venustation: act of causing to become beautiful
anvenustation (antonym): act of causing to become unbeautiful
On July 11, the anniversary of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, I swerve off Route 17 and drive the gold Plymouth to the Palisades. I sit on a rock beside the historical marker noting Hamilton’s demise though, officially, he died in New York City the next day. I want to ask Hamilton: Was it worth it? The answer must be no, though at least his marker offers a stupendous view overlooking the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline. Not bad for a loser. Not a bad location to be struck the final blow. Generations will visit you, or this spot, keeping you, albeit not the corporeal you, alive.
I remain seated on the rock beside the Hamilton marker. The warmth still seems to contain the heat of the duel, the flash of a movie camera. The Palisades also hosted the filming of many early silent-movie pictures. The first studios were in New York, and filmmakers crossed the Hudson for their outdoor shots, here on these cliffs, before decamping for Hollywood.
A slow wind blouses the tips of my hair. Buses from the Port Authority, chugging from the Lincoln Tunnel, accelerate along Boulevard East. Across the river Manhattan shimmers. A watery diesel scent of the Hudson gusts upward. Lights from a tugboat sprinkle the water, waves rippling beneath the cliffs of Weehawken. A classic Jersey setting: All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up!
Ready to be immortalized.
I flip through a collection of historic New Jersey postcards. One, a sketch of the Bothwell, an Atlantic City beach hotel, features bathing beauties on the boardwalk. What the card doesn’t show are its charred remains, burned in 1924. A portion of its casino on the steel pier remained intact, however, its luck only partially lost.
According to postcards circa 1950s, New Jersey’s luck returns in the area of retail. The Bergen Mall Shopping Center, built in 1958, features sixty-three stores (including Stern’s and J. J. Newberry’s), with a weekly traffic count of between 155,000 and 220,000 people.
Garden State Plaza, built around the same time and located at the intersection of Route 17 and Route 4, features Bamberger’s, self-described as “the world’s largest shopping center.” Every Christmas the Plaza’s giant outdoor Santa Claus, more than five stories tall, greets shoppers from his chimney perched high above the parking lot.
Of course the information contained on the postcards is only true for back then.
Today New Jersey boasts approximately seventy malls, one even named Hamilton, after Alexander, I assume. It’s a modern historical marker with more visitors, no doubt, than those paying respects at his isolated grassy remembrance on the Palisades.
Other postcards from the ’50s feature the Swiss Chalet restaurant in Ramsey, an American flag flying out front, never to be mistaken for a café in Geneva. Its architecture is virtually indistinguishable from the pure Jersey Arcola Motor Lodge in Paramus, with forty identical brick cottages featuring steam heat. The baths are tiled (sterilized for your protection). Call HAckensack 3-9744 for reservations.
Over the years, as New Jersey evolves into the most densely populated state, malls come and go, are upgraded. Swiss Chalets are reincarnated into Olive Gardens, and motor lodges into Super 8 Motels.
Only the pristine postcards remain frozen in time, as things once were, preserved in glassine paper. They’re lovingly stored in dark, dry drawers, thus able to withstand the vagaries of weather, bad luck, and time, regardless whether what they depict is now defunct or not.
I both remember various malls and restaurants as they appear in the postcards and don’t. Memory is a form of hiraeth, a homesickness for a place that never quite exists the way it seemed at the time. Memory is also like time-elapsed photography revealing a different angle, a different view of Jersey—of me—every time I look.
I walk down Rock Road in Glen Rock carrying my plastic transistor radio. It’s encased in black leather, cutouts for dials, one round wheel for volume, the other spinning stations seeking the perfect song for just this moment. Music arrives from New York City, home of deejay Cousin Brucie, vaulting over skyscrapers, bubbling across the Hudson River, swooshing over the cliffs of the Palisades. By the time rock ’n’ roll reaches me, one small Jersey girl, a mere speck in the universe, I feel a whirl of sound cycloning around me, propelling the backs of my knees as I walk familiar—though now no longer ordinary—suburban hometown streets. I pass Mandee’s Dress Shop and Gilroy’s Market. I stare into the plate-glass window of the Bake Shoppe, holding that sweet, sweet music close to my ear.
I sit in the back seat of the Plymouth, my parents in front, as we pass Fair Lawn, Cedar Grove, Verona. We drive through suburban towns, all the main streets with their shops selling clothes and gifts: a Peoples Bank on this corner, an Esso service station on another. We cross railroad tracks that, Monday through Friday, funnel dads into Manhattan, while moms drive their kids to school. I am mesmerized by the swish of car tires, by the overpowering sameness, the stillness, the hopefulness. We appear as ordinary as the day.
But are we?
Does that which is domesticated balance the wild and untamed? Or simply mask it? Where—what—are potential ruptures in the sameness of days?
A woman stands on a curb waiting for our car to pass. Her hat is yellow, the color of caution. A sign, a portent, a warning I fail to heed.
At a Glen Rock block party, the deejay plays one 45 RPM record after another, spinning like planets in a rockin’ universe. Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man,” Dion’s “Runaround Sue,” Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party.”
Other than music, the town is quiet. Night permeates Glen Rock with the everlasting memoried scent of chlorine from swimming pools and vanilla from the Nabisco plant on the edge of town.
During the same party, I hold my boyfriend Jamie’s hand: Jamie, with dimples and freckles, golden hair pale as sunrise dusting his forearms. The theme to A Summer Place plays. We dance. I want to believe this warmth will last into autumn, winter, spring.
Years and years after high school graduation, I see Jamie again, a planned reunion. He returns me to that younger Glen Rock “me,” to soft summer days lying beside each other on a blanket by the public swimming pool. Our skin smells of coconut oil, a still snapshot of safety, calm and warm, as if nothing has changed—or nothing will change. Ever. If only we remained beside each other encapsulated in time, days scented of blue hydrangeas, heavenly as dew.
If only.
How can you not feel venustation for sugary, rhythmic, long-lasting New Jersey summery days? Don’t happy, honeyed people live longer? Maybe even forever?
But New Jersey “contains multitudes.” Walt Whitman died in Camden, so he should know. It echoes voices of venustation and anvenustation from stuttering neon sounds of Route 17, to swishing silt of the shore, to the guttural clang of the Turnpike, to dark silences of the pine barrens, to whispering grassy leaves of North Jersey, to fiery cities. Ocean waves, to suburban honeysuckle, to city dusk. Every town has its own vocabulary from Cape May to Glen Rock to Newark. The words of each, just like cruising Route 17, propel their own unflinching narratives.
Voices—some beautiful, some not—ascend and descend in New Jersey’s simmer.
Just like my fate.
One Friday afternoon, several hours before I encounter a man beneath the boardwalk, I drive down shore to South Jersey to my family’s summer cottage. I pull into the driveway. I pluck the key from beneath the front mat. Inside I turn on a faux-Tiffany lamp and toss my purse, a proto-hippie cloth satchel, onto the couch. It contains maybe ten dollars, pearly lipstick, a package of Sen-Sens. The shuttered room smells of ocean and seaweed. Against the far wall is a fireplace, cinders mixing with must. I rattle the warped windows open. I kick the door ajar though the latch on the screen door is broken.
Should I have seen that as an omen? That latches should be fixed. That girls should not prowl the boardwalk—or maybe even Route 17—alone. Especially at night. Do I miss or misinterpret the signs, the metaphors, the symbols, the foreshadowing?
Later, in my white Keds sneakers, I walk the boardwalk to the carnival awash in the taste of Fralinger’s salt-water taffy, peanut brittle, cotton candy. I sit on a wood bench on the boardwalk overlooking the Atlantic. South Jersey: the salty scent of ocean and pine barrens. Tinny music from the carousel—surely it’s Sinatra, Jersey’s own, “Are You Lonesome Tonight” or “Body and Soul”—croons over summer crowds. The wood horses revolve around and around, night after night, never wavering from their preordained route.
If only I never wavered, never stood up. . . .
If only I never left that wood bench to walk down the steps onto the sand. The waxing night below the boardwalk, beneath it, is deserted. Except for one knife-thin man.
After that night I suffer my own form of alalia—an inability to speak certain specific words. I label this personal censorship because no one, including me, wants to hear them. Initially, I tell no one about the knife-thin man under the boardwalk or its aftermath. Decades pass before these words are resurrected—recovering from this one moment—a searing flash of death, which, against all odds, I survive.
But for now a star flames across space before it’s extinguished, sizzling into the ocean. Lights from the Ferris wheel create a night not too dark, not too black. Unlike stars or people, these lights, if they burn out, are easily replaced with new bulbs.
Everything always happens—in all time, for better or worse—and always in New Jersey.