Bungalow Summer - Part V
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 5 of a FIVE-PART STORY
We didn’t mind at all that we were a little lost. This was fun, and not knowing where we were made it even more fun. We just drove along mindlessly, enjoying the beauty of the countryside, secure in the knowledge that we would eventually end up someplace familiar. But the dirt road seemed to continue endlessly, dark and slightly sinister 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. This was a Saturday and the girls and I were bare-armed (and bare-legged) in tank tops and skimpy shorts that extended only a few inches below crotch level. Nothing unusual about that. But suddenly, alone in that dark setting, I began to feel isolated and vulnerable. My skin prickled. I drove faster, wanting to get the hell out of there. “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. The road seemed to continue forever, winding and desolate.
Where we were didn’t feel safe. All of a sudden, four adolescent boys with sidelocks dangling in front of their ears jumped out of the woods on either side of the road. They had rocks in their hands and they began throwing them as hard as they could at the car.
What the hell? Their faces looked pinched and angry. It occurred to me they wanted to harm us and that they were serious, really wishing us ill. (It also occurred to me that it was a Saturday, the Sabbath or day of rest when Orthodox Jews were not allowed to drive or handle money or exert themselves in any way.) The boys shouted words we couldn't understand because, presumably, they were in Yiddish. We drove a little further and suddenly the woods opened up on our left, and to our shock we saw a long, low slung, gloomy black building that seemed to stretch the length of an entire city block. A synagogue with a crowd of black-hatted men gathered in front of it like a flock of crows. It was a sinister sight, an image from ancient Biblical times. Jofka gasped and so did I. We paused ever so slightly, and then I pressed my foot down hard on the accelerator and we flew past the building as if an enemy army of tanks and machine guns were at our heels. We continued forward until the woods thinned out and the dirt road ended and we found ourselves on asphalt.
We were back in the normal world, but I felt as if I had hit a time warp and traveled many miles into the past. Now, thinking back on it, I realize that the man – Dave – who had usurped my late sister’s phone number, came from exactly this place and could have been one of those black-hatted men standing in front of the synagogue. He had wanted to marry me, sight unseen, if I had been single and the right age. He had thought, just because I was nominally Jewish, that I would fit right in. But he was wrong. I was a woman in her seventies who lived in modern times and would have withered away, or been constantly pummeled by stones for disbelief in the rigid rules of a religion my worldly family and their ancestors had long ago cast off. In the eyes of Dave, I was a failure. But in my own eyes, I had escaped a dull and terrible fate, and was free to live the life of possibilities I had always known.