Tips for Living(4)

“Son of a whore who works a train station in Siberia.” I sighed. “Grace, I just don’t want people talking about me. I wanted to die last time, I was so ashamed.”

“Don’t get confused, Nor. The shame is on him.”

Then why had I felt like ducking under the table whenever Hugh and Helene showed up at the cafés and restaurants I frequented while I still lived in the city? Why did I sneak out of friends’ cocktail parties and gallery openings if they entered the room? I came to Pequod to start a new life. No, I wouldn’t tell Kelly and the rest. I didn’t want to advertise my past.

Grace was still simmering as she slid into her car’s front seat. “Wasn’t it lousy enough that they bought a house here? I mean, the entire point was for you to start over without those two in your face. Now she has to come to your Pilates class? She’s a stalker!” she said, slamming the door.

I suspect buying a house in Pequod was Helene’s idea. Hugh was nearing sixty with some health issues. He probably feared losing his twenty-seven-year-old wife if he didn’t give her what she wanted. And she wanted a house near me. I imagined their conversation—it actually worried me that I imagined their conversations so often lately—went something like this:

“Helene, you know we can’t get a house in Pequod. Nora lives there.”

“But it doesn’t seem fair. You said Pequod had the perfect light for painting,” she’d plead in her Texas twang. “There’s a beautiful, light-filled studio on the property. Are we going to give up our dream house on the chance that we might run into your ex-wife once or twice?”

True, Hugh claimed the light in Pequod was “as transparent as vodka,” a result of air saturated with water molecules from the surrounding inlets and coves. We spent one idyllic August drinking it in—visiting with Grace and her crew, roughing it in a barn we rented so Hugh could work on larger paintings. We lit propane lamps in the evenings, took baths in a repurposed horse trough and loved every second of it. But the farmer sold his acreage to a condo developer the next spring, and we began renting a winterized cottage upstate to get away on weekends year-round.

Pequod is a summer place, really. Just under three hours east of New York City on Long Island’s north shore. Our population swells tenfold from May through September, and then it’s just us again. The Piqued. At last count 3,093 of us. A really small town. Hugh and Helene were Summer People, or more specifically, Summer Weekend People—a group whose sense of entitlement draws the ire of locals. The Courier’s “Letters to the Editor” featured a typical complaint in the Labor Day issue:

Dear Editor,

I was born and raised in Pequod, and I’ve been proud to call myself a resident of our town for almost fifty-one years. Recently, I’ve been angered by the attitude of some who share our community in the summer months. This past weekend I was standing in a long line at the farm stand—typical during our high season—waiting to pay for my corn. I was wearing my Pequod Fire Department T-shirt, so there was no mistaking my local status. When I finally reached the register, I heard a man shout from the back of the line: “Hey, Townie! Why don’t you shop during the week, so we don’t have to stand here all fu**ing day?”

Being a public servant, I refrained from violence. But like the bumper sticker says: SUMMER PEOPLE, SUMMER NOT.

S. Ayers

Pequod FD

I’d spotted Hugh and Helene on weekends this summer. It seemed as if every time I ran a Saturday errand, I had to cross the street to avoid bumping into them. When the summer ended, I was relieved they’d finally be gone. I never expected Helene Westing Walker (luckily, I hadn’t taken Hugh’s name when we married—there was less chance people in town would connect us now) to show up in my Pilates class on a Monday morning in November.

The class meets three times a week in an unusual location: the old bowling alley outside of town. Kelly and her husband brought the failing alley back to life after finding it for sale on Bizquest. A tragic event gave them the means: Kelly’s parents died in their sleep from a carbon monoxide leak in their boiler, and she came into an inheritance. Originally from Catskill, they changed the alley’s name to “Van Winkle Lanes” for the fabled Rip Van Winkle, who heard thunder in the Catskill Mountains and discovered ghosts up there bowling ninepins. Kelly dubbed the alley’s cocktail lounge The Thunder Bar. Her husband bartends there.

“The Van Winkle name says bowling is awesome, bowling is timeless. The name Pequod Lanes didn’t say a thing about bowling,” Kelly explained for a story I did on the reopening. “Business is up seventeen percent since we changed the sign.”

Until bowling hours begin, our Pilates group has the place to ourselves. Depending on moods and weather, between five and ten of us set our mats down in the shiny, oiled lanes. If you know your bowling, then you know the oil is what helps the bowling balls flow smoothly. What puts that sexy “slide and glide” on them. And if you don’t know your bowling, I understand completely. I only have this information because my father, Nathan Glasser, did a lot of business in bowling alleys and bars when I was a kid, and he often brought me along.

I miss my dad. He died sixteen years ago, not long before I met Hugh. He was a complicated man with a big heart, and I was his “pearl of a girl.” In some curious way, spending mornings in the bowling alley makes me feel connected to him again.