Gatsby and I

Lunch with Darcy Barnes

I'll come to the day that I wore the straw yelow dress a bit later, though it's a day that I'll never forget and, now that I've mentioned it, I can't stop thinking about it.

God! Why do I want to write about it so fast? Patience is usually key to me, but now I feel like cutting to the chase because every droplet of my patience not to mention that day is drizzling away like rain off a ceramic roof.

But I shall speak of that later, as I said. I shall keep my promise about it after these shorter chapters. In this one I'll talk about...

What's the use of spoiling a chapter from the beginning? I shan't spoil it for you though as I said because I want to keep it relatively short.

The next day, after I arrived and all, I woke up feeling two things: hungry and confused. I was confused because I couldn't believe that I had actually slept on a feather matress (and a really comfortable one, too) in one of the bedrooms upstairs. More specifically, the one behind the second door to the left.

Did I mention what the hallway looked like? Let me tell you now. It was a twelve foot long hallway with a door in the bottom of it that was made of birch wood. Then, there were three other doors evenly dispersed on either side of the hallway, each made of redwood. One thing the doors alkl had in common was the fact that they had knobs that looked made of copper. What Celestine had told me was that there were bedrooms behind the first and third door on the right and the second door to the left. The other doors led to rooms she needed: one to the place where she designed her gardens, one where she made models of them and received her calls, and the other to the room where she wrote in the small amount of spare time that she had. She was working on an autobiography called "The highs and lows of being a Gardener".

Anyhow, where was I? At the part where I woke up. I didn't even need to change because my kimono doubled as the best nightgown ever. I only had to brush my hair, wash my face and head downstairs for breakfast. These things I certainly did and the purpur coloured carpet was the softest one my feet had ever touched. This and the fact she had running water showed me that she was somewhere in the upper middle class, tantalizingly close to being considered a noblewoman.

I turned left at the foot of the stairs, into the kitchen where I saw Celestine waiting for me in a black dress with silver buttons down the back, which reminded me that she would have belonged in a nursery rhyme if she were called Mary Mack.

"Care for oatmeal?"

"Anything at all, Celestine, because I'm as hungry as a bear."

"Right-o! Then how about some biscuits and mint tea? Frankly, I always have that in the morning."

"Seems good to me. I sometimes used to have that back at home."

I helped her find the tin of biscuits as she was boiling the water in a brass kettle. However, this didn't stop her from talking to me.

"So how was your sleep, Clara?"

"Very good. In fact, I cannot believe how soft that feather matress is."

"So you know what you're gonna do today? You're gonna hopefully talk to some people and chisel down your speech. I arranged a meeting at lunch with Darcy."

"I beg your pardon, Celestine, but who is Darcy?"

"Darcy," she explained, "is an old friend of mine. She's the wife of someone down in East Egg."

"Darcy?! She?!", I went in awe. "Back home, Darcy is a man's name."

"Damn, you Nebraskans are strange! Next thing I know, there you call women Lindsey."