“The nerve of that woman,” Grace huffed as we walked out of class down the corridor that led to the parking lot outside.
Grace Sliwa has been like a sister to me for twenty-three years, ever since we were freshman roommates at NYU. We even look like sisters. We both have long brown hair, oval faces, and prominent cheekbones passed down from ancestors who came from the same general part of the world: Grace is of Czech descent; my people hail from the Jewish ghettos of western Russia. We’re both taller than average and long-waisted. “Modigliani model types,” Hugh once observed. But my eyes are brown and Grace’s are bright blue. She wears her hair straight and parted on the side. I favor a tousled, “sauvage” look with bangs. Grace doesn’t need an excuse to put on a skirt or a dress. I’m happy in jeans 90 percent of the time.
Smart, talented, beautiful Grace also has a voice that purrs sex, which she uses to great effect on her interview show, Talk of the Townies, produced at WPQD here in Pequod and carried regionally on public radio.
“What she should have done the second she saw you in class, if she had a decent bone in her body, was leave,” she hissed.
One of the qualities I admire most in Grace is her loyalty. She’s as loyal as Lassie. After Hugh and I divorced, she wouldn’t even deign to do a phone interview with him. Believe me, it would’ve been a coup for her, given who Hugh was. Grace was the only one of my friends who refused to talk to Hugh, fame or no fame, because of what he pulled with Helene.
“If I were you, I’d want to kill,” she fumed.
Grace zipped up her fleece and took my arm as we emerged from the large, slate-colored concrete building into the chilly November morning. We steered toward our cars, parked side by side in the lot.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t let that woman stay in class. There must be a way to get rid of her,” she said, releasing me to open the back door of her Prius and toss her mat over a booster seat full of toys. Grace has two wonderful boys, two adorable munchkins—my godsons. After the first one was born, she and her family decamped to Pequod from Manhattan, intent on raising their kids outside the city. Her husband, Mac, grew up here.
“We need to have her banned,” Grace said, turning back to the building. “Maybe we should go in there and tell Kelly and the rest of them what she’s done . . .”
“No,” I said firmly. “You know word will spread. I can’t handle being the subject of gossip again. Remember when New York Magazine ran that paparazzi shot of Hugh and Helene, pregnant Helene, alongside my wedding photo? I was completely humiliated. I don’t want to be a hot topic here.”
“That SOB wedding photographer sold you out. What was the insult your aunt had for him?”
Sina Shluha vokzal’naja ve Siberia. Aunt Lada was so enamored of her Slavic roots, she’d studied Russian language and folk dancing in the midst of the Cold War. I knew most of her sayings but had to ask her to translate that one.
“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