Verses

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose. In today's world, Miss Piranesi, who doesn't know which is more practical?

By my age--and whether or not the whole village of Fifty-Seventh-Street-and-penthouse-Seventh Avenue is drawn up at the gates waving Queenie on her way--doesn't any girl have to get out and start answering the lyric always going on between the legs? Day and night, what a musak, walking us down the street, waltzing us in a car! Safe to listen to only in bed, when it's loudest. Or dream-boating in a deckchair at ten past five. What's the difference I know who's singing it? Only the little man-doll, man-image, all virgins keep down there.

Sweet man-maidenhead, red robin-bobbin of a dollbaby, after doing all those drawings in anatomy, I'm still stuck with you! Just like any ugly orphan of the storm, I still have to deal with you. And I'm going to have to do it in my own style.

I was born and raised to be a kept woman. Nowadays, women are no longer kept. World War Two put an end to it, long before I arrive. I get the bad news when I'm eight...

--excerpt from the first chapter of Hortense Calisher's Queenie (1971)