Essex, Vermont, is the setting named for a November 1983 episode in Diana Gordon’s story. The location anchors a scene in which a practical question about an auburn wig gives way to visible tension, then to news of a public controversy involving Diana’s longtime friend. Essex is not given a detailed physical portrait; its significance comes from the intimate, consequential events situated there and from the way the scene moves from private observation to urgent news.

Setting and Narrative Placement

The setting appears in a compact heading identifying the viewpoint character, the date, and the place: Diana Gordon, November 1983, Essex, Vermont. That heading marks a shift from the surrounding present-day narration to a separate episode told in Diana’s first-person voice. The scene does not describe Essex’s streets, landscape, or community. Instead, it locates the action through a hotel and its bathroom, keeping attention on the people and the news that intrudes upon them.

The timing is part of the scene’s frame. Diana’s recollection of the hotel breakfast places the wig exchange about two hours after an earlier moment when Elroy K. Simpson had laughed at her comparison to a possibly undercooked breakfast sausage. In the later exchange, he no longer laughs. The setting therefore holds a small but telling change in their interaction: familiar humor has given way to a tension Diana notices in his movements and silence.

Diana and Elroy in the Hotel

Diana raises an auburn wig above her head and asks what they think of it, repeating a gesture she had used earlier with the breakfast sausage. The recurrence makes the wig test feel at first like another ordinary request for Elroy’s opinion. But his response is different. Diana has counted his reflection pacing behind her in the bathroom mirror twenty times and has noticed him checking his watch repeatedly. She even offers to wet paper towels at the sink so he can wipe the beads of sweat beneath his chin; he politely nudges her hand away.

The details keep the scene close to Diana’s watchful perspective. Elroy is described as thirty-four, thick-necked, and accustomed to keeping his composure, even when he noticed that his hairline was beginning to recede. His refusal of the paper towels is restrained rather than explosive, but Diana reads his behavior as a sign that he is under pressure. The bathroom mirror gives her a way to track him without turning the exchange into an argument: his reflected pacing and repeated glances at the time are the evidence she records.

The wig also gives the scene a concrete center. Diana holds it up for a judgment, but the question receives no easy, playful answer. Her repeated effort to draw Elroy into the familiar exchange, followed by his hand gently moving hers aside, makes the difference between their earlier breakfast and the present moment visible. The episode does not explain every cause of his agitation at once; it first lets Diana register its bodily signs.

The Headline and the Call

The source of the tension becomes clearer when Elroy hands Diana a newspaper facedown. She turns it over and recognizes the printed face of the woman who, over the preceding three weeks, has shared the national spotlight with her and has been her best friend for twenty years, since their seventh-grade science class with Ms. Abraham. Diana reads the headline, “Bestselling Burning Heart Editor: ‘If You White, You Ain’t Right with Me,’ ” and asks what Kenny has done. The discovery connects the private hotel scene to the public reaction surrounding Burning Heart and the friend at the center of the headline.

Elroy cannot explain what has happened. He tells Diana she will probably want to wait until after the event is over to find out, but the headline has already changed what the occasion means to her: she worries that people will ask about it during the question-and-answer session. When the telephone rings, she and Elroy look at each other through the second and third rings. On the fourth, Diana pushes his hand aside, insisting that the caller could be Dick. After waiting through the silence, she hears a voice address her as Di and say that they need to do something immediately. Essex thus becomes the point at which a newspaper revelation and an urgent call converge, without the scene yet disclosing the caller’s full identity or what action will follow.

Narrative Significance

The scene’s movement is from a seemingly modest decision about a wig to a headline with national consequences and a call demanding immediate action. That progression is carried by precise changes in behavior: Elroy’s earlier laughter has disappeared, his watch-checking and pacing replace ease, and Diana’s attention shifts from his discomfort to the printed story and then to the ringing telephone. The location holds these turns together without supplying an explanation of its own.

Essex is also the place named for this dated segment of Diana’s narration, rather than a recurring setting developed through descriptions of local life. What the episode establishes there is a threshold: Diana first confronts the headline about a friend whose relationship with her reaches back twenty years, then receives a message that the situation cannot simply be left for later. The hotel’s enclosed, ordinary details—the mirror, the sink, the paper towels, the telephone—frame the passage from private unease to an urgent problem that reaches beyond the room.