Norma Jeane’s abandonment anxiety and psychological distress

Norma Jeane Baker’s abandonment anxiety and psychological distress turn the promise of marriage into a fragile defense against separation. Her fear appears first in recurring nightmares and urgent tests of Bucky Glazer’s devotion; when his enlistment makes departure imminent, it erupts into self-injury. The episodes connect private terror to bodily sensation, and their aftermath leaves Norma Jeane alone with both the healed wounds and the conviction that Bucky will not come back.

Nightmares and the need for reassurance

Soon after the marriage, Norma Jeane begins having a nightmare she had never experienced before: a faceless person bends over her as she lies paralyzed in bed and tries to take her rings. When she refuses to remove them, the intruder seizes her hand and saws at a finger with a knife. The blade feels so real that she wakes struggling and moaning, unable to believe she felt no pain. The rings mark the marriage, but in the dream they do not make her secure. They become the object of a struggle in which the threat is not simply to lose a relationship, but to have something joined to her forcibly taken away.

Bucky wakes and comforts her, holding and rocking her in his arms. Sometimes she is too frightened to sleep again and remains awake until morning. He tries to be patient, and is flattered by how urgently his young wife needs him, but her distress also unsettles him. At twenty-one, he has only recently left childhood himself; he is tired from work and unused to sharing a bed every night. The narrative contrasts the cheerful, compliant young woman he first knew with a night-time Norma Jeane whose panic makes that familiar version seem almost absent. Its image of two twin selves gives form to the suddenness of the change without resolving it as a separate identity.

Their exchanges make reassurance both intimate and unstable. Norma Jeane asks Bucky to swear he will never leave her; he answers sleepily that he will not, and asks why he would leave when they have only just married. The reassurance seems to contain its own contradiction: the marriage has barely begun, yet she is already asking him to guarantee its permanence. Her tears and trembling give way, for a moment, to laughter and play. The scene then turns into sexual intimacy framed by Bucky’s possessive language about her belonging to him. Norma Jeane later associates his physical presence with safety, a refuge that remains dependent on his staying beside her.

Fear in the body

The fear does not remain confined to the ring nightmare. After Harriet and Irina disappear from Norma Jeane’s life, she tries to report their disappearance to the police in Mission Hills, California, but cannot get the words out without stammering and hangs up. She recognizes that Harriet is an adult and Irina’s mother, and that there is little she can do, despite loving Irina deeply. The child’s father remains officially missing, and his remains are never found. Norma Jeane’s uncertainty about what happened to him feeds an imagined image of danger rather than providing an answer.

She sees, or dreams she sees, Harriet bathing Irina in scalding water while the child screams. In this vision Norma Jeane runs through a steam-filled corridor, unable to find a door or reach the room in time. The narrative explicitly leaves the scene uncertain: it may be a dream, and its details are indistinct. Yet on waking, Norma Jeane goes into the bathroom and climbs into a bath of boiling water herself. Her teeth chatter and her skin burns; Bucky finds her there at six in the morning. He is about to lift her and carry her back to bed, but her wide eyes and dilated pupils tell him not to touch her. The movement from imagined danger to physical exposure makes the episode more than a report of anxious thoughts: the terror is enacted in her own body, while the distinction between dream and waking offers no reliable protection.

Bucky’s departure and the crisis

Bucky’s decision to enlist brings the fear of abandonment into immediate focus. He wants to leave Mission Hills, where he has lived all his life, and escape his parents, his work at Lockheed, and his shifts at the funeral home. When he tells Norma Jeane he will be leaving, she responds with a restrained expression of understanding. They embrace, both cry, kneel on the clean linoleum kitchen floor to pray, and go together to the bedroom. For Bucky, this is the first day of a new life; for Norma Jeane, the separation is already present inside the tenderness of their farewell.

Later, after a long shift at Lockheed, Bucky is asleep when Norma Jeane wakes him by touching him and pressing herself against him. She wants to have a child. He is startled and exhausted, and pushes her away, telling her to let him sleep before his early start. She returns to him, but he rejects her more harshly, calling her a pathetic dog. She runs into the dark kitchen, striking furniture and walls as she moves. When Bucky follows and turns on the light, he finds her with a knife, cutting her bare forearm. He tears the knife from her hand and sees that the cuts are deep and bleeding; the sight fixes itself in his memory as the most terrible moment of his civilian life.

Bucky presses a dish towel to the wound, takes her to the bathroom, washes the cuts, applies iodine, and covers them with compresses. Norma Jeane, now quiet and depleted, leans against him and asks whether he still loves her. He reassures her by pointing back to their marriage. His care is immediate and physical, but it cannot reverse the rupture that prompted the crisis: he has enlisted, and his leaving is no longer an imagined threat. The scene also recalls the earlier nightmares through the knife and the wounded hand, turning the feared injury into an actual one.

Aftermath and continuing absence

Once Bucky has gone, Norma Jeane describes herself as heartbroken and unable to stop crying. Because the knife wounds have healed, she thinks of her skin as hard; the repair of the surface does not end her wish to punish herself. The passage briefly adopts her first-person perspective, making the experience of the separation feel less like an outside account of symptoms than an inward record of grief and self-reproach.

The room she inhabits alone is defined by what no longer needs cleaning. She can change the towels and sheets once a week, wash her underwear, nightgown, and cotton stockings by hand, and borrow the landlady’s broom when she needs to sweep. There are no carpets to beat, no stove to scrub, and few surfaces to dust. The precise inventory makes domestic order a measure of absence: no young, muscular husband is there to soil the linens, and no shared household remains to maintain. When she left the Glazers’ apartment, she left most of its contents with them to keep until Bucky returned. She knows he will never come back. The fear that first appeared as a nightmare of someone taking her rings thus extends beyond the marriage itself; even after the immediate crisis has passed, separation has become the condition around which her solitary life is organized.