Dreamland Social Club (5 page)

Suddenly, their car unhinged, and it felt like they were going to plummet to the ground and crash to their death. But after a second it stopped dropping and it just swayed back and forth, back and forth. It had slid down a rail to another part of the wheel.

Swinging.

Marcus’s fingers were laced through the metal cage of the car when he said, “It’s just for one year, Jane.”

“I know,” she said. “But still . . .”

 

A teeth-deep sound crunched the air as they walked home. They cautiously approached a crowd that had gathered around the noise. Only a few people were wearing black. No one was holding flowers or crying. But they had the look of a funeral about them nonetheless. Beyond them, on the side of a building, a mural advertised a circus sideshow with large paintings of a snake charmer wearing a python like a necklace; a “human blockhead,” shown with a nail in his nose; a Rubber Man with his legs hooked behind his neck; a geek with a bowling ball hanging from his tongue; and a bearded lady who called herself “The Dog Lady of Coney Island.”

No wonder her mother had ditched her carny past.

Jane tore her gaze away as the sound started again and watched a huge clawed machine chew up a small red car. She stopped and stared, silent, like the others.

Metal crushed metal.

Wood splintered and split.

Small Go Kart cars in bright red, yellow, blue, surrendered to crushing one after the other. Just beyond them, a huge shark-mouthed machine bit up black chunks of track that tore in curvy sheets like giant melting vinyl records.

Someone in the crowd started booing, and then more people joined in and the boos became increasingly loud and angry. A man picked a bottle out of an overflowing trash can and threw it at the claw. It hit the side of the yellow cab and shattered, spraying caramel-colored flecks into the air. Tattoo Boy appeared and stepped over to him and said, “Easy, man,” and the controller stuck his head out a small window and shouted, “Asshole!”

“What’s happening?” Jane asked, and Marcus answered, “Don’t know, don’t care,” and started to walk away.

J
ANE’S FATHER HAD THE LOOK of a mad professor about him, all windblown and out of breath, when he came home with pizza that night. Jane was starting to think that living on Coney put you in a permanent state of windblown-ness. Her own hair, typically painfully straight, had actually never looked better now that it had a little salty body.

“So!” he said. “How was it?”

Marcus didn’t bother to stifle his snort. “It was a total freak show.”

“Jane?” their father said, and her mind was suddenly a blur of tattoos and earlobe holes. She said, “I guess it was a little . . . strange.”

“Strange?”
Marcus laughed.

“Strange how?” Their father put the pizza box down, pulled paper plates out of a yellow cabinet, and tossed them onto the table. He took a slice and bit off a piece, creating a long, thin trail of cheese.

“Dad,” Marcus said seriously, “they could remake
Is It Human?
with the kids at this school.”

“You mean
actual freaks
?”

Marcus nodded. “A small but highly freakish group of them, yes.”

“Really?”
He took another bite and pushed the box toward Jane. “Pizza?”

She pushed the box back. “No thanks.” She found the tone of the conversation unappetizing.

Marcus said, “Apparently, the sideshow that came here a few years ago brought this little group of carny families with them, and you add that to some geek kids who have been here forever plus one kid without legs who just happens to live here and it’s a complete freak show. Your poor shrinking violet of a daughter was accosted by a geek who told her Preemie was a piece of shit.”

“What?”
Her father was more than halfway through his slice.

“How did you know?” Jane snapped. “How do you know
any
of this?”

“I have my sources.” Marcus shrugged. “And word got around.”

“Well, that’ll blow over.” And now her father’s slice was gone. “And anyway, it’ll be good for you two. You’ll learn a little bit about your heritage, your mother’s family history. The whole carny thing.”

There was that word again.

“No thank you,” Marcus said.

Their father just shrugged. “It’s the school we’re zoned for,” he said. “We can’t afford private school and it was too late for you to apply to other public schools. And remember . . .”

Jane and her brother joined in with “It’s just for one year.”

Her father slapped her on the back and said, “Come on! It can’t be that bad!”

“I saw a girl combing her beard by her locker,” Marcus said.

“Just hang out with the other normal kids.”

Marcus brushed some flour off his fingertips. “Planning on it.”

When their father went upstairs to his office, Jane just sat and listened to the shuffling of papers and then the shutting and locking of the door. He reappeared in the kitchen with a portfolio in his hands and said, “I’m going out. Don’t stay up too late.”

Down the hall, the front door slammed behind him, and a picture in the hallway, one of Birdie dressed as a bird, jolted crooked on its hook.
Were
they normal? Jane wasn’t sure.

Her brother raised his eyebrows.

“Do you think he has a job interview?” Jane asked.

“At seven o’clock at night?” Marcus shook his head.

They each took slices and ate them in silence. Jane’s thoughts returned to her homework, to her Topsy essay. Why
had
she watched that film? Was it the same reason people used to go to see premature babies in incubators?

“Why do you think that guy said that?” she asked her brother. “About Preemie.”

“I have no idea.” He took yet another slice and got up, picking his backpack up off the floor and leaving the room. “Maybe Preemie
was
a piece of shit,” he called from down the hall.

 

The remnants of a hurricane blew through the city that night—rain pounded Preemie’s shingled roof and rattled and whooshed all the windows. Marcus braved the weather to go off to meet his new friend and so, with her father also out, Jane alone set out to find more of Preemie’s personal stuff and see if she could decide for herself whether he was a piece of excrement or not. Ideally, she’d find some stuff that belonged to her mom, something more interesting than a mermaid doll music box that didn’t actually play any music.

So when she noticed the string dangling from the ceiling in the upstairs hall, she pulled it. A series of stairs popped down and she climbed slowly, frantically swatting away cobwebs, and then stepped up into the attic, barely lit by the glow of a streetlight coming in the small window. When she found another string to pull, light left her face-to-face—she gasped!—with a huge red demon with eyes as big as her face. Carved out of a large piece of wood and painted a menacing red and black, it leaned against the main wall at the back of the house, beside the window that looked out onto the yard.

The room the demon guarded was long and skinny, with exposed rafters and a peaked ceiling. The wood planks that made up the floor had once been painted gray but were now chipped to reveal their original oak color. There were boxes everywhere and books stacked into jagged piles, and an old movie projector appeared when Jane pulled away a dusty old sheet.

She sifted through a stack of books, then sat in a worn dark blue armchair and read everything she could find about Preemie and Dreamland and the doctor who had blazed the incubator trail. People apparently had thought he was a quack, but Jane, having also been born early enough that she needed some additional cooking, knew that wasn’t the case.

Along the way she learned that the “preemie” display wasn’t the only weird thing about Dreamland. There had also been a ride called Creation that took people through the events of the book of Genesis and the very creation of the earth. There’d been one called Fighting Flames, where people could watch a tenement fire be put out, which seemed a little bit twisted; then again she’d willfully watched the execution of an elephant. Guests could also watch a reenactment of the Boer War, which she was pretty sure had taken place in Africa. Or go to a Dog and Monkey Show, whatever that was. There was even an entire village, Midget City, populated by a thousand dwarfs.

She paused to think about that one.

They actually
lived
there? In the amusement park? And people went there to watch them go about their daily lives?

She suddenly didn’t feel quite so bad about watching the Topsy film.

She found pictures of the demon against the wall guarding the entrance to an attraction called Hell Gate—a boat ride through a re-creation of Hades. So Preemie was either an amateur museum curator or a professional thief. Whether or not that made him a piece of excrement, she wasn’t sure.

When she confirmed what her father had already told her—that Dreamland had all burned to the ground one night in 1911, on the eve of opening day of the season, never to be rebuilt—she couldn’t help but wonder whether the midgets had had something to do with it.

Flipping to the index again, she hoped to find something about a Dreamland “social club,” something she’d missed the first time around. Sure enough, there was a separate line entry, and she turned to the page.

The photo there, dated August 13, 1924, contained about thirty or so people—black, white, tall, small, normal-looking, freaky, the works—behind a sign, propped by their feet, that said DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB. A large woman had a miniature man propped on her shoulder, and a girl in a white dress and hat perched on a chair had no arms or legs.

How could you even
live
?

Most
of the people looked normal, though Jane had to wonder what oddities the picture simply couldn’t reveal. The caption next to the photo said only, “Performers from the Dreamland Circus Sideshow gathered at Stauch’s,” so there were probably sword swallowers, fire-eaters, snake charmers, and more. Reading the text on the page, she found no more information about any “club.”

Again and again she returned to that one girl’s face—so pale and young—and studied the people sitting around her. Were they her friends? Had she had any? And was the Dreamland Social Club at school related to this one?

 

Jane read about another famous park, Steeplechase, where the signature ride was a track where you could race mechanical horses, like you were the jockey. There’d been a human roulette wheel, too, and Jane studied the pictures of people splayed out on a big disc and tried to imagine how it worked, how it felt to spin and spin. People who came off the wheel were then subjected to something called the Blowhole Theater, where a dwarf with an electric prong gave men a zap as the women stepped over a platform that blew up their skirts. A few hundred people could gather in the theater’s bleachers to watch.

She started to read, finally, about Luna Park, which had boasted a million lights.
Electric Eden
, they’d called it. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine never having seen a lightbulb—like a lot of poor people of the time—and then seeing Luna, a glistening city of minarets and spires and promenades and fountains with slices of the moon glowing white by its entrance and a glittering heart-shaped sign out front that dubbed it “The Heart of Coney Island.”

She couldn’t imagine. She wondered whether people fainted, or cried, or
swooned
. Luna, Steeplechase, Dreamland. They sounded like the most amazing places to ever have existed and they were all . . . gone. Was
this
the Coney her mother had been talking about?

When she came to a drawing depicting an attraction at Luna called Trip to the Moon, she felt a sort of spark of recognition. The ride simulated a lunar voyage and, upon arrival, riders were greeted by moon people with spiky points on their backs who sang a song for them. Jane realized it all sounded eerily familiar, eerily sad. . . .

 

My brother and I are sitting in a cardboard box, and my mom is shaking it and making
vroom-vroom
sounds from where she’s kneeling beside us. She takes a sheet she’s pulled from the bed in my brother’s room—it has stars and planets and rocket ships on it—and she’s waving it around, over our heads. Shaking the box again, she puts on a deep voice and says, “This is your captain. We are passing through a storm. We are quite safe.”

 

Jane—officially
Luna Jane
—had been named after Luna Park. She knew that in some faraway part of her mind, just as she knew that it had been her own deep desire to start going by her middle name a few years after her mother died, when they’d moved to places where “Luna” was just too weird, too hard to translate or explain. Her father and Marcus had happily made the switch, as if they’d both felt that the name had only ever felt right on Jane’s mother’s tongue anyway. But Jane hadn’t ever known what Luna Park
was
, exactly—beyond being an amusement park—or that the games of her childhood had been inspired by it.