Squali

Squali is the shark as it appears in Norma Jeane’s recollection: a possible shape beneath the water and, in a separate memory, a stranded animal still alive on a pier. Its significance lies less in a confirmed attack than in the contrast between an uncertain underwater sighting and the vivid physical facts of the remembered encounter.

The Shape Beneath the Water

The recollection begins not with a clearly seen animal but with its outline. Before the shark, there is the silhouette and the sudden silence of green, deep water. Norma Jeane seems to have just surfaced and escaped the undertow, yet the account complicates that impression: she has not been swimming, her eyes are open, and the salt stings them. The image therefore arrives through bodily sensation before it resolves into a definite object.

Even the animal’s identity and size remain uncertain. She says she watched the shark, or rather its furtive silhouette suspended in deep water, and allows that she may not have known how large it was—or whether it was truly a shark at all. The memory sustains that gap instead of closing it. What is certain is the stillness of the water and the act of looking; the danger takes shape at the edge of what she can verify.

Beaches and the Body

The remembered setting belongs to a childhood of frequent trips to the shore. Norma Jeane recalls having been an excellent swimmer and being taken to Topanga, Will Rogers Beach, Las Tunas Beach, and Redondo. Her favorites were Santa Monica and Venice Beach, which she associates with bodybuilders and surfers. These details place the shark image within a familiar coastal world rather than an isolated adventure: the same beaches offer recreation, physical confidence, and the possibility of danger beneath the surface.

Her account emphasizes the body as the medium through which this world is known. The salt burns her open eyes; the water is green and deep; the shark remains suspended as a silhouette. But bodily familiarity does not produce certainty. Being a strong swimmer and knowing the beaches do not make the shape fully legible, so competence and vulnerability coexist in the recollection.

The Shark on the Pier

A second memory gives the animal a more concrete form. Norma Jeane recalls seeing a shark hauled onto the pier at Hermosa, bleeding and still alive. This is not the underwater silhouette: the shark is exposed, visible, and wounded, though its life has not yet gone out. The image shifts the emphasis from an unseen threat in deep water to an animal made vulnerable on land.

Norma Jeane was with her fiancé, and they had only just become engaged. She was fifteen and still a girl, and remembers being intensely happy. That joy sits beside the sight of the bleeding animal without being explained away by it. The memory holds both facts together: the shark’s exposed, precarious life and the happiness of a young girl at the beginning of an engagement.

Uncertainty and Contrast

The two appearances of Squali are linked by contrast rather than by a narrated attack. Below the water, the shark may be no more than a doubtful outline; on the pier, it is plainly present, wounded, and alive. The account offers no confirmation that the underwater shape was the same kind of encounter, and no attack follows in the remembered scene. Preserving that distinction keeps fear from becoming a certainty the recollection itself does not claim.

Squali therefore belongs to a memory structured by what can and cannot be known. A silhouette can be mistaken, its size misjudged, and its identity doubted; a body hauled onto a pier can still remain alive. Around those uncertainties, the passage anchors the recollection in precise sensations, familiar beaches, and the sharply different emotional circumstance of Norma Jeane’s recent engagement.