Dreamland Social Club

by Tara Altebrando

  “But what does it mean?” It was her mother’s final message, the last thing she’d written in this book she’d kept for years.

  “Nothing, really.” Leo shrugged. “It’s supposedly some variation on the whole ‘Gooble gobble, we accept her’ thing. I don’t know why they made it gabba. I don’t think anyone does.”

  Jane felt sadness creep in. It wasn’t a clue to who her mother was. It was more old carny crap. Her voice started to shake and crumble when she said, “I guess I thought it would tell me more about who she was. Or who to be.”

  Leo squeezed her close as she started to cry, and the sound of it echoed inside the bathysphere, rippled through the air around them as if through water.

  “You know what?” The excitement in Leo’s voice filled the whole echoey chamber. “You know who she is. Or was. But no”—he shook his head—“I’m sticking with is. Present tense. Because she’s right here. I mean, God, she’s not even my mother and I can’t stop thinking about her. About Trip to the Moon. Elephant Hotel. I want to fastforward to when I have kids of my own just so I can play those games with them, you know?”

  Jane was still wiping tears, and Leo pulled her even closer and kissed her—sweetly, softly—full on the mouth. It only lasted a few seconds, but Jane felt as though the whole world had frozen, the moon lost its pull, the tides halted. When it was done, Leo pulled a few inches away and put on a deep voice. “This is your captain.”

  Jane felt the start of laughter.

  “This is a really bad storm or”—Leo laughed—“whatever it is he says.”

  She laughed now, too, and imagined them falling and falling, down into the darkest seas, bumping up against silver eels and translucent fish the likes of which the world had never seen.

  “You already know who to be, Jane.” He sighed and let her fall soft against his chest, and she imagined them floating up and up and up again, then resurfacing, into the light.

  Triumphant.

  Into countless tomorrows.

  CHAPTER thirteen

  MONTHS HAD PASSED and still no one but Marcus had seen Jane’s mermaid costume. She’d carefully covered it with a trash bag and carried it down to the staging area for the parade.

  “Well,” Babette said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Jane lifted the trash bag off, and the mermaid’s shimmering skin caught the light and nearly blinded them.

  Babette studied it. “Holy crap.”

  “That is awesome.” H.T. came closer to inspect the costume as Jane adjusted some of the fabric.

  “Nice job!” Babette gave Jane a pat on the back of her leg.

  “Thanks,” Jane said, and then Rita came over. She was carrying a heart-shaped flower arrangement with an “RIP Mermaid” sash across it and wearing an old-fashioned hat, the kind with a veil that came down in front. She lifted the black mesh off her face to say, “Cool costume.”

  “And I have to say the boys did a good job on the bier,” Babette said, turning to the wagon they’d painted black and silver.

  A girl walked over to them then, and Babette looked up, squinting, and said, “Can we help you?”

  “It’s me,” she said. “Debbie.”

  Jane saw now that she looked almost exactly the same. Just without the hair. It had been a distraction, but it had also been her main identifying trait, and it was gone. “You look the same,” Jane said. “I mean . . .”

  Debbie nodded. “I know. It’s weird. I thought I’d look so different, but I’m still me. Thank God, right?” Jane hadn’t actually noticed how pretty she was, had just been too distracted by the hair.

  “How’d your mother take it?” Jane asked.

  “She’ll come around,” Debbie said, and Jane thought she saw the start of something in her eyes—tears—but then it was gone and replaced by a smile.

  Jane changed into the costume, slipping her tail and fin on under her skirt, then ditching the skirt, then taking off her shirt to reveal the seashell top. She perched a crown of pearls on her head and turned back to take in the scene.

  Sea creatures made from papier-mâché filled the air in every direction; one was long and blue with a mouth that could hold Babette. It looked like a snake but had fins that wagged in the wind. A huge gray octopus was being held in the air by nine people—one at the center and one at each of its tentacles. Another monster was green and scaly, like the beast from 20,000 fathoms, and Jane took a quick look around for a bathysphere but found Leo instead.

  “Nice job,” he said.

  “You think?” She felt suddenly naked.

  “I think.” He smiled crookedly. “Though a true Looky Lou would’ve just come to watch.”

  Jane nodded and smiled. The sun was hot right then; her skin, too. “Maybe I’m not a Looky Lou after all.”

  Leo had to go round up his dirge band, and she felt a sort of tug when he walked away. But everything had changed since the bathysphere. She no longer had to doubt what was there in the space between them.

  It just was.

  Legs helped Jane, who was coated in sunscreen, up onto the bier, and when she lay down she was grateful that it was at least a little bit breezy, a little bit overcast. And then she was rolling and it was time for them to join the parade. Two of the school band’s trombone players started to play Leo’s dirge, and they walked down their side street and turned onto Surf Avenue.

  At first, the noise of spectators was pretty scattered, but with each block the noise got thicker and thicker, and by the time they neared Nathan’s—Jane was occasionally opening her eyes for a split second to steal peeks, plus Babette was giving her updates—it was out of control. Between the noise of the subway, and the crowds, and the dirge—not to mention the buzzing in Jane’s ears coming from somewhere inside—it was almost too much. She heard a few people say, “Check out the mermaid funeral,” and she heard Leo’s dirge, which wasn’t entirely sad but somehow full of longing, and not exactly the bad kind. Like the mermaid only wished she could climb up off her funeral bier and dive back into the sea.

  Over and over again, she had to fight the urge to smile, to say cheese at the cameras she knew were pointed at her.

  It was a funeral, after all.

  A funeral that took hours. She couldn’t believe how slowly the whole thing moved, how much time was spent hanging around, just lying there and waiting, but it was what it was.

  Finally, they turned off Surf Avenue and headed toward the boardwalk down another side street packed with spectators. Jane stole a peek and saw a blur of sunglasses and cameras and baseball hats and sun hats and smiling faces and it felt like maybe it was what Coney used to be like, back in the day—and maybe would be again.

  After an impromptu party on the beach, Jane went home to change back into normal clothes and grab the journal before heading to the Coral Room, where she found Beth sitting at a table by the aquarium, doing some paperwork. There were two women in swimsuits in the tank. Jane stopped and watched their golden hair glimmer in the underwater lights, watched the way they formed a circle with their two bodies, hands touching feet and feet touching hands, backs arched back.

  Beth turned to look at the aquarium. “It’s mermaid practice.”

  Jane started to move forward.

  “Big show tonight,” Beth added.

  “They look great,” Jane said, then she took her mother’s journal out of her bag. “I found this,” she said. “I thought you might want to look through it.”

  “Oh my gosh!” Beth took the book in her hands and then rubbed her palm over the cover. She opened to the first page. “I haven’t seen this thing in so long.” Her eyes ranged over page after page. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” Jane nodded.

  “I’ve been thinking about her a lot,” Beth said. “About why she left for art school and never came back.”

  Jane just waited.

  “I can’t help but think it was because she wanted more. For you.” She shook her head, waved a hand dismissively. “I know it’s crazy.
She hadn’t even had you yet. Hadn’t even met your father. But maybe she knew she wasn’t going to meet him here.”

  “But why not?” Jane had met Leo. She’d met Leo here.

  “Most of the smart ones leave.” Beth closed the journal. “You’ll do it, too.”

  The blue dress was one of the first ones she’d found in that chest in the attic, but it was so dressy that she’d never found an occasion to wear it. Tonight would be the night. She slipped into its silky blue fabric and felt like she was traveling back in time; in the mirror, her features, too, seemed somehow transformed. More angular, more old-fashioned. But more herself, more now, at the same time.

  When she walked into the kitchen, Marcus and her father both looked up.

  “Wow,” Marcus said.

  Her dad came over to kiss her forehead. “Lovely.” He pulled back, holding her by her shoulders. “And that mermaid! It was spectacular!”

  Jane’s father and brother were going to the ball, too, but weren’t ready yet and Jane didn’t want to wait, so she walked back up to the boardwalk, to the roller rink building, where the party was already in full swing. A disco ball was sprinkling light on the crowd, dotting people with pink and blue and green lights like raindrops. Jane saw a tuna roll dancing with a clam on a half shell and thought that maybe next year, instead of a funeral, she’d like to make a float that celebrated something instead of mourned it.

  She saw the seahorse first, then the rest of Leo came into focus. The hair on the back of his head was damp with sweat, clinging to his neck in pointy curves, and when he turned, he smiled. “I’ve been looking for you!” he shouted over the music. There was a band onstage playing some snazzy burlesque song.

  “Why?” Jane shouted.

  “Because I’m up next.”

  He disappeared into the crowd then, and the band onstage finished their number and walked off and Leo appeared in their place. He was carrying a saw in one hand and a stool in the other, and he put the stool down and sat in front of a microphone. From his back pocket, he plucked his bow and held it in his right hand at the ready. He nodded off to the right, and a man came onstage and pulled a movie screen up out of a metal tube and latched it onto a hook. Then Leo nodded to someone at the back of the room somewhere and a funnel of projection light filled the air.

  Orphans in the Surf appeared in shaky black-and-white just as Leo’s saw started to sing and sway. It sounded like a woman singing a wordless song of longing, like she’d give anything to be with those children—to be able to take them in her arms and tell them they weren’t orphans after all—but couldn’t. It was wrenching and beautiful and it was coming from him. He played with his eyes closed, not even watching the way the saw bobbed and bent, and it made Jane feel like her heart might burst out of her chest. Just when she thought it was over, because the film was that short, it started again. And then again. The effect of showing the footage on a loop was heartbreaking, and Jane only wished that the children had played a game other than Ring Around the Rosie, something that would have lifted them up and not dragged them down. Leo’s saw seemed to sing ashes, ashes, each and every time.

  “Something weird just happened,” she heard Babette say when Leo had left the stage. “Bend down.”

  Jane complied.

  “H.T. just asked me out.”

  Somehow this didn’t surprise Jane at all, didn’t seem that weird. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘For real?’”

  “And he said?”

  Onstage Jane saw that Leo had returned with his band; the drummer clicked off a count with his sticks.

  “He said, ‘For real.’ ”

  H.T. appeared and took Babette’s hand and led her into the middle of the crowd, and Jane turned to watch Leo. This time it was him—and not his saw—doing the singing.

  “Come with the love-light gleaming /In your dear eyes of blue./ Meet me in Dreamland, sweet, dreamy Dreamland./There let my dreams come true.”

  What’s the best thing about being you?

  She never had answered that final question for herself or anybody else and now her mind seemed to travel to the tips of all ten of her fingers and all ten of her toes, and up to the top of the Parachute Jump and the Thunderbolt and back. It seemed to climb the Cyclone and scream out in a fiery rage and then dive back down into the bathysphere, passing mermaids and turtles on the way, even saying hello to the bird on Nellie’s hat. It shot up to the North Pole and then on up to the moon, where it was serenaded by Selenites, and back. It was searching out an answer that was right there—just not in any way she could verbalize. And then there was a memory—of a day spent shopping, of a wall of televisions, of the lights and minarets of Luna Park.

  Leo had brought buckets and shovels and all sorts of weird plastic gadgets to the beach that night, and together he and Jane started to build a sand castle Coney, even though it was dark. When she found a sun hat among the stuff in his beach bag, she reached out and put it on his head. She said, “What sound makes you happy?”

  He was molding sand, but he looked up with a suspicious smirk. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering.” She shrugged and returned to her own bucket, and after a moment he said, “The sound of you laughing.”

  Jane’s hands were gritty and wet and Birdie’s dress was covered in clumpy sand. She wiped them off as she shot him a look.

  “I mean it,” he said, shrugging and looking away like he was shy, though she knew better by now.

  “Okay,” she said, feeling a warmth in her heart despite the cold wind off the ocean. “What was the last dream you had that you remember?”

  “There were rats in my house. I was trying to escape.”

  Jane looked up, skeptical.

  “I’m serious!”

  “Name one thing you want to do before you die.”

  “Have a kid.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  Jane hadn’t ever actually imagined having a kid, but thought that yes, someday, that would be nice. Like Leo said, she could play those old games with her child, keep that memory alive.

  “Too heavy?” Leo asked.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of drink a cocktail out of a pineapple.” She asked him, “What’s the best thing about being you?”

  “I don’t know.” He stopped and looked around. “I think it might be this. The fact that I grew up here. Makes you not take anything for granted.”

  He still hadn’t built anything that looked anything at all like the Shoot the Chutes. It was dark, but the relative lack of light wasn’t the only problem.

  “How in the hell did she even do this?” Leo asked as another bucket of sand fell away in a series of small landslides.

  “I don’t know.” Jane was having no better luck with a Monkey Theater. “Maybe I don’t even remember it right, you know? Maybe I made it up.”

  “Don’t say that,” Leo said. He was kneeling in the sand in his jeans, scooping wildly.

  “No, it’s okay if I did,” Jane said. “I mean, I was really young. Who knows?”

  “You could ask your brother.”

  She thought about that for a second. “Nah,” she said. “It’d ruin it.”

  Leo started to build the Shoot the Chutes again.

  “Here.” Jane tossed him a smaller bucket. “Try this one.”

  They worked quietly for a while, then Jane said, “That song you played on the saw at the party, and tonight . . . She used to sing that to me, the Dreamland song.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When I was little and didn’t want to go to bed because I wanted to be with her, she’d tell me that she’d meet me in Dreamland, and she’d lull me to sleep. I’m pretty sure she said it right before she died, too. That she’d see me there.”

  Leo looked up, pushed some hair out of his eyes with sandy hands. “Are you trying to kill me, Jane?”

  Luna, she almost said. The name’s Luna.

  He wiped sand off his hands and she did, too, and they lay
back on their blanket and Leo said, “I forget sometimes.”

  “Forget what?”

  “That it’s a beach.” He shook his head and laughed. “Seems like an awful lot of fuss over a beach.”

  CHAPTER fourteen

  SO, “BABETTE SAID AT LUNCH. “Friday. Electric Bathing.”

  It was the last week of school, and Jane was a little sad that she wouldn’t be seeing much of their cafeteria table for a few months. The good news was that she’d be back next year. Talks between the city and Loki were ongoing. Her father was still in the mix, as was his Lunacy ride.

  “Are you both going?” Babette asked.

  “Definitely,” Rita said.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said.

  “Oh, you’re going,” Babette said.

  “Hell yeah, you’re going,” Rita said.

  But Jane tried to picture herself swimming in the ocean; there was more than one problem. “I don’t own a bathing suit.”

  Her friends started laughing then, and at first Jane felt like her cheeks were going to crumble and give way to tears, but then it struck her as funny, too.

  Hilarious, even.

  Babette said, “You can borrow one of mine,” and they all started laughing even harder, and Jane said, “Do you have anything in black?” and they laughed even harder. Then finally, when they stopped, Rita said, “I guess we’ll go shopping.”

  I’m in a department store with my mother and she’s looking at big, shiny things. Dishwashers and clothes washers and stoves and refrigerators. I’m looking at my twisted reflection in the stainless-steel doors and looking warped and pushed and pulled and horrific. “Mommy,” I say, “I look funny.” She crouches down next to me and says, “There are worse things in life than looking funny,” and then she goes back to looking at the machines.