Bored, I wander to the end of the aisle, where white lights reflect on the long white path that leads to the mall. I want to run down it the way a plane wants to cruise down a runway and take off, so I start to run but then I see the wall of televisions, all tuned to the same station, all showing some black-and-white movie of a Ferris wheel and millions and millions of people on a beach somewhere far away. I stand and watch and forget about my mother and everything as the lights of the amusement park on the televisions twinkle and glow. A man’s voice is narrating the film, saying, “It became known as ‘the playground of the world.’”
“Luna!” my mother is screaming.
“Luna!”
But I don’t turn until she’s by my side, hugging me, holding me, crying. There is a woman standing next to her, a perfect stranger best I can tell, and she says to me that I must never, ever, leave my mother’s side, that I must hold her hand and never let go. The woman wanders off, and my mother pulls me up into her lap and sits in a leather armchair in front of one of the TVs. The Ferris wheel spins and spins and spins....
Jane bumped into her brother sneaking out of the house at midnight that Friday. She had her new swimsuit on under shorts and a T-shirt. It felt good to be wearing new things, and Jane thought she’d have to go shopping with Babette and Rita again sooner than later.
“You’re going?” Jane said. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” Marcus said back. “Since when did you decide you’re so much cooler than me anyway?”
“Give me a break, Marcus.”
They elbowed each other as they pushed through the front door and onto the porch. The sagging window there seemed somehow to have tightened up, and Jane imagined it was because she’d gotten rid of Preemie’s dead weight. The house felt lighter, newer, like it wouldn’t be the worst place to spend another year. Or two. Jane had kept the stuff that held meaning for her—the Is It Human? poster and framed photos and some of the old books and costumes, even the two-headed squirrel. But that was all.
They headed for the boardwalk and turned left when they got there. Jane saw shadows on the beach, the silhouette of a pole of some kind, and a figure atop it.
Tattoo Boy.
He was stringing up a lightbulb that ran to the Anchor via the world’s longest extension cord. The bar had opened up again after the city’s purchase of the land went through, and while there were no guarantees, there was hope.
A moment later a small circle of white light cast a glow over a small portion of the surf and the beach. Bunches of people were suddenly in the water, shrieking and splashing. It looked like everyone from school had turned up.
A host of golden daffodils.
Jane picked up her pace, afraid of missing out, afraid that it would be over—shut down by the cops—before she even got wet.
“Hey,” Babette said when Jane found her on the group’s outskirts. She had a towel around her shoulders but was bone-dry.
Jane looked out at the electric bathers and start to strip.
“You’re really going in?” Babette seemed giddy.
Jane nodded. She was a girl on a mission, a mission to claim some little part of the excitement of the park that was her namesake, of that bygone era.
The water was black, like fuel, and Jane tried hard not to think about everything that lived beneath its surface—electric eels and stingrays and big pulsing jellyfish—as she picked up one of the ropes tethered to the light tower and strode into the surf. It was cold, bracing, and the sand curled around her toes but she pressed on, until she was the farthest person out. The water was still only waist-high, but with each swell she wondered whether she was an idiot, whether she should scream for help right then, before she really needed it. Before it was too late.
Looking out over the water, she saw just a few lights—Staten Island—and she overheard someone behind her say, “Do you know how Staten Island got its name?”
Someone else said, “No,” and the other voice returned with “The Dutchman who saw it from his ship pointed and said, ‘Is stat an island?’”
Jane felt pretty sure that she wouldn’t ever have to swim away from Coney in fear for her life but wondered, still, how long she would be able to hold her breath. She imagined that her mother, a mermaid, had been able to do it for a really long time. But what counted as a really long time?
She inhaled and held it and watched her classmates in the water.
She saw Legs with Minnie propped on his shoulders. She saw H.T.’s floating torso next to a dog-paddling Babette and watched Rubber Rita push Marcus under the water and laugh.
They were frolicking.
There was no other word for it, as silly and old-fashioned as it sounded. And she closed her eyes for a second and opened them again and it was as if she could see the lights of Luna Park and Dreamland and Steeplechase Park right there.
A double-exposed photograph.
It felt as though the water itself had trapped Coney’s history in its molecules and she was steeped in it, soaking it in through her pores, breathing it as if through gills. She thought of all the people who had come to this very place, who had swum in these very waters—millions upon millions—and who had had the time of their life. She had spent the year wishing she could travel back through time and spend just one day there, during the era of the dawn of fun, but that would never happen and maybe that was okay.
Because this felt close.
Something slimy brushed against her leg and she jerked away and started to head back to shore, skin prickling from the cool air and the shock of the reminder of all the murk and mystery beneath the water’s choppy skin.
And me without my bathysphere.
Leo was directly in her path.
“Hey, Looky Lou,” he said. The lightbulb’s glow made his figure a backlit silhouette. It cast silver light on the right side of his wet face as she exhaled.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Oh, victory! Forget your underwear. We’re free.”
I’m still in the department store and the strange lady has scolded me and then left. My mother and I are still sitting in the leather chair and the film has ended again. The credits have rolled for the third time, and the salesman comes over and says, “Ma’am. We’re closing.”
He has been nice to us, playing the film again and again, but he knows we are not buying a TV.
My mother pushes me to get up off her lap and I do so, but then she grabs me and lays me down on the big chair and it turns out it spins and spins and spins and the lights on the ceiling are a swirl of white whipping by.
“Look!” she says. “It’s a human roulette wheel.”
I don’t know what that word means, roulette, but it’s fun.
When I get up, I make sure to hold onto her hand. “The lady said to never let go,” I say. “Never ever.”
My mother pulls her hand from mine, using her other one, and it hurts.
“You can let go,” she says, “as long as you stay close.”
They were standing face-to-face, wet and breathing hard, and she felt certain that if there were no one else around, Tattoo Boy would kiss her again. Or she’d kiss him.
A different kind of kiss, too.
If it didn’t happen tonight, it would happen the next day or the one after. She knew that it would as surely as she knew her own name, as surely as she knew that she’d been lost and then found.
“My name isn’t really Jane,” she said.
Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.
Tattoo Boy smiled lazily, like he already knew what she was going to say and maybe he did. “You don’t say.”
“It’s Luna,” she said. “Luna Jane.”
He lifted an inky arm out of waist-high water and she saw the Gabba Gabba Hey! tattoo for the first time. Had it been there all along? “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Luna.”
She went to shake his hand just as a wave swelled around their bellies and then curled over and crashed hard. They tumbled toward the shore together in a churning f
unnel of white and black, sand and sea, and then stood up—laughing, and still holding hands.
“I think,” Leo said between short, recovering breaths, “that might have been”—another inhale on the tail of a laugh—“Coney’s way of saying . . .”
“I know,” Luna managed, also struggling for air.
Then she licked her salty lips and found solid footing in the sand and nodded. “It’s saying, ‘What took you so long?’”
A NOTE ABOUT HISTORY, CONEY, AND DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB . . .
The Coney Island depicted in Dreamland Social Club is a mix of fact and fiction. The Parachute Jump, The Cyclone, The Wonder Wheel . . . these things actually exist on Coney Island. As did Dreamland, Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, and the Thunderbolt.
But The Anchor, Wonderland, and Morelli’s, while inspired by real places, are entirely fictional. The Coral Room is even more fictional, if it is possible to be such a thing, and Coney Island High bears no resemblance to Coney Island’s Lincoln High School.
Why? Because I wanted to take liberties with certain kinds of locations and did not want to mess with actual Coney institutions while doing so.
The Anchor, just as one example, is very much inspired by Ruby’s Bar, a glorious dive bar on the boardwalk that lost its lease just weeks before I sat down to write this note. I adored Ruby’s. My husband and I were there on our first date, and celebrated our engagement there some months later. Its closing has been devastating to all who know and love Coney. I created the Anchor as a sort of stand-in because my characters’ relationships with the bar needed to be complex and, like the bar’s fate, entirely in my control.
The fact of the matter is that there are, in the world, many more qualified chroniclers of Coney Island history than me. Readers who want to know more will be entirely mesmerized by books including Charles Denson’s Coney Island: Lost and Found and Coney Island: The People’s Playground by Michael Immerso. There is also a riveting film about Coney Island in the PBS American Experience series. I highly recommend you seek out some of these sources.
One final note: I may have manipulated some details regarding the item linked to Dreamland Social Club’s “Bath” key. Interested parties can turn to Adam Green’s New Yorker article entitled “Deep” (April 11, 2005) for the whole story.
—TA
STEP RIGHT UP . . .
. . . and behold the amazing creatures who lent their extraordinary skills to the cause of the Dreamland Social Club!
Sara Zarr and Siobhan Vivian—two fire-breathing beauties who skillfully singed early drafts.
David Dunton—a veritable Human Blockhead, who gamely incorporates into his act whatever I dream up.
My husband, Nick, the Strong Man, for constant, tireless support.
Bob, the marvelous and mysterious nine-headed beast, whose miraculous feats defy categorization.
And Julie Strauss-Gabel, the Snake Charmer, who coaxed this story out of a very deep, very dark place.
Dreamland Social Club Page 28