Norma Jeane tries to become pregnant before Bucky leaves

Norma Jeane tries to become pregnant before Bucky leaves, making the impending separation a crisis within their young marriage. Her attempt to secure a child and keep him close meets Bucky’s exhaustion and rejection; when she injures herself, their private conflict becomes a defining shock in his life.

The Impending Departure

Bucky’s decision to leave had already brought both spouses to tears. He had enlisted and expected to depart within weeks, while Norma Jeane understood that he was leaving her as well as escaping the life that had confined him in Mission Hills: his parents, his work at Lockheed, and the routine of the assembly line. Their previous day’s conversation ended with an embrace, shared tears, and prayer together on the kitchen floor. That tenderness did not settle the question of what his departure meant for their marriage.

After a long shift at Lockheed, Bucky was asleep when Norma Jeane approached him in the early hours. He understood her actions as an effort to conceive a child before he went away. The scene follows their earlier prayer with a stark reversal: the closeness they had shared gives way to a struggle over whether he would stay, and whether she could bear his leaving.

Rejection and Crisis

Bucky told Norma Jeane that he thought they had already discussed the matter and that his enlistment was settled. She insisted that she would die if he left. He tried to reassure her, but she did not respond to his words, and he recoiled from her pursuit. His reaction was sharpened by the gap between the wife he thought he had married—a shy, gentle woman—and the desperate behavior he now faced. He rebuked her harshly, turning fear and exhaustion into open contempt.

Norma Jeane fled into the kitchen. When Bucky followed and turned on the light, he found her holding a knife and injuring herself. He took it from her and saw that she had seriously hurt her arm. The immediate attempt to become pregnant had thus ended not in reassurance or agreement, but in an urgent act of intervention.

Aftermath and Significance

Bucky was fully awake by then, and the sight remained with him as the most terrible scene of his civilian life. The memory marked a rupture in his sense of ordinary security: until that night, he had regarded himself as a normal young American with a simple, apparently inviolable life. Norma Jeane’s crisis made clear that his departure was not merely a change of plans or place. For her, it had become bound to the fear of abandonment; for him, the effort to hold the marriage together had become inseparable from alarm and recoil.