SECRETS & TIES

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Marion Deyo didn’t start out as my friend, or exactly finish up that way. And yet, twenty years after our final exchange, the ending to our story still astounds me.

It will you, too.

We met in 1966, when I was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, desperately searching for a different dream. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy acting. I did. In fact, my audition instructor, the late great Jessica Tandy, said I had the natural talent to guarantee a bright future in the theater.

But I knew I didn’t have the personality for it — especially the New York City six-floor walkup, noisy neighbors, nasty bugs part. And, the menial labor between parts part. Or, the suck up and shut up part. The waiting for hours to audition with those who actually wanted to wait for hours to audition part. The desire for fame and fortune part. The tediousness of twiddling thumbs while slow learners remembered their lines part. The talk among actors about nothing but acting part. The throw momma under the bus to get the part part.

It’s why I applaud, but never become a fan of celebrities. I know how hard they worked to get to where they got. I know the bad choices they made. I know of their struggle to get by in the public eye. I know how self-destructive they become when disdaining fellow actors.

But I digress.

One Stouffer’s morning with hot buttered pecan roll and golden coffee in hand, an advertisment in The New York Times classifieds for a media clerk at a Fifth Avenue agency caught my eye. I didn’t know what the job entailed, but figured clerks keep records. Enough said.

Upon entering the office of the department head assigned to interview me, I zeroed in on her desktop nameplate: Marion Deyo.

The older woman (by 21 years) didn’t look up. She didn’t ask me to be seated. She didn’t make any attempt to put me at ease. She even forced me to introduce myself to the top of her bent down head, busily engaged in reading my job application.

“I’ve never heard of anyone with your last name,” she muttered.

“Oh yeah?” I snapped back. “Well I’ve never heard of anyone with your last name, either!” It was a pompous, knee-jerk reaction that I don’t know why I had since — then as now — I’ve yet to encounter a single person outside my immediate family who has my last name.

Suffice to say, the interview ended abruptly and I went on my Mary-quite-contrary way until a week later when I got an early bird phone call saying I was hired.

“How?” I asked. “And, why?”

“No one else applied for job,” replied the person who’d spend five minutes training me later that day.

Technically, Marion was my boss, but she never spoke to me, and made a point of ignoring me whenever we were in the same room, or passed each other in the hall.

Cue Ruth Ruffino (a fictitious name in this, otherwise, true story).

Ruth was a four-foot-eight gentile yenta with coal black hair to match her widow’s wear daily outfits. She had half-dollar size eyes, skin the color of Pattypan squash, and a passive-aggressive control freak personality that she conveyed through a chronically clogged nose. Ruth was just so transparent, so disingenuous, so cloying, so suffocating, so much the type of women I truly didn’t like a lot.

Nevertheless, Ruth was a popular little Miss nicey-nicey, chirpy-chirpy, brown-nosey to everyone, earning her favor by supplying our communal office of eight women with free donuts most mornings and coffee every afternoon.

The thing with women working shoulder-to-shoulder in one room is that their eyes are always peeled and ears cocked, providing the perfect stage and an instant audience for anyone enjoying fanfare, which Ruth invariably made whenever leaving me a box of candy, or personal note, or annoying tchotchke — then yelling from her desk, “Did you get the gift I left?”

Oh-h, I got it all right.

I just didn’t give it. I didn’t eat the donuts, or drink the coffee, or accept the gifts, or read the notes, or engage in conversation — even when she was hovering over me, talking at the top of her elastic sacs.

One day upon returning home from work I found flowers had been delivered, not by a florist, but by Ruth, personally, giving the bouquet and card to my landlord with her delivery instructions.

The next day, she crowed, “I was late to work yesterday morning because I rode all the way up town in order to deliver you flowers. Did you get them?”

“Yes,” I cawed back, “and assured the landlord the flowers were for him and I gave him your telephone number as you requested.”

Soon after, Marion summoned me into her office to tell me she was letting me go for causing too much trouble in her department.

To my chagrin and our surprise, I burst into tears, blubbering my side of the story from the minute Ruth laid eyes on me until my moment of breakdown before her.

Marion listened, stone-faced until I finished. Then she offered me a tissue and said she’d handle it — which she did. But she never said how, we never spoke of it again, and I wasn’t fired.

Hours later Ruth announced her engagement to a dweeby, much taller, older account executive who wore his suspendered pants up around his atrophied pecs; a bloke who’d been transferred to our Chicago office that very same day, taking Ruth to the windy city with him. The other communal room women shunned me afterwards.

Over the next six weeks I was assigned to a task no other employee (past or present) had been able to complete. I tackled it by initiating an unorthodox protocol, earning me a promotion and my own office.

Upon becoming Marion’s executive colleague, the walls came down. We sat together at department head meetings and lunched together regularly. She learned I was single and living in Manhattan. I learned she was single and living with her cousin on Long Island. The weekend she invited me out for a visit began a quintessential friendship lasting for years — right up until the day I discovered the two women weren’t cousins, but a couple.

I had an inkling, but I never completely understood why everything suddenly changed after that. Our daily routine ended abruptly. I ceased being invited to their home. Marion took another job at a different agency. Eventually, so would I.

Over time we continued to touch base, but seldom, until not at all.

I fell in love and my life took many dramatic turns. We ended up living in the same Long Island town as Marion and her partner. The company we launched and grew was in stark contrast to the enterprise they undertook. For fifteen years we rarely crossed paths. In 1990, we semiretired to Florida. They remained on Long Island.

Then in October of 1994 I had a premonition.

…and more

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C O L D – C A S E

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Entire worlds exist of just two people in love.

In 1959, I knew a girl who (like me) aspired to be a writer.

Her name was Ann.

She was an oddity of sorts among the girls I occasionally accompanied to Brown’s Pharmacy where we sat at the counter on hot summer afternoons and ate Cheese Doodles while sipping Cokes through waxed paper straws in glasses topped off with half inch ice cubes.

At barely five feet and under 90 pounds, I was a wisp. She was taller by five inches and heavier, with a pronounced pear shaped body. Although her family was prominent, living in a big house in a better neighborhood, Ann dressed in drab colors, had wing shaped eyeglasses that she was constantly shoving back up to the top of her flat nostril nose, wore braces to correct an overbite and fixed her mousey brown hair in an unflattering bob.

But Ann was smart and witty and we made each other laugh.

We’d both turned 13 in ‘59 (on a maturity scale of 8 by todays standards) and were as innocent as the hits of Brenda Lee, Del Shannon, Connie Francis and Dion sounded on the radio, or Leave It To Beaver, Donna Reed, and Bonanza appeared on the tube. Girls wore skirts or dresses to school with knee highs or bobby socks. Family dinners were served at 6. Nobody smoked, nobody swore, and if anyone knew about sex, nobody said.

When the 20th anniversary showing of Gone With The Wind came to town that year, Ann and I went to a matinee together, sitting in the front row of the balcony in a downtown theater.

Enthralled by the majesty of the production and enchanted by the correspondence exchanged between Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes who was off to war, we decided the best way to hone our writing skills would be to challenge each other by pretending to be Scarlett, writing letters to Ashley.

We did this by purchasing a small brown notebook of lined paper in which Ann, as Scarlett, would pen a love letter to Ashley, and give it to me as a challenge. I’d try to out write her by following course. We would hand this booklet back and forth from day to day, each one allowed the evening after school to compose a new letter.

The notebook and whatever words we might have written are now long gone and forgotten, but nothing we wrote was vulgar or suggestive; neither of us understood the intimacies of love, the innuendo of scenes seen on the screen, nor even the emotional definition of words at the time. It was just a game of pretend.

This exchange went on until a week before our first day of 9th grade. That’s when Ann informed me her mother said she could no longer associate with me in any manner, anywhere, at any time.

“Can I have the notebook back?” I asked.

“My mom burned it.”

I assumed our friendship ended because her parents were wealthier than mine and members of the country club set, or because Ann always buttoned her blouses at the top and I didn’t, or because I was color coordinated, or they didn’t want her being a writer.

It never occurred to me that her mother interpreted the innocence of our words as perverse.

I would tell you that I was hurt by both it and the many years of meanness from other former classmates and several teachers that followed — but I wasn’t.

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 our mutual friends I was queer, and I didn’t know certain teachers were warned of the same.

In fact, I didn’t even know the word ‘queer’ meant anything other than unconventional and curious.

(I’ve always been both of those.)

Nevertheless, over time and looking back I came to wonder why one girl had written “queer” in two places in my 9th grade yearbook, and the word was scrawled as graffiti in large block letters taking up the full five feet of my hall locker in 11th grade.

It must have been disappointing that I never seemed fazed by the queer tag given me by that childhood clique of classmates and group of teachers. But how could they know, the primary reason I never accepted party invitations, or attended sports events, or showed up at school dances was because, by 14, I’d forged my folks names to a work permit so I could take a job from 4 to 9, five nights a week, and 9 to 9 on Saturdays.

All that hatred shot to hell on the target being oblivious.

Five years later, after never having had a crush, fling, or intimate relationship of any kind with anyone (male or female), I looked across a crowded room and fell in love with the woman looking back at me.

Fast forward to this morning.

Upon checking my emails, I found one from someone who’d attended my 50th high school reunion over the weekend, 1300 miles away. The celebration had come and gone (as did all other reunions before this one) without me.

The email was part apology and part confession for having heard of the brown book, and being complicit in the mocking, backstabbing and shunning, and remaining silent, even to the snide remarks made at the reunion of “have you heard” and “I told you so” from those who never knew squat.

…and more

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ONE INCOMPARABLE CHRISTMAS

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There was this dog we loved and lost on Christmas morning, 1951.

The Clancy Christmas

It changed everything.

We lived in a clapboard farmhouse then, built a hundred years earlier and insulated with Civil War era newspapers layered between the rafters and floorboards. It was a rickety-rackety place that sweltered in the summer and shivered in the winter when no amount of coal heaved into the basement furnace could sufficiently heat the cast iron radiators, or warm the boiler of bath water. The windows rasped with the wind, the floors creaked with the rain and the back door flew open unexpectedly.

“It’s just a spirit visiting,” mom would say, having given up on getting my father to replace the antiquated latch.

We were born in that house; three brothers, two sisters and I. Our childhood was spent clamoring up and down its winding stairs, playing board games on its covered porch, wishing on the first seen stars in the night sky from its roof, and never suspecting life would be any different than it was each day we were living it.

Advertised as a White Elephant for three thousand dollars with nothing down, my folks bought the house because it was the only place they could afford. Ours was a life of necessities: three meals a day, twice removed hand-me-downs, a block ice icebox, a single extension phone, broomstick horses, pillowcase capes, corrugated carton sleds and summer vacations camping in a W.W.II army surplus tent at state parks where mom boiled coffee and cooked meals over an open flame while we faux-fished with safety pins tied to kite string, scouted butterflies and floated on boats made from inner tubes wrapped in clotheslines to resemble canoes.

They were wondrous years made better by the presence of a ninth member of our family adopted on the morning of my birth. Her name was Clancy. She was our family dog.

“It’s written,” said my mother, “that the original Irish setter wasn’t the pure mahogany color we see now, but a burnished red with a snow white bib and matching diamond set in the center of its head.” Clancy was born with both and – even though we boasted about the markings of her ancient pedigree – we secretly believed she possessed the heart of an angel.

Clancy was our comrade and confidante. She accompanied us on errands and watched over us when chores needed doing. She got us to school on time and waited there to greet us at the end of each day. When we ate she sat near the table. When we bathed she stood near the tub.

When we read she rested her head at our feet. When we played she kept watch over our safety. Games were intensified by her barking approval, birthdays were celebrated with her howling accompaniment, sorrows were soothed by the gentle touch of her cold nose on salt-streaked cheeks and many a bitter winter night was made warm by her body filling the cold void at the bottom of one of our beds.

But my best memory of Clancy is of the Christmas morning in 1951 when we awoke to find her gone.

• • •

A fortnight before my father made his instructions clear. “Each of you is to make a list of everything you want for Christmas.”

“Everything?” I asked, eyes wide with surprise.

“What did I just say?”

I winced. My father was a disciplinarian who expected to be obeyed without question. That wasn’t hard, since he worked eighty miles away and often forgot to check for compliance whenever he came home on alternate weekends.

“Everything,” he reiterated, “no matter how ridiculous. Is that clear?” He stood glaring at our frozen forms before taking a Chesterfield from it’s crumple-pack, lighting it, removing a stray tobacco bit from the tip of his tongue and continuing on. “In one week you’ll each give me your list in an envelope with your name on it and I’ll mail them. Dismissed.”

My mom was as affectionate as my father was aloof. It was she who encouraged us to always make amends after arguments and share our few possessions.

“You six are the only people on earth you’ll ever know your entire lifetime,” she’d remind us. “Cherish that.”

What began with cooperative glee quickly turned into the drudgery of pencil shavings, eraser residue, wadded-up paper and the sweet smell of spent crayons. Each night before bedtime we’d meet to exchange ideas, promising no duplicates would be recorded and agreeing that the first person to list an item would own it and regulate borrowing times.

“It’s the perfect plan for maximizing returns,” the eldest of us assured.

“Who’s Max?” I asked.

“Just do as you’re told!” he demanded, knowing I rarely did.

During our final review of lists I noticed my brother Kit had added a P.S. to his. “Dear Santa Claus,” he wrote, “I’m tired of sharing Clancy. Please bring me a puppy.”

Certain I was the only sibling who felt the same, I promptly drew a puppy on my list.

The next morning our signed letters in sealed envelopes were handed over. As we stood at attention accepting praise from my father for this mission accomplished, none of us knew that each of us copied the request for a puppy originated by Kit.

• • •

Every Christmas Eve Clancy accompanied us on our journey to find the sweet smelling blue spruce my father had tagged in a tree camp, chop it down with a Boy Scout axe, tie it to the roof of our maroon Ford station wagon and cart it home for trimming to the sound of carols playing on the Victrola and the comfort of Big Top peanut butter on toast dunked in mugs of Ovaltine. The trips were always cold and cramped and ripe for disagreement, but especially so that year when the predicted ‘light flurries’ became a heavier downfall. Even Clancy was agitated. She wailed with the whipping wind all the way home.

Tree trimming included hanging aluminum-hinged Shiny Brite glass ornaments, thumb thick multicolored Royalites, peppermint canes, silver tinsel and a garland of popcorn and cranberries draped under a white plastic angel with spun glass hair and a die-cut skirt of stars that glowed from a small yellow bulb tucked inside.

That angel was near and dear to my mom. Each year she watched my father teeter on a chair to place it on the treetop, signaling our time for bed. On the way upstairs we’d stop at our red brick cardboard fireplace to thumbtack our stockings to its flimsy black mantle where mom had balanced a glass of milk, molasses cookies and carrots for Santa and his reindeer.

Even though Clancy scratched at each of our bedroom doors, no love would jump onto our beds to guard our hearts that fateful night. We all ignored her pleas by forgetting her faithfulness, preferring the promise of a puppy.

• • •

A blizzard engulfed the house while we slept. The weight of its drifts barricaded the downstairs windows and forced open the back door.

Most mornings, the first boy up would check the fire in the furnace and shovel in more coal as needed. By the time he finished, the gas stove would be warming the kitchen and momma would have oatmeal ready to quell our chant, “Food for the inner-man!”

But that Christmas morning was different.

We six awoke and sprang from our beds as one, fueled by anticipation and oblivious to the unusual cold as we felt our way down the darkened stairs, huddling close until Kit flipped the switch turning on the overhead globe and illuminating a living room piled high with gifts.

There were bikes and baseball mitts, sleds and skates, trumpets and teddy bears, dolls and drums, trains and planes, chemistry sets and butterfly nets, kites and cowboy hats, battery operated cars and trucks, books and balls, and clothes and caps arranged around our very first television set!

It was as if all my wishes on first seen stars had been granted in one felt swoop and – by possession of them – I’d never again enjoy the luxury of wishful thinking.

My siblings sensed it, too. Somehow we knew we’d committed the crime of excess; having everything we’d ever imagined as glorious within our reach. And yet – instead of joy – we felt a collective emptiness.

“Where’s Clancy?” I wondered aloud, not noticing the absence of puppies. Twelve eyes darted in six directions.

“Here Clancy, here girl,” Kit called out, whistling for her to come. We joined him in calling her. “Come, Clancy. Come!”

“She’s gone,” my father declared, already dressed to leave the house through a second floor window, hoping to spot a sign of her from the porch rooftop. “She got out the kitchen door last night and was caught in the blizzard. She couldn’t get back.”

“It’s my fault,” I blurted, my lips curled and quivering with regret. “I asked Santa for a puppy. That’s why Clancy ran away. Oh momma,” I blubbered, burying my face in her lap, “I didn’t mean to do it.”

Kit immediately confessed to asking for a puppy, too. And then, one by one, the others exposed what proved to be our family folly.

Momma comforted us as best she could while watching the day die in our eyes. It was more hurt than she could bear.

“Kit,” she urged, “check the bin to see if we have enough coal to last. It could be days before we get dug out of here and no telling of what’s going on with the neighbors until your father returns. Take your sister along. Let her help you.”

The steps to the cellar were thick-pitted pine, worn smooth on the edges from a century of use. I slid butt-to-step down them into the pitch black, whimpering, until seized by the sound of a soft, steady thumping.

“Is that the monster you said lives down here?” I whispered to Kit as he fumbled for the lights.

“I was just teasing about that,” he hushed back.

He grabbed my hand as the lone light from a hanging, 40 watt bulb flickered on, shedding a soft glow directly below it. And there, in its corrugated remains of the television box was our tail-wagging best friend, Clancy, proudly nursing her six newborn puppies.

• • •

By the time the puppies were weaned, we’d assured my folks we were happy to share our one red setter. But it wasn’t until the last of the litter was adopted that we realized we’d been promised and given everything we’d wanted for Christmas – yet none of us could recall what we’d gotten, except for those puppies that we gave away.

Nine years later Clancy died. We buried her in the back yard, her grave shaded by a pear tree my father planted when she, the tree, and I were all the same size.

Thirty years would pass before the pang of joy replaced the pain of loss and I adopted another Irish setter. She looked a lot like Clancy. She had the same white diamond on her head and white vest on her chest. She was as loyal and as loving and as totally trusting of me as Clancy was. I adored her in every way.

But somehow, come December there’d be those bittersweet moments when she’d remind me of a Christmas tree with only old ornaments and popcorn streamers, a cardboard fireplace with Orlon socks dangling, a hard plastic angel, six little kids and the joy of a solitary present to pine over.

The holidays are – and will always be – a beautiful time of year.

A time I remember that giving is its own reward, sharing is the truest joy, and love is the greatest gift.

A time and a spirit likened to, but never quite the same as it was – as we were – that one incomparable Christmas.

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L A D Y • L U C K

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I’m not a superstitious person by nature. I don’t think of black cats or the number 13 as unlucky. I don’t knock on wood to ensure things go well. When my right eye twitches, I don’t believe there’ll be a birth in the family. And if a candle suddenly blows out, I’m certain it doesn’t signal spirits will come calling.

Except (maybe) sometimes. Because something so bizarre befell us one long ago Halloween night, people have been brushing the residue of salt off my left shoulder ever since.

It happened up north, in a time when the holiday was still animated by moms making scrap cloth costumes for their kids, then letting them run, unassisted, through neighborhoods where every house had someone eager to marvel over foil-winged angels, feathered fairies, eye-patch pirates, sheeted ghosts, and comic heroes in tinted tights wearing scarlet skivvies and donning pillowcase capes.

Liz and I had just such a home that omened October, numbered 13 Cheshire Street, set back on a cul-de-sac, with its vintage wraparound casements porch facing north, and attached deck laundry facing south.

Why we’d decorated both rooms that year remains baffling, but we did, with every accordion-style paper ghost and goblin we could find at the five-and-dime. We tied dried cornstalks around the doors, and scattered straw over the floors. The sidewalks were lined with jack-o-lanterns lit by three inch sabbath candles. A witches silhouette swayed on the front door with tiny plastic bats dangling from her broomstick. A black cat cutout hung on the back door, over a “Scat!” sign scribbled especially for the occasion.

Inside, candied and caramelized apples, pink popcorn balls, teal blue bubble gum cigars, white powdered donuts, and warmed cider in fold-out handle paper cups were arranged on a long linen clothed table, free for the glee of anticipated trick-or-treaters.

Who never came.

Nary a one.

Instead, a moonless, tempestuous, indigo sky of four winds spewing sleet descended, making mayhem before depositing a gravestone cold in its wake.

Wiser women would have felt a sense of foreboding.

We just went to bed.

“Wake me when it’s over,” Liz said, dispirited. “And not a second sooner.”

Around midnight, I heard howling; intermittent at first, but gradually growing into a wail, like death scratching at the door. I slipped out of bed and felt a shudder when opening the window to spot a solitary candle still flickering within a collapsed blackfrosted pumpkin. Soon, that lone light in the night died.

“Power’s just out,” I whispered to myself while creeping blindly down the stairs and through the house to the kitchen where I felt around to find a flashlight; still fearful of the steady, doleful crying.

Nevertheless, I unlocked the kitchen door leading into the laundry room, then mustered the courage to cautiously crack open its backyard door, illuminating the deck steps.

There sat a black cat, yowling through frosted whiskers.

“You’re quite the screamer,” I hushed, ushering him in.

After wrapping the cat in a towel grabbed from the hamper, I fashioned a bed from some leftover straw, placing it, and him inside the dryer before cracking the door and returning to bed.

At half past four the caterwauling began again. This time, a flashing clock dial signaled the power was restored. Exhausted, I staggered up and stumbled down to the yard door, only to find Liz had put the screamer back outside.

“How could anyone be so callous?” I asked the cat while scooping him up and carrying him — this time to the basement, where I hid him in a corrugated box filled with my best cotton rags. During my sleepwalk back to bed, I fashioned the tongue lashing I planned to give Liz for her indefensible bad behavior.

The scolding wasn’t to be.

Well-rested and up early, Liz was already at the sink making coffee when I hurried past her heading down the basement stairs, shocked to find the screamer, smug as a bug in a hug while nursing six newborn kittens.

“Egad, I’m in for it now!” I surmised, way-way too loud.

“In for what?” Liz called back.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Instead, I sheepishly carted the box of kittens up to the kitchen with momma cat in tow.

…and more

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

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DRESS REHEARSAL : TAKE ONE

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A week after my father died in 1969, my mom bought her burial dress, a long-sleeved bevy of beige chiffon accordion pleats with contoured organdy hemlines and cuffs resembling parched petunias.

The collar was fashioned into a multilayered sash, cresting the shoulders and flowing down the back to veil the neck and screen the zipper. A peach taffeta sheath shimmered underneath.

“Everyone knows a wife dies seven years after her husband,” Mom declared.

“Is that the law?” I asked.

“It is,” she assured.

“And, if you don’t die, what then? Do they give you a ticket?”

Mom flashed me the look of admonishment that every parent keeps ready to actuate in times of insolence.

“It’s a glorious dress,” she said.

“Yes,” I conceded. “A veritable work of art.”

My mom was never as thin as she thought she was, or planned to be. After 56 years, six children and a passion for chocolate, she arrived at widowhood 20 pounds heavier than ideal for her 5-foot frame.

Still, she was striking. Her ivory-streaked ebony curls were invariably fastened atop her head like crown jewels. Her posture was precise. Her apparel was meticulous, with a penchant for pastels, fabric flowers and contemporary styles.

The exception being, that dress. Where other designs died on the rack and emerged in time as retro vogue, her burial dress remained permanently detained in 1969.

I don’t know why Mom never saw fit to keep the dress in a garment bag. Perhaps she just preferred the convenience of instant viewing. Regardless, she carted it, unprotected, through five dress sizes, three homes and 37 more years.

“She makes me put it on, you know,” my sister, Sue, disclosed one day.

“The burial dress?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Whatever for?” I wondered.

“So she can imagine how she’ll look in her coffin.”

I guffawed.

“She’s serious,” Sue cautioned. “Every visit, she makes me put that dress on and lie down. Eyes closed. Hands folded. Perfectly still. She makes Kate do it, too. Every holiday. But Kate lies with arms stretched wide, like wings.”

(Kate’s our kid sister. Both she and Sue are 5 feet 7ish.)

“Wings?”

“Yeah. When the sleeve pleats open, they look like angel wings.”

“Why hasn’t she asked me to try it on?” I almost pouted.

“Because you resemble a younger, thinner her,” Sue teased. “She characterizes you as her little dolly.” I scoffed at her remark, but took it as true.

“So? How do you look in it?”

“Puh-lease,” she chortled.

…and more
THE ABOVE EXCERPT IS FROM:

Seriously, Mom, you didn’t know?  by Marguerite Quantaine

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This essay © by Marguerite Quantaine first appeared in St. Petersburg Times, on 11/5/2006.

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IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU (TOO)

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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
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IN DREAMS I WALK WITH YOU

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Grandma Sutherland (1889-1961) I adored her.

Sometimes life is a sleepwalk in which we see everything clearly and deny it.

My walk began when I was 14, five weeks before the Fourth of July in 1961.

I had a recurring dream. It was dark and raining. I saw myself asleep on my grandma’s couch. Something stirred me. I got up and walked to the kitchen. There, lying curled up on the floor, was my grandma – my mom’s mom. I knelt down and reached for her hand. Only then would I realize my eyes were open and staring at the ceiling.

Every night, for five weeks, the same dream.

The morning after the first time, I told my sister, Sue. She said I was being dramatic. The second time I told my brother, Kit, who told my mother I was being weird. After that I went on dreaming — but never spoke of it again.

The weather forecasters warned of rain for the extended holiday weekend, but promised clear skies for fireworks.

I had a job selling 45s at the only record store in town. By closing time Saturday, I knew they’d been right about the rain. My brother forgot to pick me up, forcing me to walk the half-mile home in a dismal drizzle. I remember hoping my mom was working the vigil shift at a hospice home by then, unaware of my whereabouts. All I wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep through the holiday.

And I might have. But Mom and Kit were in the living room arguing over my grandmother when I sneaked in.

“I wouldn’t ask. But I must work,” she was saying. Frantic and sorrow straining her voice. “Go? Just for tonight?”

“Nothing doing,” said Kit. “I’ve got plans for early morning. Besides, David’s living with her. He’s the one who should be there, not me.”

“Your brother won’t be there tonight and she’s not well,” Mom pleaded. “She needs you.” He ignored her. “Please?”

“I’ll go,” I said, disarming them. Without time for questions or concern, Mom gazed her gratitude and Kit drove me to where I’d never go again.

It wasn’t magnanimous of me. I idolized my grandma. Had circumstances demanded I live with her for good, I’d have gone as willingly. It’s not that I didn’t adore my mom. I did. But Mom loved six of us, equally. Grams loved me, especially.

My grandma was the scent of boiled coffee, fried doughnuts, and brown soap wrapped in the warmth of a summer day. A stern, determined woman who lived alone on an empty road, in a plain house, without television or telephone. Though her isolation required Mom’s visiting every day, she clung to her privacy and possessions as if they were gold. They weren’t – not even gold-tone.

By 11 the rain turned fierce, with roaring thunder swallowing the sky. I had to pound hard on her raised-paneled door before Grandma would let me in. She immediately demanded to know the whereabouts of my brothers.

“They couldn’t come,” I lied. “I came instead.”

“I don’t want you,” she said. “I want Kit. Where’s David? I want David.”

She sounded slurred, as if the storm had scrambled her senses.

“Well you got me, Grams,” I said. “So let’s get you to bed. I’ll sleep in the parlor on the couch.”

It took some fussing before she shuffled back to the bedroom. I sat with her in the dark a while, making certain she was settled before gently kissing her good night. Then I returned to the parlor and lay down damp, intent on sleeping fast.

When a silent streak of lightning crept by the window, I realized my eyes were open. There was no thunder. No rain. No noise. Only that bright white transient light marking the moment and where I was.

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DIVIDED WE (STILL) STAND

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Ergo, E Q U A L I T Y

Gays are scary people.

Not the gay next door who provides for his parents and carpools his nieces to day care. Or the fellow who fixes my car. Or the lady who cuts my hair.

It’s only the media-hyped homosexual that makes me cringe and withdraw. Those clusters of erotic exhibitionists captured on camera for our viewing displeasure. Scurrilous straights cause me discomfort. But vulgar gays make me ashamed.

Harvey Fierstein has expressed impatience with people like me. He once called us “leeches” sitting silent on the sidelines while proud gays pave the way to equal rights for the majority of us “slackers.”

I like Harvey a lot. I admire and respect him for his courage and integrity. I think he’s a superb actor and writer and a fine role model. He gives gays spirit.

But I don’t think he understands that most gays don’t want to be enslaved by the duplicities of straight society. We don’t want to clone our ethics, or edit our emotions, or conform our lives to any corrupted concept of happily ever after.

If I could sit down with Harvey Fierstein, I’d tell him I’ve been hopelessly in love with the same woman for 43 years. But we won’t wed, not even though we work to support those who choose to. Not even if the Supreme Court makes marriage rights a reality.

Because, for most of my generation, love is our legacy. Not marriage. We aren’t joined by dowry, arrangement, prestige, or necessity. We aren’t bound by license, law, or nuptial contract. We don’t stay together for the sake of religion, parents, children, social stigma, economics, or expediency.

We’re connected only by love. Since time began, it’s has been the code of our culture. And, since love is holy, what we have is sacred.

So, I’d assure Harvey that – even though the alleged “gay agenda” seeks to stir us into the debauchery of that marriage melting pot – wedlock isn’t the priority of our majority.

It isn’t even our dream. Our culture is just more valuable, valiant, imaginative, romantic and hopeful than that.

I’d tell Harvey we dream of the day when gay men, who have the highest rate of disposable income in America, stop wasting their resources on purchasing the promise of eternal youth and utilize it to create safe havens in the heartland instead.

We imagine gay doctors, nurses, therapists and health care officials joining forces to build medical centers. Gay lawyers combining talents to establish legal firms. Gay singers and comedians backing gay-owned-and-operated restaurants and nightclubs. Gay athletes creating gay health complexes. Gay financiers building banks. Gay actors starting theaters. Gay educators forming charter schools. Gay religious leaders developing denominations that embrace gay people by interpreting ancient text in the spirit of divine law.

Our desire is to cultivate our culture, not to abolish it.

To elevate, not to assimilate.

To create, not to copy.

To lead, not to follow.

To record our history, not to erase it.

I’d question Harvey as to the purpose of new laws, when the constitutional law of equality has not yet been upheld for all Americans – guaranteeing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable.

I’d wonder aloud why we continue to chase after a society that doesn’t rise to the talent and tenderness of our own.

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IMMORTAL KISS

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Eighty days after Bobby Kennedy kissed me he was killed. I don’t know why it happened — either the kiss, or the killing. Each time, he was caught up in the joy of the moment. Both times, he got whisked away.

As happenstance had it, Kennedy was frolicking with friends in the back seat of an inconspicuous car crawling down Fifth Avenue when he spotted me — a young, vibrant, redheaded Breck-replica in a Kelly green, worsted wool coat, weaving through revelers lining Fifth Avenue for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

I was pugnacious. The flock in front of the 666 building was so sardined, it turned my two-minute sprint to the Primeburger into a twenty-minute tussle.

Hearing the crowds crescendo as a car of paraders slowed to a stop behind me, I poised myself to push through an advancing pocket of people.

Suddenly, someone grabbed my elbow and pivoted me into his arms, gently tilting my chin upwards before planting a quick kiss. His thicket of hair reflected like flax in the midday sun veiling two hazel, sleep stripped eyes conferring a dilatory blink – not unlike that of a tomcat purring thanks.

Then, just as instantaneously, he was hustled back to his locus in that long procession trekking towards his untoward future.

“You’re never going to guess what happened to me,” I nudged my friend, Marion, during the elevator ride up to our offices at Fuller & Smith & Ross the next morning. “Bobby Kennedy kissed me.”

“Ohmigod, you gotta be kidding!” Marion gasped. “What’d’ya do?”

“Do? What could I do? I was stunned. That’s all.”

“Did anyone see?”

“Well, yes. I guess. How could they not?”

“I mean, anyone here. Because it might not set well. Him being in the running now and all.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. “It was just a kiss,” I dismissed.

“Yeah,” Marion nodded. “But Bobby Kennedy for cripes sake. Who gets kissed by a Kennedy?”

“Who doesn’t?” I scoffed.

Fuller & Smith & Ross is an advertising agency footnoted in history. As Manager of Purchasing & In-House Printing I’d been privy to a confidential meeting detailing departmental procedures for handling the 21 million dollar account we’d secured two months earlier. My first assignment was to have business cards engraved for our new client. The inscription: Richard Nixon, 577 Chestnut Ridge Road, Wood Cliff Lake, New Jersey 07675.

Upon completion and delivery to his Park Avenue address, Nixon graciously sent me an autographed card. Seeing his inked signature on that ivory colored Bristol board proved pretty heady stuff to me — a small town transplant and political novitiate.

I was young, eager, and altruistic back then; a cookie cutter copy of that last generation of Americans who hadn’t a true clue as to what went on inside our nation’s governing bodies or outside our autonomous lives.

So, while I excelled at my job of vetting vendors, overseeing offset runs, getting offices decorated, equipment updated, carpets cleaned, prototypes printed, supplies stocked, and locks on doors changed whenever a colleague left — it wasn’t until I was entrusted with the billing of telephone lines linked to a network of chameleon operatives that I started to sink with the sinking-in.

“Cause and effect, people,” was the daily drill. “Never has so much money been amassed to elect a candidate. Our targeted buyouts of principal advertising airtime will efficaciously shut the Democrats out. Cause and effect.”

Try to remember, or imagine: In 1968, PBS was still in the proposal stage, there were just three major networks, prime time was essentially over by 10 p.m., a 30 second spot in the top rated markets cost about ten grand, and a million dollars was an unimaginable sum to most. But 21 million? That was whew!

By day, Nixon commandeered Town Hall meetings answering random questions in primary states while being filmed at three angles — front, back, and side. By night, our media technicians removed audio from side and back-shot tapes, replacing it with Nixon voiceovers of perfected responses. These were the videos offered to the media for viewing and airing. This was the foundation for creating many of the 15, 30, 45 and 60-second spots and news feeds.

Apparently, audience participants were so elated at seeing themselves on television that they failed to notice Nixon’s edited answers. At least, I heard no rumors of suspicion outside the office. I saw no evidence of complaint.

But within our ranks, long hours involving similar scenarios (and the disillusionment such capers caused) was taking its toll.

Perhaps that’s why Kennedy’s assassination registered as an amplified aghast to us. Because, by the time he announced his candidacy, we’d already been entrenched in a predetermined campaign victory for 10 weeks, believing everyone working on the inside of both political parties concurred from the get-go. Our jobs seemed only a matter of proper execution.

Sure, Bobby Kennedy added glamour and excitement to the illusion being painted for an impressionable public. Sensational headlines and endless editorials promised he could change things. And would.

But factuality was, by the time Kennedy won the California primary, every projection we’d been made privy to in January had confirmed itself by June. Ad copy, speeches, rebuttals, and press releases were written and delivered verbatim, leading a nation of primary voters to the polls and persuading them to push the Republican button. We knew if the Democrats had been wealthier in ’68, only the names would have changed to protect the process.

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(This freshly edited, updated essay was first published in The Antiquarian Magazine © 1985, More © 1995, and in Venus Magazine © 2011 by Marguerite Quantaine © 1985, 1995, 2011 & 2013.)
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Marguerite Quantaine is an essayist and author.
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THE TELLTALE HEART

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Publicly, Thomas Jefferson believed in the principles of freedom. But privately, he grappled over whether the worst white man was still better than the best black man.

Ultimately, Jefferson’s failure to champion equality left his own illegitimate child enslaved, opening the wound which has since defined – not the competency of his mind – but the capacity of his heart.

We are once again at a crossroads governing the use of fine print to qualify equality.

But this time, the Jeffersonian paradox challenges whether we, as a nation, believe the worst heterosexual is still better than the best homosexual.

Because all the worst heterosexuals can marry anywhere in America. But even the best homosexuals cannot.

As the high court strips away all righteous rhetoric and political posturing, it’s possible they’ll recognize a raw reality, i.e., even when heterosexuals commit the most heinous crimes (murder, rape, child molestation, spousal abuse, terrorism, treason, and crimes against humanity), their known deviant behaviors are ignored by American marriage laws.

However, even when homosexuals are model citizens, their single, aberrant activity is prepossessed.

The court must then question whether this speaks to the heart of who we truly are, regardless of what we profess ourselves to be.

On the one hand, we insist the purpose of marriage is a belief in the sanctity of family.

On the other, we ignore the fact that millions of felons sitting in high security prisons are predominately heterosexuals possessing marginal moral character at best.

Yet each has a right to marry.

In some sit the suspects and convicts held for complicity in the 9/11 and Boston marathon attacks. And even they have the legal right to marry in every state.

But Lily Tomlin doesn’t.

Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, David Berkowitz, the Menendez brothers, Theodore Kaczynski, James Eagan Holmes and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev can.

But Ellen DeGeneres can’t.

The former, loathsome, dictator Saddam Hussein, terrorist leader Osama Bin Ladin, and even Chancellor Adolf Hitler could have.

But Kate Smith, an American icon of our anthem, God Bless America, could not.

If the court entertains the position that “sin” is the foundation on which law is defined, will it validate the proponent “hate the sin, not the sinner” premise?

Can it then ignore evidence that it isn’t “sin” being shunned, profiled, attacked, ridiculed, denied equal rights and murdered?

Only American citizens are.

Will the court ask why there are no marches planned, political wars being waged, or state constitutional amendments being drafted against the seven deadly sins? Will it demand to know why it’s only a singular, Bible referenced, declared abomination being targeted? And, if it’s determined the sin/sinner assertion is an inflamed edict, could it set precedence for other inflamed edicts as just-cause to alter constitutional law?

Should the court recognize the Ten Commandments governing the worship of other Gods, building graven images, working on the Sabbath, blasphemy, dishonoring parents, murder, adultery, stealing, coveting, and bearing false witness as written-in-stone, will it be compelled to admit that being gay is not?

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