Dreamland Social Club

by Tara Altebrando

  Those are my girls, they’re thinking. Fearless.

  One thing I’ve never been.

  An old, wet man whose butt cheeks are showing walks past them and says, “Go back to Westchester.”

  I don’t know exactly what he means, but then again, I do. They’re rich. They’re Looky Lous. They don’t really belong here.

  Babette comes back to shore looking even smaller, like the cold water has actually shrunk her, and I have a fleeting thought about my friend’s vulnerability in the world. I’ve never thought about it before, the fact that grown men could dropkick her. Would she be at the front and center of a photo of the new Dreamland Social Club? Will I ever be invited to sit by her side?

  Something lands on my head then—a towel—and Leo screams, “Last one in’s a rotten egg.”

  I pull the towel off my head and watch him run into the surf. Seeing him without his shirt on is jarring, and not only because it’s the first time I can see his back. There is a whole seascape there with a shark at the center that has its jaws opened wide and almost appears to be three-dimensional, like if I touched his skin it would bite me. I feel sort of dizzy, watching the bones of his shoulder blades—like bird wings—as he splashes around, and then more dizzy still when he turns around, his chest facing the shore. The skin there, so far at least, is ink-free, and looks so very white. He shouts, “Come on, you slackers!”

  Someone in the crowd shouts, “Look at these idiots!” but I wonder, who are the idiots here, exactly? The people in the water or the Looky Lous on the shore?

  We have called a truce, Leo and I. There have been no more late-night meet-ups—no more tours of forgotten Coney with my mother’s keys as our map—nor have there been any more fights. Once a week or so we find ourselves leaving school at the same time, though we never actually plan it, and then walking down toward Brighton Beach for a knish at Mrs. Stalz’s, like his mom said she and my mom used to do. If it’s not snowing and I’ve remembered my hat and gloves, we take them back up to the boardwalk, sit on a bench, and eat the steaming-hot potato pockets while seagulls and pigeons appear as if from nowhere to inspect us and our deep-fried treats. There are more birds than I can count, and when we get up to leave, they follow us. Their caws sound like heckles, like they’re berating me for eating the whole knish and not even leaving them a crumb, or maybe berating me for not telling Leo how I really feel. We don’t talk about the fact that Loki’s plans were vetoed by the city just after Thanksgiving, or that my dad’s coaster most likely won’t be built, or that a new plan is being presented in the spring, or that all of this is the reason why we’ve called a truce, why I’ve been given a social reprieve, why school has become manageable.

  We chase after birds sometimes, making fun of their lazy ways, how it seems like pigeons would rather run a marathon than actually fly.

  “I was just in!” Babette shouts, and Leo looks at me and yells, “What’s your excuse?”

  I shrug and hope he never tattoos his chest. My excuse is simply that I am Jane. I understand why the birds would rather run than fly.

  I am trying to coax a memory to light—a memory of a bathtub, a dark room, a lightbulb dangling on a wire but hidden so as to only project a tiny bit of light. A memory of bath toys that look silver-and-black and of my mother, splashing the water around me and laughing in the near-dark.

  Legs arrives then, holding a thermos. “Want some?”

  I take it from him and sip hot chocolate. Because Legs has actually become my friend. And even though I’m sure he still wants us to be more than that, he never says anything about it and neither do I. He doesn’t care that my father designed a coaster for Loki, thinks maybe a big slick coaster would be really cool for Coney. Even if I’m not sure anymore, it’s nice to not be judged.

  Down the beach a ways, I spot Rita—squeezed into a black string bikini and wearing a hot-pink bathing cap. I marvel that it can contain all that hair. I can tell that one of the women she is with is her mother and figure the other is her grandmother. They all three take hands and then walk straight out into the surf, exclaiming things in Spanish that I don’t understand. Watching them, I feel a pang of envy, like a jellyfish has somehow pulsed its way into my heart and stung me there. Rita and Babette have a truce of sorts, too. Rita pretends nothing is going on with Marcus and Babette pretends she believes that. Or maybe she really does.

  H.T. has arrived, too, and he says, “You’ll notice that most of those idiots are like y’all.” He’s bouncing on his legs, trying to keep warm. “White.”

  He’s right.

  “Why is that?” I ask, because I sense an opening where openings rarely exist.

  He pulls his hat down to better cover his ears and breathes icy fog into his hands. “You tell me.”

  “Seriously,” I say. “Why aren’t you out there?”

  “’Cause it’s COLD!” he says, and we all laugh.

  Legs says, “This is ridiculous. I can’t take it.” He turns to go. “You coming?”

  I take one last look at the ocean, with the winter sun glaring off it in a shocking white burst, making me squint.

  Tomorrow, things will go back to sleepy and only the pigeons and seagulls will miss the crowds. Winter will settle over Coney again like an invisible igloo. The streets will be cleaner, the nights quieter, and there will be no girls with pigtails and oversize sunglasses, no smart-alecky T-shirts, no families from Westchester, wherever that is. I will go back to poking around the attic for keys and journals and contemplating the Bath key and hiding my heart away in a shipwreck or submarine. I will go back to puzzling over the increasingly cryptic Dreamland Social Club fliers—“You really don’t know, do you?”; “Are you daft?”—and wait to see what they do next.

  I will hum the Dreamland song and hear Leo’s sad, sad saw song in my head and hope that the tsunami of spring will never come.

  Part Three

  GABBA GABBA HEY

  CHAPTER one

  THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, a Friday, actually felt like the first day of spring. Even Jane had been in a light and breezy mood—and had dared to wonder why she’d ever dreaded the onset of the new season—until she walked into the cafeteria at lunchtime only to have her red skirt blown chin-high by a cool blast of air.

  The room was full and staring and laughing as Jane froze—Idiot! She froze!—and tried to hold her skirt down against the wind and then, finally, stepped aside. A small ramp had been placed over the steps down into the room, with a fan blowing up through a grate. She was thinking Claveracks! when she saw these words written in thin black paint on the ramp’s wooden top step:IT’S WHAT’S UNDERNEATH THAT REALLY MATTERS.

  DEEP THOUGHTS FROM THE DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB.

  Everyone in the room was still laughing.

  She stormed out, blushing, as another unsuspecting person walked in and had her skirt blown up and the laughter roared louder. It was only when she went into the girls’ room and locked herself in a stall that she remembered the Blowhole Theater at Steeplechase Park. Which made her feel slightly better—she had not been the intended target but just one of many unsuspecting ones—but at the end of the day, she snapped when she saw the fliers all over that said:dreamland social club

  EMERGENCY MEETING TODAY, ROOM 222

  Which was familiar enough, but they all had a new slogan:

  YOUR MOTHER WEARS COMBAT BOOTS.

  She ripped down the closest flier she could find and stormed up the stairs and knocked on the door to 222. Babette opened the door, and Jane was thinking of that armless, legless girl in the white dress in the old photo and feeling just that vulnerable, when she said, “What’s the deal with this club and its deep thoughts, anyway? And You know who you are? Your mother wears combat boots? Why be so exclusive? So vague? I mean, what if I wanted to join?”

  She stepped into the room, and a chorus of voices let out a rhythmic “Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.”

  Legs was there. And Minnie. Leo. Venus. Rita. And Debbie, too. Pounding ou
t a beat on the desks with their hands.

  “Gooble gobble. We accept her. We accept her. One of us, one of us.”

  For a second Jane wanted to scream, wanted to play her part—was that what she was supposed to do?—and shout out “FREAKS!” because that’s what the normal woman in the movie had done, but then something dawned on her. Her mother never would have started a club so exclusive; there was no way. The signs weren’t meant to exclude but to tease those who might want to be included. So when the chanting and pounding stopped, she said, “It’s the opposite of exclusive, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, you idiot.” Babette closed the door. “And we’ve been waiting. All freaking fall and winter. I mean your mother founded the damn club.”

  Jane was elated and incensed. “But you never said anything or asked me to join or anything. None of you.”

  Not that Venus or Minnie would have, but still . . . Leo could have. Or Legs!

  “That was the whole idea,” Legs said. “The whole way your mother set it up. No recruiting. No asking your friends. No talking about it, even. Ever.”

  All of which would explain why Beth wouldn’t talk about it. Freddy Claverack, too.

  Leo said, “New members have to turn up on their own and they have to be let in, whoever they are. So it never becomes cliquish.”

  Babette pulled out a beat-up notebook, opened to the front pages, and read: “I hereby found the Dreamland Social Club as a haven for the wayward and curious, for those interested in the strange in the normal, the normal in the strange, the old in the new, the new in the old.

  “Anyone who walks through the door must be accepted with the following refrain: ‘Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble. We accept her. We accept her. One of us, one of us’—preferably recited in the style of the scene in the film Freaks—even if the person is technically not a her, but a him.

  “Or generally despised.

  “Or too popular for his or her own good.

  “The Dreamland Social Club is, therefore, a safe haven for outsiders and outcasts of all kinds. Even those who appear to be insiders.”

  Jane went closer to Babette and saw that the club’s mission statement had been written in her mother’s own hand. “So that day when I knocked on the door . . .”

  Babette said, “We thought you’d caught on.”

  “So I could’ve become a member back then?”

  “All you had to do was walk in. And my God. The clues!” Babette shook her head. “I left the questionnaire at your house.”

  “You did?” Venus protested.

  “And I gave you that old photo,” Legs said.

  “Against the rules,” Minnie said, but Legs just shrugged.

  “And I started rewriting the posters just for you,” he said. “To try to get you to come in.”

  “My mother wore combat boots,” Jane said. “Are you daft?”

  “Exactly,” Legs said. “Actually, Leo came up with those two.”

  “Did the trick!” Leo said. Jane wasn’t sure, but he seemed happy she was there. His gooble gobbles had seemed especially spirited.

  “I didn’t know!” she said to them all.

  “Obviously!” Babette said.

  Jane studied the flier. “So what’s the emergency?”

  “The emergency,” Babette said, turning to the group, “is that we’re all set for Electric Bathing, but we’ve got no ideas for the Mermaid Parade.”

  H.T. came in then and sat down, then spotted Jane and said, “Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.” He flashed a smile. “Finally.”

  But Jane’s brain was like a record that had skipped, back at the words Electric Bathing.

  Stuck on four letters in particular.

  Bath.

  She hadn’t actually thought all that much about the key over the winter, but now that a possible clue had presented itself, she felt a phantom itch.

  “Come on, Babette,” Venus whined. “It’s March. It’s Friday and I want to go home. We’ll think of something.”

  “Seriously,” Minnie said. “There’s plenty of time.”

  They had both said their own gooble gobbles. But did it really mean Jane had been accepted?

  “That’s what we always say, and then we were totally scrambling last year.” Babette furrowed her brow and said, “I know! Let’s meet Sunday at the Anchor, just for a little bit. It’s opening day. The boardwalk. Fresh air. Maybe we’ll be inspired.”

  Everyone grumbled agreement, and a noon meet time was decided upon.

  “What’s Electric Bathing?” Jane asked as she and Babette walked home. “It sounds sort of familiar but—”

  “Every year, last day of school,” Babette cut in, “since your mother’s year, we rig up a light on a pole in the water, and there are ropes that lead you out and then we wade in and swim by the light of a forty-watt bulb. They used to do it back in the thirties or something.”

  And just like that . . .

  I’m in the bathtub and the lights are out except for a flashlight that my mother is holding up high over me. Through the skylight in the ceiling I think I can see stars and even part of the moon, and my mother is saying, “Gosh, ain’t electricity grand?”

  “Earth to Jane,” Babette said. “Come in, Jane.”

  “Sorry,” she said. There hadn’t been much more to the memory anyway. “Any keys involved?”

  “Keys?” Babette said. “Like to what?”

  “I don’t know. Never mind.” Jane tripped on one of the boardwalk’s uneven planks but recovered quickly; one of her middle toes panged. “So that’s all you do? Weird Coney-related stunts?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.” They stopped by a bench and sat. “But don’t blame me, your mother started it.”

  Jane looked out at the empty beach and wondered how Sunday’s crowds would compare. It wasn’t warm enough to swim yet but it was a mild March so far, more lamb than lion. She said, “What kinds of things have people done before?”

  “Well, last year we tried to build a Helter Skelter slide from the gym windows.” Babette played with one of her seven looped earrings for a second. “With one of those inflatable slide things, but decorated to look cooler. But the whole thing was a disaster.”

  “What did the first club do?” Jane asked. “Is there a list in there?”

  “Oh,” Babette said, “yeah, that’s pretty much all this book is, notes about stunts.” She started to flip through the official Dreamland Social Club notebook.

  “Do you mind?” Jane held out her hands, and Babette handed the book over. Jane turned back to the beginning and to the pages that came right after the club’s statement of purpose, the rules of membership. When she found the list of stunts from the club’s first year she said, “It says here that they made a papier-mâché version of the beast in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and put it on the roof of the school.”

  “Turn the page,” Babette said. “There’s a picture.”

  Jane turned and found the photo taped into the book and studied it. “I saw that movie,” Jane said. “My brother has it.”

  They hadn’t talked about Marcus in any real way in a long time, not since they’d both accepted that Jane knew more about her brother and Rita than Babette really wanted to know. Jane regretted even mentioning him.

  “Any good?” Babette asked. She’d become a professional at this nonchalance thing over the winter.

  “Not really,” Jane said. “No.”

  Babette looked at her watch. “I better go.” She stood. “So I’ll see you Sunday at the meeting?”

  “That’s really it?” Jane held out the book and Babette took it. “I’m a member?”

  “That’s really it.”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Here,” Babette said, handing the book back. “Why don’t you take it home? There are some old questionnaires in there, in the envelope in the back.”

  “My mom’s?”

  Babette just nodded.

  Jane sat with the book in her room when she got home and st
arted to flip through the opening pages, where more rules were laid out.

  “In addition to not speaking about the existence or activities of the club when not at an official meeting, members are asked to refrain from claiming membership in yearbooks or on résumés and the like. The founder of the club will claim credit for its foundation in one publication of record, The Coney Island High Tide, solely to put the club in the history books.”

  It all seemed sort of dopey to Jane, in a way, but it was also thrilling to glimpse these insights into her mother’s world. It wasn’t her journal, no, but it was sort of close. She turned to the envelope taped to the book’s inside back cover and saw a note written on the envelope:

  The official Dreamland Social Club Membership Questionnaire is NOT mandatory for membership, but if members are inclined to answer a few random probing questions so that future generations might glimpse the inclinations and personas of some former members, so be it:

  She flipped through the stack until she saw the one with Clementine written in the top slot for “Name (first only).”

  What’s your earliest memory?

  Waking up to the noise of my parents’ crazy parties.

  What sound makes you happy?

  Silence.

  What was the last dream you had that you remember?

  I dreamed I was the singer of a band that had a sort of B-movie dragon as the drummer.

  Name one thing you want to do before you die.

  See the world. Or at least part of it.

  Why is a raven like a writing desk?

  Because you cannot ride either one of them like a bicycle.

  What’s the best thing about being you?

  I have a lot of secrets and an active imagination. Seriously good daydreamer.