CHAPTER fourteen
SO, “BABETTE SAID AT LUNCH. “Friday.
Electric Bathing.”
It was the last week of school, and Jane was a
little sad that she wouldn’t be seeing much of their cafeteria
table for a few months. The good news was that she’d be back next
year. Talks between the city and Loki were ongoing. Her father was
still in the mix, as was his Lunacy ride.
“Are you both going?” Babette asked.
“Definitely,” Rita said.
“I don’t know,” Jane said.
“Oh, you’re going,” Babette said.
“Hell yeah, you’re going,” Rita said.
But Jane tried to picture herself swimming in the
ocean; there was more than one problem. “I don’t own a bathing
suit.”
Her friends started laughing then, and at first
Jane felt like her cheeks were going to crumble and give way to
tears, but then it struck her as funny, too.
Hilarious, even.
Babette said, “You can borrow one of mine,” and
they all started laughing even harder, and Jane said, “Do you have
anything in black?” and they laughed even harder. Then finally,
when they stopped, Rita said, “I guess we’ll go shopping.”
I’m in a department store with my mother and
she’s looking at big, shiny things. Dishwashers and clothes washers
and stoves and refrigerators. I’m looking at my twisted reflection
in the stainless-steel doors and looking warped and pushed and
pulled and horrific. “Mommy,” I say, “I look funny.” She crouches
down next to me and says, “There are worse things in life than
looking funny,” and then she goes back to looking at the
machines.
Bored, I wander to the end of the aisle, where
white lights reflect on the long white path that leads to the mall.
I want to run down it the way a plane wants to cruise down a runway
and take off, so I start to run but then I see the wall of
televisions, all tuned to the same station, all showing some
black-and-white movie of a Ferris wheel and millions and millions
of people on a beach somewhere far away. I stand and watch and
forget about my mother and everything as the lights of the
amusement park on the televisions twinkle and glow. A man’s voice
is narrating the film, saying, “It became known as ‘the playground
of the world.’”
“Luna!” my mother is screaming.
“Luna!”
But I don’t turn until she’s by my side, hugging
me, holding me, crying. There is a woman standing next to her, a
perfect stranger best I can tell, and she says to me that I must
never, ever, leave my mother’s side, that I must hold her hand and
never let go. The woman wanders off, and my mother pulls me up into
her lap and sits in a leather armchair in front of one of the TVs.
The Ferris wheel spins and spins and spins....
Jane bumped into her brother sneaking out of the
house at midnight that Friday. She had her new swimsuit on under
shorts and a T-shirt. It felt good to be wearing new things, and
Jane thought she’d have to go shopping with Babette and Rita again
sooner than later.
“You’re going?” Jane said. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” Marcus said back. “Since when did
you decide you’re so much cooler than me anyway?”
“Give me a break, Marcus.”
They elbowed each other as they pushed through the
front door and onto the porch. The sagging window there seemed
somehow to have tightened up, and Jane imagined it was because
she’d gotten rid of Preemie’s dead weight. The house felt lighter,
newer, like it wouldn’t be the worst place to spend another year.
Or two. Jane had kept the stuff that held meaning for her—the Is
It Human? poster and framed photos and some of the old books
and costumes, even the two-headed squirrel. But that was all.
They headed for the boardwalk and turned left when
they got there. Jane saw shadows on the beach, the silhouette of a
pole of some kind, and a figure atop it.
Tattoo Boy.
He was stringing up a lightbulb that ran to the
Anchor via the world’s longest extension cord. The bar had opened
up again after the city’s purchase of the land went through, and
while there were no guarantees, there was hope.
A moment later a small circle of white light cast a
glow over a small portion of the surf and the beach. Bunches of
people were suddenly in the water, shrieking and splashing. It
looked like everyone from school had turned up.
A host of golden daffodils.
Jane picked up her pace, afraid of missing out,
afraid that it would be over—shut down by the cops—before she even
got wet.
“Hey,” Babette said when Jane found her on the
group’s outskirts. She had a towel around her shoulders but was
bone-dry.
Jane looked out at the electric bathers and start
to strip.
“You’re really going in?” Babette seemed
giddy.
Jane nodded. She was a girl on a mission, a mission
to claim some little part of the excitement of the park that was
her namesake, of that bygone era.
The water was black, like fuel, and Jane tried hard
not to think about everything that lived beneath its
surface—electric eels and stingrays and big pulsing jellyfish—as
she picked up one of the ropes tethered to the light tower and
strode into the surf. It was cold, bracing, and the sand curled
around her toes but she pressed on, until she was the farthest
person out. The water was still only waist-high, but with each
swell she wondered whether she was an idiot, whether she should
scream for help right then, before she really needed it. Before it
was too late.
Looking out over the water, she saw just a few
lights—Staten Island—and she overheard someone behind her say, “Do
you know how Staten Island got its name?”
Someone else said, “No,” and the other voice
returned with “The Dutchman who saw it from his ship pointed and
said, ‘Is stat an island?’”
Jane felt pretty sure that she wouldn’t ever have
to swim away from Coney in fear for her life but wondered, still,
how long she would be able to hold her breath. She imagined that
her mother, a mermaid, had been able to do it for a really long
time. But what counted as a really long time?
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?’”