Bungalow Summer - Part III
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 3 of a FIVE-PART STORY
Iris, my neighbor at the bungalow colony, had been spending summers there since childhood. I was a newcomer, very low on the totem pole, and for that reason she considered me a second class citizen. But there were other reasons for her disliking me. I didn’t look right with my stylish clothes and expensively cut, short-cropped hair. My older daughter, Jofka, had gone to sleepaway camp in New Hampshire rather than attending the colony’s day camp on the premises. (A big strike against us.) My younger daughter, Gabi, who was a year and a half old, had sensory issues that we didn’t know about at the time; every morning she would 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 the wall, decided I was abusing her.
She spread rumors through the colony, and people began giving me dirty looks and treating me as if I were some sort of weirdo. No one would talk to me – not that I minded. I was persona non grata, lower and more unwelcome than a leper, someone to be avoided at all costs.
I had the kind of personality that automatically assumed I was in the wrong if people gave me odd looks or talked smack about me. And so I snuck around the colony, keeping to the shadows in order to avoid contact with other residents. But mostly I stayed in our bungalow, a small space that contained two tiny bedrooms, a kitchenette and common area with a pull-out couch. At the time, I was working on a novel and I brought my computer with me, a bright blue, box-shaped Kaypro that I didn’t really know how to operate. The thing kept giving me trouble and I was constantly going back to the city to have a computer person help me. Pretty soon, I was staying in the city every night, only returning to the colony on weekends like all the husbands, mine included.
We’d shelled out $5000 for our bungalow and so, to get our money’s worth, we drove up there every Friday night, gritting our teeth and complaining before we even reached the colony gates. We’d unpack, have a quick take-out meal, and the next morning our daughter would wake up screaming and there was nothing we could do to stop her. A sharp rap on the wall would remind us of our neighbor. When I tried to explain to her that waking screams were my daughter’s M.O., she drilled her eyes into me with a look that said: Yeah, sure, say what you want, but I know you’re mistreating that baby.