Norma Ever After

Once upon a time, specifically our time, there lived an ordinary commoner named Norma Dale. Norma Dale, hovering near thirty, had not given up on finding passion, or even romance. She had never expected passion, or even romance. Not since puberty and the retirement of her single Ken doll and his harem of Barbies. First, it was the name thing. For this, she blamed her mother. There was simply no excuse. Her mother had come up with Madeline for her first girl, and Norma's younger sister was named a perfectly decent Bethany, so why had her mother dried up so thoroughly in the middle? Mrs. Dale, herself named Elizabeth, had never acknowledged her choice as bland. "Norma is a fine name, Norma," she would say. Oblivious. Compounding. "Norma is an aunt name," Norma would counter. "Like smelly lavender and rotten old lace. Why didn't you name me Myrtle and be done with it?" "Myrtle is lovely," her mother would say, "I believe your father had a great-aunt Myrtle." (At this point Norma's fa-ther would look over and wink.) Then her mother would drift off for a moment and resurface with, "Marilyn Monroe was named Norma, wasn't she, Norma? She was such a beautiful girl." Norma had neither the luxury of a movieland fantasy machine nor the fallback of a decent middle name, being seconded with the imageless "Lynn." In middle school she had made the inevitable attempt to change her personain this case she simply dropped the m from her name and tried for a while to be "Nora." Ah, glamorous Nora. She of the emerald green eyes and chestnut hair. The slender ankle and cocky little hat, she of snappy banter and the devastating flirt. We were talking middle school, however. Poor Nora was suffered her m back in short and humiliated order. Norma's hair was chestnut, by the waywhen freshly washed and highlighted by a bright overhead sun. Her eyes were green, or at least there were green flecks in the brown when viewed in the same bright sun on the days that she wore her one green blouse. A blouse that didn't look too good with her skin, which couldn't take too much of that sunlight, which was okay, because the cute guy was never going to be standing there in the first place to gaze upon her undiscovered beauty. The cute guy would always be off with Ashley or Jessica or one of the other girls whose mothers had not cursed them with a bad name or used up all the good genes on their popular and happy sisters. There. The second cause of nonexpectations of passion. Or even romance. Norma was not ugly, she wasn't even plain. She had sometimes wished for plain, this during hours gazing into the bathroom mirror of scrutiny and shame. Plain you could work with. Plain was a blank canvas on which to buildblue hair, nose ring for the Goth, perfect makeup for the prep, even scrubbed and healthy for the jock. No, Norma's problem was that she was pretty, but pretty from another time. She'd had that epiphany one night during a sleepover. She and her non-Ashley, non-Jessica friends were up at two in the morning in their powder-pink and pony-purple sleeping bags watching late-night cable TV. The movie was black-and-white, an old musical with that rubbery-faced guy with the popped-out eyes, who sang and danced and dressed in embarrassing black-guy drag. Set in ancient Hollywood Rome, one of the big dance numbers involved hundreds of naked slave-babes concealed only by their chains and long blond wigs. Norma's friends were making hilarious fun of the corny old erotica, but Norma had sat there, stunned. That was her body, under the wigs anBaxter, Nancy is the author of 'Norma Ever After', published 2005 under ISBN 9780345479143 and ISBN 0345479149.