Dreamland Social Club(3)

“Trust me,” her dad said, “he made an impression.”

Jane felt like a portal had opened in a formerly impenetrable wall. She’d never heard any of this before.

“He actually harassed me into dessert once.” He attempted a Brooklyn accent: “Go on and eat it, whatsa matter? We got a Looky Lou here. Doesn’t know what to do with a piece of tiramisu.”

“What’s a Looky Lou?” Jane asked.

“Oh, it’s somebody who basically just sits on the sidelines and stares. Though usually not just at a piece of cake. Your mother thought it was the worst thing a person could be.” He opened a window shade and released a new cloud of dust. “If she saw me rubbernecking when we passed an accident, or staring at someone with a big birthmark, she’d tell me that there was nothing worse in life than being a Looky Lou.”

Jane was fairly certain she was a Looky Lou through and through.

She stepped up close to the wall by the stairs to look at more photos as her father moved on to his next topic: her grandmother.

“Her stage name was Birdie Cusack,” he said. “That was her sideshow act, pretending she was part bird.”

Jane studied a picture of a woman in a feather headpiece and a bodice that gave her a pear-shaped, birdlike body as her father went on. “She was in a famous movie about freaks in the nineteen fifties. Totally weird stuff.”

Jane spotted a framed poster for Is it Human? and moved over to study the ghoulish cartoon drawings of the cast, which included a pair of female twins joined at the hip and a man who had hands coming out of his shoulder sockets. She found a drawing of a woman with a feather on her head, wearing a bird bodysuit, and whispered softly, “Grandma.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us about them?” she dared, turning to her father. She’d had grandparents. Her grandfather, at least, had been alive until recently. She could have met him.

“Yeah.” Marcus looked up. “Did you contact them after Mom . . . ?” He trailed off.

They’d all spent ten years trailing off....

“Of course. I mean, someone notified them. So it must have been me.” He shrugged. “But as for talking about them, well, you know how she was about the whole carny thing.”

But Jane didn’t know. This was the first she’d even heard of “the whole carny thing.” “What does that even mean?” she asked. “Carny?”

“You know,” her dad said again. “Carnival people. Sideshow types. Like Preemie and Birdie. They’re like their own community. Like a different ethnic group, practically. And they’ve always been drawn to Coney Island.”

“And Mom didn’t like being raised that way?”

He shrugged. “I think your mother struggled to belong.”

All Jane could think was, Who doesn’t?





Jane claimed a third-story bedroom that looked out on a death’s-door garden. Sun-bleached pink and purple blooms hung on browning hydrangeas, and some overgrown rosebushes held a few wan, yellow buds. Jane was no expert, but the yard desperately needed a trim, a drink; that freakishly short thunderstorm had clearly been no help at all. A small patch of grass was long and speckled with dry, brown blades, and a few white statues—Were they ducks? Gnomes?—needed to be saved from imminent weed suffocation.

She stood at the window for countless silent minutes, studying the view. Raindrops clung like white pearls to the black electrical wire strung between the house and a wooden pole at the end of the yard. Other buildings loomed there, with their fire escapes zigzagging between windows, and Jane thought of the countless Brooklynites who lived there, unaware that there was a new kid on the block. She could see the Parachute Jump in a sliver of sky between buildings and kept returning to the window to peek at it as she dusted.

Leathery wallpaper with bubblegum pink roses and army green vines covered the walls. Even though Jane couldn’t imagine her mother had a hand in picking such a pattern, she had done a quick check of the other rooms in the house and knew that she’d chosen her mother’s childhood room. The only actual evidence she found, however, was tucked away at the back of a high shelf in the closet with some old pillows and blankets—a small mermaid doll. Jane took it down and blew the dust out of its curly red hair and its crown of pearls, and off the orange-and-white-striped tiger fish it held in its tiny hands. She still had a book of mermaid pictures, The Mermaid’s Secret, her mother had given her. A note inside said: My dear daughter, I used to be a mermaid once, so I know that mermaids are good at a lot of things, like keeping secrets. I hope your life is full of them. Love, Mom.

The doll had to have been her mother’s. She was sure of it.

Further examination revealed a silky tag that read “Plays ‘By the Beautiful Sea,’ ” hanging from the mermaid’s sparkly green bottom. Jane wound the small metal handle next to the tag and released it but nothing happened, no music, and she set the doll down on the dresser.

Marcus ended up across the hall in a room that looked like it had most recently been used as a study or guest room: a desk, a bed, some old books. Her father took over the second floor, claiming the master suite and the room across the hall as his office.

Without conspiring, they’d all three unpacked—Jane had only really brought clothes and books, including that old mermaid book—then lay down and napped on dusty bed linens. She drifted off easily, into a memory of a day at the Ocean Dome, a memory that had long been locked away....