CHAPTER three
THE STORE FOR LEASE BANNER hanging on the
Anchor rippled in the wind like a flag. Just down the boardwalk,
similar signs—PROPERTY FOR LEASE—wrapped around the gate to
Wonderland. Jane and the rest of the Dreamland Social Club stood
outside and watched as people walked by, then stopped, midsentence,
when they noticed what was going on.
What the feck?
The signs had appeared overnight, as if by magic.
Jane knew for certain they had not been there last night.
But there was no mistaking their origins.
Jane looked at the serpent bolt of the logo and
swore she heard a hiss. This was all very wrong.
Leo had gone inside to talk to his dad and now came
back to report. He said, “They’re trying to mothball the
boardwalk.”
“Mothball?” Jane crinkled her nose. It
didn’t make sense.
“It means that Loki’s pissed their first plan got
vetoed, and now they’re going to shut down the Anchor and
Wonderland even if they can’t replace them. Just to prove a
point.”
Jane shook her head. Still didn’t get it.
Babette rolled her turquoise eyes and said, “The
point being that they can just let the land sit there. Gathering
moths. Unless the new plan they’re presenting on Thursday gets
approved.”
“Oh!”
So the news of the presentation was out. And
Loki had obviously timed this power play for maximum impact. Jane’s
father had neglected to mention the mothballing, to warn her. Had
he known this was going to happen?
Leo shook his head. “My dad said that’s it. The jig
is up. Six weeks and he’s shut down. And Wonderland only has two,
so they might not even bother opening up again next weekend.”
The park was open now. You could hear a few of the
rides whirring and tinkling.
“Let me get this straight,” Legs said. “This is
supposed to force the city to approve the new plan?”
Leo said, “Yes.”
“Do you think it will work?” Rita asked. Rita, like
Coney, just looked better, happier, now that winter was over
with. Her skin seemed to thrive on a particular kind of sun.
“No idea,” Leo said, and then they watched a few
more people stop and point at the STORE FOR LEASE signs.
Moving over to the plastic tables in front of the
bar, they took seats, and Leo’s dad came out to say hi and to clean
their table.
“We’re really sorry, Mr. LaRocca,” Babette said,
and everyone muttered their regrets, too.
“Crazy days,” he said, and then his sinewy arms ran
a cloth around—he was wearing a shirt this time—and rearranged some
condiments. Jane tried to glimpse Leo’s future in his father’s
form, tried to imagine what he might look like in a bunch of years,
what kind of man he might become. She still wasn’t sure she agreed
with what her father had said about how loving someone’s potential
wasn’t really love. She was sure, though, that she loved Leo just
as he was right then, even if he didn’t feel the same way.
Finally, Mr. LaRocca took the ashtray away and
said, “I’ll send over some sodas.”
“I’ll help.” Leo sprung up out of his chair.
H.T. took the seat next to Jane. He had his legs on
but was wearing shorts, so the metal joints glinted in the sun. She
watched the people around them do double takes and gawk and elbow
friends and found herself staring at one woman who was staring
intently at H.T.
Look at me, she thought, trying to will the
woman to turn her head. I dare you.
And when she did, Jane just stared at her,
like she was the freak, until finally, the woman looked
away, whispered something to her friend.
“I wonder what they’ll do with that,” Babette
said.
She pointed over to the neon sign at Wonderland,
and Jane wondered whether Alice and the Mad Hatter and their
fluorescent blue teapot would suffer the same fate as the Hell Gate
demon and the Claverack horse, locked away in some old man’s dusty
old house. It didn’t seem right.
Mothballing.
A funny word.
Preemie had been doing his own variation of it for
years.
Leo’s dad was back with sodas, and then Leo
reappeared with a clipboard. He said, “Petition to save the
Anchor.”
Babette signed the hastily drawn-up document. So
did Rita. And Minnie and Venus and H.T. But when the clipboard came
around to the other side of the table, to where Jane was sitting,
she hesitated.
Leo said, “What do you say, Looky Lou?”
It was the first time he’d called her that in
months, and she felt like it meant something, she just wasn’t sure
what.
She studied the statement at the top of the
petition, scrawled in Leo’s handwriting: We, the undersigned,
object to the amusement park and mall planned by Loki Equities and
want a fair renegotiation of leases for establishments including
the Anchor. She looked up and said, “I don’t think I
can.”
“Figures.” Leo slid the clipboard away.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jane snapped.
“I’m just not surprised is all.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be,” she said. Maybe he was
right about the sass. “We knew this was coming.”
“Yeah, I guess we did.” He shook his
head.
“And it wouldn’t look good for me to have my name
on that if my father’s project goes ahead. It’s that simple. So
what’s your problem?”
“My problem is that I’m wasting time talking
to you when I could be getting signatures.” He pushed the clipboard
toward Legs. “What about you, Legs?”
Legs looked at Jane, then back at Leo and said,
“Sorry, man.”
Leo said, “Whatever.”
The woman who’d been staring at H.T. got up and
gave him one last stare and he smiled at her—big, white, happy
teeth—and said, “Have a nice day.”
She hurried away, and H.T. turned to Jane. “I saw
you giving her the evil eye. What was that about?”
Jane shrugged. “I just think it’s rude.”
“It’s normal.”
“Still.”
Debbie slid into a seat then and said, “Sorry I’m
late.” She’d bleached her facial hair over the winter and it was an
improvement, yes, but it was still a lot of hair.
Babette had brought a bunch of old photos so that
they could try to get inspiration from the kinds of things people
had done in the past—like dress up as sushi or make a procession
for King Nemo or craft huge monsters from the deep. Hundreds of
thousands of people came to the parade, apparently. It was a big
deal. No one at the table, however, seemed particularly
inspired.
“Well, whatever we do,” Babette said with some
annoyance, “I think it should have music. I want people to hear
and see us.”
“Well, sign me up for music,” Leo said. “I’m going
to try to get some signatures.”
Jane watched him walk away, to a table where a few
tourist types had just sat down, and she thought of the sound of
his saw playing the Dreamland song. How sad it had been.
“What about some kind of funeral procession?” she
said.
Babette looked like she’d just smelled day-old
fish. “A funeral for who?”
Jane was looking up at the STORE FOR LEASE sign
that would be the Anchor’s death knell. “I don’t know,” she said.
“For Coney Island?”
But that wasn’t quite right.
“No, wait!” She sat forward in her chair. “It’s for
a mermaid. It’s a mermaid funeral.”
She could picture the scene then instantly—more
vividly than she could picture even her own mother’s funeral, which
had been reduced to a series of flashes: Muddy ground. Hugs from
strangers. Big cars. White lilies tossed onto a black
coffin.
“We’ll make a big funeral bier and someone will
dress up as a mermaid and we’ll all push it down the parade route.”
She was getting excited. “And the music can be like a dirge or some
kind of old sad sea shanty or something, and we’ll all wear
black.”
“I don’t know,” Babette said, but her eyes seemed
to light up.
Jane said wryly, “You’re already in costume.”
Venus said, “It’s not much of a stretch for you
either. Some of your clothes are so old they should be
dead.” Jane had been visiting vintage and secondhand shops all
winter, assembling a wardrobe sort of inspired by Birdie’s old
clothes. Today she was wearing a blue-and-white gingham dress with
short cap sleeves and a mildy frilly old-fashioned collar.
“Not nice,” Babette said.
“I’m kidding,” Venus said, then added brightly,
“Gooble gobble!”
“A mermaid funeral,” Babette said again—trying it
on for size—and Rita said, “It’s pretty good.”
Legs agreed, as did H.T. and Debbie.
Venus and Minnie just shrugged, but for some reason
Jane didn’t even care anymore. It wasn’t like Leo had picked Jane
over Venus. It wasn’t as though she’d done anything with Legs but
become his friend. And she was a member of the D.S.C. now, so they
were just going to have to get over it.
“I can make the mermaid tail and fin out of some of
my grandmother’s old costumes,” she said in an attempt to cinch the
deal.
“Nobody has any better ideas?” Minnie said, sort of
desperately, and everyone shook their heads. When Leo walked by
their table, Babette said, “Feel like writing a funeral
dirge?”
“Always,” he said, and then he approached another
group.
Petition to save the Anchor.
Petition to save the Anchor.
The phrase lodged itself securely on a loop in
Jane’s head.
Jane and Legs—the only two people who were
famished—headed over to Nathan’s after the group split up to find
that hundreds of other people were also craving hot dogs on opening
day. Jane would have been happy to redirect to pizza or anything,
really, but Legs was determined to get a hot dog—or four, as the
case may be—and so they waited and waited and waited and pushed and
shoved and finally ordered five dogs and three orders of fries.
When Legs announced the order, it became obvious to Jane that
everyone on line was staring at him.
At them.
People had, she realized, probably been doing it
the whole time, and every other time they’d been out together—as
friends, just friends—but Jane hadn’t actually noticed. Now that
she had—now that she and H.T. had talked about it, the staring—she
couldn’t not notice. She didn’t like it.
Legs acted like he didn’t notice—trying to make
light conversation about the weather—but Jane could tell he did,
and that he sensed the change in her. They finally sat down with
hot dogs at a table outside and he said, “Does it bother
you?”
“What?”
“You know.” He looked off to his right, and Jane
followed his gaze and saw a bunch of guys in baseball caps avert
their eyes and then laugh. “The staring.”
She suddenly wasn’t interested in her hot dog.
“It’s weird,” she said. “I never noticed it before today for some
reason.”
Leo walked by them then, though he didn’t see them,
and neither of them called out to him as he stopped people on the
street to get signatures.
“You know, it’s funny.” Legs was already on his
second dog; Jane was still spreading mustard on hers, squeezing it
out of the small, soft paper cup she’d filled at the condiment
pumps. “For a while there I thought you were going to end up with
Leo.”
Jane stared at her dog, covered in off-white kraut
and golden-brown mustard. It suddenly looked like horribly fake
food, like it would be wrong to eat it. Someone named Nathan got
rich because of this? “Why would you think that?” she said
steadily.
“Just a sense I got, and I mean, there’s some
history, right?”
“Right,” Jane said. “Our mothers were
friends.”
As if that explained it all.
“I heard that. And I thought you were going to go
for him, but then I guess the whole Tsunami thing happened.” Legs
chewed a bit, moved onto his third dog. “People stare at him, too,
but it’s different.”
“How is it different?” Jane was pretty sure she
already knew.
Legs swallowed, and Jane watched his Adam’s
apple—like the size of a baseball—travel down his neck. “They look
at me because they’re grateful they’re not me. They look at him
because they want to be him.”
Jane said, “I bet there are people out there who’d
want to be you.”
“Name one good reason why anyone would want to be
seven and a half feet tall.” Before she could say anything he
added, “And the reason can’t be basketball.”
She was stumped for a second, but then she said, “I
think some of the, you know, little people. Minnie. Babette. I
think they sometimes wish they were you.”
“They wish they were taller,” he said. “Not
this tall.”
“Well, there are good things about it, right? I
mean, you can always see if you go to a concert.”
Legs let out a loud “Ha” before continuing. “I have
to stand in the very last row or at the back edge of a crowd or I
piss people off.”
She felt her own pout.
“You’re sweet.” Legs started to gather his trash.
“And it’s not the worst thing in the world, no. But it’s not that
great either.”
“Dude,” someone said as Legs stood up. “You play
basketball?”
“No,” Jane snapped. “He doesn’t.”
She was angry—had been angry the whole time, she
realized—and finally felt the need to ask Legs, “Why didn’t you
sign the petition?”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to.”
“What did you want to do?” Her whole body
seemed to tighten.
“I don’t think it’s a big deal either way.” Legs
threw his trash into a large bin. “It’s not like a stupid petition
is going to change anything.”
He was right. But Jane wanted to smack him
anyway.
Peach Fuzz had a new Mets shirt but the same tire
belly and the same old lines. “Check-check-check it out,” he said
into the mike. “Shoot the Freak in the freakin’ head.”
Jane had half a mind to slap down ten bucks and let
rip. She’d pretend the Freak was Leo again and she’d nail
him.
He deserved it.
Not for trying to save his father’s bar or trying
to stop Loki from building a shopping mall, but for just not
getting it. Not getting that none of it—Loki, the Anchor, the
Tsunami, nothing—had anything to do with them, not really. For not
getting that they had had something that was worth pursuing that
fall and that they owed it to themselves to follow through and see
what it really was.
The more time that had passed, the more knishes
they’d shared during their truce, the more sure Jane had become
that he’d wanted to kiss her that night on the roof of the bumper
car building, when they’d gone to Luna Park and the Elephant Hotel
in their minds.
The more time that had passed the surer she was
that she was the one who’d screwed it up, by not realizing she’d
agreed to a date with Legs, by not telling Leo about the Tsunami
sooner.
But he hadn’t helped.
She watched as a few shooters splattered orange and
green paint on the trash can the Freak had ducked behind and then
found herself, once more, staring at the Mad Hatter and his teapot.
She was suddenly very, very thirsty, like there was a webby moths’
nest in her throat. And when she walked by the carousel house and
saw the sign that said that the ride had been removed, to be
restored, and would be back next year, she knew what she had to
do.