Bucky decides to join the Merchant Marine

Bucky Glazer’s decision to join the United States Merchant Marine is both a bid for freedom and a rupture in his marriage to Norma Jeane Baker. He presents enlistment as patriotic service, but the relief and exhilaration he feels reveal a more personal urgency: he wants to leave behind not only his wife but also the hometown, family, and work that have made him feel trapped.

The decision and its circumstances

Bucky tells Norma Jeane that he enlisted that morning and will probably be sent overseas within a month, most likely to Australia. He expects an invasion of Japan to bring the war to an end. The decision is not sudden in his mind: he has wanted to enlist for a long time, and believes Norma Jeane has understood as much.

He frames his choice as an obligation of the moment, the duty of a man living through history. Yet the prospect of departure carries ambitions beyond service. He has lived in Mission Hills since birth, feels stifled by his parents, and wants out of the Lockheed assembly line and the smell of embalming fluid. His enlistment promises an exit from several forms of confinement at once.

Telling Norma Jeane

Bucky insists that leaving does not mean he loves Norma Jeane less or is unhappy with her. He says he loves her intensely and has never been happier; what he wants, he explains, is more from life than a honeymoon. His assurances and his departure announcement sit uneasily together: he tries to preserve the marriage emotionally even as he chooses a future that takes him away from it.

Norma Jeane’s pain is visible in her tear-filled eyes, but she answers with composure, telling him that she understands and addressing him as Daddy. Bucky feels guilty at her grief, yet also radiant and euphoric at having made his escape. The decision brings opposing feelings into the same moment: attachment to Norma Jeane and excitement at being almost free of the life he has known.

The first day of separation

In the kitchen, Norma Jeane and Bucky embrace and begin to cry together. They kneel on the clean, polished linoleum and pray. Then Bucky carries her to the bedroom as she wraps her arms around his neck; he is still sobbing. The enlistment, initially spoken of as duty and personal liberation, becomes a bodily farewell between two people who still love one another.

After a long shift at Lockheed, Bucky is asleep when Norma Jeane wakes him, urgently seeking sex. The scene presents her desire to have a child before he leaves, making the impending separation an immediate pressure on their marriage as well as a practical deadline. The account does not establish whether she conceives; it leaves the attempt suspended alongside Bucky’s expected departure.