Read Online The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek - Free Book Online

She loved to give me writing advice, little tidbits that were like expressions of fondness, coming from her. “Writing is rewriting,” she would say.
    Marking a moment, in Peck’s parlance, meant drinking a cocktail, so she was mixing up a batch of her “famous” Southsides, a minty concoction meant to be consumed while we dressed for the evening. “I coined that term, the dressing drink,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of a civilized life.
    “Isn’t this so Something’s Gotta Give ?” Peck asked as she held up a silver cocktail shaker like it was a trophy. This was part of her continued attempt to convince me we could keep the place. She was referring to the movie with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in which a particularly spectacular beach home stirred house lust in its audience. The dank little Fool’s House resembled that light and airy—and large—house only in theory. Yes, they were both shingled and in Southampton. But Diane Keaton’s was on the ocean and surely didn’t smell like mildew. Fool’s House was close to town and reeked like an old shower curtain. Diane Keaton’s house didn’t have a pair of mannequin legs in one corner with silver platform shoes on the feet, or stacks of needlepoint pillows with sayings on them— A laugh a day keeps the doctor away , that sort of thing. It also didn’t have a floor covered in a blue-green-and-yellow floral rug so loud it could be heard as far away as Montauk. It wasn’t filled with stuffed sofas and chairs and lamps collected at the estate sales where Lydia went in search of treasures in other people’s junk. And I don’t believe it had a tiny closet tucked under the stairs, perfect for hide-and-seek or building forts, that was now jammed so full of old coats and pillows and boxes of things that it could not be opened.
    Our house had a doll called the Pink Lady. It was a relic of an earlier era at Fool’s House, before it had a name, when perhaps there was a young girl occupying the bedroom that was now mine, with its view of the tiny garden in the back. The doll had bald patches and hair that was supposed to be red but had faded to a punk shade of pink. She was missing an eye and wore an old-fashioned smock that had once been pink but was now a dirty mauve color. The Pink Lady was creepy, but she’d become the house mascot and sat on the edge of the second-floor landing looking down at the living room. There was a cocktail of the same name, and Lydia had been known to invite friends to parties allegedly given by the doll at which only these horrible concoctions—something involving gin and grenadine and raw egg created during the Prohibition days—would be served.
    The Something’s Gotta Give house didn’t have a leaking roof, a gas stove that looked and smelled like it was going to combust any minute, or a raging ant situation. But there was a certain zany joy to Fool’s House that the perfectly decorated movie set lacked, and I did love it, although I knew it was wise to keep my feelings in check. This was to be a brief summer fling, that was it.
    “More like Grey Gardens ,” I said. “Without the cats.”
    There was something of Edie Beale’s uncensored dramatics to my half sister. When she was thirteen she’d been in a car accident that nearly killed her. She hovered near death—at least that’s the way she liked to tell it; “I hovered near death, for months, I tell you, months !”—and then, slowly, she recuperated. She missed almost her entire eighth-grade year, spending weeks and weeks of bed rest with old movies on television and gothic romances to read, followed by many more weeks of physical therapy. Like a color photograph coming into focus, she grew bolder and brighter and more intensely saturated as she grew stronger. This process had continued until she evolved, as an adult, into a full-fledged character who prided herself on being an eccentric.
    “Mum saw that play.” Her mother was “Mum.” Not “Mom,”