by Richard Ford
It is not a churchy town, though there are enough around because of the tiny Theological Institute that’s here (a bequest from Wallace Haddam). They have their own brick and copper Scottish Reform Assembly with a choir and organ that raises the roof three days a week. But it is a village with its business in the world.
There is a small, white-painted, colonial Square in the center of town facing north, but no real main street. Most people who live here work elsewhere, often at one of the corporate think-tanks out in the countryside. Otherwise they are seminarians or rich retirees or faculty of De Tocqueville Academy out Highway 160. There are a few high-priced shops behind mullioned windows—men’s stores and franchised women’s undergarments salons are in ascendance. Book stores are down. Aggressive, sometimes bad-tempered divorcées (some of them seminarians’ ex-wives) own most of the shops, and they have given the Square a fussy, homespun air that reminds you of life pictured in catalogs (a view I rather like). It is not a town that seems very busy.
The Post Office holds high ground, since we’re a town of mailers and home shoppers. It’s no chore to get a walkin haircut, or if you’re out alone at night—which I often was after my divorce—it isn’t hard to get a drink bought for you up at the August Inn by some old plaid-pantser watching the ball game, happy to hear a kind word about Ike instead of heading home to his wife. Sometimes for the price of a few daiquiris and some ardent chitchat, it’s even possible to coax a languid insurance broker’s secretary to drive with you out to a madhouse up the Delaware, and to take in the warm evening of springtime. Such nights often don’t turn out badly, and in the first few months, I spent several in that way without regrets.
There is a small, monied New England émigré contingent, mostly commuters down to Philadelphia with summer houses on the Cape and on Lake Winnepesaukee. And also a smaller southern crowd—mostly Carolinians attached to the seminary—with their own winter places on Beaufort Island and Monteagle. I never fitted exactly into either bunch (even when X and I first got here), but am part of the other, largest group who’re happy to be residents year-round, and who act as if we were onto something fundamental that’s not a matter of money, I don’t think, but of a certain awareness: living in a place is one thing we all went to college to learn how to do properly, and now that we’re adults and the time has arrived, we’re holding on.
Republicans run the local show, which is not as bad as it might seem. Either they’re tall, white-haired, razor-jawed old galoots from Yale with moist blue eyes and aromatic OSS backgrounds; or else retired chamber of commerce boosters, little guys raised in town, with their own circle of local friends, and a conservator’s clear view about property values and private enterprise know-how. A handful of narrow-eyed Italians run the police—descendants of the immigrants who were brought over in the twenties to build the seminary library, and who settled The Presidents, where X lives. Between them, the Republicans and Italians, the rule that location is everything gets taken seriously, and things run as quietly as anyone could want—which makes you wonder why that combination doesn’t run the country better. (I am lucky to be here with my pre-1975 dollars.)
On the down side, taxes are sky high. The sewage system could use a bond issue, particularly in X’s neighborhood. But there are hardly any crimes against persons. There are doctors aplenty and a fair hospital. And because of the southerly winds, the climate’s as balmy as Baltimore’s.
Editors, publishers, Time and Newsweek writers, CIA agents, entertainment lawyers, business analysts, plus the presidents of a number of great corporations that mold opinion, all live along these curving roads or out in the country in big secluded houses, and take the train to Gotham or Philadelphia. Even the servant classes, who are mostly Negroes, seem fulfilled in their summery, keyboard-awning side streets down Wallace Hill behind the hospital, where they own their own homes.
All in all it is not an interesting town to live in. But that’s the way we like it.
Because of that, the movie theater is never noisy after the previews and the thanks-for-not-smoking notices. The weekly paper has mostly realty ads, and small interest in big news. The seminary and boarding school students are rarely in evidence and seem satisfied to stay put behind their iron gates. Both liquor stores, the Gulf station and the book stores are happy to extend credit. The Coffee Spot, where I sometimes ride up early on Ralph’s old Schwinn, opens at five A.M. with free coffee. The three banks don’t bounce your checks (an officer calls). Black boys and white boys—Ralph was one—play on the same sports teams, study together nights for the SATs and attend the small brick school. And if you lose your wallet, as I have, on some elm-shaded street of historical reproductions—my Tudor is kitty-cornered from a big Second Empire owned by a former Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court—you can count on getting a call by dinner just before someone’s teenage son brings it over with all the credit cards untouched and no mention of a reward.
You could complain that such a town doesn’t fit with the way the world works now. That the real world’s a worse and devious and complicated place to lead a life in, and I should get out in it with the Rhonda Matuzaks of life.
Though in the two years since my divorce I’ve sometimes walked out in these winding, bowery streets after dark on some ruminative errand or other and looked in at these same houses, windows lit with bronzy cheer, dark cars hove to the curbs, the sound of laughing and glasses tinking and spirited chatter floating out, and thought to myself: what good rooms these are. What complete life is here, audible—the Justice’s is the one I’m thinking of. And though I myself wasn’t part of it and wouldn’t much like it if I were, I was stirred to think all of us were living steadfast and accountable lives.
Who can say? Perhaps the Justice himself might have his own dark hours on the streets. Maybe some poor man’s life has hung in the balance down in sad Yardville, and the lights in my house—I usually leave them blazing—have given the Justice solace, moved him to think that we all deserve another chance. I may only be inside working over some batting-average charts, or reading Ring or poring through a catalog in the breakfast nook, hopeful of nothing more than a good dream. But it is for just such uses that suburban streets are ideal, and the only way neighbors here can be neighborly.
Certainly it’s true that since there is so much in the world now, it’s harder to judge what is and isn’t essential, all the way down to where you should live. That’s another reason I quit real writing and got a real job in the reliable business of sports. I didn’t know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn’t care to risk speculating. And I still don’t. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say—my best, most honest effort. And that isn’t enough for literature, though it didn’t bother me much. Nowadays, I’m willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her lawn and hedge and rain gutters. Let things be the best they can be. Give us all a good night’s sleep until it’s over.
Hoving Road this morning is as sun-dappled and vernal as any privet lane in England. Across town the bells of St. Leo the Great chime a brisk call to worship, which explains why no Italian gardeners are working on any neighbors’ lawns, clearing out under the forsythias and cutting back the fire thorns. Some of the houses have sunny Easter-lily decorations on their doors, whereas some still abide by the old Episcopal practice of Christmas wreaths up till Easter morning. There is a nice ecumenical feel of holiday to every street.
The Square this morning is filled up with Easter buyers, and to avoid tie-ups I take the “back door” down Wallace Hill through the little one-ways behind the hospital Emergency entrance and the train station. And soon I am out onto the Great Woods Road, which leads to U.S. 1 and across the main train line into the suave and caressing literalness of the New Jersey coastal shelf. It is the very route I took yesterday afternoon when I drove to Brielle. And whereas then my spirits were tentative—I sti
ll had this morning’s duties ahead—today they are rising and soaring.
Six miles out, Route 33 is astream with cars, though a remnant fog from early morning has clung to the roadway as it sways and swerves toward Asbury Park. A light rain draws in a soughing curtain of apple greens from the south and across the accompanying landscape, softening the edges of empty out-of-season vegetable stands, farmettes, putt-putts and cheerless Ditch Witch dealers. Though I am not displeased by New Jersey. Far from it. Vice implies virtue to me, even in landscape, and virtue value. An American would be crazy to reject such a place, since it is the most diverting and readable of landscapes, and the language is always American.
‘An Attractive Retirement Waits Just Ahead’
Better to come to earth ih New Jersey than not to come at all. Or worse, to come to your senses in some spectral place like Colorado or California, or to remain up in the dubious airs searching for some right place that never existed and never will. Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it’s all you have to go on. Indeed, in its homeliest precincts and turn-outs, the state feels as unpretentious as Cape Cod once might’ve, and its bustling suburban-with-good-neighbor-industry mix of life makes it the quintessence of the town-and-country spirit. Illusion will never be your adversary here.
An attractive retirement is Pheasant Run & Meadow. I make the turn up the winding asphalt access that passes beneath a great water tower of sleek space-age blue, then divides toward one end or the other of a wide, unused cornfield. Far ahead—amile, easy—billowing green basswoods stand poised against a platinum sky and behind them the long, girdered “Y” stanchions of a high-voltage line, orange balls strung to its wires to warn away low-flying planes.
Pheasant Run to the left is a theme-organized housing development where all the streets are culs-de-sac with “Hedgerow Place” and “The Thistles” painted onto fake Andrew Wyeth barnboard signs. All the plantings are young, but fancy cars already sit in the driveways. Vicki and I drove through once like tourists, admiring the farm-shingled and old-brick homesteads with price tags bigger than I paid for my three-story in town fourteen years ago. Vicki’s father and stepmother live in the same sort of place down in Barnegat Pines, and I have a feeling she would like nothing better than for herself and some prospective hubby to move right in.
Pheasant Meadow sits at the other lower end of the stubble field—a boxy, unscenic complex of low brown-shake buildings overlooking a shallow man-made mud pond, a yellow bulldozer, and some other apartments already half-built. In the ideal plan of things, these are for the younger people just starting in the world and on the way up—secretaries, car salesmen, nurses, who will someday live to buy the complete houses over in Pheasant Run on resale. Starter people, I call them.
Vicki’s aqua Dart sits out front in slot 31, still with black and white Texas plates, and shining with polish. The last hiss of rain squall thrums off north into the Brunswicks as I pull in beside her, and the air is thick with a silvery, chemical smell. But before I can get out, and to my surprise, I see Vicki in the front seat of her car, nearly hidden by its big head rest. I roll down the passenger window and she sits peeking out at me from the driver’s seat, her black hair orchestrated Loretta Lynn style, two thick swags taken toward the back of her head and ears, then straight down in sausage curls to her shoulders.
Across in the new units two hardhats sit grinning on unfinished Level Two. It’s clear they’ve been having a good time over something before I got here.
“I figured you probably wouldn’t show up,” Vicki says out her open window, as tentative as a school girl. “I was sitting up there waiting on the phone to ring for you to give me the bad news, and so I just came down here and listened to some tapes I like to hear when I’m sad.” She smiles out at me, a sweet-natured, chancy smile. “You’re not going to be hot at me are you?”
“If you don’t get over here in about two seconds I am,” I say.
“I knew it,” she says, running her window up quick and grabbing her bag, bouncing out of her Dart and into my life in a twinkling. “I told myself, I said, self, if you go out there he’ll come, and sure enough.”
All fears are put instantly to rest, leaving the two hardhats shaking their heads. I wouldn’t mind, as I back out, blinking my lights and wishing them just half the fun I’m expecting. But they’d probably get the wrong idea. As we back up, though, I give them a grin and we wheel out of Pheasant Meadow down the access road toward Route 33 and the NJTP, Vicki cleaving to me, squeezing my arm and sighing like a new cheerleader.
“Why’d you think I wouldn’t show up?” I say, as we weave through rain-drenched Hightstown, and I am thinking how glad I am to own a car with an old-fashioned bench seat.
“Oh it’s just old silly-milly. Seemed like too good a thing to happen, I guess.” Vicki is wearing black slacks that fit her tight but not too, a white, frilly-dressy blouse-and-scarf combination, a blue Ultrasuede jacket straight from Dallas and shoes with clear plastic heels. These are her dressy travel clothes, along with her nylon Le Sac weekender tossed in the back and her little black clutch where she keeps her diaphragm. She is a girl for every modern occasion, and I find I can be interested in the smallest particulars of her life. She stares out as the upright Federalist buildings of Hightstown slide past. “Plus. I had a patient kick out on me last night just right when I was talking to him, asking him questions about how he felt and everything, I wasn’t even s’posed to be workin, but a gal got sick. He was this colored man. And he was C-liver terminal, already way into uremia when he admitted, which is not that bad cause it usually starts ’em dreamin about their pasts and off their current problem.” (A tiny sigh of relief as to her whereabouts last night. I had called and found no one there, and my worst fears were loosed.) “Only you don’t really get that used to death, which is why I came down to ER from ONC. We’re supposed to be used to it and all, but I’m just not. I’d lot rather see a guy busted up and bleeding than some guy dying inside. I guess that was why I started worrying. I knew you went to the cemetery this morning.”
“That all went fine, though,” I say, and in most ways it did.
Vicki takes a Merit Light out of her little purse and lights up. She is not the kind of girl who smokes, but likes to smoke when she’s nervous. I reach a hand across her plump thighs and pull her closer to me, leg-side to leg-side. She lowers her window a crack and blows smoke that way. “When’s your birthday, anyway?”
“Next week.”
“Okay, that’s what you’re supposed to say. Now when is it really?”
“That’s the truth. I’m going to be thirty-nine.” I snake a glance down to see if there’s adverse reaction to this news. We have not discussed my age in the eight weeks I’ve known her. I assume she thinks I’m younger.
“You are not. Liar.”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” I say, and try to smile.
“Well, maybe I’ll make you a present of an eight-track, and tape you all my favorites. How’d you like that?” There is no more reaction to this news about my age. There are women I know who care about men’s ages, and women who don’t. X didn’t, and I have always counted that as a sign of good sense. Though where Vicki is concerned—her possible reasons for not caring are probably related to a bad first marriage and a wish to hook up with someone at least kind—it is another in a burgeoning number of happy surprises. Maybe we’ll get married in Detroit, fly back and move out to Pheasant Run, and live happily like the rest of our fellow Americans. What would be wrong with that?
“I’d like that fine,” I say.
“You weren’t mad at me for bein out in the car like a tart?”
“You’re too pretty to be mad at.”
“That’s about what them dimwits thought, too.”
We approach the Turnpike, take our ticket and start north, above the flat, featureless bedrenched Jersey flatlands—a landscape perfect for easy golf courses, valve plants and flea markets.
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The reason Vicki is worried that I would be mad at not getting to come to her door is because she knows I love the tribal ritual of picking her up for our dates, even if I’m hoping to spend the night. Usually I am formal and bring a gift, something I quit doing long ago when X and I went on outings. Though it’s true that X and I lived together, and such things are easy to forget. But with Vicki, I usually bring something down from New York, where she has only been once and claims she can’t abide. For her part, she is always almost ready and pretends I hurry her, runs to the bedroom with straight pins in her mouth, or holding her hair up in back, needing to stitch a hem or iron a pleat. We are throwbacks in this, straight out of an earlier era, but I like this nervous and over-produced manner of things between us. We seem to know what each other wants without really knowing each other, which was a dilemma between X and me at the end. We didn’t seem to be tending the same ways. Though it may simply be that at my age I’m satisfied with less and with things less complicated.
Whatever the reason, I’m always happy when I am invited to spend the night or just an hour waiting in the pristine and nursey neatness of Vicki’s little 1-BR condo, on which her dad holds the note, and which the two of them furnished in a one-day whirlwind trip to the Miracle Furniture Mile in Paramus.
