Danielle Ganek - The Summer We Read Gatsby: A Novel

a cognizant original v5 release october 08 2010

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements in novels are problematic. When too short they appear terse and we read between the lines, seeing tension and ambiguity in the faint thanks. When too long, with endless lists of names and adjectives, they read like a high school yearbook pagelook how popular I am! Some include celebritiesor, worse, famous writers who provided inspiration(!)and sound horribly pretentious. Frankly, I wanted to skip the whole exercise. One, because Ive been out of high school for a long time. Two, because Im lazy and a procrastinator and just finishing the novel was hard enough. And three, because Im terrified of offending anyone. Also, I dont personally know any celebrities. But it would be rude and inaccurate not to express my extreme heart-felt (see? The adjectives immediately start to pile up in a way that seems cloying) gratitude to my editor, Kendra Harpster, and the other brilliant (yes, really) women at Viking: Clare Ferraro, Molly Stern, Nancy Sheppard, Tricia Conley, Veronica Windholz, Tory Klose, Rachel Burd, and Amanda Brower, who worked on this book with me. Thank you so much. I feel very lucky to adore my agent (sorry, do you think that sounds smug? I do), Leigh Feldman, and I have to tell her and the team at Darhansoff, Verill, Feldman how much all their efforts on my behalf have been appreciated. While my family and friends are all a little tired of this whole novelist thing, I want to thank them for their patience, especially my son Harry, who read Gatsby this year (or so he tells me), to whom this book is dedicated and my two younger children, Nick and Zoe, who were less than pleased to see their older brother singled out for attention. (Your turns will come, we hope.) And of course, I have to acknowledge and thank the man Ive loved all of my adult life, my first, and presumably only, husband, David, who is not, I repeat, NOT, a character in this story and was most definitely not a mistake. (He has read Gatsby, though, or so he tells me).

Summer 2008

Hats, like first husbands in my experience, are usually a mistake. But the invitation was specific. And demanding. A GATSBY party. Wear white. And below that, in imploring cursive: Hats for the Ladies.

Its still unclear to me how hats were involved in Fitzgeralds storyonly a few are mentioned in the novelor, frankly, why any adult above the age of twenty would care to attend this sort of theme party. Im also still not sure that this part of the storyhow Miles Nobles first party at the house it took five years to design and build came to be themed around this book hed once given my sisterwas ever fully explained, but as Peck kept pointing out, I was a foreigner, so what the hell did I know?

Like many of her observations, this one wasnt entirely accurate. Peck, short for Peckslandthats the sort of mother she hasis my half sister. We shared the same father, although he died when I was three and she was seven, after hed left her mother for mine. Im as American as she is, with the same navy blue passport. Its just that I never lived in the States and, according to her, I dont know anybody, or any of the sorts of people she would have liked me to know: American celebrities, fashion designers, New York socialites, people who could get a table at a place called the Waverly Inn, those sorts.

I didnt own any hats of the kind I imagined Daisy Buchanan might have worn, but on this, as on so many things, Peck was adamant. She not only insisted (read: begged, pleaded, and threatened to kick me out of the house) that I accompany her to Miles Nobles party, but also that I follow the oddly specific sartorial directions. She was often adamant, often about absurd things, but particularly about hats. On this, thered been no room for argument. She hadnt seen Miles in seven years and she needed someonemeby her side for this encounter.

Id only been in Southampton for three days and I was in no mood for a party. Even one hosted, as Peck kept dramatically exclaiming, by the first and only man shed ever loved. It was the Fourth of July, a holiday about which Id always been reverent, but at that point in the summer I was still jaundiced and cynical, a divorced twenty-eight-year-old aspiring writer whose creative ambitions had led only to a dead-end job as a translator at a lifestyle magazine for tourists in Switzerland. And my only blood relative, aside from the half sister I hardly knew, had only been gone a couple of months. I was far more saddened by Lydias death than I might have expected, especially as I hadnt seen my aunt in a few years. I was a weepy, confused mess and was finding it hard to be there, in her house, without her. So at first I politely declined Pecks invitation to join her.

But being polite and declining invitations do not agree with my glamorously eccentric half sister, and since I was at the very beginning of what was supposed to be a month of sisterly togetherness at the house wed jointly inherited from Aunt Lydia, I reluctantly agreed to go with her. In the interest of getting along, I pulled the only dress Id brought with me from my suitcase of jeans and T-shirts and borrowed a hat from the strange assortment Aunt Lydia had left in the house, unwisely choosing a drooping off-white bowler that made my head itch and kept falling over my eyes as Peck inexpertly maneuvered our aunts ancient station wagon down the driveway.

Theres a situation, she announced as she pulled into the sun-dappled street, spraying gravel like she was commandeering a get-away car. This is a standard expression from Peck, who tends to speak in proclamations and for whom life is one long series of situations. A situation could be anything from the mysteriously locked safe in Aunt Lydias closet that we had not been able to open to the guy wearing nothing but wet tighty-whitey BVDs wed witnessed just that morning slowly pedaling his bicycle home from the beach. (Or the situation could be me.)

The situation, Peck explained, in the aggrieved tone of an irrelevant monarch, is that you and I cant agree on anything.

This was true. I was trying, I really was. But to say it wasnt going well between Peck and me would be an oversimplification. The first three days had been, well, strained. Inheritances will do that, people tell me. Our circumstances werent necessarily unusual: a beloved elderly aunt bequeathing a small second home to two nieces who must come together to settle the estate. Except the two nieces, half sisters raised an ocean apart by two utterly different women whod both loved the same man, had a complicated relationship. And it was a house in the Hamptons. Southampton, to be specific. (Apparently there are nuances I couldnt possibly understand, being a foreigner.) Also, as Peck kept telling me, nobody calls it the Hamptons.

Certain types of New Yorkers, I was to learn, and style-obsessed Peck, to her delight, was now one of these New Yorkers, go to the Country on weekends and in the summers. To them the Country refers to anyplace outside Manhattan, which is the City. The City is where you live during the week. On the weekends, you go to the Country. Even suburbs like Larchmont and Scarsdale are the Country to such city people, as are Southampton, East Hampton, and Westhampton. These were the sorts of distinctions about which my sister was appalled to find I didnt already know.

Literally. Peck often started a sentence that way. Lit-tra-ly. It was a verbal tic and could be contagious. She sped up and then slammed on the brakes as she cursed the driver ahead of us. I dont see how we could be related. You have no sense of priorities.

This was a theme she kept revisiting. Peck felt vehemently that we should ignore Lydias wishesIts not like she would