Dreamland Social Club

by Tara Altebrando

  Mothy.

  She studied the demon from Hell Gate up close for the first time, felt the chipping paint and the smooth lines of the curvature of its lips. She tried to imagine what it had been like to ride through Hell Gate, tried to understand the desire to pay hard-earned money in order to take a boat ride through a simulated hell, to confront its fiery circles, to look Satan in the eye. It seemed that people who lived all those years ago had had a hard enough time just dealing with the realities of their own world—epidemics, wars, outhouses. Did they really have to make it any worse? Any scarier? What was this fascination with the morbid and terrifying and weird? And why didn’t people have it anymore?

  Or did they?

  Looking around the room, Jane saw a few other things she was going to have to part with, whether her family ending up staying or not. Those “swinging” and “stationary” signs, for example. The invitation to Trump’s Demolition Party.

  Those she wouldn’t miss.

  But those films!

  She’d grown so fond of those orphans, those diving horses, the old footage of Luna Park. They weren’t old family movies, no, but they’d started to feel that way. Apart from Is It Human? they were all she had.

  But still . . .

  She found a pen and paper and started to make a list of things she thought the Coney Island Museum might want. After she wrote down “Old Film: Orphans in the Surf,” she decided to watch it again, maybe for the last time, and it didn’t seem quite so horribly sad this time around. The shock of it was gone, and in its place was sadness, sure, but not nearly as much of it. When it ended, she returned to her list and wrote down, “Old film reel: ‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great Diving Horses.”

  She had neglected to turn off the projector, and after she added a few more items to her list, new words appeared on the attic wall.

  Baby Class at Lunch.

  A new film started playing, tacked onto the same reel as Orphans.

  It was impossible to tell for sure if it was the same toddlers. This time there were more of them, sitting on a staircase and eating sandwiches from brown bags. They were chewing and smiling and laughing and making funny faces, and even the herky-jerky grain of the film couldn’t change that fact.

  They seemed . . . happy.

  In the quiet of the attic, Jane let out a laugh.

  Baby Class at Lunch?

  The title seemed ludicrous.

  Hilarious, even.

  And the laugh turned into a giggle as she watched these orphans chew and mug for the camera. She couldn’t stop.

  That’s what they’d called it?

  Baby Class at Lunch?

  Because if they’d called the first one Baby Class at the Beach instead, she would have been spared an awful lot of heartache.

  When the film was done, just a minute after it started, Jane took the reel off the projector and put it in a box with the others. It was time.

  CHAPTER five

  ALL RIGHT, PUT YOUR BOOKS AWAY.” Mr. Simmons turned to the board and started to draw a big building. It had columns on the front and peaked roofs, and above the doorway, where an inscription might appear cut into marble, he wrote TOWN HALL.

  “Since you’re all aware that Loki Equities is trying to force ‘the future of Coney Island’ to arrive”—he put the chalk down and brushed his hands together—“I thought we’d take today to talk about some of this past weekend’s events in our own mock town hall meeting.”

  He looked out at the room, stroked his goatee. “Anyone want to get us started and jump right in?”

  Leo stood. “My father’s bar is getting shut down. It’s not fair.”

  Somebody in class, maybe an Emmett, said, “Nobody’s making him sell it! Just don’t take the money!”

  “They don’t own the land.” Leo turned to speak directly to the guy. “They rent the space, and Loki is forcing them out by not negotiating a new lease.”

  “The Anchor’s a dump,” another person, possibly a Stephanie, said.

  Leo said, “Sure, it’s run-down and stuff, but it’s old. And it’s run-down because it caters to thousands and thousands of people. It’s a Coney Island institution.”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Simmons was writing years on the board: 1949, 1964, 1985.

  Then after that he wrote, History repeats.

  “Today, my dear students, you are taking part in an age-old Coney tradition. Namely, fighting about what Coney means, what Coney’s future should be. We can, and should, look to the past as a series of cautionary tales, because each time”—he pointed at each year with the piece of chalk in his hand, making a click each time—“Coney was going to be redeveloped . . . and each time . . . what happened?”

  “Nothing,” Legs said.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Simmons said. “What, if anything, is different this time?” He put the chalk down on the ledge beneath the blackboard.

  “It’s hard to say,” Babette said. “Something is different every time. This time it’s Loki.”

  Mr. Simmons said, “Well put. Loki does seem to be serious. And of course the city has a few acres of its own to develop. Though politics seems to have brought all that to a screeching halt.”

  Jane had sort of hoped her father had been misinformed about that.

  “The long and short of it,” Mr. Simmons said, “is that I might be—any of us might be—rolling in our graves by the time any of this actually happens.”

  “Mr. Simmons?” Leo said. “Why don’t you ask Jane for any insider information she might have? In case you haven’t heard, her father designed Loki’s weenie.”

  Something about the look in Leo’s eyes when he turned to her made her blood boil, and she said, “The only inside information I have is that your father hasn’t paid his rent in months and that there are rats in the bar.”

  “You’re joking, right?” Leo rolled his eyes.

  “Now, now,” Mr. Simmons said, patting the air in front of him with his palms to say calm down. “I am curious, though, Jane. What do you think of Loki?”

  She said, “I was thinking of reserving judgment until after I actually see the new plan.”

  “I suppose that’s sensible enough,” Mr. Simmons said, and Leo snorted.

  He took his petition up to the front of the room after class ended. Mr. Simmons signed without batting an eye. Was she the only one who saw how complicated all this was?

  “Yikes,” Babette said, appearing by her side in the hall.

  “Yeah.”

  And then there was Leo, right in her face.

  “I just don’t get you. At all.” He looked visibly shaken for the first time since she’d known him; even his seahorse seemed agitated, blurry. “It just seems sometimes you do one thing, then do something else that’s like the total opposite.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Jane said.

  Legs walked past them then and Leo looked up at him and nodded briefly, and it felt like some sort of weird exchange of male sympathy, like they both felt they were better off not even dealing with crazy girls like Jane.

  “Forget it, Jane.” Leo looked back at her, seemed to shake something off. “But I mean, what side are you on anyway?”

  It wasn’t about sides.

  There weren’t sides, unless there could be like a million of them.

  Nothing about it was black and white, this or that.

  “You know what?” Jane said to Leo, and Babette drifted away with an apologetic raise of the eyebrows. “I don’t get you either. I don’t get how you can be so smart about so many things and have such ridiculous tunnel vision about this. About the bar. And I mean, have you even looked around lately? Taken a good look? Coney is a dump, and Loki’s the only person—or company or whatever—who’s really trying to do anything about it.”

  He threw his hands up into the air. “There aren’t any rats!”

  “And your father hasn’t stopped paying his rent?”

  “That’s just a flat-out lie.”

  “Are you sure?�
��

  He was winding the dial on his combination lock. “Your father’s obviously been fed some crazy propaganda. And I mean, seriously”—he pulled his lock open, then opened the locker door—“your dad isn’t the first person I’d trust right about now.”

  “It was just a question.”

  “Whatever, Jane.” He started putting away books, taking out others. “Why don’t you go back to looking for journals and solving mysteries about keys and teasing Legs and holding carousel horses hostage and whatever else it is you do.”

  Jane didn’t like being whatever-ed and liked what came after it even less and, stunned, let herself drift into the flow of kids in the hall and bumped right into Legs, who’d obviously decided to hover. Had she been teasing him? Just by being friends?

  He said, “Hey, do you have any tickets to the presentation?”

  She nodded and saw, on the bulletin board, a flier that hadn’t been there that morning.

  dreamland social club

  TODAY. UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

  “Can I have one?” Legs said. “I’m covering it for the paper and I want to make sure I get in.”

  “Sure,” Jane said.

  A meeting?

  Today?

  Babette need to chill. Out.

  “Thanks,” he said, then nodded toward Leo’s locker. “I hope he apologized.” Legs shook his head. “The guy has lost all perspective.”

  “He’s just upset,” she said, not wanting to make things worse. “I mean, it’s his father’s bar.”

  “You know what, Jane?”

  “What?” she snapped. She closed her locker and Legs looked like he was going to say something really urgent, and then he just huffed and said, “Never mind.”

  She had been planning on finding the Claveracks that day, to tell them about her decision about the horse. But when she saw them picking on a dowdy freshman between classes, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. And really, it didn’t have anything to do with them—with Harvey and Cliff. It was their grandfather she should be talking to. He was the one who’d made the damn thing. He was the one who cared, if anyone did.

  Did anyone really care as much as she did?

  About anything?

  She went to the meeting of the Dreamland Social Club after school, hoping that the spirit of the club would make everything better. But the mood was icy, at best. Nothing like it was the first time she’d walked in, just last week, and even then, there’d been Minnie’s and Venus’s cool stares to contend with.

  “Let’s get down to it so we can get out of here,” Babette said, obviously sensing the tension.

  “We need people to take the lead on the funeral bier,” Babette said. “We either need to build something with wheels or we need to find some kind of wagon or cart that we can decorate, because holding something or carrying it that whole time will be too much.”

  “I have some ideas,” H.T. said, so Babette wrote his name down, and then Legs said, “Me, too,” so she wrote again.

  “Music.” Babette looked over at Leo, who said, “I’ll scare up a dirge band the likes of which you’ve never heard.”

  “Excellent,” Babette said, and then she added, “And we need to pick a mermaid.”

  There was a moment of silence before she said, “I nominate Jane.”

  Venus snapped, “Why her?”

  “Yeah,” Minnie said. “Why her?”

  “Well, look at the rest of us,” Babette said. “We’re not exactly mermaid material.”

  “I’m mermaid material.” Rita puffed up her breasts.

  Venus snorted. “When’s the last time anybody saw a Puerto Rican mermaid?”

  “Same time they saw a mermaid with tattoos,” Rita snapped.

  “I’m starting to question the rules of membership in this club,” Leo said from the back of the room, and Jane’s face burned. “Me, too,” she said. “Because the whole idea was that it wasn’t going to become a clique and it is. None of you would really know what to do if someone really different, someone who challenged you, walked through that door.”

  “You know what?” Leo said. “I told my mother I wouldn’t be late.”

  And he left.

  And then Venus followed, saying to Jane, “You really want to be a dead fish, go ahead.”

  Minnie left, too, saying, “I wouldn’t want to just lie there the whole time anyway.”

  Rita left, then Legs, and Babette said, “Then it’s decided.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jane said, and Babette said, “Unless anyone objects on the record?”

  H.T. said, “This seems like a decision for the womenfolk.”

  “Then Jane it is.” Babette wrote something down, seeming pleased. She declared the meeting adjourned.

  “You should have asked me first,” Jane said to Babette after H.T. skated away.

  “Are you saying you don’t want to do it?”

  “No,” Jane admitted. “Not exactly. It’s just, I don’t know. My mother went to mermaid camp once. With Leo’s mom. And she had this thing about mermaids, so it all makes me sort of sad.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.” Babette patted her leg. “But think of it this way. It’s your chance to take back the mermaid. And make it not sad anymore.”

  “I guess,” Jane said, though it all sounded sort of dumb. “But it’s a funeral.”

  “Well, it was your idea.”

  “I know. I just didn’t think it through.”

  Babette took a small card out of her backpack and handed it to Jane. “Leo gave this to me,” she said, “but he probably meant it for you.”

  It read MERMAID AUDITIONS @ THE CORAL ROOM, 4:00 p.m., and it had that day’s date on it.

  “You’re joking, right?” she said.

  “Not to audition,” Babette said with an eye roll. “To watch. To be inspired.”

  “Oh, what’s the point?” Jane said, but she was still studying the card.

  Babette looked at her watch. “If you hurry, you can get there in time.”

  Jane took off toward the Coral Room as fast as her legs would carry her. Leo would probably be there. She didn’t care. Or maybe that was the whole reason she was going. She wasn’t sure. She thought maybe she wanted to apologize for saying the stuff about the rats and the rent in front of everybody. But she’d been provoked. Shouldn’t he have to apologize, too?

  The club was packed, mostly with women in bikinis, so Jane shrunk her shoulders and slid through until she was right up behind the people sitting at the bar, right near the tanks. In front of her a pair of twin girls swiveled on bar stools—“Mom is up first,” one of them said, and their small bodies seemed to vibrate with anticipation. Jane felt that way, too.

  Buzzing.

  Buzzed.

  She looked around for Leo but couldn’t see past the people nearest her and, really, she didn’t feel like dealing with him right then anyway.

  When the first mermaid drifted down into the tank—the fish darted away in a sudden bolt—the crowd let out a collective gasp and she was there, a beautiful brunette who was waving and smiling, which had to be hard, in a pink and red polka-dot bikini. Was smiling underwater something they taught you how to do at mermaid camp? Had all of these women who were auditioning been to camp? Or did Beth run her own? Was Jane too old to go?

  Between mermaids, she studied the glass, looking for that starfish she’d seen, and finally found it stuck to the side of the treasure chest of jewels. For a second she thought the journal had to be in there, but then she remembered: the club hadn’t even been around then. Jane knew that sea stars could grow new limbs when they were hurt and, as she watched mermaid after mermaid take their quick turn in the tank, she wondered if maybe she was starting to regenerate missing parts in her own way, too.

  It was sort of heartbreaking how un-mermaidy some of the women were—they were old and misshapen or had straggly hair or wrinkled bellies—but they all got their turn, and sometimes there were surprises. Like right at the end w
hen the skinny old woman with the long white ponytail got in the tank in her black one-piece suit and let her hair loose and swam like she was putting on a mermaid show for real, waving and pretending to be having tea with a blowfish that seemed drawn to the sheen of her floating white hair. Jane would have hired her in a heartbeat.

  Jane walked over to say hi to Beth, who cleared the room with the announcement that she would be calling three or four women tomorrow, and wished she wasn’t a little bit scared of her, but she was. She was scared of how good that hug had felt, scared that Beth was—besides Jane’s father—the one living breathing tie that existed to her mother’s past, scared that if Beth knew about her father and the Tsunami—she must!—she’d never want to talk to Jane again.

  “Did you just come to watch?” Beth asked, pulling her into a hug.

  “I did,” Jane said. “It was fun.”

  “Leo was just here.” She looked around, as if he still might be in the room.

  “Oh,” Jane shook her head. “We’re not—” How to explain? “I just mean, I’m not looking for him. I don’t think—”

  “Sit,” Beth said, and she pointed toward a booth; they moved over to sit.

  “Here’s the thing.” Beth straightened a tent card for Burlesque Night on the table. “Leo worships his father. So the idea that his father might not have done everything he could have to save this sinking ship, well, that’s not so easy for him to accept right now.”

  So it was true about the rent, the rats. Jane stole a glance at the tank, where some fish had decided to come out of hiding. “But why is he so mad at me?”

  “You’re the messenger,” Beth said. “Never a good role.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “You wait. Or you move on. Or both.” She took Jane’s hand and said, “Your father is quite a roller coaster designer, by the way.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Jane said, and Beth said, “Oh, honey. Don’t be. It’s not about one roller coaster or one amusement park or bar. It’s about how to go about things is all. How to do things so that people feel they’re being heard. That’s all Coney Islanders for Coney is really about.”