Dreamland Social Club

by Tara Altebrando

  “So you don’t hold it against me?” Jane said, almost crying with relief.

  “Of course not.”

  Jane reached into her bag and took out her keychain and isolated the one labeled “Bath.” She held it out and a smile crept across Beth’s face.

  “Do you know what it means?” Jane’s heart thumped wildly.

  Beth sat back in her chair. “I know this is going to seem terribly cruel of me. But your mother had a thing about secrets and keeping them.”

  Jane wasn’t sure she understood what was happening. “Do you mean that you know what it is and you’re not going to tell me?”

  Beth seemed to be considering what to do one more time. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said finally, and then she fake-zippered her mouth shut.

  “Please,” Jane said. “You have to.”

  Beth unzipped her lips and said, “As your mother would have said, where’s the fun in that?”

  CHAPTER six

  JANE HAD NEVER PLAYED HOOKY BEFORE, but when she woke up Tuesday morning, head throbbing, she told her dad she felt sick and wanted to stay home. He had better things to worry about and so said only, “I’ll call it in.”

  She crawled back into bed, and soon the house was quiet and then it turned out she couldn’t sleep. She had the “Bath” key on her night table and she kept turning it over in her hands, as if it might suddenly develop a mouth and tell her what it opened.

  Eventually, she pulled on some clothes and went out into the yard and down to Birdie’s Bavarian Bar and started to pull out costumes while also setting aside a few things that would go on her museum list.

  Looking at the bird getups, it occurred to her that maybe cutting them up and using them to make a mermaid costume wasn’t the best idea. To help her decide, she put one of them on. She picked a green one—the same color as the mermaid doll’s fin—and then she found the matching headpiece, a feathery plume—and stood in front of the old mirror. She looked ridiculous. And so it was decided that she’d set aside one costume to save for the family—maybe for a Halloween party somewhere down the line—and then another for the museum, just in case they’d want that sort of thing. That left her three costumes to work with. Green. Orange. And yellow. Perfect.

  It was possible the whole mermaid funeral would never happen, of course. But if it did she wanted to be ready. She wanted to prove to anyone who ever doubted it that she could be a mermaid.

  And a damn good one.

  So she put on some old records and found some scissors and pins and grabbed the mermaid doll from her room for inspiration and got to work. Eventually, she moved the operation out to the yard when it was clear that the sequins and glitter could not be contained. Soon the small lawn—which was actually beginning to turn green—sparkled in the sun.

  Marcus stepped out into the yard after school and slumped into a metal chair that was covered with a layer of green seeds that had fallen off a tree behind the bait-and-tackle shop. Jane had quickly bagged up a lot of the dead vines and leaves in order to have more room to work in and had uncovered, in the process, a white swan, a birdbath, and a two-headed gnome. Marcus rested his hand on the gnome head closest to his chair, as if it were a pet dog.

  “So what’s the deal with the Dreamland Social Club?” he said after he watched her work for a while.

  “How should I know?” She was cutting a fin, this one out of the green sparkling costume. She’d already made most of the bodice and only prayed it would fit when she actually tried it on.

  “I thought you belonged,” he said.

  “I don’t know why you’d think that,” she said, and it felt sort of wrong, since her mother was his mother, too, and she wanted him to know, but it was also sort of fun.

  “Whatever,” he said. “It’s not like I really care.”

  After a pause during which Jane’s scissors could be heard splicing fabric, he said, “I got my first letter.”

  Jane stopped cutting and looked up, eyebrows questioning.

  “NYU,” he said. “I’m in.”

  “That’s awesome,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “I was thinking of living on campus.”

  Jane nodded and went back to cutting. “You should.”

  Marcus said, “You’re happy we might be staying, aren’t you?”

  “I guess,” she said.

  He took a tree seed off the arm of the chair and split it and tried to get it to helicopter though the air, with moderate success. “I see it,” he said. “The thing with Leo.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Hard to say,” he said. “But something.”

  “Well, it’s not that,” she said, wanting to move on. “Or it’s not just that. Not that that is ever even going to happen. I’m sick of moving. It’s getting boring. It’s nice to feel like I have roots here. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though.” He patted the gnome’s head. “If you’re staying, you can’t go on like this. With all this old crap around.”

  “I was thinking of giving some of it to the museum,” she said. “I started a list.”

  He looked up at the back of the house. “Maybe you can just airlift the whole place over.”

  “So you don’t mind?”

  “You know me.” Marcus shrugged. “Not the sentimental type.”

  She really did have to talk to Grandpa Claverack about the horse, but she had been letting herself be easily sidetracked, since she was sort of dreading having to see Freddy and his ponytail again. But it was the right thing to do to tell the old man he could have it, to maybe even show him the entry in Birdie’s journal that explained it all, or at least explained some of it. Just thinking of Birdie’s journal awakened that old itch.

  And my God, the doodling.

  “Okay, so here’s question, Mr. Unsentimental. If, totally hypothetically, you found Mom’s diary”—Jane lifted the fin-shaped fabric—“would you read it?”

  “You found Mom’s diary?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “It really is hypothetical. I think it’s probably gone.”

  Marcus tilted his head. “I would probably read it. But just out of curiosity. And probably only once.”

  Jane looked up now. “And then you’d what, throw it out?”

  “It would depend, I guess. On if it was any good, if it said anything meaningful. But I’ve read some diaries in my day, and most of them suck.”

  “Whose diaries have you read?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He looked at his watch and got up. “I guess what I’m saying is, I’d have pretty low expectations. And I certainly wouldn’t expect it to solve the great mystery of life.”

  On another day maybe she would have argued with him, would have said he was wrong. But maybe he had a point. There were things worth keeping and things worth letting go of, and figuring out which was which wasn’t that easy. Do you save an old journal if it’s boring? Do you save an old bar if it’s got rats?

  Her fin was ready to be attached to the tail bit that she’d laid out on the table, so she pinned it in a few places, then slipped on the whole sequined concoction. Her entire lower half sparkled in the sun.

  “It’s cool,” Marcus said before heading back into the house. “But the fin needs to be, I don’t know, firmer?”

  A bell tinkled overhead when, a few minutes later, she pushed open the door of the bait-and-tackle shop next door in search of some stiff wire. There was no one at the cash register, but a male voice in some back room called out, “Right with ya!”

  She started to cruise the aisles, looking for something that might help her fin stay finlike. She passed stacks of crab and lobster traps and endless spools of fishing line. There were rubber worms and tackle boxes and hooks as far as the eye could see. A refrigerator-freezer in the back right corner held boxes labeled FROZEN SEA BAIT. There were knives and scales and lamps and batteries and fishing rods and rod bags and a million other items Jane had never seen before. Overwhelmed, she wondered wh
ether maybe she’d do better at a regular hardware store or a 99-cent store. Just because she was trying to make a mermaid didn’t mean a shop for fishermen would have the right stuff.

  “Can I help you?”

  Jane turned and saw an old man standing at the end of the aisle. He wore black pants tucked into big rubber boots and had white hair and wore a black-and-gold sailor’s cap. He was smoking a pipe, and the woody aroma suddenly filled the room.

  “I’m not sure,” Jane said, thinking maybe she’d just back away down the aisle and out the door.

  “You’re that gal who lives next door,” he said.

  Jane nodded, then realized she shouldn’t have. What if he was a psycho? Now he knew where she lived.

  “Preemie’s grandkid, right?” He puffed his pipe.

  “Right.” It was too late to deny it.

  “I miss that idiot.” He shook his head. “Couldn’t fish to save his life but acted like he was Hemingway.” He looked Jane over. “How about you? What are you trying to catch?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that.” She eyed a box of rubber worms and decided to charge ahead. She was here. She might as well see if he had anything that would work. “You know the Mermaid Parade?”

  He raised his brows at her, like she was an idiot.

  “I’m making a costume for a mermaid funeral.” It probably sounded dumb, but she kept going. “And I just need some wire to help the fin stay fin-shaped.”

  “A mermaid funeral.” He puffed and was momentarily blurred by white smoke. “Sounds sort of kooky.”

  “It is.”

  He shrugged and said, “Well, I guess we better have a look around.”

  As he started to poke through bins and weave through the aisles of his tiny store, Jane thought to ask, “Did you know my mother?”

  He stopped his poking and said, “I did. But only when she was a girl, you know. It broke Preemie’s heart when she died.” He looked up at her. “Yours, too, I’d imagine.”

  “Was he an asshole?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “The mouth on you!”

  “It’s what everyone calls him.”

  “He wasn’t an asshole.” Back to poking with a shake of the head. “He was mostly just having fun, but he didn’t know that his fun was sometimes at the expense of others. Like his daughter’s. But I liked him enough.” He held up a spool. “This should do the trick.”

  Jane studied the wire he handed her and thought that yes, it would. She trailed him to the register and he said, “Oh, and don’t let me forget the key.”

  “The key?”

  “Your grandfather’s key. No use my hanging onto it now that you’re here.”

  “Oh, a spare key to the house, you mean?” Jane was absentmindedly fingering some rubber worms.

  “No, my dear, the horse.”

  No one answered the door at the Claveracks, but Jane was pretty sure she heard a TV inside, so she knocked louder.

  Then louder.

  Then louder.

  “What is that infernal knocking?” Grandpa Claverack said when he whipped the door open.

  Jane held up the key.

  “Well, if you had a key, why’d you knock?” he said, and then he turned to shuffle away.

  “No, Mr. Claverack.” She’d almost said “Grandpa.” “You don’t understand. It’s the key to the horse.”

  He turned.

  “Your horse.” She pointed across the street in the direction of Preemie’s house and the bait-and-tackle shop. “When he told you to ‘go fish,’ it didn’t mean the key was in the ocean. It was in the—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m Preemie’s granddaughter,” she backtracked. “I thought you should do the honors.” She turned the key in the air to make it clear. “Unlock the horse. So you can take it.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

  It took longer to get the old man down the block between their houses than Jane would have thought possible. Halfway there, she thought she should run home and see if her father or Marcus was there, so they could help her carry the old carousel maker the rest of the way, but she was afraid, too, of leaving him—a wisp—on the street by himself. Not in this breezy weather.

  Her father poked his head out onto the porch while Jane was helping Claverack up the stairs. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I’ve got the key.” Jane held it up. “This is Mr. Claverack.”

  In the living room, the horse was reflecting sunlight from the window. Its coat seemed shinier, its mane more alive. Even the horse’s eyes seemed to have more life in them, like they sparked with recognition of their creator.

  “There she is,” Claverack said. “Still a beaut after all these years.”

  He stepped up to the horse then and ran a shaky hand down its hide, then down its mane. “They just don’t make’em like this anymore.”

  Jane and her father stood back a bit, letting him have his moment. But when his fingers found the chain around the horse’s tail, Jane stepped forward. “The lock’s right there,” she said. “And we’ll figure out how to get the horse to your house, or to your buyer.”

  “You do it,” he said. “Knees don’t bend as well as they used to.”

  Jane looked at her father, who shrugged, and then she went to the lock, inserted the key, and opened it. Gingerly, she took the thick chain and unwound it so that it was no longer holding the horse. The heavy links slumped by the radiator in a pile.

  “That bastard really said I could have it?”

  He looked at Jane, and she could see something missing in his eyes. They looked a lot like the horse’s eyes right then, without memories or proper focus.

  Jane said, “He did.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do with it?” he said. “It won’t fit through the front door of my place.”

  “Your son said you had a buyer.”

  “Not me, no,” he said. “He’s the one with the buyer.” He studied her again. “I just wanted to see her again. She should be in a museum, don’t you think?” He sighed and said again, “They just don’t make them like this anymore.”

  “Actually,” Jane said, “I do think it should be in a museum.”

  “Well then, get on the horn.”

  “But what about your son, and the European buyer?”

  Claverack rested a hand on the horse’s nose and seemed to look right into its empty eyes and see something that Jane couldn’t. When he looked back at her, he said, “They’ll live.”

  CHAPTER seven

  THINGS WERE SUDDENLY very grim on Coney the next morning. Word spread quickly through homeroom that a six-year-old girl had been hit by a stray bullet from a robbery in the building next to hers the night before and was dead. That very same night, a famous competitive eater—he’d won the hot-dog-eating contest at Nathan’s a number of times—had been killed in a hit-and-run accident on Surf Avenue at the age of 103. And while it shouldn’t have inspired nearly as much grief as the other two tragedies, the announcement that Wonderland was going to be dismantled and packed up on Saturday seemed to be the thing that pushed everyone over the edge. Even Mr. Simmons seemed incapable of talking about it without getting visibly upset. “It’s been here forever,” he kept saying, which everyone knew wasn’t exactly true, but apparently it felt that way.

  In class he dimmed the lights and pulled a movie screen down from above the blackboard and said, “No field trip today, but I managed to get my hands on a few more Edison films with a Coney connection. He filmed some reenactments of the Boer War, which was also one of the larger spectacles ever staged at Dreamland.” He seemed to lose his train of thought for a second and just said, “Let’s watch.”

  He stood by the projector set up in the room’s center aisle, and its tube of light shot through the room to the screen. The words, white on black, said “BATTLE OF MAFEKING, April 28, 1900, Thomas A. Edison.”

  It was even harder to see what was going on here than
it had been with Topsy. There were two groups of people in a field—one line in the distance and another in the foreground with their backs to the camera—and there were frequent bursts of smoke, presumably made by gunfire, and then one group appeared to charge forward and the other retreated but not fast enough, and they clashed. Some men rode by in the foreground on horses.

  Immediately following that reel came Capture of a Boer Battery, in which a bunch of people stood in a field firing into the distance. Then a group of men on horseback charged at them from the distance and captured some of them, and then you could see that the men on horses were wearing kilts. They were taking the Boer peasants prisoner.

  After that came one called Boers Bringing in British Prisoners—Edison sure was fascinated by the Boer Wars—which was basically just a bunch of people walking through a field together, with some horses. The man at the back took off his cap and waved it, as if to signify victory.

  “Exploitation,” Mr. Simmons said, after the last film was over and he asked Babette to get the lights. “We talked about exploitation, meaning to treat poorly or take advantage of, earlier, but there is a second definition, which is merely the act of making some area of land or water more profitable or productive or useful. There isn’t, in those cases, any wrongdoing or ill intent.

  “People have been trying to exploit land and water the whole world over as long as humans have been roaming the planet.” He was pacing the aisles. “To raise more, better crops, for example. To find oil to fuel our cities. To provide seaside amusements and services on beaches much like our own. So Coney has exploited and also been exploited. And, as we all know, it is still happening now.”

  He seemed distracted, unfocused, like he’d sort of forgotten what he had been planning on teaching. “Uh, Mr. Simmons,” Leo said. “Why bore us to death with the Boer War?”

  “Africa,” Mr. Simmons said, “in the nineteenth century was the victim of an unabashed landgrab by the more wealthy, industrialized nations of Europe. France, Germany, Italy, and even Belgium carved up Africa arbitrarily. And the Boers, understandably, didn’t like it. It was their land. But then again, they—the Boers—were Dutch settlers. They’d just gotten there first.” He looked meaningfully at Leo, and Leo said, “Is this a call to arms, Mr. Simmons?”