The Last Place I Saw Them

The following essay first appeared, in a slightly different version, in the print-only literary journal, AGNI 99. It’s an abcedarian, which means there are 26 sections, titled in alphabetical order. It encompasses several journeys, among them mine from Asbury Park to Baltimore.

Asbury Park

I usually say I am from the famous beach town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, because people have heard of it, mostly thanks to Bruce Springsteen. But Bruce is actually from Freehold and I am from the suburban edge of Asbury’s zip code, an inland area nonetheless called Ocean Township. In fact, I am second-generation Asbury, my grandparents having raised their four children there decades before Ocean Township was even a twinkle in its developer’s eye. My father, their eldest, played quarterback for the Asbury Park High School football team. His name was Hyman, for reasons I will soon explain. 

Best Friend’s Mother

From fifth grade on, my best friend was Sandye, who lived on the other end of Dwight Drive, which the internet confirms is .9 miles long and has seventy-two houses in all. We were #7; they were #64. Of all the people who lived in these two houses since 1960, the last one left was Phyllis, Sandye’s mother. After my mother died in 2008 and we sold her house, I was able to maintain the illusion of going home by visiting Phyllis with Sandye at #64.

Clams

At the Jersey Shore in the years of my childhood, steamed clams were often served in bright-colored plastic sand buckets, and came with hot clam broth and melted butter. My parents ate them at a place called Dave and Evelyn’s, and later, just Evelyn’s. My parents remained Hy and Jane, though their union also had its embattled aspects.

Recently I have been craving steamers, hunting for them on menus in various seaside locations. When I found them in coastal Delaware, I got a dozen on a plate for more than twice the price of the old sand bucket. 

Directions 

To get to the street I have not lived on since 1975, but will always think of as home, I would for many years take Exit 7A off the New Jersey Turnpike, heading east on Interstate 195 to Shore Points, though if I were coming from the north, I would get off the Turnpike at Exit 11 and take the Garden State Parkway to Exit 105, Eatontown.

I know it’s a joke to identify yourself by what exit you’re from in New Jersey, but these directions have come to feel very sentimental to me. I felt like I might burst into tears as my daughter, also Jane, followed my instructions to take 7A when we recently traveled from Baltimore for a short visit I feared might be my last. I was grateful she didn’t insist on using the GPS, as the kids often do, and thanked her for believing that I knew how to get there. “Of course,” she said kindly.

Eternity

It’s as if my parents still live on Dwight Drive, though my father hasn’t lived there, or anywhere else, since 1985. Both of them died in the house, in their bedroom, in the bed of which I still use the headboard and frame. When I am on Dwight Drive, I feel strongly that they are there somewhere. It is, after all, the last place I saw them, which is where you should look for things you have lost. When not on Dwight Drive, I conjure them through various fetishized practices, for example by eating peanut butter and bacon on rye, a combination my father enjoyed (though not with vegetarian bacon, as I make it), or by using odd expressions of my mother’s, like “Dopey Dildock” or “starving Armenian.”

Forefathers

To get to Dwight Drive, the Winiks first had to leave Lithuania and, in the late nineteenth century, one of them did. Facing conscription into the Russian army and the constant threat of Cossack pogroms, the first Hyman Winik—my father’s grandfather—walked more than 150 miles from Jonava to Riga, where he stowed away on a mercantile ship. When he was caught, he managed to communicate that he was a carpenter, so they put him to work repairing the masts, keeping him in the brig at night. Knowing he’d be turned over to the police when they returned back home, he tried to jump ship at every port, getting himself into one scrape after another, but always avoiding disaster through his charm and skill.

Gravel

One of my earliest memories: before Dwight Drive was paved or even named, it was made of gravel, and the van that took me to nursery school bumped over the white stones. The street was called RD #1, and our mailbox was 104C. Along with asphalt came the name Dwight, with three short intersecting streets, evenly spaced: Doreen, Donald, Dennis. I remember my father telling me these were the names of the developer’s children. I poked around on the internet to see if I could confirm this but, if the information is there somewhere, it is well-hidden. 

Hollywood

Curving behind Dwight Drive for its entire length is a world-class private golf course called the Hollywood Golf Club. The course was fenced off from the backyards of the houses on Dwight Drive, but behind our house there was a gate. This is because my parents were longtime members of the club; my mother was a gifted golfer, in play for the annual championship against her rival, the great Bobbie Doubilet, and my father, known for his charm and skill, was the head of the House Committee. 

Both my sister and I got married at Hollywood, we held my mother’s memorial service there in 2008, and I have been back only once or twice since. On this recent visit, my daughter and I stood at the north entrance, now impregnably gated, peering at golfers on the practice tee. 

On its south side, Hollywood directly faces another golf course—one that did not originally accept Jews as members. 

Ikh farshtey nisht

When Hyman Winik’s ship reached Sydney, Australia, he had his last chance to escape, since from there they would return to Riga. During the shore stay, he managed to sneak off the boat and found his way into a commercial district. He had a plan. He entered a dry goods store where he swiped a few things off the shelves, stuffed them under his clothes, and made for the door. “Stop, thief,” shouted the shop owner, Philip Symonds. Submitting quickly to capture in hopes of avoiding return to Riga by being jailed for a petty crime, Hyman could only shake his head in response to Symonds’ interrogation. “Ikh farshtey nisht,” he said in Yiddish. The shop owner’s jaw dropped. “You’re a Jew?”

Jody and Jodee’s Fishery

During this recent short visit to #64, I mentioned my craving for steamers to Sandye as we were heading to the beach in Asbury. Like clams, going to the beach costs a lot more than it used to: four dollars an hour for parking and six per person to get on the beach. Afterward we went to a great local seafood store called Jody and Jodee’s Fishery. The clams were $13 a pound but we got them anyway. 

The steamers were as Proustian as can be, briny madeleines of memory: from the little brown sleeve you have to peel off the neck and when they hit the back of your tongue it’s like a brief burst of ocean. Like the hot dogs at the Windmill, like the coleslaw from Mac’s Embers, the corn from Snooky’s or Quackenbush, the pizza from a place that was actually called Memory Lane, the extra-large chocolate chip cookies from Delicious Orchards—the menu in the ghostworld food court of my childhood. 

Kin

Having emigrated to Australia from a Russian shtetl himself, Phillip Symonds embraced the young stowaway like a long-lost relative. He took him upstairs to his home above the shop to meet his family—a wife and eight children—and kept him hidden there until the ship had sailed and Hyman was a free man. Symonds immediately put him to work in the dry goods store, and clever Hyman greatly increased its profits and reputation. He married the oldest Symonds daughter, Mary, and they had a son whom they named Leslie. As the clan expanded, Hyman began to doubt that the dry goods operation would be able to support them all.

Last Time

Phyllis left Dwight Drive last winter. Her beautiful house and garden were too much to maintain and she hoped to have more fun in a senior living community (though so far this hasn’t quite materialized.) Every single thing in that house was special and unique, from the plywood underfloor Sandye hand-painted for the kitchen to the high-ceilinged sunroom for crafts Phyllis designed, overlooking the deck and the yard. Phyllis’s TV room featured the most comfortable sectional couch I have ever encountered. “Can I have that couch when you move?” I asked her a few months before the move. “Everybody wants that couch, sweetie,” she said.

That visit to #64 in the summer of 2023 turned out to be my last. Sandye and I ate steamers from Jody and Jodee’s at Phyllis’s kitchen table, sitting across from our two clam-averse daughters. This alone felt like a miracle, since the four of us had had a terrible falling-out during the pandemic, now pretty much, but probably never completely, healed.

MARION + NANCY 1960

My father carved these letters into the original sidewalk in front of #7 the day it was poured. Nancy had been born in January and I turned two that May. We moved to what was then RD #1, Box 104C from an apartment next to Washington Square Park that is now an NYU dorm. I have the feeling the engraved letters and numbers are no longer there, gone for quite some time. And yes, when I look on Google Earth I can see that the current walk is made out of paving stones, not the poured cement I remember. I also see what’s left of the “rock garden,” a little hill of boulders and bonsai-ish shrubs at the side of the front yard, which came with many interior renovations and a granite fireplace as part of the great 1971 remodel.

Nancy, herself

What would I do without my sister, who shares the precious vanished world of our familial past? To whom I can say, Remember Daddy’s carving in the sidewalk? Remember the flowering cherry willow he planted in the front yard, of which there is also no longer a trace? Remember the day the kelly green Formica was brand-new, and you put the hot pan from boiling water to make Jell-O down on it? Remember the phone on the wall of the kitchen with its very long cord? Remember the fat dachshund, Noodles, and the crazy fox terrier, Kukla, and the beautiful, black-and-tan miniature dachshund Schnapps, who went blind in her old age but flew around the house so confidently you couldn’t tell?

Obsessions

I get my relationship to work from my father and my relationship to alcohol from my mother, and in these ways I keep them close. There is also my dachshund, Wally, who followed my dear dachshund, Beau. I may have to live without parents, but never without a dachshund.

Phyllis

There may be a reason Phyllis has outlasted the rest. In the 1970s, she was the first person I knew to buy whole wheat bread and take vitamins and follow the advice of Adelle Davis. I have wonderful memories of a ratatouille-type dish she would make and freeze in foil pans, using vegetables she grew in her garden. In her late eighties, she has retained so much of her beauty—her gorgeous Jewfro, her heavy-lidded amber eyes and swooping cheekbones — and her style. 

Quake

Hyman Winik had heard rumors that there were great opportunities in South Africa, which was rebuilding after the Boer War. So off they sailed: he and his wife and son, the Symonds parents, and several of the other children. They stayed in South Africa long enough for my grandfather, Cecil, to be born there, but when news of the 1905 earthquake and fire in San Francisco reached them, Hyman got dollar signs in his eyes again and the clan went back to sea.

Research

Though I cannot call anyone to verify the details of the Hyman Winik story, which came to me via my grandmother and my great-aunt, both long gone, I have just called Jody and Jodee’s to ask about its unusual name. It turns out a fisherman named Jody DiStasio founded the store in the 1980s, and when his son Jodee took over, he added his name to the sign. After this phone call, I was able to find Jody DiStasio’s 2019 obituary on the internet, and when I saw a picture of him with a big fish, I felt sad that he was only sixty-one when he died. 

Since I was on a roll, I tried calling Phyllis, to see what she knew about the Dennis/Donald/Doreen situation. She had heard the same rumor, but nothing more. 

Stalker

With Phyllis gone from Dwight Drive, I will have no reason to go there. What will I do, park the car in front of #7 and stare like a stalker?

Jane did this once, the one time she was on Dwight Drive without me at Sandye’s daughter’s birthday party, and the people came out and invited her in! Jane took two pictures, which I just spent an hour digging up. Amazingly, the current owners have kept my mother’s kelly green Formica and bright white cabinets with Lucite handles in the kitchen. The faux white brick flooring is gone; I don’t know about the Vera flowered wallpaper but surely the wall phone is long gone.

Trouble at the Top

After establishing himself in San Francisco, Hyman found a new way to make a living, opening the first nickelodeon theater in the area, which prospered beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Having become very rich, Hyman sent to Lithuania for his family, and one of his brothers married one of the Symonds sisters. By then he had obtained the worldwide distribution rights to films of Charlie Chaplin, and mingled with Hollywood folk and real royalty, supposedly loaning money to Darryl Zanuck. I have seen a home movie of Hyman and Charlie at Buckingham Palace. The family moved to New York, where Hyman believed the biggest deals were made, but at some point, he ended up at cross-purposes with Chaplin, who sued my great-grandfather for a quarter of a million dollars, which probably would be about a billion dollars today. He had a nervous breakdown and died at forty-two, leaving four sons born on four different continents. 

Unhelpful

Ever since I started working on this essay, my subconscious has been scrambling to help, digging through the files for long-lost scraps of memory. Unfortunately, it has gotten stuck on “ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ,” as sung by Big Bird in 1969–the Sesame Street alphabet song, in this case both an earworm and a rabbit hole.

Violins

My grandmother Gigi, Cecil’s wife, who told me most of what I know about our genealogy, claimed that Hyman’s widow, Mary Symonds Winik, never owned a permanent home or a piece of furniture of her own. After her husband’s death, she resided in a hotel they owned in Miami and spent much of the rest of her time on cruise ships. She was leaving from New York Harbor the day Gigi went to tell her that she was pregnant with her first grandchild. If it was a boy, Gigi was concerned to know whether tradition would require her to name him Hyman after the deceased patriarch, or if Mary would endorse the idea of using a more American name that began with the letter H, as many Jewish people had begun to do. 

“It would mean so much to all of us if you would name the baby Hyman,” said her mother-in-law. Tragedy! Poor Gigi was in despair. Whenever she recounted this story, she would imitate Mary’s imperious Australian accent.

Wondering

Why don’t I consider the place I live now, where I’ve been happily planted for fifteen years, my home? Sweet Baltimore, whose bad news travels around the globe at the speed of light, and where I have a dear little house in a peaceful neighborhood of tall trees and lush gardens. This city powerfully retains its natives, who identify themselves by where they went to high school, but it is far too late in the game for me to become one of them.

X

It wasn’t until my father was eighteen and about to enlist in the Marines that Gigi told him he was not Hyman at all. The birth certificate she produced for “Baby Winik” indicated no first name. So actually, he could choose anything at this point!

“It’s too late,” said my dad, and he remained Hyman evermore. 

You Never Know

My father never met his grandfather Hyman–just as I never met my grandmother Marion, my mother’s mother, whose name I share. In the afterlife, I hope to throw a family reunion on Dwight Drive where we can all get together and enjoy steamed clams in the kelly green kitchen, though I’ll have to find out if Hyman the First is kosher and I imagine Young Jane will want to explain to Big Jane that we no longer use the expression “starving Armenians.” Perhaps Jody and Jodee can bring the clams over personally, in sand buckets, with 1970’s pricing.

Zip Code

The day I started writing this essay, I spent a happy quarter-hour staring at zip code maps on the internet–my magic carpet and my genie. I saw Dwight Drive, sharing the 07712 zip code with Asbury Park, and I saw other street and place names that retain incantatory power for me: Deal Road, Monmouth Road, Whalepond Road, Cold Indian Springs, Allenhurst, Elberon. I remember how badly I wanted to get away from this place when I was an adolescent and look at me now, a restless immigrant roosting in 21210, dredging up names and numbers to reclaim a lost world.