Dreamland Social Club (25 page)

T
HE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, a Friday, actually felt like the first day of spring. Even Jane had been in a light and breezy mood—and had dared to wonder why she’d ever dreaded the onset of the new season—until she walked into the cafeteria at lunchtime only to have her red skirt blown chin-high by a cool blast of air.

The room was full and staring and laughing as Jane froze—
Idiot! She froze!
—and tried to hold her skirt down against the wind and then, finally, stepped aside. A small ramp had been placed over the steps down into the room, with a fan blowing up through a grate. She was thinking
Claveracks!
when she saw these words written in thin black paint on the ramp’s wooden top step:

Everyone in the room was still laughing.

She stormed out, blushing, as another unsuspecting person walked in and had her skirt blown up and the laughter roared louder. It was only when she went into the girls’ room and locked herself in a stall that she remembered the Blowhole Theater at Steeplechase Park. Which made her feel slightly better—she had not been the intended target but just one of many unsuspecting ones—but at the end of the day, she snapped when she saw the fliers all over that said:

Which was familiar enough, but they all had a new slogan:

YOUR MOTHER WEARS COMBAT BOOTS.

She ripped down the closest flier she could find and stormed up the stairs and knocked on the door to 222. Babette opened the door, and Jane was thinking of that armless, legless girl in the white dress in the old photo and feeling just that vulnerable, when she said, “What’s the deal with this club and its deep thoughts, anyway? And
You know who you are? Your mother wears combat boots?
Why be so exclusive? So vague? I mean, what if
I
wanted to join?”

She stepped into the room, and a chorus of voices let out a rhythmic
“Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.”

Legs was there. And Minnie. Leo. Venus. Rita. And Debbie, too. Pounding out a beat on the desks with their hands.

For a second Jane wanted to scream, wanted to play her part—was that what she was
supposed
to do?—and shout out “FREAKS!” because that’s what the normal woman in the movie had done, but then something dawned on her. Her mother never would have started a club so exclusive; there was no way. The signs weren’t meant to exclude but to tease those who might want to be included. So when the chanting and pounding stopped, she said, “It’s the opposite of exclusive, isn’t it?”

“Yes, you idiot.” Babette closed the door. “And we’ve been
waiting
. All freaking fall and winter. I mean your mother founded the damn club.”

Jane was elated and incensed. “But you never said anything or asked me to join or anything. None of you.”

Not that Venus or Minnie would have, but still . . . Leo could have. Or Legs!

“That was the whole idea,” Legs said. “The whole way your mother set it up. No recruiting. No asking your friends. No
talking about it
, even. Ever.”

All of which would explain why Beth wouldn’t talk about it. Freddy Claverack, too.

Leo said, “New members have to turn up on their own and they have to be let in, whoever they are. So it never becomes cliquish.”

Babette pulled out a beat-up notebook, opened to the front pages, and read: “
I hereby found the Dreamland Social Club as a haven for the wayward and curious, for those interested in the strange in the normal, the normal in the strange, the old in the new, the new in the old.

“Anyone who walks through the door must be accepted with the following refrain: ‘Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble. We accept her. We accept her. One of us, one of us’—preferably recited in the style of the scene in the film
Freaks
—even if the person is technically not a her, but a him.

Jane went closer to Babette and saw that the club’s mission statement had been written in her mother’s own hand. “So that day when I knocked on the door . . .”

Babette said, “We thought you’d caught on.”

“So I could’ve become a member back then?”

“All you had to do was walk in. And my God.
The clues!
” Babette shook her head. “I left the questionnaire at your house.”

“You did?” Venus protested.

“And I gave you that old photo,” Legs said.

“Against the rules,” Minnie said, but Legs just shrugged.

“And I started rewriting the posters just for you,” he said. “To try to get you to come in.”

“My mother wore combat boots,” Jane said. “Are you daft?”

“Exactly,” Legs said. “Actually, Leo came up with those two.”

“Did the trick!” Leo said. Jane wasn’t sure, but he seemed happy she was there. His
gooble gobbles
had seemed especially spirited.

“I didn’t know!” she said to them all.

“Obviously!” Babette said.

Jane studied the flier. “So what’s the emergency?”

“The
emergency
,” Babette said, turning to the group, “is that we’re all set for Electric Bathing, but we’ve got no ideas for the Mermaid Parade.”

H.T. came in then and sat down, then spotted Jane and said, “Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.” He flashed a smile. “Finally.”

But Jane’s brain was like a record that had skipped, back at the words
Electric Bathing
.

Stuck on four letters in particular.

She hadn’t actually thought all that much about the key over the winter, but now that a possible clue had presented itself, she felt a phantom itch.

“
Come on
, Babette,” Venus whined. “It’s
March
. It’s
Friday
and I want to go home. We’ll think of something.”

“Seriously,” Minnie said. “There’s plenty of time.”

They had both said their own gooble gobbles. But did it really mean Jane had been accepted?

“That’s what we
always
say, and then we were totally scrambling last year.” Babette furrowed her brow and said, “I know! Let’s meet Sunday at the Anchor, just for a little bit. It’s opening day. The boardwalk. Fresh air. Maybe we’ll be inspired.”

Everyone grumbled agreement, and a noon meet time was decided upon.

 

“What’s Electric Bathing?” Jane asked as she and Babette walked home. “It sounds sort of familiar but—”

“Every year, last day of school,” Babette cut in, “since your mother’s year, we rig up a light on a pole in the water, and there are ropes that lead you out and then we wade in and swim by the light of a forty-watt bulb. They used to do it back in the thirties or something.”

And just like that . . .

 

 

“Earth to Jane,” Babette said. “Come in, Jane.”

“Sorry,” she said. There hadn’t been much more to the memory anyway. “Any keys involved?”

“Keys?” Babette said. “Like to what?”

“I don’t know. Never mind.” Jane tripped on one of the boardwalk’s uneven planks but recovered quickly; one of her middle toes panged. “So that’s all you do? Weird Coney-related stunts?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” They stopped by a bench and sat. “But don’t blame me, your mother started it.”

Jane looked out at the empty beach and wondered how Sunday’s crowds would compare. It wasn’t warm enough to swim yet but it was a mild March so far, more lamb than lion. She said, “What kinds of things have people done before?”

“Well, last year we tried to build a Helter Skelter slide from the gym windows.” Babette played with one of her seven looped earrings for a second. “With one of those inflatable slide things, but decorated to look cooler. But the whole thing was a disaster.”

“What did the first club do?” Jane asked. “Is there a list in there?”

“Oh,” Babette said, “yeah, that’s pretty much all this book is, notes about stunts.” She started to flip through the official Dreamland Social Club notebook.

“Do you mind?” Jane held out her hands, and Babette handed the book over. Jane turned back to the beginning and to the pages that came right after the club’s statement of purpose, the rules of membership. When she found the list of stunts from the club’s first year she said, “It says here that they made a papier-mâché version of the beast in
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
and put it on the roof of the school.”

“Turn the page,” Babette said. “There’s a picture.”

Jane turned and found the photo taped into the book and studied it. “I saw that movie,” Jane said. “My brother has it.”

They hadn’t talked about Marcus in any real way in a long time, not since they’d both accepted that Jane knew more about her brother and Rita than Babette really wanted to know. Jane regretted even mentioning him.

“Any good?” Babette asked. She’d become a professional at this nonchalance thing over the winter.

“Not really,” Jane said. “No.”

Babette looked at her watch. “I better go.” She stood. “So I’ll see you Sunday at the meeting?”

“That’s really it?” Jane held out the book and Babette took it. “I’m a member?”

“That’s really it.”

They both shook their heads.

“Here,” Babette said, handing the book back. “Why don’t you take it home? There are some old questionnaires in there, in the envelope in the back.”

“My mom’s?”

Babette just nodded.

 

Jane sat with the book in her room when she got home and started to flip through the opening pages, where more rules were laid out.

“In addition to not speaking about the existence or activities of the club when not at an official meeting, members are asked to refrain from claiming membership in yearbooks or on résumés and the like. The founder of the club will claim credit for its foundation in one publication of record,
The Coney Island High Tide
, solely to put the club in the history books.”

It all seemed sort of dopey to Jane, in a way, but it was also thrilling to glimpse these insights into her mother’s world. It wasn’t her journal, no, but it was sort of close. She turned to the envelope taped to the book’s inside back cover and saw a note written on the envelope:

She flipped through the stack until she saw the one with
Clementine
written in the top slot for “Name (first only).”

 

 

What’s your earliest memory?

What sound makes you happy?

What was the last dream you had that you remember?

Name one thing you want to do before you die.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

What’s the best thing about being you?

 

Setting the page down, Jane lay back on her bed. She’d been hoping for more insight, but there were some clues, weren’t there? That the girl her mother had been had been pretty similar to the woman she’d become, or at least the woman Jane remembered. She’d wanted to travel before she died, and the fact that she had accomplished that struck Jane as a good thing, a happy thought. But what did it mean if one of the best things about being you was that you were a serious daydreamer? It meant you were good at escaping, which meant that you had a life worth escaping from, which was sort of sad. Then again, all those games—Elephant Hotel, the house under the roller coaster—that was a kind of daydreaming, a kind of reverie, too, and a good kind.

That word again.

Going to her desk, where the mermaid doll sat with its secret keys stuffed back inside where they’d spent the winter, Jane pulled them back out again.

Thunder. Jump. Wonder
.

Those had all been sorted out—for the most part, anyway. The Wonder key still nagged, but not as much as the Bath key. And when her fingers found it, she felt a new determination to try to figure out what it was. Electric Bathing wasn’t a clue, wasn’t the answer. Still, it was out there. So she took the key off the ring and put it on her keychain with her house keys so that it would be with her when the answer presented itself.

H
ER FATHER CAME HOME that Saturday afternoon with a garment bag and wanted to model his new suit. Jane couldn’t think of the last time her father had bought a suit and admitted it looked good on him, though possibly just because it was new. “What’s the occasion?” she asked, feeling playful. “Hot date?”