Dream Factory

by BARKLEY, BRAD

  They sit near us in the grass, Ella and Prince Charming, and Amy right behind them. Mark (he has started wearing his official Disney name tag when we aren’t in costume) is telling them more from his storehouse of Disney trivia. Did they know that the only three attractions working on opening day in 1971 were the Swiss Family Treehouse, the Jungle Cruise, and the Tropical Serenade? That only Bill Clinton and George W. Bush recorded their own voices for the Hall of Presidents? He keeps talking, and I keep thinking that he looks like a male model during the Renaissance. Someone says he should be in charge, the new Walt Disney, and he smiles and says he just might, and then there is that question again, What are you going to do?

  Jesse says he wants to be a stuntman who specializes in falling from buildings and crashing through walls.

  “They specialize?” Amy says, looking at him.

  He nods. “Just like doctors except, you know, instead of pediatrics it’s like getting shot or walking on trains. The train walking, that’s a little hard to practice.” On her turn Amy says that she always wanted to teach high school English or band, since she plays the oboe. Prince Charming is going to major in business management. I’m sitting there feeling like we are talking about our Halloween costumes this year, not our entire lives. Why am I not ready for all of this? What’s wrong with me? Cassie starts talking then, on and on about Brown, about her scholarship, about her triple major. Her plans seem so much bigger than anyone else’s that I can feel the rest of us shrinking in comparison.

  Finally it’s Amy who interrupts her, though I know all of us, even me, are thinking the same thing.

  “What are you doing here ?” Amy asks her, then blushes. “I mean, that’s not meant to be bitchy or anything. I’m just curious.”

  Cass smiles. “Listen,” she says, “I live in Florida. Around here Disney is like the world’s biggest sorority and fraternity, all rolled into one. Later on I just mention this place, it’s like I’m part of the club. It’ll open doors.”

  I wonder about that, the idea that the world is just a big private club full of secret doors. I think about how my parents used to be, the ones I see in the photo albums, back when they were attending all the conventions, dressing up in costumes. Back when they were giving me and my brother our oddball names. They weren’t much older then than I am now. They are smiling in all those pictures, laughing and silly, until someone told them that they would never be able to join the club if they kept acting like that. “Grow up,” someone said, and they did, and they got to join the club, buy the house, own the cars and the pool. The only trade-off—you have to give up the costumes and the laughing.

  “Okay, Luke S-stands-for-something Krause,” Cass says, “your turn.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t apply to any colleges, not yet. I don’t know what I want to do. Maybe I’ll make a career of Dale.”

  “Like that phantom guy,” Amy says.

  “He made a career of Dale?”

  “No, dumbhead, you’re Dale. But he made a career of someone. I mean, how much would that suck?”

  Cass shakes her head, frowning. “Luke, stop messing around. Tell them about your dad’s business.”

  “You seem to know as much as me. You tell them.”

  I mean it to be sarcastic, but she doesn’t hear it that way, and she starts in telling them about my dad’s company, how he went public last year and made all this money in stocks, how he did the drilling for the university, how he started with nothing and made himself rich. “Just like in the movies,” she says. I sit there the whole time like I’m Exhibit A, on display. And what can I say? Cass knows all this stuff because I told her all of it the first night I met her. I told her because I was trying to impress her with my father’s money and success, like everything he has to show for his life is a flashy car I can borrow and ride around in, honking the horn, pretending it’s mine. And the whole time she is talking, I can’t look at Ella. For whatever reason, I can’t. But I can feel her looking at me.

  Cass is finishing her sales pitch of me. “And while we’re sitting in a dorm eating ramen noodles,” she says, her hand on my shoulder, “this guy is going to be starting out at fifty thousand a year, with his own office, and driving a company truck. I mean, how cool is that?”

  All true, all true of Ben before me, all part of my opening night bragfest to Cassie. Now the whole idea of it makes me feel stupid, like all I’ll ever do is play grown-up, as opposed to actually growing up. “Well, I don’t know,” I say before I even realize I’m saying it out loud.

  “You don’t know what?” Cass says, her hand moving across my back.

  “I don’t know about any of it. If I want to do that.”

  “You have to do that,” she says. “The rest of us would kill for a job like that.”

  “I hope I’m making that much, like, when I die,” Amy says. “I’d buy ten cats and a motorcycle. And a pool.”

  “Cass is right, dude,” Robin Hood says. “Starting at fifty K? That totally rocks.”

  “I know,” I say. “But . . . I don’t know. Maybe I just want to do nothing for a while. Just bum around or something. See things.”

  “Okay, right now we dress up like cartoon characters and shake hands with little kids all day. For minimum wage,” Cass says. “That’s your nothing. That’s your bumming around.”

  “And about a hundred pairs of shoes,” Amy says.

  Suddenly everyone has joined in, saying I have to take a job like that, just have to, and pretty soon it starts to feel like it does at dinner on Sunday afternoons, when my father and Ben start in talking about the same things: how they will position me, how I need field experience, how much I could learn from six months in the front office. Talking and talking about me, forgetting that I’m sitting there. Cass slides her hand down my arm and squeezes, still talking, while Amy and Jesse keep listing all the things they would buy if they could, and in the middle of all of it, I look over and see Ella, smiling at something Mark is saying to her, but then cutting her gaze at me, holding it, slowly shaking her head while her mouth forms one word: No.

  Back at the dorm I get messages that I have missed three calls from home. That happens a lot because we are out so much, really just using the dorm for sleep and showers and almost nothing else. Plus, I’m in the costume most of the day and couldn’t even take a call if I was sitting right beside the phone. Usually I just avoid the calls because I know what they will be—my mother telling me that this could lead to other acting jobs if I wanted it to, and my father telling me about the latest brilliant thing Ben said in a meeting. I wad up the messages, throw them into the trash.

  That night I slip out of the dorm again, the clock tower showing it to be after midnight. And as usual, I find Ella sitting on the bench behind the castle, in the shadows of the leaves. We’ve met out here twice more since that first night, just sitting and talking—in whispers so we don’t get busted. I sit beside her, nudge her knee with mine.

  “Luke, I need to tell you—”

  “Wait . . . what did you mean today?”

  She kicks off a flip-flop, then slides it back on, kicks it off again. “When?”

  “At the picnic. Everyone was telling me how great my life was going to be, and you just looked at me and shook your head. You said, ‘No.’ No what?”

  She shrugs. “No, you don’t have to listen to them. No, it’s not that great if you don’t want it. You know exactly what I meant.”

  I lean forward, elbows on knees. “Yeah, I guess. But why did you say it?”

  She kicks off her shoe again. “I guess I felt sorry for you. Luke, listen—”

  My face gets hot. “Felt sorry for me?”

  “Everybody ganging up on you. Pelting you with your own success. Yeah, I did.” She shrugs again. “Listen, this isn’t Happy Days and you’re not Richie Cunningham having to follow your dad into the hardware business. I’m not the Fonz giving you advice, okay?”

  I smile. “You’re not?”

  “N
o, I’m way cooler. Look, just do what you want to; it’s your life.”

  “Is that what you’re doing? What you want to do?”

  She gets very quiet then, and when I look back across my shoulder at her, I see the tears brimming full in her eyes, shining in the dim light. “What I want to do is impossible. Physics and all. Luke, I’ve been trying to tell you something else—”

  I shush her then because I hear footsteps coming. Last time, the security guard found us and spent about twenty minutes explaining the whole concept of curfews. Only this time it’s not a security guard, it’s Mark walking out of the darkness into all the spilled light in front of the castle.

  “What is he—”

  “I tried to tell you,” Ella says. She shakes her head, wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I have to go,” she says, then stands and moves off toward him, her flip-flops making their quiet sound against her feet as the clock tower chimes the hour. One chime, then quiet, and they are gone.

  5

  Ella

  The fact that no one was at the airport to meet me should have been enough to turn me around and send me back to Maine, but the truth was, I didn’t have anything to go back to. Our house was empty, a sign from Evergreen Realty poked into the frozen ground. All of our belongings, the ones we didn’t sell, were piled in the Rosen’s barn. Boxes full of photographs and blankets and china. A tangle of bicycles leaning against one another along the back wall. Snowshoes poking out of milk crates. An apple box stuffed with a camp lantern and empty jam jars. Random items, meant to add up to our lives, waiting in the dusty barn for one of us to come back and find them.

  The baggage claim emptied as suitcases were lifted, car seats were unpacked, and golf clubs retrieved. I sat on the top of my suitcase, my blue duffel and backpack leaning against my feet. It had been a long trip. Four planes total—Bangor to Boston. Boston to Atlanta. Atlanta to Orlando. Orlando to Sarasota. It was like spring in fast-forward, snow to sunshine in eleven hours. I stared as the cars slid past, knowing only that Aunt Sara had a minivan. “Blue,” my mother said. “Light blue.”

  For weeks before my trip south, my parents had been reorganizing, regrouping, re-creating. The re words had blown into our lives shortly after Ash died. “We just need to reposition, reprioritize, reassess,” my father said. Like everything in our lives had been one way, and now it was going to be another. It was as if we’d had a piece of art hanging over our sofa, a painting of the ocean with a setting sun, the sky bright with reds and oranges and yellows, then one day someone came in and told us it was upside down. That instead of the ocean, the blue was actually the sky, and instead of a sunset, the bright colors were actually a meadow filled with flowers.

  It was my mother who first broke the news. “Cameroon,” she told me, and for a second I thought she was talking about coconut cookies. “It’s in Africa. West Africa, near Nigeria.” And suddenly, the vague ideas about their doing something for others and making a difference in the world had details and a date. The talk about Third World countries and famine and the AIDS epidemic had focus and an itinerary.

  “When are you going?” I asked, thinking late summer or fall. Sometime after I left for college.

  “In six weeks,” she said. “March nineteenth.” She paused slightly, as if the reality of what they were doing had forced its way past passport photos, vaccinations, language lessons, and mosquito netting. “It took us by surprise, too, Ella,” she said, fiddling with the blanket folded on the foot of my bed. And the way her voice sounded, I knew by “it” she meant Ash.

  “What about me?” I asked, but I knew the answer was the one I had already realized. Instead of pulling together, circling the wagons against our pain, my parents had drifted away. Like parental attachment in reverse. “What about school?” I was still three months short of high school graduation.

  “They said they’d let you graduate early.”

  I tilted my head at her. There was something else there. Something she hadn’t told me yet.

  “Aunt Sara said you could live with her until you start at Vermont.”

  “In Florida?” I asked.

  “We thought you’d love it.” I sat and watched my mother touching the satin edge of my blanket, smoothing it between her thumb and her forefinger, sliding her fingers past one another along the fold. “No school. No responsibilities. Just time to relax.”

  “Just think of it as an extended vacation before you have to buckle down again in the fall,” my father said from the doorway. They waited in silence, my mother still rubbing the edge of my blanket, my father leaning against the jamb. I wondered briefly what would happen if I just said no. Would they stay? Would they realize that instead of losing one child, they were in ways losing two?

  “Okay,” I whispered, knowing that no matter where I was, Florida or Maine or Cameroon, nothing was going to fix what was really wrong. Nothing was going to change the fact that my brother was gone, and that even when they were right there in my room, sitting on my bed and standing there in my doorway, my parents were gone, too.

  I remember hearing the van before I saw it, wheels squealing on the hot asphalt as it took the corner too fast. It came to an abrupt stop in front of where I was sitting under the overhang of the terminal, out of the sun, but not out of the heat. The automatic door slid open. Out spilled the theme song from Blue’s Clues and an empty juice box. “Get in,” said Aunt Sara, leaning back in the driver’s seat to peer out the door. “Quick, before they wake up.” I didn’t know who “they” were until I leaned into the back of the van to position my suitcase behind the passenger’s seat. “They” were three children. A boy, a girl, and an infant of unknown gender. All in car seats, all asleep. I pulled my hand back and watched the door close in front of me. As I slid into the passenger seat and pulled my seat belt across my lap I had the sinking feeling that maybe my time at Aunt Sara’s was not going to be quite as advertised. Words like relax, regroup, reprioritize seemed like they were about to morph into rediaper , re-dress, redirect, and regurgitate. Suddenly six months in Florida seemed like a really long time.

  “Bend down and look at the statue,” Mark says. I bend slightly, peering at the figure of Cinderella. “Lower. Think six-year-old child.” I bend farther, nearly kneeling in front of the bronze statue, this one featuring Cinderella in her peasant dress. The soft splashing of the fountain to her left invites anyone with a penny to make a wish. “Do you see it?” he asks. I squint at the statue, looking into the folds of her dress and the curls of her hair for an answer.

  “Mark, I’m sorry. I don’t—”

  “Ella,” he says, kneeling just behind me. “Not at her. At the castle.” He places his hands on either side of my head, letting his fingers rest against the curve of my jawline, and tilts my head upward slightly. I look past her kerchiefed head to the mural painted on the castle wall. Then I see it. A crown, hovering there, just over the statue’s head.

  “I see it,” I say, feeling his fingers on my neck, hot against my skin.

  “See?” he says, letting his fingers trail through the back of my hair. He takes my arm and pulls me to standing. “She was a princess even before anyone knew it.” I turn to face him, feeling the mist from the fountain blowing over us in the breeze. He leans toward me, and I close my eyes. I feel the brush of his lips on mine, so soft that for a moment I’m not even sure if he’s actually kissed me or if I’ve just imagined it. The flags snap in the air overhead as the wind picks them up. Then the press again, a little harder, more solid, more sure. He places his fingertips on my jawline again, this time letting them trace the side of my neck and brush my collarbone.

  I concentrate on kissing him back, moving my lips against his. And I realize that I do have to think about it, concentrate on it, because I find my mind wandering . . . back to the look on Luke’s face when he saw Mark walking toward us in the dark. And from there I start to think about Luke in general, that I told him to follow his heart. What a crock that is. Like I’m some sor
t of expert.

  “That was nice,” Mark says, leaning his forehead against mine. He’s right. It was nice, not nice in the way that I want a kiss to be, but nice in the “having lunch with you was nice” or “she seems nice” or “a glass of lemonade on a hot day is nice” way. And I realize I should say something, too.

  “It was,” I say.

  “Ella,” Mark says, leaning back so that he can look at me, “I like you.” I tilt my head at him and wonder how that can be. How can you like something you don’t know anything about? But the way he says it with that earnest look on his face, which he seems to have about just about everything, makes me nod at him.

  “Me too,” I say, and it’s true. I do like him. I like him, and kissing him is nice. And maybe for now that’s enough, because maybe letting someone know me past the costume, past this summer, past this very moment, is just too much. He leans toward me again, but I turn slightly so that I’m looking back at the castle. His lips brush at my cheek.

  “You know, yesterday when I was walking down the aisle, I thought I saw someone.” Mark follows my gaze, looking up at one of the narrow windows in the towers. “Do you think it’s haunted?” I’ve been thinking about this all day, how sometimes things aren’t what they seem.

  “Maybe by Roy Disney,” he says, and it makes me look at him, surprised to hear him make a joke. I smile at him, but he continues. “There’s an apartment built inside the castle. I hear the bigwigs use it for parties.” I turn back to look at the castle, framed by the dark sky. I guess I have to amend my thoughts. Apparently, sometimes things are just what they seem.