The Other Norma Jean
It’s a sticky July Monday in 1972 when Norma Jean Negri hears about the elephant from a traveling circus who’d just been struck by lightning and died. The elephant’s name had been Norma Jean too. “I guess the poor thing was named for Marilyn Monroe,” Evelyn says over the phone. “Remember when you used to say you were too? What was that, eighth grade? Until someone pointed out you were born too early for that.” Norma Jean Negri, named for an aunt who’d died in childbirth, is both-hands into pie filling, holding the phone between her neck and shoulder, sweating a little, hoping not to drip. She considers replying, but knows it’s usually best to let Evelyn talk herself out.
“Act of God. It was just on Channel 17,” Evelyn says. “The circus was parading into Oquawka, and it came down out of a cloudless sky. The keeper was blown back some fifty feet, but he’ll survive. They had to bury Norma Jean right where she dropped in the town square. Couldn’t move her an inch. God works in mysterious ways, I guess.”
“What’s God have to do with it?” Norma Jean asks.
“A bolt from the heavens? Norma Jean, that’s like God’s calling card.”
“I’m not sure what an elephant would have to fear from God.”
Norma Jean Negri can almost hear Evelyn’s shrug over the phone. “Maybe Jesus doesn’t like circuses.”
Norma Jean Negri uses one finger to scrape the apple from the others. “Evelyn,” she sighs, “I hate to go, but I’ve got four pies to make by this afternoon. Sorry about the elephant.”
“She wasn’t my elephant,” Evelyn says.
Norma Jean Negri lets the phone drop from the crook of her neck, abandons it to dangle from its own cord until her hands are clean.
“Dale?” she calls into the den. “Dale, I’m going to be short on sugar.”
“Send one of the kids,” Dale calls back. She can hear him putting on his shirt. “I have to get back out to the fields here pretty quick.”
“Dale, I have three more apple pies due to the Methodist Church today. The Moss funeral is tomorrow, and we’re hosting the luncheon.”
“Send one of the kids,” Dale says again, and the front door shuts.
She hangs up the phone, lays her apron over the counter, and walks to the store herself. The whole way she thinks of that elephant—the other Norma Jean. She wonders if it was the same circus that marched through town last year, when she took her son and two girls downtown to see it all. The jugglers, the clowns, the elephant, the prancing horses. They’d seemed so unimpressed, her children, but they were already in their early teens by then, unimpressed by everything. They seemed older to her than she’d been at their age, not so long before. Even that day last summer, Norma Jean Negri had marveled at being so close to an elephant, touching its thick and scaly trunk as she was allowed to feed it an apple, which it crunched on cue. She wondered if that had been Norma Jean, if she’d been feeding a beast that shared her name.
Norma Jean Negri considers telling her children about the elephant dying in Oquawka, but she knows they’d have no interest. They’re biding their time until they can leave, like Norma Jean Negri did before she was a Negri, back when she was still a Snyder, and she couldn’t wait to get away from her parents, and her parents’ house, and this stifling town, and she and Evelyn would talk about the places they’d go when they were out and on their own and free to do anything. Paris, Istanbul, the Nile. “I don’t want to die here,” Norma Jean Negri remembers saying out back of the barn, stealing a smoke. Evelyn had agreed. That’s all people did, they thought then: die here.
It’s a child’s duty to break their parents’ hearts. Norma Jean Negri knows this, knows that it’s the way of the world, that she’s supposed to offer her children this life of apple-fed happiness, but that it’s all just show, marching through town as instructed, smiling with practiced step for the audience. She clutches the single bag of sugar to her chest and wishes things were different. She wants to walk the markets of Istanbul. To drink wine in the daytime shadows of Notre Dame. To know if she’d fed Norma Jean an apple. For the skies to open up, for her children to sit down at the kitchen table, to laugh with her about what Norma Jean used to call herself, to care about what makes a good crust.
Teague von Bohlen is a writer, novelist, and associate professor of creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he also serves as one of the fiction editors for Copper Nickel. His first book, The Pull of the Earth, won the Colorado Book Award for Fiction, and his short fiction has been seen in outlets nationwide. His latest book, Flatland, is a collection of flash fiction and photography set in the great American Midwest.