Dreamland Social Club(44)

“Really?”

“Totally.”

“Jane,” Babette said, with a whine. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“You can have it,” Jane said to H.T. “I mean, if you want it.”

“For real?”

“Jane!” Babette said again.

“Yeah,” Jane said to H.T.

“Awesome,” he said. “Thanks.” Then he turned to Babette and said, “And why are you in such a hurry, Little B?”

Jane thought it was cute he had a nickname for her.





Jane had done all her homework and made another search of the attic and her own room for her mother’s journal—what a nagging thing that was, to know it existed and might still—but there were still hours to fill before she was meeting Leo. If he was even going to show up.

She’d found a VHS copy of an old movie called Freaks in the attic and decided to watch and see if maybe Birdie was in it. Heading downstairs with it she heard voices—plural—coming from her brother’s room. He had a girl with him. Jane didn’t even want to think about who it was and what would happen when Babette found out.

She fixed herself a snack in the kitchen and started the movie, which seemed like it had been made for shock value, with a thin plot about a circus sideshow. There were two pinheads and a torso boy and those same Siamese twins who had been in Is It Human? and, yes, there was a bird woman, but it wasn’t Birdie. And what kind of crazy world was it when two women could get famous pretending to be part bird?

She almost turned it off a few times, it was so bad, but it was also strangely compelling, and then it was almost over and there was a banquet because a normal woman was marrying one of the freaks—some kind of miniature man—and they were at a table with big goblets and the freaks were stomping on the table, chanting, “Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble. We accept her. We accept her. One of us, one of us.”

Pounding and pounding and stomping and stomping and then saying it again, over and over, in a strange sort of initiation ritual.

Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.

It was creepy as all get-out and then, thankfully, it was over.

When her brother came downstairs with Rita trailing behind him, Jane was almost happy to see them.

Rita said to Jane, “Walk me to the door?”

Jane got up, followed Rita down the hall.

“Hey, do me a favor,” Rita said, her hand already on the knob. “Don’t tell Babette I was here.”

Jane was studying her closely, looking at the way her hair—no longer pulled back in the ponytail she’d worn all day—seemed so unruly.

Rita said. “You know how she is.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “I do.”

Marcus was whistling while looking for something to eat in the kitchen when Jane returned. She said, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and he said, “Don’t lose any sleep over it, sis.”

“You know,” she snapped. “You’re sort of becoming a jerk.”

“Why? Because I don’t like Babette? Get real.” He took a Coke out of the fridge, snapped it open, and went upstairs.

Jane sat down at the kitchen table, where a note from her father that she hadn’t noticed earlier read Loki meeting in city late afternoon. Order takeout. A twenty-dollar bill peeked out from behind it. But Jane wasn’t hungry, and anyway dinnertime had passed. She went to her bag and got out the photo Legs had given her, then looked at the clock on the wall.

It was late for a lot of people.

But not for people who ran clubs.





Walking down the boardwalk by the light of a crescent moon, Jane could almost feel its pull in the air around her. Something about the way she was moving in the world now made her feel like there were invisible tendons and connections everywhere. The gravitational pull of Coney, of Leo, of her mother’s past, was right there in front of her, where she could touch it.

As she walked up the carpeted staircase to the Coral Room, she heard music—a deep, sultry, slow beat. Pushing through a set of doors at the top of the stairs, she slid into the room as inconspicuously as she could. At the far end of the room, in weird contrast to the seascape, a woman pranced around onstage wearing a polka-dot bra and some matching boy-shorts. She was dancing to old-timey piano music, making strange, pouting faces. During a drum break, she bent forward and blew a big kiss, jiggling her breasts.

Jane slid into one of only two empty booths along the wall opposite the bar and hoped that no one noticed her until she figured out exactly what she was going to say if anyone other than Beth asked her what she was doing there.

But it was hard to think straight. A little card pyramid on the table announced that it was Burlesque Night, and Jane couldn’t take her eyes off the woman onstage, her pale skin, her red lipstick, her increasingly scanty outfit. She’d just moved her bra straps off her shoulders while looking tantalizingly over her shoulder at the crowd. Then she turned and revealed breasts bare except for gold tassels hanging from her nipples, which she somehow managed to spin around. Looking back at the aquarium and finding some of those gold fish, Jane thought that yes, it was the same kind of shimmer, the same shade of gold.

She watched a white blowfish make slow progress across the bottom front edge of the tank. And when she looked up there was a new girl onstage. She was wearing a black bikini and dancing with two huge black wings made of feathers. The music was a classical song that Jane recognized from the deep boom of horns—“The Ride of the Valkyries.”