Bungalow Summer - Part II
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?
THIS IS PART 2 of a FIVE-PART STORY
Gharith Pendragon
So I continued as a “regular American,” ignoring the fact that my parents were refugees who’d escaped the horrors of the Nazi regime. That fact branded me, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I was just a girl who’d grown up in New York City, daughter of art collectors, a father who was in the oil business, a mother who was a painter and spent endlessly long days in her studio. I married young, the first time to a much older man from Czechoslovakia – a relationship that ended in divorce – and the second to a man closer to my own age and background. I became pregnant almost immediately. 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. This place was in upstate New York, a mile or two from the town of Monsey. It was a self-contained property, dotted with cottages, a swimming pool, a main house, a playground. It wasn’t pretty or even particularly bucolic – just a bunch of buildings scattered on a patchy lawn that reminded me of the land around a second rate public school.
This was, we realized, a bungalow colony. The movie Dirty Dancing came out that summer, and while it, too, was set in a bungalow colony, it was nothing like the colony where we were exiled for the months of June, July and August.
First off, the one in Dirty Dancing was glamorous. It had a lush dining room, a huge auditorium, a vast swimming pool, a well-dressed clientele, an orchestra for Saturday night dancing, a surfeit of waiters, groundsmen, crafts people, more like a grand hotel in central Europe where one “took the waters” than a schlocky retreat in the Catskills. We didn’t want to be there, but we were stuck, having paid $5000 for a dreary cottage that shared a wall with its neighbor.
And what a neighbor that was, a shrill angry woman who wore threadbare Bermuda shorts, and sometimes went around with spongy pink curlers in her hair. From the start, for reasons I didn’t understand, she hated me.