Lockheed

Lockheed is the wartime workplace that anchors Bucky Glazer’s life outside the home: by day he assists in preparing bodies at a funeral home, and by night he helps assemble aircraft on a noisy production line. The novel presents the company less through its formal organization than through this work and its consequences. Its factory links domestic life to the war, giving Bucky a place in the industrial effort while drawing his attention toward military service and the possibility of leaving Norma Jeane Baker behind.

Wartime Production and Bucky’s Work

Bucky works nights at Lockheed, assembling aircraft on a production line. The work is described as the making of B-17s destined to bomb the enemy, placing his ordinary labor within the scale and violence of the war. It is a second job, not his only employment: he also works part-time as an assistant embalmer at a funeral home in Mission Hills, where he helps prepare the dead. The contrast between the two workplaces is stark. At Lockheed, the line produces aircraft for combat; at the funeral home, Bucky encounters death after it has occurred.

By the winter of 1942, Bucky is working forty hours a week at Lockheed as well as one or two mornings a week helping Mr. Eeley at the McDougal Funeral Home. The novel records the combination as part of his attempt to earn his living and make himself useful. His embalming experience, athletic background, knowledge of mathematics and radios, and familiarity with maps all enter his thinking about how he might serve in the armed forces. Lockheed is therefore both an immediate source of employment and one element in the larger wartime routine from which he imagines moving into military service.

The Factory in the Marriage

Lockheed’s night shift structures the young couple’s daily life. Bucky works amid the clamor of the production line while thinking about Norma Jeane Baker and wondering whether she has gone out despite promising to stay home. Around him, coworkers talk about their wives and girlfriends and show photographs; their stories intensify his desire to present his own wife as especially beautiful. He boasts that he will show the men his girl. The factory is not just a workplace in these passages: it is the social setting in which Bucky measures his marriage against other men’s accounts of domestic and sexual life.

That atmosphere sits beside the tenderness and insecurity of the relationship. Bucky can be proud of Norma Jeane Baker and pleased by the attention she attracts, yet he also distrusts what he sees as her wish to be more than simply beautiful. He is unsettled by her depth, her curiosity about his work at the funeral home, and her unpredictable manner. At home, meanwhile, she plans meals for the week, cooks from recipes passed along by Mrs. Glazer, and tends to the household. The account of Lockheed’s shifts thus belongs to a broader portrait of a marriage shaped by work, gender expectations, and Bucky’s confidence that he understands what a wife should be.

Work, War, and the Prospect of Enlistment

Bucky’s labor at Lockheed does not diminish his desire to enlist. He has told Norma Jeane Baker from the beginning that he wants to fight for his country, and as the war continues he grows increasingly restless. With married men without children likely to be called up, he reasons that he might as well enlist before being summoned. He follows the war news closely, reads the Los Angeles Times, and keeps maps of Europe and the Pacific theater on the walls, moving colored pins as the situation changes. His factory employment belongs to this same atmosphere of mobilization, but it does not satisfy his wish to take a more direct part in the conflict.

The gap between Bucky’s plans and the marriage’s needs becomes more painful as his departure seems increasingly likely. By autumn 1943 and winter 1944, Norma Jeane Baker understands that he will soon leave. The novel connects that expectation to the wider absence of men drawn into military service and to the couple’s private future. Lockheed’s production line is one visible part of the war effort, while the prospect of enlistment threatens to carry Bucky away from the home the couple has made.

Narrative Significance

Lockheed enters the story through concrete labor rather than an institutional portrait: the long shifts, the clattering line, and the aircraft Bucky helps assemble. The limited view matters. The factory appears as a place where industrial production and personal life meet, not as an independently developed corporate setting. Its narrative significance lies in how it makes the war present in Bucky’s hours, ambitions, and marriage.

The juxtaposition with his funeral-home work gives that presence a further edge. Bucky moves between preparing the dead and assembling planes intended for combat, while wartime images and news occupy his attention away from both jobs. Lockheed thus contributes to the novel’s account of a household organized around a conflict larger than itself: the factory keeps Bucky at work, but the war also supplies the reason he believes he must leave.