Dreamland Social Club

by Tara Altebrando

  She’d found a VHS copy of an old movie called Freaks in the attic and decided to watch and see if maybe Birdie was in it. Heading downstairs with it she heard voices—plural—coming from her brother’s room. He had a girl with him. Jane didn’t even want to think about who it was and what would happen when Babette found out.

  She fixed herself a snack in the kitchen and started the movie, which seemed like it had been made for shock value, with a thin plot about a circus sideshow. There were two pinheads and a torso boy and those same Siamese twins who had been in Is It Human? and, yes, there was a bird woman, but it wasn’t Birdie. And what kind of crazy world was it when two women could get famous pretending to be part bird?

  She almost turned it off a few times, it was so bad, but it was also strangely compelling, and then it was almost over and there was a banquet because a normal woman was marrying one of the freaks—some kind of miniature man—and they were at a table with big goblets and the freaks were stomping on the table, chanting, “Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble. We accept her. We accept her. One of us, one of us.”

  Pounding and pounding and stomping and stomping and then saying it again, over and over, in a strange sort of initiation ritual.

  Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.

  It was creepy as all get-out and then, thankfully, it was over.

  When her brother came downstairs with Rita trailing behind him, Jane was almost happy to see them.

  Rita said to Jane, “Walk me to the door?”

  Jane got up, followed Rita down the hall.

  “Hey, do me a favor,” Rita said, her hand already on the knob. “Don’t tell Babette I was here.”

  Jane was studying her closely, looking at the way her hair—no longer pulled back in the ponytail she’d worn all day—seemed so unruly.

  Rita said. “You know how she is.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “I do.”

  Marcus was whistling while looking for something to eat in the kitchen when Jane returned. She said, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and he said, “Don’t lose any sleep over it, sis.”

  “You know,” she snapped. “You’re sort of becoming a jerk.”

  “Why? Because I don’t like Babette? Get real.” He took a Coke out of the fridge, snapped it open, and went upstairs.

  Jane sat down at the kitchen table, where a note from her father that she hadn’t noticed earlier read Loki meeting in city late afternoon. Order takeout. A twenty-dollar bill peeked out from behind it. But Jane wasn’t hungry, and anyway dinnertime had passed. She went to her bag and got out the photo Legs had given her, then looked at the clock on the wall.

  It was late for a lot of people.

  But not for people who ran clubs.

  Walking down the boardwalk by the light of a crescent moon, Jane could almost feel its pull in the air around her. Something about the way she was moving in the world now made her feel like there were invisible tendons and connections everywhere. The gravitational pull of Coney, of Leo, of her mother’s past, was right there in front of her, where she could touch it.

  As she walked up the carpeted staircase to the Coral Room, she heard music—a deep, sultry, slow beat. Pushing through a set of doors at the top of the stairs, she slid into the room as inconspicuously as she could. At the far end of the room, in weird contrast to the seascape, a woman pranced around onstage wearing a polka-dot bra and some matching boy-shorts. She was dancing to old-timey piano music, making strange, pouting faces. During a drum break, she bent forward and blew a big kiss, jiggling her breasts.

  Jane slid into one of only two empty booths along the wall opposite the bar and hoped that no one noticed her until she figured out exactly what she was going to say if anyone other than Beth asked her what she was doing there.

  But it was hard to think straight. A little card pyramid on the table announced that it was Burlesque Night, and Jane couldn’t take her eyes off the woman onstage, her pale skin, her red lipstick, her increasingly scanty outfit. She’d just moved her bra straps off her shoulders while looking tantalizingly over her shoulder at the crowd. Then she turned and revealed breasts bare except for gold tassels hanging from her nipples, which she somehow managed to spin around. Looking back at the aquarium and finding some of those gold fish, Jane thought that yes, it was the same kind of shimmer, the same shade of gold.

  She watched a white blowfish make slow progress across the bottom front edge of the tank. And when she looked up there was a new girl onstage. She was wearing a black bikini and dancing with two huge black wings made of feathers. The music was a classical song that Jane recognized from the deep boom of horns—“The Ride of the Valkyries.”

  BUM-BUM-BUM. Bum-be-bum. Bum-be-bum.

  Flap. Flap. Jiggle. Jiggle.

  BUM-BUM-BUM. Bum-be-bum. Bum-be-bum.

  That’s when Beth saw her and came over.

  “Hey there,” she said, sliding into the booth. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” Jane said, wondering why it felt like a lie. Everything was okay, wasn’t it? “I wanted to show you this.”

  She pulled the photo out of her bag and put it on the table in front of Beth. “It was in the archives at school.”

  “Wow,” Beth said carefully, and then she held the photo closer to the small light sconce on the wall of the booth. Then, finally, she shook her head and put the photo down. “We were so young.”

  Jane picked it up and turned it over. “It says D.S.C. on the back. Do you know what that means?” It didn’t matter that she already knew it had to be the Dreamland Social Club. She wanted to be told.

  Beth’s eyes got sad. “Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head again. She pushed the photo over so that it sat in front of Jane. “Here’s what I will tell you.” She pointed to the face of one of the boys in the photo and said, “That’s one of your mother’s ex-boyfriends.”

  “Really?” Jane studied the boy’s face. “What was his name?”

  “You’re not going to like it.” Beth tapped his face with her finger. “That’s Freddy Claverack.”

  “You gonna walk right by?” the voice said. “You’re a regular ole Looky Lou.”

  Jane’s head snapped toward the voice, and she saw a man holding a microphone standing in front of the Shoot the Freak booth.

  “Well, would you look at that?” He nodded at her. “She’s got ears. Just not the nerve to shoot the Freak.”

  He had dark peach fuzz for hair and wore mirrored sunglasses that covered half his face. His neck pooled under his chin like a deflated inner tube, and his belly pushed out on a Mets T-shirt that barely met the top edge of his denim shorts. Turning away from Jane he said, to no one in particular, “Shoot the Freak in the freakin’ head.”

  Jane looked up and down the boardwalk—saw no sign of anyone she knew, though it was a warm night so pretty bustling with people—and then she stepped up to the guy and studied the Shoot the Freak booth.

  The target was standing among the field’s scrap metal and trash, just standing there and waiting. The entire scene was splattered with paint, and paint guns rested on a ledge in front of Jane. She said, “How much?”

  Peach Fuzz pointed to the sign that Jane really should have seen, hanging right behind him. Ten bucks for ten rounds sounded like a lot, and Jane thought maybe she’d just move on but suddenly she really wanted to shoot the Freak.

  “I don’t have all night,” he said.

  “Fine.” She reached for her wallet and handed him the money.

  Peach Fuzz loaded up a gun with paint pellets, then handed it to Jane. She stabilized her hands by propping her elbows up on the barrier between the boardwalk and the Freak’s junk-metal obstacle course and found her target. He was moving slowly, swaying on his feet and holding a plastic shield. Jane aimed low and fired. Orange paint exploded on the Freak’s leg.

  He started to show a little more life as she fired again, and hit him again—imagining now that he was a Claverack. Harvey. Cliff. Freddy. It didn’t matter. Right then som
ething about the Freak’s body movements—he took a few determined steps forward—made Jane think he was getting mad. But if he didn’t want to get hit, he needed to move around more, show some hustle.

  She popped him again, this time with a splatter of blue and this time imagining he was Leo, who’d canceled on her. Leo who was on course to break her heart.

  Peach Fuzz was trying to attract a crowd. “Check, check, check it out. We’ve got a sharpshooter here.” The last word sounded like heeya.

  She let the rest of her rounds pop faster once she’d gotten the hang of the gun, and she hit the Freak each time. When the gun was emptied—and that last time, it was her mother, her mysterious, elusive, dead, fun mother whose image had flashed through her mind—she put it down and felt a rush of excitement at how well she’d done.

  “Not bad,” he said, and Jane said, “Thanks.”

  He gathered up some saliva in his mouth with a whipping sound and then spat on the boardwalk and shrugged.

  High on catharsis, Jane blurted, “You should give out prizes or something.”

  “Yeah.” He was counting a wad of bills. “I’ll look into that.”

  CHAPTER five

  SNEAKING OUT A SECOND TIME took some of the thrill out of it, but not much. This time there was the added edge of fear that Leo just wouldn’t turn up—because maybe he really was sick?—or that she’d get delayed somehow and miss him. How long would she wait for him? How long would he wait for her?

  She’d gone to sleep at 12:00 and set an alarm for 1:45 and saw evidence that her father had, in fact, finally come home within that window. So each floorboard seemed a little bit more squeaky, each lock on the front door seemed clickier. Because what if she actually got caught this time? What if Leo showed up and she didn’t?

  A psst whizzed by when she hit the sidewalk, and Leo stepped out from behind a lamppost in front of the abandoned lot next door. “You scared the crap out of me,” Jane whisper-yelled, though there was a secret, calming thrill in feeling like she’d stepped into a scene in a noir film—all lampposts and shadows and lurking.

  “Sorry,” he whispered back, and then they took off, with him guiding her down the street with a hand on her elbow. “I realized I shouldn’t let you walk by yourself. After the other night.”

  He had his backpack on again, and another tight band tee, and they headed straight for the fence around the abandoned tower. Quietly, they circled its perimeter, methodically trying the locks they found at the four gates—one per side—but had no luck at all.

  “Well, it has been a long time,” Leo said, and they took a break on a bench on the boardwalk. It was breezy and there was a cool edge to the air, a threat from fall.

  “Are we giving up?” Jane asked, but Leo shook his head. Then he said, “Let’s go back this way,” and led her to a post at one corner of the fence. After looking up and down the boardwalk—they were the only two players in their noir scene—he cupped his hands down low and said, “Okay, step up and over, using the post.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  Jane had never climbed a fence or trespassed before, but she took one look at the moon—and saw the outline of the whole of it, lit by the crescent—and felt that gravitational pull again, this time like a tug in her Achilles’ heel. And then there was her foot in Leo’s cupped hands. And then there was her body going up, up, up. And then there were her hands grabbing fence, and then her belly was scraping wire, and then her feet were finding footing, and then moving down, down, down, and then with a jump backwards she was in.

  In no time, Leo hooked his backpack over the fence to her, then scaled its rungs. Soon they were taking crunchy steps through tall grass toward the tower, which looked so much larger now, like it couldn’t possibly be that same steel flower she’d first spied from the cab. Jane followed Leo right up to its base—the beams were so much thicker, wider, redder—where he stopped and unzipped his backpack and spread out his small blanket. He lay down, looking up, and patted the spot next to him.

  “Best view in the world,” he said, and Jane realized something. She said, “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this all before?”

  When he just smiled, she took her place beside him, looking up at the steel tower. From here, lit just so, it took on the shape of a roulette wheel in the sky, and that felt somehow fitting. She closed her eyes and imagined it spinning and spinning and spinning. Jumping off it had been a gamble, just like being here tonight. It was time to go for broke.

  “I’ve been remembering things,” she said quietly. “About my mom.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “All these games we used to play when I was little.”

  Leo looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.

  “We moved around so much so we didn’t have a lot of toys, I guess.” She looked up at the shadow moon as she spoke but felt Leo watching her. “So she’d always make up games using stuff we had around the apartment, like Trip to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Like inspired by Luna Park.”

  When he said nothing, she just kept talking.

  “Like she’d turn a box into a spaceship or pretend that green string was seaweed, or she’d dress up as an Eskimo or pretend to be the captain of a ship going to the moon.” Jane put on a deep voice. “This is your captain. We are traveling through a storm. We are quite safe.” She added, “That was from Trip to the Moon.”

  Leo spoke very slowly when he said, “That. Is. Awesome.”

  Jane had to keep talking to keep from crying. “One of my favorites was playing Elephant Hotel. One time she actually made a bed of peanuts for us to sleep on. I’d never seen so many peanuts.”

  Leo laughed.

  “We had a game about living under a roller coaster, too. She must’ve been thinking of the Thunderbolt.”

  “How old were you when she died?” Leo asked tentatively, sadly.

  “Six,” Jane said. “So I don’t remember a lot. Or didn’t. Until lately. And I mean, I didn’t even know she’d ever been to a mermaid camp or kept a journal or anything, really.”

  In the silence that followed, Jane felt a magnetic pull between their hands, their bodies, and knew she wasn’t making it up. “I just found out, from your mom, actually, that my mother actually dated one of the Claveracks.”

  “Oh, snap.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. I mean, how is that even possible? Nothing makes sense.” She shook her head. “I really wish I could find that journal.”

  “It’s been a really long time, Jane,” he said, sort of sadly, and Jane said, “I know. But we used to play this game, hiding this little journal I kept when I was little. I feel like she must’ve hidden hers, too. And like maybe I could find it.”

  “Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t sound convinced, and Jane couldn’t blame him. She wasn’t entirely convinced either.

  “So what was the deal anyway?” He pulled a blade of a grassy weed up out of the ground and played with it. “How come your mother never came back to visit or anything? My mom said she hasn’t—hadn’t—seen her in like twenty years.”

  “I don’t know.” Should she know? “I guess she never really got along with Preemie, and then she met my dad and they just started traveling and stuff and it sounds like Coney Island was pretty awful back then, too. But we were all going to come back together, apparently, when I was little. To meet my grandparents, probably even your mom, when I was six, but then she died and we never did.”

  “That’s sort of wild to think about.” Leo tossed his grass blade. “We could’ve met when we were six.”

  For a moment she imagined what that trip would have been like, what Coney would have been like all those years ago, what it would’ve been like to see this all as a kid, with her mom walking her down the boardwalk, holding her hand and playing tour guide, and not as who she was now, older, more alone, adrift. What it would’ve been like to meet some weird boy her age, with a weird accent, and what it would
’ve been like to pretend to be interested in whatever he was interested in then, like comic books or guitars.

  They sat quietly a while longer and finally she said, “Did you ever hear that story about the elephant that swam to Staten Island?”

  “Sure!” Leo shook his head. “Poor bastard.”

  Jane knew it as a happy story, one of escape. “But he made it!”

  “He did. But, I mean, it’s Staten Island!”

  Jane looked at him blankly.

  “Never mind.” He shook his head. “But anyway, they charged the elephant with vagrancy and put him in jail.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Then people from Luna went to get him and brought him back.”

  “Oh.” Jane hadn’t remembered reading that part. It made the story entirely different.

  “I’m not really sure my mom would want us to be back here,” she said finally, the thought having occurred to her right then for the first time. “I mean, she made such a point of leaving.”

  Leo shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters.”

  After another moment, he sat up and said, “All right. Time to climb.”

  “No,” Jane said, looking at the thick base of the Jump.

  “Yes,” he said, and then he waited for her to come to his side. He put two fingers into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

  “What are you doing?” Jane said, confused and a little panicked, and then she saw the lights coming their way. Two security guards. “Why did you do that?” she snapped, but Leo wasn’t moving, wasn’t running.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “I know these guys.”

  “You sure about this, Leo?” one of the men said as they stopped in front of Leo and Jane and turned off their flashlights.

  “I’m sure.”

  One of the guards went to the structure surrounding the base of the Jump and found a key on his waistband keychain and opened a door. He pushed it open—nothing but darkness in there—and stepped back, looked at his watch, and said, “I’m giving you fifteen minutes. Not a second more.”