Dreamland Social Club(23)
“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.