Digging through in haste to make sure she’d found the best dress of the lot, Jane rammed her nails into something and pulled a small wooden box from the chest. Putting the dresses aside so she could open it, she found that it held a few old trinkets: a small cross on a chain, a silver rattle, and a small silver cup, the kind they make for babies, with the name Clementine engraved in it. She set it all aside to take upstairs and turned her attention to a manila envelope full of old photos. Flipping through jagged stacks of sepia-toned squares, she found pictures of Birdie as a young girl riding a bike, as a young woman smoking a cigarette in a director’s chair, and then pictures—rectangular and color—of her mom as a little girl, by a lake with Preemie and Birdie—all of them in square swimsuits. There were baby birthday parties and Christmas trees and then—a shock—a picture of Birdie, in her bird costume, next to a man like H.T., legless, also wearing feathers and a headdress. They were smiling cheek to cheek thanks to a pedestal. Two birds of a feather. She set that photo aside, too.
After packing the costumes back up, she approached another large piece of furniture—a sort of tall cabinet. She ran a finger along the metal plate on the front that said “Victrola,” then lifted its top lid to discover a record player. Nearby on the wall, a shelf held what had to be several hundred old records, in a size Jane had never seen before, a little bit smaller than Marcus’s handful of collectible LPs but not by much. She thought about putting one on but then saw there was already a record on the turntable. Jane spun it so that she could read the title: “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.”
She placed the needle on it and then hit a button that looked like a power button, but nothing happened. Opening the front door of the cabinet, she found a crank, so she removed the needle from the record, wound the crank a bunch of times, then put the needle back, hit the power button, and, voilà, orchestral sounds flowed into the room. Then a warbly female voice followed, crooning, “Dreaming of you, that’s all I do,/Night and day for you I’m pining,/And in your eyes, blue as the skies, /I can see the love-light softly shining . . .”
And then Jane wasn’t hearing the lyrics anymore but was concentrating on a memory, trying to re-create it in sharp detail. But it was fuzzy, like the edges of sleep....
I’m not tired. I don’t want to go to bed. I want to play more, but my mother says, “No, it’s time.”
I say, “But I miss you when I sleep.”
She smiles. “Well, then I’ll meet you tonight in Dreamland.”
“Where’s that?”
“You go to sleep, and I’ll go to sleep, too, a little later, and when I do, I’ll find you there. Okay?”
“Is it nice there? In Dreamland?”
“Oh boy, is it! And there are angels there, waiting for us.”
She tucks me in and now I really want to fall asleep, can’t fall fast enough, because the sooner I do the sooner I get to meet her in Dreamland. . . .
She hums a song, a tune I’m sure I’ll never forget, and I drift off and wait and wait until I forget I’m waiting. . . .
Turning off the Victrola, and then the lights, Jane took the burgundy dress and a few of the skirts and tops and went back out into the yard, then into the house.
“Find anything good?” her father asked when she appeared in the kitchen. He was sitting at the table eating a sandwich with one of his old sketchbooks in front of him, pencil in hand.
“I don’t know. Just some baby stuff of Mom’s.” She held up the rattle. “Some of Grandma’s clothes.” She indicated the dress.
He nodded, put his pencil down, and closed his book, then held out a hand for the rattle. “I should send you back down with a couple of trash bags. And up to the attic, too.” He examined the rattle, ran a finger across the engraved letters, then shook it, releasing the jangle of a hollow bell, and handed it back. “This place isn’t going to get cleared out on its own.”
“I don’t mind doing it,” she said, but it wasn’t her top priority. Her top priority right at that moment was seeing what her father was sketching in that notebook. Because from the tiny glimpse she’d stolen, it looked like it might be the beginnings of a coaster design. “Whatcha working on?” she asked with a nod toward the book.
“Nothing,” he said, and he pulled it toward himself protectively.
“Okay,” she said. “If you say so.”
“Touché,” he said.
She crossed the room to the hall, where her bag lay, and pulled out Babette’s newspaper. “I thought you’d want to see this,” she said. “The city is accepting bids for attractions.”
“Oh, Jane.” He sighed. “If only it were that easy.”
“Maybe it is,” she said, and he let out another sigh and started to read as Jane spun on her heels and left the room.
CHAPTER nine
SHE HAD COMPLETED HER EXAMINATION of the yearbook that Sunday and had, infuriatingly enough, found no other mentions of the Dreamland Social Club.
Not a one.
But she had noticed a female student who looked an awful lot like Babette’s bendy friend at school. Like a twin. So when she found herself walking with Babette into homeroom, which she had mostly been avoiding to avoid the issue of deciding where to sit, Jane said, “Hey, I want to thank this girl, I think she’s a friend of yours, for helping me out with the Claveracks last week.” She nodded toward Babette’s usual table, where the girl was already sitting.
“Rita?” Babette said.
“I guess so.”
“She’s got an act,” Babette said pointedly. “Rubber Rita, aspiring contortionist extraordinaire. She’s double-jointed. The Claveracks call her Rubber Rican—racist losers.”
Jane didn’t know what to say except “I don’t have an act!”
“Well, come on, then,” Babette said, and led the way. At the table, she introduced them. “I wanted to say thanks,” Jane said to Rita, “for what you did last week. With the rubber chicken.”
“No problem,” Rita said, and Jane and Babette took seats across from her. Legs and Minnie were at the table, too, talking to each other intensely, and Jane did a quick comparison of Babette’s body type with Minnie’s now that she knew there was an explanation for how they could both be so small in such different ways.
She felt weird flat-out asking Rita if she was born here and if her mother had grown up here and maybe had known Jane’s mother, so she asked, instead, “So what extracurriculars do you guys do?” That was a normal question, wasn’t it?
Babette and Rita exchanged a look so quick that Jane would have missed it if she hadn’t sort of been anticipating it.
“I don’t do much,” Rita said. “I spend most of my spare time at a gym, doing gymnastics and stuff.”
“Cool,” Jane said, feeling terribly uncool.
“I do the occasional piece for the school paper,” Babette said. She set about eating her brown-bag breakfast.
So they weren’t talking about the Dreamland Social Club. They weren’t going to be any help in that regard. The fact of it irked her, and she decided to just dig in. Trying to sound casual, she turned back to Rita and said, “So were you born here?”
Rita nodded.
“And your parents?”
Another nod.
Jane leaned in toward Rita. “Did they go to school here?”
Rita looked up and spoke through a mouthful of bagel. “You got a lot of questions.”
“Well, my mother went here, so if your mom did, too, maybe they knew each other.”
Right then Marcus walked over and sat down and Jane wanted to scream, What do you think you’re doing? It took me more than a week to get a seat here! She said only, “This is Marcus. My brother.”
“I know who you are.” The curls of Rita’s hair seemed to spring to life. “Everyone knows who you are.”
Turning back to Jane she said, “How old’s your mother?”
Marcus said, “She’s dead,” and Jane wanted to smack him.
“Oh,” Rita said, curls deflating some
. “Sorry.”
Jane said, “But if she were alive she would’ve been, like, fifty, fifty-one?”
Rita shook her head. “My mom’s not that old.”
Jane didn’t understand. “But there was a woman in the yearbook that looked so much like you.”
“I look a lot like one of my aunts,” Rita said. “She’s older.”
Babette pinched Jane’s arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jane shrugged and Babette sighed, then said, “How?”
“Brain aneurysm,” Marcus said. “Here one minute, gone the next.”
He looked at the second half of Rita’s sandwich, untouched on a piece of waxy white paper. “You going to eat that?”
She pushed it his way and Jane noted the gold rings on her fingers, matching the hoops peeking out from those curls. She couldn’t believe Marcus could be so nonchalant about things sometimes.
“Can you ask her?” Jane pressed. “Your aunt?”
“Yeah,” Rita said. “Sure, I guess.”
Marcus was chewing, but Jane could tell he was also subtly shaking his head.
They were all quiet for a moment and then Babette, apparently taking her tact cue from Marcus, turned to him and said, “So, did you hear about the party on Saturday?”
He nodded while he chewed, not looking up from his half sandwich.
“You should totally go.”
Jane felt embarrassed on Babette’s behalf.
“Hey, I just heard about the headless chicken thing.” He turned to Jane as he brushed his hands together—the sandwich was gone—and got up. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Jane was annoyed that he was playing the part of the good big brother when he never did it without an audience. “It was a lifetime ago. And anyway Rita helped me out.”
Marcus turned to Rita and said, “Thanks for the sandwich,” then got up to throw out his trash. Rita crumbled the waxy white paper into a ball and threw it about ten feet to land in the same can a second later. She stood and pumped her fists in the air, revealing the brown skin of her taut belly. Marcus turned and smiled. Babette looked like she might cry but only for a second, only until Rita turned back to the table, pulled her shirt down. She had some serious breasts in there.
“So really,” Babette said brightly to Jane, “what are you going to wear?”
The next morning a naked baby doll hung from the door of Jane’s locker in a noose. The Claveracks were hovering, as usual, and Jane decided to just leave the doll there. At least for now. Maybe even all day. What did she care? It was just a doll. So she gathered her books, closed her locker, and walked away, leaving the baby hanging.
“You forgot your grandfather,” Harvey said. “He looks like he could use an incubator right about now.”
“That’s just not funny,” she said.
“You know what’s really not funny?” Cliff said. “You keeping our grandfather’s horse when he made it and has the right to do whatever he wants with it.”
“And what, exactly, does he want to do with it?” she snapped.
“Sell it,” Harvey snorted. “What else?” He elbowed his brother. “Ride it around the living room?”
“How much is it worth?” she asked. It wasn’t like her family couldn’t use the money.
“Like we’d tell you,” Harvey said. “You know what, Cliff? That old house of Preemie’s doesn’t look that hard to break into.”
“You know, Harv, you’re right.”
Jane said, “Breaking into the house isn’t the problem. The problem is the horse is chained to the radiator and the radiator and horse combined probably weigh, I don’t know, a ton? So good luck to you.”
They backed away, snorting useless comebacks—“I could probably bench-press the freakin’ thing”; “F.U. and the horse you rode in on”—and Jane walked back to her locker, pulled the baby off it, and walked down the hall toward Principal Jackson’s office, fully prepared to register an official complaint. But when she found the office empty, she lost her nerve, tossed the doll into the trash can by the door, then hurried to Topics in Coney Island History, where Mr. Simmons was handing out postcards in see-through plastic sleeves.
“Americans bought seven hundred and seventy million, five hundred thousand postcards in 1906,” he said, giving Jane a solemn raise of the eyebrows since she was officially late. “And imagine this: on one day in 1906, over two hundred thousand postcards were sent from the post office right here on Coney Island. One day. Two hundred thousand postcards.”
Jane gingerly held the card Mr. Simmons handed her right then, but she also tried to bore her thoughts into the back of Leo’s head.
Seahorse, seahorse, seahorse.
Postcard, postcard, postcard.
“Ms. Dryden,” Mr. Simmons said. “If you will. . . .”
“Johnny,” she began, then took a breath. “I’m having the time of my life here on Coney. The bars are rowdy. The women are mad.”
People started laughing, and Jane felt herself start to blush. She read on: “Hope you’re holding down the fort. Cheers, Geoff.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dryden.” Mr. Simmons nodded. “Anyone think their postcard is particularly worth sharing?”
Leo raised his hand.
“Mr. LaRocca,” Mr. Simmons said. “Let’s have it.”
“Billy. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you half the things we’ve been up to,” Leo began, in an Irish accent.
Everyone laughed again and Jane smiled and had to resist the urge to doodle her name and Leo’s in a heart. She’d dearly loved Ireland, and was impressed with the accuracy of his accent.
“Was picked up last night for drunk and disorderly behavior. Turns out the copper has a taste for the Irish; we’ll have to send him a case when I return. ’Tis a mad place, this Coney. Who knew the States were so liberated? Best, Jimmy.”
“Excellent,” Mr. Simmons said. “Now can anyone point out something that these messages have in common?”
In the silence that followed, Jane heard the flutter of a bird and looked out the window. A pigeon had landed on the outside ledge, and for a moment she studied it because it seemed to be studying her. She looked hard into its round pigeon eyes, wondering if maybe it was Birdie reincarnated?
“The people are having fun,” Babette called out.
“Bingo,” Mr. Simmons said, and he turned and wrote the word FUN on the board. “Coney was known during this era as the ‘Playground of the World.’ So let’s talk for a minute about fun! What is it?”
Luckily he didn’t seem to actually expect a response. He just kept talking. “Is fun by definition bad? Sinful?”
Now he waited.
“Not necessarily,” Legs said. “If you think things like the human roulette wheel and the Shoot the Chutes are fun. Or riding wooden horses at Steeplechase Park.”
“Good,” Mr. Simmons said. “That’s what I believe we call good clean fun, right. But Coney Island has also been called ‘Sodom by the Sea.’ And not by some religious fanatics or anything but by a reputable source: The New York Times. Who can tell me what Sodom is?”
Jane waited for someone to answer, but everyone’s faces seemed blank. For the first time she wondered whether her education to date—while scattered about the globe—was actually better than she’d realized. She raised her hand, and Mr. Simmons called on her. She said, “It’s a city that was destroyed by God for being so full of sin.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Simmons said, and Jane thought, Thanks, Mrs. Chester, who had taught her religious studies class in Ireland. “And it was considered sinful back in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds for women to cavort in the surf with their skirts pulled up, or to wear swimsuits in public. There were, let’s face it, brothels here on Coney and bars—lots of bars—where people were free to overindulge.”
“Sounds awesome,” Leo said, and people laughed.
“How’s this for fun?” Mr. Simmons said. “When Fred Trump bought Steeplechase Park, he threw a demolition party wh
ere guests were handed bricks and encouraged to destroy windows, rides, whatever, at Steeplechase. Does that sound like a fun party?”
“It sounds like a party for assholes,” Leo said, and everyone laughed again and Mr. Simmons did, too. “You do have a way with words, Mr. LaRocca.”
Back at the bulletin board, Mr. Simmons said, “What about executing an elephant? Or watching it? Fun?” He picked up the stack of Topsy essays and started handing them back with grades. “Some of you thought so. Others, not so much.”
Jane was a little bit disappointed that she’d only gotten a B+.
“Before we meet again, I want you all to turn that sentence you wrote last week”—he winked dramatically and said, “And I know you all did it”—“into a postcard. A postcard from the place and time here on Coney where you had the most fun of your life. And I want you to send it to me.”
He pointed to an address written on the board, the school’s address. The class groaned.
Mr. Simmons just kept talking. “Be creative. Have fun with it. Bust out your crayons or markers if you must!”
Jane studied the main word in question—the hard corners of the F, the symmetrical curve of the U, and the jagged rise and fall of the N—but nothing was clicking. There was nothing fun about this assignment at all.
A tightly folded piece of paper landed on her desk as Mr. Simmons went on with his lesson, and she held it down low and out of sight to open it. Probably from Babette.
It said: “Still looking for that damn postcard. Want to go to the Anchor after school on Thursday?”
She looked over at Leo and he raised his eyebrows. Jane just nodded and then the bell rang.
Babette asked, “Where is your postcard going to be from?” as they headed out of the room.
“I’m not sure.” It was hard to talk to Babette while walking—and while freaking out about Leo’s invitation—but she had to try. “What about you?”
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