Dreamland Social Club (6 page)

Plural.

There had been more.

She sat down with her journal and tried to write down the details of the memories as best she could, and then she suddenly remembered there’d been a game about a submarine that went to the polar ice caps, clearly inspired by Luna Park’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea attraction, and a battleship game that she’d never liked quite as much as her brother, something her mother called War of the Worlds. There had been toy ships made of Tupperware involved; the bathtub, too. Her heart suddenly ached for the mother she’d almost forgotten and was only now—ten years later—starting to remember. The very synapses in her brain seemed to be responding to her new surroundings.

Setting her journal aside and returning to a Coney book, she found a picture of a building shaped like an elephant—a hotel, the caption said—that used to stand on the land that eventually became Luna Park, and she realized that had been a game, too. Involving peanuts and trunks made of . . . what had it been, exactly? She couldn’t recall, and she felt a sort of irrational anger at her own brain, for failing her, for not remembering more . . . or everything.

 

When she discovered a box of old film reels, she pulled out one labeled
Orphans in the Surf
and approached the projector. With a few adjustments it whirred to life and projected an image on the attic’s far white wall. A group of little kids—they couldn’t have been more than two or three years old, mostly boys—frolicked in the surf. Some were fully clothed, even wearing hats, but some wore only diapers.

For the minute the film played—and despite the gentle whir of the projector—the attic seemed quieter than was possible, a black hole of sound. And in that painful silence, the grainy black-and-white images, herky-jerky on the wall, seemed to call out for some kind of mournful sound track. Jane could almost feel the sounds of strings hitting melancholy notes in her heart as a few kids pushed farther out into the water and then rejoined the group. They clasped hands and skipped in a circle, playing a silent game of Ring Around the Rosie.

It was only a minute or two and then it was over, and Jane sat back down in the old armchair and wondered where those orphans had ended up in life, if they were orphans at all, and whether or not they’d ever found a place to call home. In that same instant, she decided that Preemie couldn’t have been as bad as the geek said.

 

A line of light escaped from under her brother’s door. She knocked lightly and heard him say, “Come in.”

Marcus was reading in bed by the light of an antique lamp on his night table. He put the book aside as Jane sat at the foot of the bed.

“Do you remember that game we used to play when we were little,” she asked. “Trip to the Moon?”

He thought for a second and put on a deep voice. “This is your captain. We are passing through a storm. We are quite safe.”

“Exactly!” Jane felt relieved that she hadn’t made it up. “It’s based on a ride at Luna Park. That’s an actual quote.”

“Weird,” Marcus said, and Jane added, “And the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea game, where Mom would put on her parka and pretend she was an Eskimo taking us to the North Pole to see polar bears?”

Her mother had made an igloo out of white sheets and tickled their faces with seaweed made of green yarn when the submarine surfaced.

Her brother nodded.

“That, too.” Jane’s nose itched from the memory. She was pretty sure there’d been a whale made out of a pillow on the way to the North Pole, and some sea turtles made of upturned green bowls. Had there been seahorses, too?

No. She didn’t think so.

“What are you doing, Jane?” Marcus said, his voice full of a strange kind of disappointment.

“Nothing,” she said. “Why?”

He switched off the light and turned on his side.

J
ANE SHRIEKED AND SWATTED at the headless rubber chicken that had flown across the hall and smacked her on the head, then watched it fall to her feet, a soft sickly looking thing with fake blood drips on its severed neck. A bunch of geeks stood a few paces down the hall, laughing it up.

Suddenly, Babette’s bendy friend picked up the chicken and hurled it at the geeks. “Grow up, assholes,” she said, and they had to duck as the poultry pounded the lockers behind them with a deep
thwack
. She didn’t stick around long enough for Jane to thank her, so Jane just hurriedly collected her books. Babette was standing
right there
when she closed her locker door and turned around. Jane said, “I thought you said they wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

Babette’s tiny eyes went wide. “You really don’t know?”

Jane had no idea what she could possibly not know. She shook her head. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. The geeks were still laughing it up by their own lockers.

“Stoop down or something,” Babette said. “I can’t talk to you when you’re all the way up there.”

Jane lowered to Babette’s eye level, into a squat.

Babette looked around as if to make sure no one was listening. “Okay, so a long time ago, like in the twenties or thirties or some other time B.C., Grandpa Claverack built a carousel, and it was sort of famous and it was in Steeplechase Park for years.”

Jane hadn’t been expecting a history lesson. For a second she was relieved, except then she remembered that this story was going to have something to do with her.

Babette could really talk: “After Steeplechase closed, they moved the carousel but some of the horses had to be taken off, since the new building was smaller. Preemie somehow got his hands on one of the horses and for years, the Claveracks had been asking Preemie if they could buy it off him. Since their grandfather
made it
and all. But Preemie wouldn’t do it. And he used to taunt old man Claverack on the boardwalk, telling him to giddyup and neighing at him.”

Now Jane thought she might be sick. “You’re making this up.”

“Afraid not. And apparently his grandsons”—she nodded toward the geeks—“know how to hold a grudge. Preemie used to neigh at Harvey—he’s the one who confronted you. And Cliff, too, he’s the one to the left.” Turning back to Jane, she said, “I would have told you this yesterday
if you’d told me who you were
.”

Jane stood up and they walked in silence then, heading toward their first class. Jane pictured Harvey—the way his pores tore right through the ink on his skin—and then his brother, sort of a Harvey-lite, but still scary.

She could just give them the horse.

It would be that easy.

“People were taking bets on whether you two would even show up today,” Babette said.

Jane looked at her blankly for lack of anything else to do. Crying, while tempting, was not an option.

“I lost ten bucks, but I’m actually happy I was wrong.” Babette stopped short to let the legless kid roll by on his skateboard. “Because believe it or not, things had started to get sort of boring around here.”

They entered the classroom then and Babette said, “And another thing.” She waved her hand to indicate Jane should bend down again, and so Jane did. “You’re brother’s cute and I happen to be in the market for a boyfriend.”

 

Jane looked for Marcus between classes that morning but couldn’t find him anywhere. Luckily, she survived several hours without further incident and made it to lunch. Juniors and seniors were allowed to leave the school and eat on the boardwalk, and Jane thought a bit of air might do her some good. When she saw Tattoo Boy sitting alone on one of the benches right near school, she almost turned right back around, but she didn’t. He was drinking from a bottle of water, and something about the fact that it was just water reassured her, calmed her.

He was
human
.

He drank
water
.

And just thinking hard about the seahorse wasn’t going to help her figure it out. She waited a minute to make sure he was, in fact, alone, and then walked over. This close up, she noted the sharp line of his lips, the ski jump at the end of his long nose. His hair, as black as Babette could ever hope for, seemed to be constantly in motion, like the soft tentacles of a sea anemone.

“Hey,” she said, and he said “Hey” back. The blue of his eyes swirled, like his irises had been tattooed to look like a lollipop. She looked out toward the ocean, counted ten people standing way out on a cross-shaped pier, and considered what to say. The sea was a dark gray that morning, and calm. With a strange sort of calm in her heart she said, “Where did you get the seahorse tattoo? The design, I mean.”

“It’s from an old postcard,” he said. “You gonna explain what you meant? When you said you’d seen it?”

“It’s just
really
familiar. Sort of like I dreamed it.”

He looked at her funny, then shrugged a shoulder. “I can look for it if you want.”

Maybe it was a postcard from somewhere she had lived. That would explain it. “Do you know where the postcard is from?”

“I’m pretty sure Florida.”

Jane had never been to Florida, and she said so.

“Well, I’ll look for it anyway.”

She said, “Thanks,” and was suddenly lost at sea in their conversation, afraid it was over.

“So Preemie Porcelli was really your grandfather?” He gave her this look, sideways and suspicious, like the whole story was too unlikely to believe, and maybe she’d have felt the same way if she’d been an outsider considering Preemie Porcelli on the one hand and Jane Dryden on the other.

“He was.” Jane eyed the bench, pocked with flattened bits of gray gum and some bird crap, too. The paint was so chipped it was barely there and the wood looked soft, worn from the wind and the water. She decided to sit anyway, close enough that no one would sit between them but not much closer than that.

“What was
that
like?” His eyes lit with actual curiosity.

Jane knew the truth would disappoint. She practically sighed when she said, “I never met him.”

“You never met your
own grandfather
?” Tattoo Boy crossed and then uncrossed his ankles, legs stretched out.

Jane shook her head, and when she thought she saw him look at her knee, she tried to cover it with her gray skirt, then felt dumb for doing that. “My parents moved abroad before I was born.”

His eyebrows climbed up to meet his hair. “So you’ve never even lived in
America
before?”

His accent was sort of crazy:
befaw.

“Twice.” She shook her head. “When I was like seven. In Michigan and California.” She remembered that period right after her mom died only by the apartments they’d lived in while their father worked on some bridge or building, remembered missing being around amusement parks all the time, missing getting to go on rides for free, missing her mom. “It was a long time ago.”

Tattoo Boy nodded and then smiled and said, “
I
knew Preemie.” He turned to her. “I mean I played his game a few times—the water gun game—and got yelled at by him a few times. And I used to see him all over the place, you know. On his bike. I think he’s the only person I’ve ever seen smoking and riding a bike at the same time.”

“He
did that
?” Jane almost laughed.

“It was a sight to behold.” He looked back out toward the water. “My dad used to tell me stories about him, too. He’d always be placing weird bets at the Anchor, like how he could eat three pieces of Wonder Bread in a minute or smoke a whole cigarette in forty-five seconds.”

“Really?”
Jane felt a sort of thrill in knowing that she’d walked past a bar Preemie had been to, even if it was a dump. “I wish I’d known him,” she said after a moment. “Or at least I thought I did until I met the Claveracks.”

Tattoo Boy nudged her with an elbow and said, “It’ll blow over.” Then he raised his eyebrows. “Is it true that he had a ton of great old Coney stuff in the attic? That’s what my dad said.”

Jane nodded. “Yeah. I’ve only made a dent, but there’s all these old films and books and”—Jane wasn’t sure she should be talking about this, considering the situation with the carousel horse, but she wanted to impress—“he’s got a big demon face that I think used to be at Dreamland.”

“The one from
Hell Gate
?” Tattoo Boy asked.

Jane nodded.

His eyes went wide, and he let out a plummeting whistle. “Holy shit.”

The surf had picked up—a storm must have been churning off the coast—and Jane tried to picture the submarine that she’d read was shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of Coney. She imagined swimming down to it with Tattoo Boy, and hiding out there while they told each other their life stories, why they both felt like they’d always known each other.

“I’m Jane,” she said, “but you already knew that.” And for the first time in a long time, it felt wrong to use her middle name.

“Leo,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

Then he smiled and said, “I think.”

 

During study hall, in a far, dark corner of the school library, Jane found the school’s old yearbooks—years and years worth of
Coney Island High Tide
s. She pulled out the one from 1978, the year her mother graduated, and flipped through to the “Seniors” section, and then flipped through pages and pages of alphabetical student photos until she found her.

Clementine Porcelli.

Her mom had long, straight hair in the photo and was wearing a T-shirt with some kind of writing on it, though you could only see the tops of the letters and thus couldn’t read what it said. She was smiling with her mouth closed, and had a look in her eyes that said she really couldn’t be bothered. Still, she looked pretty.

Under her name appeared the words “Founder, Dreamland Social Club.”

“No way
,
”
Jane whispered to herself.