Bungalow Summer
For sentimental reasons, I had neglected to remove my dead sister’s number from my phone. Seven years passed, and late one night I pressed it by mistake. Seconds after hanging up with the man who’d usurped her phone number, I began receiving pushy texts and calls from him. His name was Dave and he was an ultra Orthodox Jew living in the much scrutinized town of Monsey, New York–a place where, four decades earlier, I’d had a shocking and sinister experience that felt like something from ancient Biblical times. Could Dave be one of the men who was in the dark woods that day?
A FIVE-PART SERIES, BASED ON A TRUE STORY
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Part 1: Bungalow Summer
“Call or text whenever you want,” he texted. “I don’t sleep much, so I’d be happy to engage in conversation.”
I texted him a happy face and assumed that would be the end of it. But the next day he called me, and wanted to know if A) I was Jewish, and B) if I was married. Poor Dave was lonely and miserable, and had I said I was single, would happily have flown me up to New York and married me even though we were total strangers.
Part II: Bungalow Summer
We lived in a gritty city, swelteringly hot in the summer, miles and miles of concrete with no place to go for relief. A friend suggested that we rent a cottage on the same property where she had been renting a summer cottage for years. This was a marvelous place, she told us, quiet, private, deep in the country, but only an hour outside of Manhattan. It seemed so easy. We put money down on a cottage sight unseen.
And what a shock we had when we first went there.
Part III: Bungalow Summer
Iris, my neighbor at the bungalow colony, didn’t like me for various reasons, but the biggest culprit was that my younger daughter, Gabi, who was a year and a half old, had sensory issues we didn’t know about at the time; every morning she’d wake up screaming because the label at the neck of her pajamas rubbed against her skin and bothered her so much. Iris, who could hear the shrieks through our shared wall, decided I was abusing the baby and began spreading rumors through the colony.
Part IV: Bungalow Summer
When my daughter, Jofka, returned from sleepaway camp, we began to spend full weeks, rather than just weekends, at the colony. Up till then we hadn’t explored the surrounding area much, but we’d noticed that whenever we went to the local grocery store, there’d be a number of orthodox Jews going in and out. The black of their clothing looked very out-of-place in that country setting. They drove huge station wagons loaded with kids and spoke to one another in Yiddish. I was fascinated.
Part V: Bungalow Summer
We were lost. The dirt road seemed to continue endlessly, dark and slightly ominous because of the thick ceiling of overhanging trees and branches. We were the only car on that road and after a mile or two it began to feel creepy. Even my kids had grown silent. My skin prickled. “Where are we?” Jofka whined nervously. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t a clue, so I just kept driving with a tight little smile on my face. Suddenly the woods opened up, and what we witnessed was something that would be imprinted in my mind forever.