Steady in the Silence

I should have known this could happen at the bungalow colony.

The bungalow had been a gift. A one-month vacation, at an aunt’s bungalow she wouldn’t be using that summer. I’d prepared myself — for people with a lot more disposable income than us, for the envy that might bubble up when surrounded by people who owned a house and a bungalow when we were a decade in and still renting.

I’d steeled myself to not get too used to it, to remember that it was a one-time treat and hardly a lifestyle. I knew all the warnings that come with bungalow colonies, where there is little privacy and so much freedom.

But the thing that had stayed with me hadn’t been any of the gossip or the materialism or even the calm afternoons spent doing payroll at a laptop on the porch. It had been Shabbos, when all the families had emerged from their bungalows. I’d seen them then — the fathers and sons rolling in the grass in Shabbos shirts (the grass stains, I’d mourned, but their wives had only laughed), the enthusiasm with which the men had learned and squabbled b’chavrusa, the men who’d sloped off together in search of still-warm cholent.