Dreamland Social Club (10 page)

Marcus raised his eyebrows salaciously and said, “I don’t think you really want to know.” He was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, a combo that Jane guessed worked on only about three days of the year in New York weather. Today was one of them.

“Ew.” A hydrangea plant next to her held some purple blooms in defiance of the decay around it. “And I don’t believe you anyway.”

“I don’t know.” Marcus flipped his burgers and each one sizzled. “I had fun at that big theme park in Germany, and that Ocean Dome place in Japan was pretty cool. Actually, they should build something like that here, you know?”

An indoor beach was certainly a better idea than a shopping mall, but Jane still wasn’t convinced that day at the Ocean Dome was the most fun she’d ever had. She reviewed her memory of it all. The sand castles of Coney. The volcano erupting. The wave pool. It had been fun, at the time. But now she had a hard time thinking of anything she’d done with her mother as fun. “I’m supposed to write a sentence about the most fun I’ve ever had on Coney, or somewhere else since we just got here. I’m drawing a complete blank.”

“One sentence?”
Marcus shrugged. “Make something up.”

But that wouldn’t do. Something about the assignment was getting under Jane’s skin. It was under there right next to this business about the city accepting bids for their new amusement park attractions. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to her father yet. “Where’s Dad?” she said, and Marcus shrugged again.

He pulled the burgers off the grill with a spatula, slid them onto a plate where two open buns awaited. “So are you going to that party next weekend?”

Of course
he already knew about it.

“I don’t have anything to wear,” Jane said, because Babette had gotten under her skin, too.

“It’s a party in the projects, Jane. Not a cotillion.” He bit into a burger, nodded approval as he chewed, and presented the plate with the other burger to Jane.

“What do you care what I do?” Jane said. Then she took a bite of her burger and felt her body come alive from it, felt the warmth of it slide down to her belly.

“Eat fast,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

 

Five bites later their burgers were gone, and then Marcus got up and walked to a set of metal doors at the side of the house, built into the ground at an angle. He opened one of them and took a step down and said, “Follow me.”

Jane did as he asked and then the lights came up on what appeared to be . . . well, she wasn’t sure.

A huge fake stone facade covered the far wall, where a red leather bar sat on four small wheels. It had a fireplace on the front of it—replete with fake logs—and a wire running to a nearby outlet. Marcus plugged it in, and the fireplace glowed orange through a gray film of dust.

The rest of the room’s walls were covered with red-and-gold wallpaper adorned with American eagles. Overhead, wagon-wheel lanterns dangled from a white stucco ceiling cut across with dark wood beams. Then Marcus switched on a light by the bar, and a neon sign that read “Birdie’s Bavarian Bar” glowed red. On a shelf behind the bar sprung a liquid rainbow: liqueurs in bright green and cherry red, even electric blue.

“Wow,” she said, and Marcus said, “Yeah. There’s a bunch of Birdie’s stuff here. Some clothes, even. I thought maybe . . .”

“Thanks,” she said, trying to take it all in, since she hadn’t found much of Birdie’s stuff anywhere else in the house. “This is where you found the movie?”

“Yeah.”

There passed a split second during which Jane was going to get mad that Marcus hadn’t shown her the bar as soon as he’d found it, but she hadn’t exactly gone running to show him the attic.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Marcus said, heading back up the stairs to the yard.

Jane found the clothes in a huge wardrobe in the corner. They weren’t dresses and costumes, like she’d been expecting, but more casual skirts and tops, the sort which a girl like Jane could actually wear
to school
. This was good, but no help on the party front. There were drawers beneath the hangered section, where some old shoes sat waiting in pairs. Jane slipped them on and they fit. She liked knowing she took after her grandmother physically, even if it was just a shoe size.

She approached a large wooden chest that sat on the floor in the farthest corner of the room.
Please, please, please
, she said—to herself, to God, to no one, but mostly to her dead grandmother—as she knelt and opened its dusty top.

First came the hats—five of them—and then a sequined green bird costume. She couldn’t exactly go to the party wearing only a hat or dressed as a bird, so she tossed it all aside, only to pull out still another bird costume, this one gold, and then another in a fiery pink and another in a neon blue. The last one was a sea-foam green.

She kept digging, though, and finally found a dress, and then another dress, and then another; they had been pressed and folded and individually wrapped with tissue paper like someone had actually hoped they’d be worn again someday. She pulled out a gorgeous deep blue, almost black, dress that was just way too nice for a high-school party. But soon she found a burgundy dress with an overlay of lace on a silken shift. It was a little ornate in its details but still managed to seem subtle, almost casual. She stripped down to her bra and underwear right there in the basement bar to try it on and said another silent prayer. Looking at her reflection in a mirror that had taken on a gold sheen with age, she saw that the dress fit perfectly, made her body look better than anything in her current wardrobe. Birdie Cusack had saved her life, and Jane would never be able to thank her.

Digging through in haste to make sure she’d found the best dress of the lot, Jane rammed her nails into something and pulled a small wooden box from the chest. Putting the dresses aside so she could open it, she found that it held a few old trinkets: a small cross on a chain, a silver rattle, and a small silver cup, the kind they make for babies, with the name
Clementine
engraved in it. She set it all aside to take upstairs and turned her attention to a manila envelope full of old photos. Flipping through jagged stacks of sepia-toned squares, she found pictures of Birdie as a young girl riding a bike, as a young woman smoking a cigarette in a director’s chair, and then pictures—rectangular and color—of her mom as a little girl, by a lake with Preemie and Birdie—all of them in square swimsuits. There were baby birthday parties and Christmas trees and then—a shock—a picture of Birdie, in her bird costume, next to a man like H.T., legless, also wearing feathers and a headdress. They were smiling cheek to cheek thanks to a pedestal. Two birds of a feather. She set that photo aside, too.

 

After packing the costumes back up, she approached another large piece of furniture—a sort of tall cabinet. She ran a finger along the metal plate on the front that said “Victrola,” then lifted its top lid to discover a record player. Nearby on the wall, a shelf held what had to be several hundred old records, in a size Jane had never seen before, a little bit smaller than Marcus’s handful of collectible LPs but not by much. She thought about putting one on but then saw there was already a record on the turntable. Jane spun it so that she could read the title: “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.”

She placed the needle on it and then hit a button that looked like a power button, but nothing happened. Opening the front door of the cabinet, she found a crank, so she removed the needle from the record, wound the crank a bunch of times, then put the needle back, hit the power button, and,
voilà
, orchestral sounds flowed into the room. Then a warbly female voice followed, crooning,
“Dreaming of you, that’s all I do,/Night and day for you I’m pining,/And in your eyes, blue as the skies, /I can see the love-light softly shining . . .”

And then Jane wasn’t hearing the lyrics anymore but was concentrating on a memory, trying to re-create it in sharp detail. But it was fuzzy, like the edges of sleep....

 

 

Turning off the Victrola, and then the lights, Jane took the burgundy dress and a few of the skirts and tops and went back out into the yard, then into the house.

“Find anything good?” her father asked when she appeared in the kitchen. He was sitting at the table eating a sandwich with one of his old sketchbooks in front of him, pencil in hand.

“I don’t know. Just some baby stuff of Mom’s.” She held up the rattle. “Some of Grandma’s clothes.” She indicated the dress.

He nodded, put his pencil down, and closed his book, then held out a hand for the rattle. “I should send you back down with a couple of trash bags. And up to the attic, too.” He examined the rattle, ran a finger across the engraved letters, then shook it, releasing the jangle of a hollow bell, and handed it back. “This place isn’t going to get cleared out on its own.”

“I don’t mind doing it,” she said, but it wasn’t her top priority. Her top priority right at that moment was seeing what her father was sketching in that notebook. Because from the tiny glimpse she’d stolen, it looked like it might be the beginnings of a coaster design. “Whatcha working on?” she asked with a nod toward the book.

“Nothing,” he said, and he pulled it toward himself protectively.

“Okay,” she said. “If you say so.”

“Touché,” he said.

She crossed the room to the hall, where her bag lay, and pulled out Babette’s newspaper. “I thought you’d want to see this,” she said. “The city is accepting bids for attractions.”

“Oh, Jane.” He sighed. “If only it were that easy.”

“Maybe it is,” she said, and he let out another sigh and started to read as Jane spun on her heels and left the room.

S
HE HAD COMPLETED HER EXAMINATION of the yearbook that Sunday and had, infuriatingly enough, found no other mentions of the Dreamland Social Club.

Not a one.

But she
had
noticed a female student who looked an awful lot like Babette’s bendy friend at school. Like a twin. So when she found herself walking with Babette into homeroom, which she had mostly been avoiding to avoid the issue of deciding where to sit, Jane said, “Hey, I want to thank this girl, I think she’s a friend of yours, for helping me out with the Claveracks last week.” She nodded toward Babette’s usual table, where the girl was already sitting.

“Rita?” Babette said.

“I guess so.”

“
She’s
got an act,” Babette said pointedly. “Rubber Rita, aspiring contortionist extraordinaire. She’s double-jointed. The Claveracks call her Rubber Rican—racist losers.”

Jane didn’t know what to say except “I don’t have an act!”

“Well, come on, then,” Babette said, and led the way. At the table, she introduced them. “I wanted to say thanks,” Jane said to Rita, “for what you did last week. With the rubber chicken.”

“No problem,” Rita said, and Jane and Babette took seats across from her. Legs and Minnie were at the table, too, talking to each other intensely, and Jane did a quick comparison of Babette’s body type with Minnie’s now that she knew there was an explanation for how they could both be so small in such different ways.

She felt weird flat-out asking Rita if she was born here and if her mother had grown up here and maybe had known Jane’s mother, so she asked, instead, “So what extracurriculars do you guys do?” That was a normal question, wasn’t it?

Babette and Rita exchanged a look so quick that Jane would have missed it if she hadn’t sort of been anticipating it.

“I don’t do much,” Rita said. “I spend most of my spare time at a gym, doing gymnastics and stuff.”

“Cool,” Jane said, feeling terribly uncool.

“I do the occasional piece for the school paper,” Babette said. She set about eating her brown-bag breakfast.

So they weren’t talking about the Dreamland Social Club. They weren’t going to be any help in that regard. The fact of it irked her, and she decided to just dig in. Trying to sound casual, she turned back to Rita and said, “So were you born here?”

Rita nodded.

“And your parents?”

Another nod.

Jane leaned in toward Rita. “Did they go to school here?”

Rita looked up and spoke through a mouthful of bagel. “You got a lot of questions.”

“Well, my mother went here, so if your mom did, too, maybe they knew each other.”

Right then Marcus walked over and sat down and Jane wanted to scream,
What do you think you’re doing? It took me more than a week to get a seat here!
She said only, “This is Marcus. My brother.”

“I know who you are.” The curls of Rita’s hair seemed to spring to life. “Everyone knows who you are.”

Turning back to Jane she said, “How old’s your mother?”

Marcus said, “She’s dead,” and Jane wanted to smack him.

“Oh,” Rita said, curls deflating some. “Sorry.”

Jane said, “But if she were alive she would’ve been, like, fifty, fifty-one?”

Rita shook her head. “My mom’s not that old.”

Jane didn’t understand. “But there was a woman in the yearbook that looked
so much
like you.”