Dreamland Social Club(93)

She inhaled and held it and watched her classmates in the water.

She saw Legs with Minnie propped on his shoulders. She saw H.T.’s floating torso next to a dog-paddling Babette and watched Rubber Rita push Marcus under the water and laugh.

They were frolicking.

There was no other word for it, as silly and old-fashioned as it sounded. And she closed her eyes for a second and opened them again and it was as if she could see the lights of Luna Park and Dreamland and Steeplechase Park right there.

A double-exposed photograph.

It felt as though the water itself had trapped Coney’s history in its molecules and she was steeped in it, soaking it in through her pores, breathing it as if through gills. She thought of all the people who had come to this very place, who had swum in these very waters—millions upon millions—and who had had the time of their life. She had spent the year wishing she could travel back through time and spend just one day there, during the era of the dawn of fun, but that would never happen and maybe that was okay.

Because this felt close.

Something slimy brushed against her leg and she jerked away and started to head back to shore, skin prickling from the cool air and the shock of the reminder of all the murk and mystery beneath the water’s choppy skin.

And me without my bathysphere.

Leo was directly in her path.

“Hey, Looky Lou,” he said. The lightbulb’s glow made his figure a backlit silhouette. It cast silver light on the right side of his wet face as she exhaled.

Someone in the crowd shouted, “Oh, victory! Forget your underwear. We’re free.”





I’m still in the department store and the strange lady has scolded me and then left. My mother and I are still sitting in the leather chair and the film has ended again. The credits have rolled for the third time, and the salesman comes over and says, “Ma’am. We’re closing.”

He has been nice to us, playing the film again and again, but he knows we are not buying a TV.

My mother pushes me to get up off her lap and I do so, but then she grabs me and lays me down on the big chair and it turns out it spins and spins and spins and the lights on the ceiling are a swirl of white whipping by.

“Look!” she says. “It’s a human roulette wheel.”

I don’t know what that word means, roulette, but it’s fun.

When I get up, I make sure to hold onto her hand. “The lady said to never let go,” I say. “Never ever.”

My mother pulls her hand from mine, using her other one, and it hurts.

“You can let go,” she says, “as long as you stay close.”





They were standing face-to-face, wet and breathing hard, and she felt certain that if there were no one else around, Tattoo Boy would kiss her again. Or she’d kiss him.

A different kind of kiss, too.

If it didn’t happen tonight, it would happen the next day or the one after. She knew that it would as surely as she knew her own name, as surely as she knew that she’d been lost and then found.

“My name isn’t really Jane,” she said.

Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.

Tattoo Boy smiled lazily, like he already knew what she was going to say and maybe he did. “You don’t say.”

“It’s Luna,” she said. “Luna Jane.”

He lifted an inky arm out of waist-high water and she saw the Gabba Gabba Hey! tattoo for the first time. Had it been there all along? “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Luna.”

She went to shake his hand just as a wave swelled around their bellies and then curled over and crashed hard. They tumbled toward the shore together in a churning funnel of white and black, sand and sea, and then stood up—laughing, and still holding hands.

“I think,” Leo said between short, recovering breaths, “that might have been”—another inhale on the tail of a laugh—“Coney’s way of saying . . .”

“I know,” Luna managed, also struggling for air.

Then she licked her salty lips and found solid footing in the sand and nodded. “It’s saying, ‘What took you so long?’”





A NOTE ABOUT HISTORY, CONEY, AND DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB . . .

The Coney Island depicted in Dreamland Social Club is a mix of fact and fiction. The Parachute Jump, The Cyclone, The Wonder Wheel . . . these things actually exist on Coney Island. As did Dreamland, Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, and the Thunderbolt.

But The Anchor, Wonderland, and Morelli’s, while inspired by real places, are entirely fictional. The Coral Room is even more fictional, if it is possible to be such a thing, and Coney Island High bears no resemblance to Coney Island’s Lincoln High School.

Why? Because I wanted to take liberties with certain kinds of locations and did not want to mess with actual Coney institutions while doing so.

The Anchor, just as one example, is very much inspired by Ruby’s Bar, a glorious dive bar on the boardwalk that lost its lease just weeks before I sat down to write this note. I adored Ruby’s. My husband and I were there on our first date, and celebrated our engagement there some months later. Its closing has been devastating to all who know and love Coney. I created the Anchor as a sort of stand-in because my characters’ relationships with the bar needed to be complex and, like the bar’s fate, entirely in my control.