Dreamland Social Club(2)
The cab turned down Siren Street, and she felt her gut tighten at the blur of graffiti and soot stains on the brick of a row of abandoned houses. Dingy curtains still hung where there had once been windows; old rocking chairs sat eerily still on porches. Clearly, this was the wrong side of town.
The cab stopped.
They were right in front of a big old house that looked entirely out of place, like some tornado in Kansas had gotten carried away with itself. Jane’s father looked at a piece of paper in his hand—“It’s number two-thirteen”—and Jane found the crooked gold numbers near the door and confirmed that they’d found it.
Wedged between an ancient-looking bait-and-tackle shop and a fenced-in lot overgrown with weeds, the house was shingled and beige with weird peaks and small windows. An air conditioner in the second floor’s right window was like a lone bucktooth; the uppermost window wore a top hat of black roof tiles. The front porch looked like it might fall off at any moment, and a gang of demented woodpeckers had apparently had their way with the glossy red paint on the front door. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded the front yard, where two cement strips indicated a driveway that dead-ended at the porch. On the gate to the drive hung three metal signs—NO PARKING, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE, and NEVER BLOCK DRIVEWAY. Next to them dangled a handmade wood sign that read, YES, ITS A DRIVEWAY. Jane had to fight the urge to add the apostrophe.
“This isn’t exactly what I was picturing,” Marcus said, and Jane would have laughed if she wasn’t about to cry. It wasn’t that she’d thought they’d be living in an amusement park, exactly, but her mother had loved Coney Island—hadn’t she?—and Jane simply didn’t see anything around to love.
“Your grandfather was what polite people called an eccentric,” Jane’s father said when he joined her on the sidewalk by the driveway signs, having paid the cab fare and gotten their luggage. “He went by the name Preemie.”
“What?” Marcus laughed. “Why?”
“There was an amusement park here in the early nineteen hundreds. Dreamland. Incubators had just been invented.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Your grandfather was part of a premature baby display when he was born.”
Jane took a minute to process that: a premature baby display.
She had only had two weeks to process the fact that she and Marcus had inherited a house from a grandfather they had never known, that they were leaving England and moving to the place where their mother had grown up.
“That’s pretty sick,” Marcus said, and a thick drop of rain landed on his nose. Another one left a dark slash on his light blue shirt.
“Dreamland burned down, and your grandfather was rescued by nurses and the whole thing made him sort of famous.” Their dad picked up a suitcase as the drops became increasingly, alarmingly abundant.
“What was his real name?” Jane asked. Her father so rarely—like ever—talked about her mom or her mom’s family, and she wanted to keep him going.
He took a moment to think and then said, “No idea.”
The heavens opened up then, and they all got soaked by heavy pellets of warm water in the short distance between the curb and the front door. Her father’s wet hands struggled with the keys Preemie’s estate lawyer had sent, until finally the front door surrendered with a click. Dust clung to every surface and the air felt thick; the grime on the floors muted Jane’s footfalls as she stepped into the front hallway and put her dripping suitcase down. She swept water off her face with a wet hand and then wiped it off on her wet shirt. In the heat, her clothes had started to cling to her like a second skin.
“Crack some windows, but don’t let the rain in,” her father said, coughing and swatting at the air.
Fortunately, the squall had already blown past and the sun blared through a parting in the clouds. As light entered the living room, the air sprang to life with dancing dust, and items came out of shadow to reveal themselves. Faded black-and-white framed photographs lined the wall along the main staircase; a man whom Jane could only assume was her grandfather posed with famous people like Frank Sinatra, President Gerald Ford, Marilyn Monroe. Every end table and bookshelf—the fireplace mantel, too—boasted weird figurines, like a small Siamese totem pole in a glass case and a pewter statue of a two-headed squirrel.
There was a wooden horse, like from a carousel, in one corner of the living room. Jane went for a closer look. It was white and shiny, with a fiery red mane, pale pink gums, white teeth, and a gold-and-orange muzzle. A piece of purple armor shielded its chest, while red tassels dangling from its pink-and-green saddle seemed to have been frozen in mid-leap. Its glassy brown eyes were so lifelike they gave Jane the creeps, but she soon found herself distracted, instead, by the thick metal chain that was wrapped multiple times around one of the horse’s legs and then looped over and under its red tail before snaking across the floor to twist around a radiator. It locked onto itself with a rusty padlock.
“My word,” her father said from across the room, “it’s like a museum.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “A crap museum.”
“Why do you think this carousel horse is chained to the radiator?” Jane asked.
Her father shook his head. “I can’t even begin to imagine.”
As they uncovered old sofas and chairs, Jane’s father told stories about Preemie, whom he had only met a few times. Like how his skin looked like worn brown leather from sun exposure; how he had famously never left Brooklyn —not even to go into Manhattan—and how he made his living harassing people on the boardwalk into playing a carnival game where you shot into clown mouths with water guns, trying to explode balloons to win inbredlooking stuffed animals.