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.
CHAPTER four
JANE’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.
What on earth?
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.
Midget City?
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 lar
ge 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.
No arms or legs.
Which meant no hands, no feet.
Limbless.
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.”
A million lights.
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.”
I grip the sides of the box tight and laugh, even though I’m a little bit scared. Then in her deep voice she announces that we’re landing, and she puts on a headband with a few antenna-type things attached to it; she made them out of straws and cotton balls. “Welcome to the moon,” she says, sort of like a robot, and I laugh. “I am a Selenite, and I would like to sing a song for you.
“My sweetheart’s the man in the moon,” she sings. “I’m going to marry him soon./’Twould fill me with bliss just to give him one kiss./But I know that a dozen I never would miss. . . .”
She kisses my brother all over his face and he says, “Yuck! Get away!” and then she kisses me, her lips warm and wet and full, and I start giggling and can’t stop.
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.
Games.
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.
Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.
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.
CHAPTER five
JANE 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.”
Dreamland Social Club Page 4