For 15 years, Norma Jean’s husband Leroy, a trucker, has mostly lived on the road. After a bad accident, however, he moves home to recuperate. Leroy and Norma Jean, living together full-time for the first time in over a decade, discover that they’re strangers—distant and awkward, unsure of who the other person has become. This is partially due to Leroy’s long absences while trucking, but that’s not the root cause: back when they were 18-year-old newlyweds, their baby died, and they never grieved together. Instead, Leroy started trucking, and they haven’t been close since. While Leroy hopes that his return home will be a fresh start for their marriage, Norma Jean experiences it differently; his presence in the house reminds her of being 18, a time that is too painful for her to revisit. She leaves him in the end, but the story implies that their marriage has actually been over since their child died. This illustrates the tremendous strain that grief puts on a marriage, particularly when both partners suffer alone rather than processing their feelings together.
When Leroy starts living at home full-time, he marvels at how little he and Norma Jean know each other. Norma Jean is suddenly enthusiastic about bodybuilding, for instance, and she’s enrolled in a writing class. She has new gestures and habits, like saving bread heels for the birds, and she’s cooking “unusual foods” like tacos and “Bombay Chicken.” Leroy finds all of this alienating, a sign that she’s moving on from him. In fact, even when Norma Jean picks up a familiar hobby (playing piano, which she loved to do in high school), it doesn’t comfort Leroy. Her taste has completely changed; she used to hate sixties songs, but now she plays them wistfully, feeling that she “missed something” about them back then. Norma Jean and Leroy fell in love in the sixties, so her feeling that she missed out shows that something between them is wrong.
Leroy has changed too; he’s no longer trucking, and he’s found new hobbies like needlepoint and building models. But Norma Jean seems to have no interest in getting to know who Leroy has become. She’s away all the time, and even when she’s home, she barely asks Leroy about himself. Worse, she refuses to entertain his most fervent interest: building them a log cabin to live in. While Norma Jean seems to have no desire to reconcile, Leroy does want them to get “reacquainted.” He feels “unusually tender” about his wife and, at one point, he has a fleeting impulse to “tell [her]about himself, as if he had just met her,” hoping to bridge their divide. But he’s stoned and he forgets all about it a moment later, suggesting that their estrangement is here to stay.
The story doesn’t spell out the root cause of the couple’s estrangement, but the implication is that it began when they lost their baby. The night the baby died, as they stood together in the hospital, Norma Jean began to seem like a stranger to Leroy: he remembers thinking “Who is this strange girl?” and feeling that he had “forgotten who she was.” In this moment, Norma Jean and Leroy are processing their initial shock and grief, and it’s significant that they turn away from each other in such an extreme way. They do not simply grieve separately—grief seems to transform them into different people altogether, making them unrecognizable to one another.
Exacerbating this problem, Leroy and Norma Jean each process this tragedy without leaning on the other. Leroy deals with his grief through being on the road all the time and telling his tragic story to hitchhikers—even though he never talks about the baby to Norma Jean. He also seems to use his job as a distraction, reflecting that “in all the years he was on the road he never took time to examine anything.” While he’s explicitly saying that he never noticed the details of the landscape as he drove, he’s also admitting that his demanding job distracted him from examining his emotions. Meanwhile, it’s not totally clear what Norma Jean has done to grieve; the story narrates from Leroy’s perspective, and he doesn’t seem to know much about what she did or felt during all those years he was away. But once he comes home, he understands intuitively why she doesn’t want him around: he “reminds her too much of the early days of their marriage,” the era when their baby died. Since Leroy’s presence brings back memories of her grief, she avoids him.
Early on in the story, Leroy naively reflects on how lucky he is that losing a child didn’t wreck his marriage—but he’s obviously wrong. The baby’s death irrevocably changed both Leroy and Norma Jean, and their failure to grieve together sealed their estrangement. Now, living in the same house, they think about the baby constantly, but they can’t figure out how to talk about him: Leroy awkwardly avoids bringing up the child, and when Norma Jean references him (obliquely, after a fight with her mother), Leroy pretends not to know what she’s talking about. In this light, their marriage doesn’t stand a chance—if they can’t even name their grief, they have no hope of coming back together. When Norma Jean finally ends their marriage, she tells him, “I feel eighteen again. I can’t face that all over again.” She grieved without Leroy for so long that grieving with him is no longer an option.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Grief, Love, and Estrangement ThemeTracker
Grief, Love, and Estrangement Quotes in Shiloh
“They won’t let you build a log cabin in any of the new subdivisions,” Norma Jean tells him.
“They will if I tell them it’s for you,” he says, teasing her. Ever since they were married, he has promised Norma Jean he would build her a new home one day. They have always rented, and the house they live in is small and nondescript. It does not even feel like a home, Leroy realizes now.
Norma Jean is often startled to find Leroy at home, and he thinks she seems a little disappointed about it. Perhaps he reminds her too much of the early days of their marriage, before he went on the road. They had a child who died as an infant, years ago. They never speak about their memories of Randy, which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home all the time, they sometimes feel awkward around each other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should mention the child. He has the feeling that they are waking up out of a dream together—that they must create a new marriage, start afresh.
Leroy remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was.
Leroy used to tell hitchhikers his whole life story—about his travels, his hometown, the baby. […] In time, he had the feeling that he’d been telling the same story over and over to the same hitchhikers. He quit talking to hitch hikers when he realized how his voice sounded—whining and self-pitying… […] Now Leroy has the sudden impulse to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just met her. They have known each other so long they have forgotten a lot about each other. They could become reacquainted.
Later, she says to Leroy, “She just said that about the baby because she caught me smoking. She’s trying to pay me back.”
“What are you talking about?” Leroy says, nervously shuffling blueprints.
“You know good and well,” Norma Jean says. She is sitting in a kitchen chair with her feet up and her arms wrapped around her knees. She looks small and helpless. She says, “The very idea, her bringing up a subject like that! Saying it was neglect.”
She sits at the kitchen table, concentrating on her outlines, while Leroy plays with his log house plans, practicing with a set of Lincoln Logs. The thought of getting a truckload of notched, numbered logs scares him, and he wants to be prepared. As he and Norma Jean work together at the kitchen table, Leroy has the hopeful thought that they are sharing something, but he knows he is a fool to think this. Norma Jean is miles away. He knows he is going to lose her. Like Mabel, he is just waiting for time to pass.
“Your name means ‘the king,”’ Norma Jean says to Leroy that evening. He is trying to get her to go to Shiloh, and she is reading a book about another century.
“Well, I reckon I ought to be right proud.”
“I guess so.”
“Am I still king around here?”
Norma Jean flexes her biceps and feels them for hardness. “I’m not fooling around with anybody, if that’s what you mean,” she says.
“Would you tell me if you were?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does your name mean?”
“It was Marilyn Monroe’s real name.”
“No kidding!”
“Norma comes from the Normans. They were invaders,” she says.
At Shiloh, she drives aimlessly through the park, past bluffs and trails and steep ravines. Shiloh is an immense place, and Leroy cannot see it as a battleground. It is not what he expected. He thought it would look like a golf course. Monuments are everywhere, showing through the thick clusters of trees. Norma Jean passes the log cabin Mabel mentioned. It is surrounded by tourists looking for bullet holes.
“That’s not the kind of log house I’ve got in mind,” says Leroy apologetically.
“She won’t leave me alone—you won’t leave me alone.” Norma Jean seems to be crying, but she is looking away from him. “I feel eighteen again. I can’t face that all over again.” She starts walking away.
General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still thin and good-looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then she married Leroy and they had a baby, which they lost, and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same battleground. Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him.
Leroy gets up to follow his wife, but his good leg is asleep and his bad leg still hurts him. Norma Jean is far away, walking rapidly toward the bluff by the river, and he tries to hobble toward her. Some children run past him, screaming noisily. Norma Jean has reached the bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River. Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is she beckoning to him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.
