Free The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek Page A

closet. I took a shower and got dressed for the party, sticking to jeans, because as my sister put it, I was “afraid to stick my neck out, playing the role of the foreign observer rather than participating in life.” Peck could sometimes be astute, but I wore my jeans anyway. Mostly because I hadn’t packed much besides the dress I’d already worn to the Gatsby party the night before. I wasn’t in the habit of going to parties at all, let alone on back-to-back evenings.
    When I finished putting on makeup (lip gloss), I went to Peck’s room, where it looked like she’d tried on and discarded every single piece of clothing in the very extensive wardrobe she’d brought with her to Fool’s House, in three enormous vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunks, no less. Apparently she’d also poured herself a refill of the dressing drink in the process and was parading around in nothing but a mesh thong with “the twins” on full display as she held up different options for me to judge. “Come on,” she complained, when I told her they all looked fine. She fluffed out her hair and sprayed it with a product called, no kidding, Big Hair. “Offer a critique. This is what sisters do for each other. Haven’t you always wanted a sister?”
    It was true, I had always wanted a sister. I’d kept a picture of the two of us from our first summer at Fool’s House, when I was nine and she was twelve, on my bedside table growing up, and went through a phase of talking about my half sister so often that my best friend at the time asked me to stop. So I did as Peck asked, offering a critique of the long orange dress and encouraging her to go with a short feathered number she swore was vintage Halston, “though the tag fell out,” and ignored her as she made a face when I refused to make more of an effort than my jeans and a gauzy top.
    It did feel sisterly, our squabbling, and I found it enjoyable. I’d grown up in a quiet house, although there were often guests, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room reading. There was often music, bootleg Dead tapes and Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, but the homes—apartments, mostly—I’d shared with my mother had been peaceful and orderly. This was something I remembered from our summers at Fool’s House together, that it was fun to hang out in each other’s bedrooms, even if we weren’t getting along. In fact, in some ways I liked it even more when we were arguing, like real sisters.
    “You know what I want ?” Peck was one of those people who always asked if you knew what they wanted. She’d call me up at odd hours, when I hadn’t heard from her in months, forgetting, or ignoring, the time difference, to tell me she was craving truffles or “one of those dear little chicken pot pies.” Or she’d announce that what she wanted more than anything in life was to have an audience with the pope. Or to host a dinner where she invited only comedians, twelve of them around the table, and let them duke it out. “More than anything? I want to be on the Best-Dressed List in Vanity Fair magazine,” she announced, as we made our way out to the porch.
    The porch was the best feature of the house, a wide, welcoming space both contemplative and gregarious that wrapped around the entire lopsided place, accessorizing it in overly grand style. One side of the porch we had draped in an enormous American flag, because that’s what Lydia had always done. At the other end was the warped wooden table where meals were taken on nice summer days. Now it was piled high with food.
    Hamilton Frayn, aka Sir Ham, as Lydia liked to call him, was our first guest. He was my aunt’s best friend but anyone who referred to him that way, as simply a friend , was always quickly corrected. “He’s family ,” Lydia would say. “Anyone who thinks you can’t choose your family never had a friend like Hamilton Frayn.”
    Hamilton was gay and British and had spent thirty years of summers and weekends in a