Bungalow Summer - Part IV
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 4 of a FIVE-PART STORY
Meanwhile, our friends who’d talked us into spending the summer at the bungalow colony in the first place, had not disappeared exactly, but made themselves very scarce. Their bungalow was at the edge of the property, down a small grassy hill from everyone else. They barely ever emerged from their bungalow, and never invited us – or anyone else as far as we knew – to visit. That, somehow, made me feel doubly ostracized. My neighbor, Iris, would complain about how I hung out my laundry to dry – on a foldable rack rather than on a line – and I, unused to such trivial gripes, wouldn't know how to react. I was a polite young woman who didn’t want to start trouble, and so I’d just stand there with my mouth hanging open and my face turning a guilty red.
When my daughter, Jofka, returned from sleepaway camp, we began to spend full weeks, rather than just weekends, at the colony. It was August and very hot. We felt our family would be better off in the country, where the air was fresh and corn grew in fields, than in the stifling heat of the city.
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. Bearded men with sidelocks, women in long skirts and wigs.
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. If I went back far enough in my lineage, would my ancestors have looked like that? I wondered. Unlikely, since this was kind of a sect and I came from worldly people.
But whenever I saw them, I gawked. I wanted to follow them around, study them. One Saturday morning, Jofka and I decided to take a drive in the surrounding countryside. We strapped Gabi into her baby seat and took off without a single idea of where we were going. Jofka was twelve then and little Gabi, at eighteen months, was already a very fluent talker. It was fun to be in the car with my two girls, driving around haphazardly, buying peaches and tomatoes from farm stands, all of us sticky from the juice running down our chins. The fields and meadows and country lanes were beautiful, but pretty soon we found ourselves on a gravelly dirt road in the middle of a dark woods and realized we had no idea where we were.