Dreamland Social Club (2 page)

“What was his real name?” Jane asked. Her father so rarely—like ever—talked about her mom or her mom’s family, and she wanted to keep him going.

He took a moment to think and then said, “No idea.”

The heavens opened up then, and they all got soaked by heavy pellets of warm water in the short distance between the curb and the front door. Her father’s wet hands struggled with the keys Preemie’s estate lawyer had sent, until finally the front door surrendered with a click. Dust clung to every surface and the air felt thick; the grime on the floors muted Jane’s footfalls as she stepped into the front hallway and put her dripping suitcase down. She swept water off her face with a wet hand and then wiped it off on her wet shirt. In the heat, her clothes had started to cling to her like a second skin.

“Crack some windows, but don’t let the rain in,” her father said, coughing and swatting at the air.

Fortunately, the squall had already blown past and the sun blared through a parting in the clouds. As light entered the living room, the air sprang to life with dancing dust, and items came out of shadow to reveal themselves. Faded black-and-white framed photographs lined the wall along the main staircase; a man whom Jane could only assume was her grandfather posed with famous people like Frank Sinatra, President Gerald Ford, Marilyn Monroe. Every end table and bookshelf—the fireplace mantel, too—boasted weird figurines, like a small Siamese totem pole in a glass case and a pewter statue of a two-headed squirrel.

There was a wooden horse, like from a carousel, in one corner of the living room. Jane went for a closer look. It was white and shiny, with a fiery red mane, pale pink gums, white teeth, and a gold-and-orange muzzle. A piece of purple armor shielded its chest, while red tassels dangling from its pink-and-green saddle seemed to have been frozen in mid-leap. Its glassy brown eyes were so lifelike they gave Jane the creeps, but she soon found herself distracted, instead, by the thick metal chain that was wrapped multiple times around one of the horse’s legs and then looped over and under its red tail before snaking across the floor to twist around a radiator. It locked onto itself with a rusty padlock.

“My word,” her father said from across the room, “it’s like a museum.”

“Yeah,” Marcus said. “A
crap
museum.”

“Why do you think this carousel horse is chained to the radiator?” Jane asked.

Her father shook his head. “I can’t even begin to imagine.”

As they uncovered old sofas and chairs, Jane’s father told stories about Preemie, whom he had only met a few times. Like how his skin looked like worn brown leather from sun exposure; how he had famously
never left Brooklyn
—not even to go into Manhattan—and how he made his living harassing people on the boardwalk into playing a carnival game where you shot into clown mouths with water guns, trying to explode balloons to win inbredlooking stuffed animals.

“Trust me,” her dad said, “he made an impression.”

Jane felt like a portal had opened in a formerly impenetrable wall. She’d never heard any of this before.

“He actually harassed me into dessert once.” He attempted a Brooklyn accent:
“Go on and eat it, whatsa matter? We got a Looky Lou here. Doesn’t know what to do with a piece of tiramisu.”

“What’s a Looky Lou?” Jane asked.

“Oh, it’s somebody who basically just sits on the sidelines and stares. Though usually not just at a piece of cake. Your mother thought it was the worst thing a person could be.” He opened a window shade and released a new cloud of dust. “If she saw me rubbernecking when we passed an accident, or staring at someone with a big birthmark, she’d tell me that there was nothing worse in life than being a Looky Lou.”

Jane was fairly certain she was a Looky Lou through and through.

She stepped up close to the wall by the stairs to look at more photos as her father moved on to his next topic: her grandmother.

“Her stage name was Birdie Cusack,” he said. “That was her sideshow act, pretending she was part bird.”

Jane studied a picture of a woman in a feather headpiece and a bodice that gave her a pear-shaped, birdlike body as her father went on. “She was in a famous movie about freaks in the nineteen fifties. Totally weird stuff.”

Jane spotted a framed poster for
Is it Human?
and moved over to study the ghoulish cartoon drawings of the cast, which included a pair of female twins joined at the hip and a man who had hands coming out of his shoulder sockets. She found a drawing of a woman with a feather on her head, wearing a bird bodysuit, and whispered softly,
“Grandma.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us about them?” she dared, turning to her father. She’d had
grandparents
. Her grandfather, at least, had been alive until recently. She could have
met him
.

“Yeah.” Marcus looked up. “Did you contact them after Mom . . . ?” He trailed off.

They’d all spent ten years trailing off....

“Of course. I mean, someone notified them. So it must have been me.” He shrugged. “But as for talking about them, well, you know how she was about the whole carny thing.”

But Jane
didn’t
know. This was the first she’d even heard of “the whole carny thing.” “What does that even mean?” she asked. “Carny?”

“You know,” her dad said again. “Carnival people. Sideshow types. Like Preemie and Birdie. They’re like their own community. Like a different ethnic group, practically. And they’ve always been drawn to Coney Island.”

“And Mom didn’t like being raised that way?”

He shrugged. “I think your mother struggled to belong.”

All Jane could think was,
Who doesn’t?

 

Jane claimed a third-story bedroom that looked out on a death’s-door garden. Sun-bleached pink and purple blooms hung on browning hydrangeas, and some overgrown rosebushes held a few wan, yellow buds. Jane was no expert, but the yard desperately needed a trim, a drink; that freakishly short thunderstorm had clearly been no help at all. A small patch of grass was long and speckled with dry, brown blades, and a few white statues—
Were they ducks? Gnomes?
—needed to be saved from imminent weed suffocation.

She stood at the window for countless silent minutes, studying the view. Raindrops clung like white pearls to the black electrical wire strung between the house and a wooden pole at the end of the yard. Other buildings loomed there, with their fire escapes zigzagging between windows, and Jane thought of the countless Brooklynites who lived there, unaware that there was a new kid on the block. She could see the Parachute Jump in a sliver of sky between buildings and kept returning to the window to peek at it as she dusted.

Leathery wallpaper with bubblegum pink roses and army green vines covered the walls. Even though Jane couldn’t imagine her mother had a hand in picking such a pattern, she had done a quick check of the other rooms in the house and knew that she’d chosen her mother’s childhood room. The only actual evidence she found, however, was tucked away at the back of a high shelf in the closet with some old pillows and blankets—a small mermaid doll. Jane took it down and blew the dust out of its curly red hair and its crown of pearls, and off the orange-and-white-striped tiger fish it held in its tiny hands. She still had a book of mermaid pictures,
The Mermaid’s Secret
, her mother had given her. A note inside said:
My dear daughter, I used to be a mermaid once, so I know that mermaids are good at a lot of things, like keeping secrets. I hope your life is full of them. Love, Mom.

The doll had to have been her mother’s. She was sure of it.

Further examination revealed a silky tag that read “Plays ‘By the Beautiful Sea,’ ” hanging from the mermaid’s sparkly green bottom. Jane wound the small metal handle next to the tag and released it but nothing happened, no music, and she set the doll down on the dresser.

Marcus ended up across the hall in a room that looked like it had most recently been used as a study or guest room: a desk, a bed, some old books. Her father took over the second floor, claiming the master suite and the room across the hall as his office.

Without conspiring, they’d all three unpacked—Jane had only really brought clothes and books, including that old mermaid book—then lay down and napped on dusty bed linens. She drifted off easily, into a memory of a day at the Ocean Dome, a memory that had long been locked away....

G
O GET SPIFFED UP A BIT,” Jane’s father said when they all had woken up and reconvened in the kitchen. “We’ll go for a walk up to the boardwalk and then we’ll have dinner someplace nice. As a treat. A celebration.”

“Of what?” Marcus asked with a stifled snort. “Our year of slumming it?”

Jane looked at her father, to see if he’d take offense, but he didn’t. He just said, “If you want to think of it as ‘slumming it,’ sure!”

“It’s only for a year” had become her father’s mantra in the previous few weeks, and now Jane sensed that her father, at least, hadn’t been surprised by the state of their new home. She got the distinct impression that he’d known it was going to be sort of a dump. Still, it was probably a better home than he himself could provide for them right now. He’d had a bunch of small structural engineering jobs in Europe and Asia for the last ten years—they’d even done time in Michigan and California—but nothing that amounted to the career he used to have, designing world-class roller coasters. His job in London had recently ended and he had no other prospects.

Another mantra: “We’ll just move in, clear it out, clean it up, sell it, and move on.”

And: “It’s just until I get back on my feet.”

They changed clothes and went out on foot as the setting sun cast long shadows on their street. They walked toward the beach—their block appeared to dead-end into sky—and past a series of abandoned lots, one of which was decorated with banners that said THE FUTURE OF CONEY ISLAND HAS ARRIVED.

“What do you think that means?” she asked.

“Just some snazzy builder talk,” her father said.

He laced his fingers through the fence around the lot, and Jane and her brother exchanged a look. A look that said,
He used to be the one talking the snazzy builder talk. Before Mom died and everything fell apart
. But Jane looked away. She was afraid to hope that things could be different this time, that
something
about being here, where her mother was born, could change the way things were and get her father’s career back on track.

When they reached the boardwalk and she saw the ocean’s dark blue blanket stretching to the horizon, she felt a lump in her throat—some combination of hope and sadness and fear caught up in a sticky ball.

And the crowds.

The crowds!

They were the sorts of people Jane had expected to see in Brooklyn: black, white, everything, loud, laughing, terrifying. She just hadn’t expected—and this was silly, she now knew—quite so many of them to be right there on the beach and on the boardwalk all at once.

Hundreds upon hundreds.

Thousands, even.

Then she saw that the Parachute Jump was lit by thousands of tiny lights, and their twinkle made her giddy. Giddy, and something else, too. She pushed the lump back down and looked out at the beach and promised herself she’d go down onto the sand one day and build a small Coney in her mother’s memory. She would wait and watch and watch and wait until the tide came in and washed it all away.

What had she even meant,
It’s gone
?

It’s right here.

There was a rowdy crowd outside an open-front bar, where some white plastic furniture sat wobbly on the uneven planks of the boardwalk. The sign on the front spelled out
The Anchor
in dirty pink fluorescent script, and a long bar on the left stretched way back into darkness, high stools lined up all the way. Everyone outside was watching a guy do one-handed push-ups. He counted them off in a thick Brooklyn accent—“. . . faw, five”—and when he got to ten, he got up and wiped his hands together and said, “Yeah, baby, told you so.” Jane wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a stranger scene, a dumpier bar.

Then she saw him.

A tattooed boy.

A beautiful tattooed boy.

He was standing on the boardwalk in front of the bar, pointing out elaborate tattoos on his forearms. A particularly terrifying crowd—in part because they looked to be around Jane’s age, her
peers
—surrounded him. One of the boys must have been seven feet tall; one girl was a dwarf who also looked like a goth; another girl, a brunette, had a faint mustache and beard; and Jane would have sworn the brown-skinned girl with curly hair bent her knee the wrong way to scratch her calf. Through a parting between their bodies, Jane saw serpents on Tattoo Boy’s skin, and mermaids and a seahorse and the same clown face she’d seen in those dreams about burning Ferris wheels, drowning roller coasters, and her mother still alive. His hair was black and soft-looking, and his eyes were marbles of blue. She’d never seen a more beautiful boy in her life.

“I like it,” the giant said, and the dwarf in black said, “Bend down, let’s see what you’ve had done to yourself now.”

“I wouldn’t mind a beer,” Jane’s father said, and Marcus said, “I’m starving, Dad.”

“Well, then I’ll get it to go.” He ducked into the bar, and Marcus shrugged and followed. Jane turned to follow him but not before taking one more look at Tattoo Boy. The crowd had dispersed, but he was still there, looking at her looking at him, and his tattoos felt familiar in a way that filled Jane with a sort of excited dread. He was rolling down the sleeves of his night-black shirt and he was still staring at her and smiling, too. “Whatsa matter?” he said. “Never seen tattoos like these?”

“No, actually,” she said, studying the curves of the seahorse again and feeling a kind of vertigo in her heart. “I have.”