Grief, Love, and Estrangement Theme Analysis

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.