undress her. But Norma Jeane could undress herself! She was six. Gladys was in a hurry, pushing Norma Jeane’s hands away. “For shame. Cake all over you.” Waiting for the tub to fill, and it was a long wait. Such a big tub. Gladys removed her crepe dress, pulling it over her head so her hair lifted in snaky tufts. Her pale skin slick with sweat. Mustn’t stare at Mother’s body, which was so secret: pale freckled skin, the bones beneath pushing out, small hard breasts like clenched fists straining at the lacy slip. Almost, Norma Jeane could see fire in Gladys’s charged hair. In her moist staring lemony eyes.

  The wind in the palm trees outside the window. Voices of the dead, Gladys called them. Wanting always to get in.

  “Inside us,” Gladys explained. “Because there aren’t enough bodies. At any given time in history there is never enough life. And since the War—you don’t remember the War because you weren’t born yet, but I remember, I’m your mother, and I came into this world before you—since the War where so many men and women, too, and children died, there’s a scarcity of bodies, let me tell you. All those poor dead souls wanting to push in.”

  Norma Jeane was frightened. Push in where?

  Gladys paced, waiting for the tub to fill. She wasn’t drunk, nor was she high. She’d removed the glove on her right hand and now both slender hands were bare and reddened in patches, the skin scaling; she didn’t want to admit it was her work at The Studio, sixty hours a week sometimes, chemicals absorbed into her skin even through her latex gloves, yes, and into her hair, the very follicles of her hair, and her lungs, oh, she was dying! America was killing her! Once she began coughing she couldn’t stop. Yes, but why then did she smoke? Well, everyone in Hollywood smoked, everyone in the movies smoked, a cigarette calmed the nerves, yes, but Gladys drew the line at marijuana, what the papers called reefer; God damn, she wanted Della to know she was no hophead, and she was no junkie; she was no round-heels God damn it and she’d never done it for money, or almost never.

  And that only when she’d been laid off for eight weeks from The Studio. After the Crash of October 1929.

  “Know what that was? The Crash?”

  Norma Jeane shook her head in wonder. No. What?

  “You were three years old at the time, baby. I was desperate. All that I did, Norma Jeane, I did to spare you.”

  Lifting Norma Jeane then in her arms, her thin sinewy-muscled arms, lifting her with a grunt, lowering the startled child, kicking and thrashing, into the steaming water. Norma Jeane whimpered, Norma Jeane didn’t dare to scream, the water was so hot! burning hot! scalding hot, rushing from the faucet Gladys had forgotten to shut off, she’d forgotten to shut both faucets off, as she’d forgotten to test the temperature of the water. Norma Jeane tried to climb back out of the tub but Gladys pushed her back. “Sit still. This has to be done. I’m coming in too. Where’s the soap? Dir-ty.” Gladys turned her back to the sniveling Norma Jeane and quickly stripped off the rest of her clothes, slip, brassiere, panties, flinging them down onto the floor gaily, like a dancer. Naked then, boldly she climbed into the big old claw-footed tub, slipped and regained her balance, and lowered her lean hips into the water, which smelled sharply of wintergreen bath salts, seating herself facing the frightened child, knees opened as if to embrace, or to secure, the child to whom six years before she’d given birth in an agony of despair and recrimination—Where are you? Why have you forsaken me?—addressed to the man who was her lover, whose name she would not reveal even in the throes of labor. How clumsy, mother and daughter in this tub, with water surging in choppy waves overflowing the rim; Norma Jeane, nudged by her mother’s knee, sank in water past her mouth, began to choke and cough, and Gladys quickly yanked her up by the hair, scolding—“Now stop that, Norma Jeane! Just stop.” Gladys groped for the bar of soap and began to lather vigorously between her hands. Strange for her who shrank from being touched by her daughter to be naked now, crowded in a tub with her daughter; and strange the rapt, ecstatic expression on her face, which was flushed and rosy with the heat. Again Norma Jeane whimpered that the water was too hot, please Mother the water was too hot, so hot almost her skin couldn’t feel it, and Gladys said severely, “Yes, it has to be hot, there’s so much dirt. Outside us, and in.”

  Far away in another room, muffled by splashing water and Gladys’s chiding voice, there came the sound of a key turning in a lock.

  This was not the first time. It would not be the last time.

  CITY OF SAND

  1

  “Norma Jeane, wake up! Hurry.”

  Fire season. Autumn 1934. The voice, Gladys’s voice, was charged with alarm and excitement.

  In the night the smell of smoke—of ash!—a smell like burning trash and garbage in the incinerator behind Della Monroe’s old apartment building in Venice Beach, but this wasn’t Venice Beach, this was Hollywood, Highland Avenue in Hollywood, where mother and daughter were living alone together at last, just the two of them as it was meant to be until he summons us, and there came the sound of sirens and this smell like burning hair, like burning grease in a frying pan, like damp clothes carelessly scorched by the iron. It was a mistake to have left the bedroom window open, for the smell permeated the room: a choking smell, a gritty smell, a smell that stung the eyeballs like windblown sand. A smell like the hot-plate coils when Gladys’s teakettle, its water steamed away without Gladys’s noticing, melted onto it. A smell like the ash from Gladys’s perpetual cigarettes and the scorch burns in the linoleum, in the rose-patterned carpet, in the double bed with the brass headboard and goose-down pillows shared by mother and daughter, the unmistakable scorch smell of bedclothes the child recognized immediately, in her sleep; a smoldering Chesterfield fallen from Gladys’s hand as, reading in bed late at night, a compulsive and insomniac reader, Gladys drifted off to a light doze to be wakened suddenly and rudely and, to her, mysteriously and unaccountably by a spark igniting pillow, sheets, comforter, which sometimes flared up into actual flames to be desperately pounded out with a book or a magazine or, in one instance, an Our Gang calendar hurriedly snatched from the wall, or Gladys’s own hammering fists; and if the flames persevered Gladys would rush cursing into the bathroom to get a glass of water and fling it onto the flames, wetting the bedclothes and mattress—“God damn! What next!” There was an antic slapstick rhythm to such episodes, pre-talkies. Norma Jeane, who slept with Gladys, would have awakened immediately to scramble from the bed p
anting and alert as any animal primed for self-survival; and often, in fact, it was the child who ran to fetch water. For though this was a true alarm and upset in the middle of the night it had become familiar enough to be a routine ritual emergency and to have evolved a methodology. We were used to saving ourselves from being burned alive in bed. We’d learned to cope.

  “I wasn’t even asleep! My mind is too restless. In my brain it’s bright day. What seemed to happen was, my fingers suddenly went numb. It’s been happening lately. I was playing piano the other night and nothing came. I never work without rubber gloves in the lab but the chemicals are stronger now. The damage may already have been done. Look: the nerve ends in my fingers are practically dead, my hand doesn’t even shake.”