Gladys bathes Norma Jeane on her sixth birthday

On her sixth birthday, Norma Jeane Baker is bathed by Gladys Mortensen in a scene that turns an ordinary act of care into an encounter with coercion, danger, and an unexplained recurring intrusion. The child is able to undress herself, but Gladys takes over; the bathwater grows painfully hot, yet Gladys makes her stay in the tub. Then, as the water runs and the two sit together, the sound of a key turning in a distant lock closes the scene with the assurance that this is neither the first nor the last such occurrence.

From stories to the bath

Norma Jeane Baker hopes Gladys Mortensen will read more poetry: poems that rhyme and that the child can understand. Gladys has also spoken intensely of books she considers prophetic, imagining that their contents will soon become reality. But on this evening the reading is over. She announces that it is bath time, and the narrative shifts from the anticipated pleasure of stories to water running from the taps. Its splashing seems almost to supply music for a scene in a film, lending the domestic moment an initially staged, dreamlike quality.

That cinematic impression does not make the bath safe. Gladys is impatient as she begins to undress her daughter. Norma Jeane Baker can manage her own clothes, but Gladys brushes her hands away, reproaching her for having cake on her fingers. The child’s wish to act for herself is thus overridden before she enters the tub. The long wait for the bath to fill extends the scene, while Gladys removes her own dress and the narration dwells on the mother’s exposed body and Norma Jeane Baker’s awareness that looking at it feels forbidden. The intimacy is present from the outset, but it is not settled or reassuring: the child is close to her mother while also being instructed, handled, and kept from acting independently.

Heat, restraint, and bodily confusion

The danger becomes explicit when Gladys lifts Norma Jeane Baker into the steaming bath. The taps have been left running, and Gladys has forgotten to check the temperature. The child kicks and struggles as the water burns; she tries to climb out, but Gladys pushes her back and orders her to sit still. Gladys treats the child’s distress as a tantrum that will only delay finishing the bath. The scene therefore makes the difference between their bodily experiences unmistakable: what Gladys regards as necessary washing is, for the child, an immediate and painful threat.

Gladys then turns her back to remove the rest of her clothes and climbs into the same old tub. Her movements are described as light and almost dance-like; she briefly loses her balance and recovers before settling opposite her daughter. The gesture brings them physically together, and her open-legged posture can suggest an embrace or an invitation to be held. Yet that closeness does not end the child’s distress. The water spills over the rim; Norma Jeane Baker is pushed under until it reaches beyond her mouth, coughs, and is pulled up by her hair. Gladys scolds her, searches for the soap, and rubs it vigorously between her hands. The juxtaposition is stark: a posture that might welcome the child sits alongside rough handling and a refusal to let her escape the water.

Maternal intimacy and remembered abandonment

As the two face one another in the tub, the scene connects this strained intimacy to the circumstances of Norma Jeane Baker’s birth. Gladys’s body is presented as the body that brought her into the world in pain and despair, while the narration gives voice to a cry about abandonment directed toward the man Gladys loved, whose name she would not reveal even during childbirth. This association does not explain every part of the bath, but it places the mother and child’s physical closeness beside an older absence: the unnamed father and the unanswered question of why the child was left.

The bath also makes care and harm difficult to separate. Gladys insists that the water must be hot because there is too much dirt, both outside and inside. Her language turns bathing into a response to contamination, but the water’s heat is itself injuring the child. She appears absorbed in the bath even as Norma Jeane Baker keeps complaining that it is too hot. The scene offers no correction or comfort that resolves this contradiction. Instead, the child’s pain and the mother’s certainty occupy the same cramped space, the old tub, where an apparent act of nurture becomes an exercise of control.

The key in the lock

While the water continues to rush and Gladys continues to scold, a key turns in a lock in another room. The sound is distant and partially muffled, but it abruptly changes the bath from a closed scene between mother and child into one touched by someone or something outside it. The narrative does not identify who is entering or explain the circumstances, so the sound cannot safely be assigned a motive or a visitor. Its significance lies in the recurrence the text explicitly attaches to it: this has happened before, and it will happen again.

That final repetition alters the meaning of the film-like opening. The water’s near-music and the mother’s bodily closeness have not made the moment a protected domestic idyll. The locked door and its returning sound place the bath within a larger pattern of disturbance, without yet disclosing the pattern’s cause. What remains sharply visible is the child’s limited control: she cannot undress herself when she wishes, leave the burning water, or make her complaint change Gladys’s response. The scene’s decisive turn is therefore not a completed explanation, but the collision of intimate care with danger—and the small, recurring sound that warns that the disturbance extends beyond the tub.