The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine

."
    "Oh, Annie. You and your laps."
    The cottage, on the other hand, was another story. Annie's heart sank when they pulled into the narrow dirt driveway beside the house itself. It was an unpromising sight, a slightly lopsided structure built in 1929, its shingles painted a dull, tired gray. A sunporch ran the length of the front of the cottage, its louvered windows quaint and outdated and yellowed. An overgrown hedge rose on one side of a dirt path leading to the louvered front door. With one corner wedged in the dirt, the rickety gate stood open, as listless as an idling bystander, unconcerned with, unaware of, the ramshackle house. The hard dusty path sidled shamelessly into the patchy crabgrass.
    The cottage.
    It was a shack, a hut, a garden shed of a thing, stunted and unwashed.
    "Oh," Annie said in dismay.
    But her sister and mother were already out of the car and exclaiming with joy. It was so unspoiled! It was so old-fashioned, so perfectly old-fashioned! Think of all the barefooted children who had scampered up and down this path! The commuters in their fedoras, tired and grimy from the train! The two women were beside themselves.
    "It's like camp!" Miranda cried.
    "Girl Scout camp!" Betty cried in response.
    Of course, Annie knew well enough that Betty would have tired of real Girl Scout camp the minute she wanted a hot bath and there was only a cold shower to be had, that Miranda would exclaim over the unspoiled nature of the cottage until the first hot night without air-conditioning. But Annie said nothing. She knew better than to confront her mother and sister when they were waxing poetic together. It would be like stepping into a dog fight. One had to wait, patient and quiet, until they wore themselves out.
    Annie sometimes reflected that all those poor publishers who thought Miranda was bluffing or bullying had never understood Miranda's secret, which was supreme innocence. She was a good-looking woman: her face animated; her eyes, tapering at both ends, womanly and remote; and she had a slow, curling half-smile that people around her experienced as a moment of recognition, as if they'd been lavishly but secretly praised. When all was said and done, however, Miranda's greatest strength was a sublime ignorance that things could go other than she, in her benevolent excitement, had imagined them. She didn't worry about what the world thought of her or her tantrums, for the world existed only as imagined by her, and Miranda believed in her imagination the way others believed in God or capitalism: it was a force, and it was a force for good.
    Annie, who was acutely aware of how the world viewed her, or at least of how she worried that the world viewed her, often watched her younger sister with wonder. Miranda was so unselfconscious that the older sister was deprived of even the bitter satisfaction of envy. In fact, Annie had always been proud of both her sister's beauty and her guileless, autocratic power.
    On the other hand, Annie could not help but notice that her sister was extremely self-involved, and over the years, watching Miranda go through one disastrous love affair after another, she began to suspect that Miranda's preoccupation with herself was a kind of protection. Everywhere Miranda looked, she saw the world she insisted upon. This was her great tautological strength. It had fascinated and frustrated Annie since childhood. How could you ever win an argument with such a sister? How?
    She asked herself this question again as they stood outside the cottage. The house hunched over the yard, shabby, uncomfortable, ill-tempered. Its closed windows, dead flies pressed like flowers beneath the heavy wood sills, were bleary, unseeing behind cataracts of grime. Large, smooth plots of pale dirt basked in the sun interrupted here and there by a few straggling, scratchy formations of crabgrass. There were two trees, one an evergreen brown and diseased at the top, the other a gnarled, barren fruit tree. The steps,