Category Archives: memories

BIRTH OF A NOTION

I’VE ONLY EVER MADE ONE New Year’s commitment. It was soon after I learned I was conceived during the wee hour following a New Year’s Eve celebration welcoming January 1, 1946.

“I don’t remember your birth,” my Mom dodged as she ironed blouses on my fiftieth birthday while detailing the deliverances of my siblings. “Your’s was like a used car after a New Year’s Eve dalliance.” 

“Excuse me? Dalliance? I was a dalliance?

My folks didn’t display evidence of a demonstratively affectionate union. The serrated edge, sepia wedding photo buried at the bottom of a bedroom dresser drawer attested to their having once been in love. But by the time I was old enough to empathize, there was no physical contact to observe. Suffice it to say, I never saw them kiss, hold hands, or even touch. It made any accounting of my arrival play more like a balancing act between burning the ironing board cover and battling spray starch build-up than accurately answering me. And, to be fair, at eighty-three her memories of maternity weren’t exactly chart toppers.

Nonetheless. 

“Cathy was born fifteen months after me,” I pestered, “yet you remember her delivery day and not mine?”

“David was my first, that’s why. Kit was my biggest, Michael was my earliest, Susie was my first girl, and Cathy was my last pregnancy — all two years apart! How could I forget?”

There were other distinctions made between us as well. As children, David and Cathy were gifted athletes. Kit marched in every school band through college playing coronet. Susie sang well enough to turn professional and Michael looked like a movie star. I was quieter by comparison, content with pets as my companions and seldom sought attention.

Perhaps I was like that from birth? It called for my surrender. “Well, at least I have the distinction of you remembering my creation.”

“Oh, no, I recall them all,” she perked up. “David was planned as our first anniversary gift to each other, and Kit was conceived on Halloween as a treat. I ended up in labor for 33 hours with that boy, walking the halls of Foote Hospital, trying to push him out. To this day he’s never without a piece of candy in his mouth. As for Michael — Michael was a Valentine’s Day creation that we were expecting near Thanksgiving. But you know how your brother Michael is about being early. Delivered him on the elevator. He just couldn’t sit still and wait. Now your sister Susie was conceived on my birthday, so we knew she’d arrive as our seventh anniversary gift. Of course, we were expecting a boy. That was the plan, to only have four boys. And finally Cathy, dear sweet Cathy. She was an income tax day deadline we met in the nick of time. But you all have that one thing in common.”

“Which is?”

“Your father was never present at any of his children’s birth. I delivered all of you solo.”

Sensing she spent a lifetime twinged by the loneliness of that indignity struck a cord in me more tender than her not recalling my day of birth. 

Since then I have made and kept the singularly same resolution:  I resolve that my Mom, and all the memories she shared with me will never be forgotten. 

Happy New Year!

~

Marguerite Quantaine is an essayist and novelist

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“SHALL I ADMIRE” HER ANOTHER 50 YEARS?

YESTERDAY,

after growing my hair out for six months,

I chose  a vintage Hermes scarf to tie it back

in the Vogue model style I wore when

she first fell in love with me.

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Friday, March 13, 1970

I squeezed into a Saks Fifth Avenue label outfit

from the early 70’s that she’d packed away.

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I applied Germaine Monteil makeup coaxed

from half-a-century old tin foil samples.

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I selected a pair of Trifari, love-knot, 

clip-on earrings that haven’t seen daylight

for five decades.

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Neither had the ecru garter belt and bare beige nylons

I slipped into with less ease.

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Finally, I splashed just a hint of Shalimar 

to the nape of my neck.

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It worked.

~

TODAY,

she asked me to make an appointment

to get my hair cut.

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She returned the outfit, scarf, garter belt and nylons

to the memento place at the bottom of

our 19th century humpback trunk.

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She mentioned she missed the emerald studs 

I’ve worn daily in my earlobes for thirteen years.

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She sprayed Shout on the Germaine Monteil

makeup stained washcloth.

.

And … let me think …

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Oh! … yes.

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She wrote “Shalimar” 

on her holiday shopping list.

.

~

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Marguerite Quantaine is an essayist and novelist

who values your opinion and appreciates

your sharing of this with others.

.

Please select LEAVE A REPLY by clicking below the  headline.

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NOW ON AMAZON & AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES NATIONWIDE

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IMOGENE’S ELOISE: Inspired by a true love story.

SERIOUSLY, MOM, you didn’t know?

Women Who Love Women

MerryHappy Seriously

Always Look Inside to try a few chapters for FREE

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I’m A 9th Generation American Homosexual

Front Cover 4 FBMothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces, lovers, friends. With a public declaration on page one, this candid chronicle reveals how the thoughts and emotional conquests of women who love women differ instinctively from those of their parents and the male dominant heterosexual ideologies of a patriarch society.

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Through lyrically warmed words engendering levity and benevolence these forty-nine relatable narratives shed insight on the simple dignity of an endangered female culture vanishing-by-assimilation into an age of artificial equality.

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Spanning the course of 70 years, each story embraces a different kind of love and loss that bears witness to women who triumphed in spite of the tokenism shown by both straight society, and the preponderance of recorded gay history that virtually ignores the female perspective of people and events.

There’s never been a colored, a Jew, a Democrat, a Yankee, a queer, or a woman as Mayor of this town and there never will be! Page 167 • Entire worlds exist of just two people in love. Page 78Life is a silver lining for those of us willing to scrape the surface of adversity. Page 198 • So let’s stop telling kids that bullies are a schoolroom problem graduation solves, or law enforcement can control, or Congress can legislate against. Page 35 • Sometimes life is a sleepwalk in which we see everything clearly and deny it. Page 147 • I never danced on a grave, but I did steal something from the dead, once. Page 143 • Our existence evolves through exchanges, most of it involving how we choose to spend our time in pursuit of people, places, or things on which we place the greatest value. Page 15 • Eighty days after Bobby Kennedy kissed me, he was killed. Page 111 • I wonder if any other daughter remembers the first time she made her mother cry. Page 183 • There was this dog we loved and lost on Christmas morning, 1951. It changed everything. Page 95 • Back then, those of us in love with another woman conducted our lives without a need for labels or social acceptance. Page 13 • I want every woman to fall in love with the person who has fallen in love with her. Page 63 • There sat a black cat yowling through quivering whiskers. Page 47 • Because I didn’t know that Ann had been told I was queer, and I didn’t know Ann told all our mutual friends her mother said I was queer, and I didn’t know her mother told the parents of mutual friends I was queer, and I didn’t know certain teachers were warned of the same. Page 68 • But I don’t think he understands that most of us don’t want to be enslaved by the duplicities of straight society. Page 176 • et cetera

~

Seriously, Mom, you didn’t know?

by Marguerite Quantaine

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~

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CELEBRITY RECALLS

Long before it became a song or included in quizzes, “Do you know who you are?” was one of those instantaneous, absurd (yet common) questions most starstruck fans would ask a celebrity encountered on the streets of New York City. Not that I knew it in March of 1973 and not that I’ve made a fool of myself by uttering the question ever again. In fact, I was embarrassed and surprised I did the one time.Scan 2019-3-12 15.14.08

But we were young and giddy and on our way to Julius’ in the West Village to celebrate our anniversary with out-of-town friends when I spotted Lily Tomlin walking towards us on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village.

“Do you know who you are?” The words just gushed out.

“Gee, I think so,” was Lily’s reply, and “sure” to my request to take her photo. The shorter girl with blonde hair accompanying her hurried back out of frame range and, even though I waved her back in, she’d have nothing to do with the invite.

Apparently gaydar was down that day because none of us picked up on the other as being a couple. Or maybe an over abundance of happiness was drowning the frequency out? Because they would have been enjoying their first year together around then to our third. Which means this must be their 47th anniversary year to our 49th.

Oh happy daze!

~ ~ ~

I rode in my first limousine on New Year’s Eve, 1973. Our friend, Tom Dale, was a market research specialist and producer of television commercials who lived in a penthouse on East 48th Street and needed to be seen on the town with arm candy as a guise for his closeted true self. Elizabeth and I were his go-to-gal-pals and happily so. It afforded us the luxury to eat at the most trendy restaurants, attend posh events, and always have third row orchestra seats on the aisle at Broadway shows. That New Year’s Eve we’d seen Pippin’ at The Music Box Theater on West 45th Street.

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The show let out to throngs of partygoers who had already gathered in Times Square and beyond anticipating the ball dropping at midnight to welcome the start of 1974. At some point the limo needed to cross Broadway to the east side. When the police separated the crowds enough for traffic from the theater district to pass through, the people began to touch the darkened windows, hoping to get a glimpse of a celebrity hidden inside.

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At that moment I realized how much more we identified with those oozing joy on the outside of the limo freezing in the streets than we’d ever be like those presumed to be riding within. I’ve never ceased wondering who’s hidden behind the tinted windows of limousines — but I stopped assuming it was anyone famous long, long ago.

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Three weeks later, after attending Liza Minnelli Live At The Winter Garden, we joined Tom’s chum, Ted, for dinner at his private table in Ted Hook’s Backstage Restaurant next door to the Martin Beck Theater. Besides being a former hoofer in the chorus of more than 400 movies, Ted served as Talulah Bankhead’s personal secretary for five years and regularly entertained friends and customers with intimate stories of the star.

……

THIS POST REPRESENTS AN EXCERPT FROM:

Seriously, Mom, you didn’t Know? by Marguerite Quantaine Copyright © 2019

currently available on Amazon, Kindle, and in bookstores nationwide.

 

C H R I S T M A S T I D E

A Merry Christmas
Cleone’s favorite holiday song was Joy To The World directed by the Philharmonic Orchestra and sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She’d begin playing it as a daybreak reveille on December 12th and continued through the morning of her birthday, December 27th. We were reminded of the fifteen day musical salute while driving Elizabeth’s mother back to Arkansas in November 1990.
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“How come I don’t remember this tradition, Mom?”

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“You’re never home for the holidays more than a day or two, Elizabeth Ann. Besides, your daddy and I only began it after you left home.”

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During those long gone 30 years, Elizabeth’s father died and Cleone remarried several times. As a southern lady born and bred in Montgomery, Alabama, she was raised to believe a woman’s life wasn’t complete without a man in hand. Her current husband, Bill, was confined to a nursing home, diagnosed with violent hysterical dementia. He hadn’t recognized her (or anyone) for six months and never would again, but that didn’t stop Cleone from visiting him daily, ignoring his foul-mouthed curses and dodging food flung in her direction.

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We promised to stay with her through Thanksgiving, but those plans changed after she asked me to sort through stacks of personal papers to determine if any needed keeping.

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The first item of interest I came across was Bill’s membership in a local white supremacist group. He kept propaganda, recruitment paraphernalia and a loaded .38 in his desk drawer next to a box of hollow point bullets. I immediately disposed of everything burnable and buried the gun in his asparagus garden. Other discoveries were as serious.
.
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(more…)

__________________________________

THE ABOVE EXCERPT IS FROM:
Seriously, Mom, you didn’t know?
by Marguerite Quantaine © Copyright 2019

Paperback & Kindle
Available on Amazon and in bookstores nationwide.

CLICK ON & THIS BOOK OPENS TO A FREE 3+ CHAPTER PREVIEW
(If it skips ahead, just tap the left arrow.)
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WITH GRACE AND GRATITUDE

Won't You Be My Honey

The first time I spotted the alligator in the murky waters of a man-made lake framing luxurious condos on one side and a city park on the other, I worried aloud for the safety of the mallards, Muscovy, and white, waddling ducks, the snapping turtles, giant goldfish, flock of pristine egrets, and wading blue heron, making their homes in the marshes there.

“And, the kids who play in this park,” my sweetheart added.

I didn’t respond. Not that I would ever want a person of any age to be harmed by an alligator, but there was no imminent danger in that. Only the nature-preying-nature lurked.

The lake is more for show and tell by realtors looking to justify pricey units with a view. There’s no swimming allowed, and since it’s illegal to feed wildlife in Florida outside of a reserve, observing nature in this park is mostly done from a deck built 15 feet above, and stretching 20 feet out over the water, where picnic tables are placed for brown baggers wondering what so many thieving sea gulls are doing there, some sixty miles inland.

At first, all I saw were the mammoth marble shaped alligator eyes, trolling the lake’s surface, leaving innocent ripples of water in his wake.

“Or,” she said when I pointed out the marauding eyeballs, “it’s a submarine.”

“No, hon, I’m pretty certain it’s an alligator.”

“But, I’m thinking…”

“It’s a gator, okay?”

“I’m just saying what it could be,” she persists, as the tire-like tracks on it’s back emerges. “Or, maybe one in camouflage to look like an alligator, so no one would suspect.”

Really, who am I to say otherwise? I thought.

We only visit this particular park once a year, in September or October, depending on what date the High Holy Days fall.

I won’t expound on the significance of these 10 days for those of you who aren’t Jewish, but I will share the custom of casting bread upon the water (tashlikh) as a symbol of one’s transgressions being disposed of. Unlike other religions, Jews don’t believe in original sin. Instead, we’re born pure, acquiring our indiscretions with age, intent, or ignorance along the way.

But, if we’re sincere in saying “I’m sorry” to those we’ve wronged, and have done good without expectation in return, and made an earnest effort to mend fences, the sin slate gets wiped clean on Yom Kippur, giving each of us another chance to get life right, and do it better.

 

…and more

 

———– TO CONTINUE ————
THE ABOVE ESSAY REPRESENTS AN EXCERPT FROM:
Seriously, Mom, you didn’t Know?
by Marguerite Quantaine © Copyright © 2019
NOW ON AMAZON & AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES NATIONWIDE
You are urged to LOOK INSIDE on Amazon for a try-before-you-buy FREE READ of the first 3 chapters.

Find Me On Amazon • Friend Me On Facebook •  Follow Me On Twitter

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This essay was first published entitled See Ya Later Alligator in 2015 and continues to be revisited each year at this time in memory of those who have passed, and with hopes we all continue to be written into The Book of Life. ~ 

Marguerite Quantaine is an essayist and author.  Copyright, © 2015-2018

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IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU (TOO)

Were I to write my epitaph, it would read, “She lived a charmed life.” Those who have only known of me might not agree — but those who’ve known me well, would.

Consider this as evidence of that.

August often stifles New York, as it did forty years ago, with temperatures so high and rain so scarce a brownout swept over all five boroughs, leaving the city sweltering in virtual darkness from dusk until dawn.

We were living in Bensonhurst by then, renting the upper two floors of a 1925 three story duplex; a stucco, fort-like house located on a tree-lined street between Avenues O and P, not far from a rumored underboss residence. It was a neighborhood where no one locked their doors at night and old-country madonnas garbed in basic-black sat in fold-out lawn chairs on cement sidewalks, waiting for the intense fragrances of Sicilian sausage, fennel seed biscotti, and basil-based sauces to waft through their kitchen windows, signaling meals had simmered to perfection and were ready for serving.

Our home’s private entrance had four steps up to the front door. Once inside there was another seven steps up to the hallway landing leading to a bedroom, living room, dining room, and bathroom, with a second flight of stairs to two more bedrooms. A doorway leading off the dining room opened to an eat-in kitchen. Another opened from the living room onto a second floor veranda stretching 25 feet long and 15 feet deep, with a 4-foot high wall leveling off just below the treetops.

We loved that place and porch, especially in August when sleeping outside beat the heat of the house by thirty degrees, and the starlit sky with its dreamsicle moon overhead was about as romantic as any heart could wish for, or mind could imagine.

It was after 10 one night when we were out there, lying on army surplus canvas and wood framed cots, listening to the neighbors battery operated radios synchronized to Casey Kasem naming, And I Love You So, by America’s favorite barber as “holding at 38” on the Top 40 charts when we heard a knock on the door and Liz called out, “Who’s there?”

“I’m looking for Marge,” came a baritone response.

“Who are you?”

“Mike Kelly.”

“Are you Irish?”

“I am.”

“Then the door’s open. Come on up.”

At the time, I was still recovering from a crash that left me chronically disabled the year before. As predicted, I’d regained my ability to walk, but still needed a wheelchair or walker, occasionally, and a cane, always. As I struggled up and into a lightweight, summer robe, Liz donned hers and, with a Coleman lantern in tow, greeted the fellow, leading him out onto the porch, and offering him a seat at the fold-out card table stationed there for Canasta and Hearts competitions whenever family or friends visited. Then she excused herself to get us all some iced lemonade while I tried to read his face by candlelight.

I liked what I saw. Mike Kelly had a crinkle-eyed smile plastered to his super-sized mug, with a pencil mustache complementing his noggin of silky grey hair.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” he began, “but you never contacted us. I had to take the Long Island Railroad from Port Washington after work and two subways — then got lost while walking here from the El.

“Why should I have contacted you, Mr. Kelly?”

“Mike, please.”

“Mike.”

“Didn’t you get our telegram about winning Publisher’s Clearing House?”

…and more
THE ABOVE EXCERPT IS FROM:

Seriously, Mom, you didn’t know?
 by Marguerite Quantaine © Copyright 2019
THIS LINK OPENS TO A FREE 3+ CHAPTER PREVIEW
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Did you ever with a sweepstakes, contest, or anything at all? How did it affect your life?
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I’m all eyes and heart.

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