"True Jersey" by Angela Townsend

True Jersey

I have it on Bruce Springsteen’s unimpeachable authority that nothing matters in this whole wide world when you’re in love with a Jersey girl.
Whereas: I am haltingly falling in love at all times.
Whereas: I am a Jersey girl from my solar plexus to my lunacy.
Ergo: this whole wide world is garden fresh. “Sha la la,” and all that.
Rigid logicians will protest at this point, and they will have their point. I was not born in New Jersey. I do not presently live in New Jersey.
But there is nothing rigid, and very little logical, about New Jersey.
The state is a squiggle between the Keystone and the sea, an S sketched in a spiral notebook. It is passionately debated ham and endlessly scrambled eggs, a toll-studded parkway from the swamp to the skyway.
It is Princeton ivy and Secaucus stench, myth and meatball, tomato and asphalt, Boss and hoodlum.
It is the underdog in the rhinestone collar, baying with, not at, the moon.
It was home from the hour I arrived.
It was one of life’s aquamarine moments, when you see the water while you’re still in it. My first night at Princeton Seminary, I typed gasping missives to many, trying to express the full light of my landing.
I babbled about instant friends and ivy and Einstein, all of which were and were not relevant. I rhapsodized about God, who is always relevant. I said that I was where I was meant to be, which said it all.
I received verbal pats upon the twenty-two-year-old head, “have fun” and “happy you’re settling in well” and — in a hundred unspoken smiles — “there there, there’s our Angie, exuberating again, as she does.”
They didn’t get it. But this time, I did. My “where” and my “there” were holding hands.
I’d come from a place that felt like nowhere in particular, a thumbtack pushed too far into the wall. This is no fault of Middletown, NY, a fast-fattening suburb as tall and reasonable as a banker.
Our former farm town, marbled with Arby’s and Gaps, would prove habitable for my friends, most of whom remain. But neither Middletown nor its Empire State had ever been, empirically or empathetically, mine.
New York was my Mom’s. This made me proud, donning sunglasses when her stories glinted off the river. Brooklyn lent her a leading edge. Manhattan exulted in her elegance. She was stickball and glamour, Sheepshead Bay and Saks Fifth Avenue, the leading lady in my favorite movie. I was spellbound.
It was a foreign film.
My Mom can credibly caution, into her seventies, “don’t make me bring out my Brooklyn.” But I was born without edges. I am no Sheepshead bravery. I am no Saks satin. I am not even a subway survivor, tall in the strap.
I am, at best, a blintz, soft in the center and oozing excess earnestness.
New York was not mine, and I was not New York’s.
Maybe I’d have accepted Middletown’s promise ring if we’d stayed to the last act. But two months before graduation, my parents’ divorce hustled Mom and me one town over, a gentle way station with a biblical name and no time to make me a cup of tea before college.
The final night in Middletown, I lay on my back under bookcases that my Pennsylvania chicken-farm Dad had built and built until he ran out of walls. I fingered the edge where history bled. My wall of pink paint winked a quarter inch, lifting its skirts to violent chartreuse. It was an artifact of the year I’d asked for a yellow room, bright as the button at a daisy’s heart.
City and Farm obliged with extra sauce, as they always did for their only daughter. Together we painted the room, and together we watched in horror-turned-to-hilarity as sunshine dried to slime. The effect was less flower, more phlegm.
We roared with laughter. We fixed it quickly — pink, of course, the color it should have been from the start, the only color that had ever felt like home.
I wondered if the future owners of my house would ever notice the tiny chartreuse streak under the shelf.
I never looked back to Middletown, and I scarcely looked around Poughkeepsie over four years of college. New York was not mine, any more than St. Petersburg. But I would have 19th-century Russian Literature to thank for New Jersey.
Junior year, I was blandly pre-med when forced to take an elective. God alone can explain why I chose Dr. Duriyanu’s sole English-language course. God alone charted the course from the world’s largest landmass to the Northeast’s strangest state.
We read Notes from Underground and Dead Souls, Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin. I knelt with Karamazovs and censors. Sirens summoned me from one healing to another.
I was to bear witness to all the light I saw. I was to exhale exuberance. I was to write and write and write into night. I was not to continue with pre-med.
I was to nurture, somehow, somewhere. Not through medicine. Not in New York.
Dr. Duriyanu was heat-lightning across my suburb, spleen-screaming across my plans. One day he arrived with a mushroom as large as a television and grotesque as pride. “This” — he lofted it above his head like the Times Square New Year’s ball — “is like Gogol.” His flamethrower eyes torched me. “He’s WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIRD.”
Nobody laughed. It wasn’t supposed to be funny.
It also wasn’t supposed to call me into combat with my own intentions, dreaming of peasants and prayer but waking to inorganic chemistry. But the redistricting was accomplished. I could not keep drifting to medical school. Mom drove me to seminary.
I found myself standing in New Jersey.
I found myself standing on tall, responsible legs, able to walk the full length of town without tiring.
I found myself teaching and preaching, holding crepey hands in hospitals and holding doors for children with no country.
I found myself fervent for this salty hash state, a yelping pound of underdogs with vinegar chips on their shoulders and baskets of bread for their neighbors.
I found myself crying every April for the Northern magnolias, for no and every reason.
I found myself healthy and strong.
I found myself in the underestimated eyes of the earnest and the outrageous, out to prove forty-nine out of fifty scoffers wrong by doing right.
I was twenty-four, the age when my mother had commanded Saks and astounded Manhattan. I was a brand new adult and a safe child.
In New Jersey, I was no lonely child.
Perhaps this is less sublime, more sausage. Perhaps we all love the place we come into our own, where we first feel big fingers curl and realize we’re center-palm.
Perhaps.
But I tell you, everything matters in this whole wide world when you love as a Jersey girl.
Across two decades and one kidnapping to the Keystone state, I have loved and been loved. Among the earnest and the odd, I ooze like grilled cheese. As squiggled as an S, as curly as a question, I am weird and whole.
I love in exile today, a few bagels across the Pennsylvania border. But even if the years tow me to Tuvalu, I know my home.

Angela Townsend

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a B.A. from Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, and The Razor, among others. She has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her mother every morning, and delights in the moon. Angie loves life dearly.

Headshot: Ruth Miller

Photo Credit: Staff