MADELEINE E. ROBINS

SOMEWHERE IN DREAMLAND TONIGHT

THE DRESS, WHEN SHE FINDS it, is pink. It smells richly of lavender, slightly of
camphor, an uneasy mixture in the stifling heat of the attic. Ruth sits back on
her heels and holds the thing out before her wonderingly. From the style, it
would be from before she was married, when she was still living with Aunt Min,
the summer she was wild, going out to Coney on the weekends with that girl from
her office. She imagines herself in the dress, poised before a mirror.

A door slams downstairs. Peg, on her way out to God knows where. On the surface
of the cloth Ruth sees the argument an hour before, her daughter standing in the
attic doorway shouting that she is old enough to run her own life. "I bring home
my pay, don't I? I'm entitled to a little fun. You just don't know the way
things are." Sees herself, all the love and worry she feels turning to hard
little words in her mouth when she tries to caution her only child, her baby.
The headache that began an hour ago dances hotly behind Ruth's eyes. Her eyes
and throat itch.

Ruth shakes the dress out brusquely. Why did I keep it, she wonders. There is
yellowed lace at the collar; on one side there is a small brown stain, almost
invisible. When she looks at the dress Ruth feels a frisson of fear and
something she almost doesn't recognize: a sudden unnerving sexual pang. That was
the summer that . . . she begins, then cannot finish the thought. Memories of
that summer are immediate, but something eludes her. Did something happen? She
tries hard, going beyond the heat and dust in the attic, beyond the pain that
makes her vision jump with each pulse; Ruth knows the dress means something, but
cannot recall what.

The summer when she was wild, she calls it in her memory. But what we thought
was wicked then. . . . I always went home with -- what was her name? Leda McHale
-- back to Leda's to sleep on the trundle in Leda's own bedroom, as chaste as a
nun. I should go downstairs now, she thinks. But downstairs will be empty of
Peg, gone off to a football party at college with one of those boys. Downstairs
will be full of Peg's discarded stockings and teddies, the purple cloche hanging
off the newel post, the scent of Peg's too strong, too suggestive perfume. Peg
doesn't understand, doesn't know what she's doing, how dangerous it is to tempt
those boys. She's too young -what's eighteen years? She doesn't know how men can
be. Ruth knows.

The dress, when she found it, was pink. It hung in the window of Hooley's Dry
Goods and Ladies' Furnishings and cost Ruth almost a week's wage from her job as
a type-writer. The bodice draped to a short waist, the sleeves teardrop-shaped
with lace at the wrists; the collar was ivory lace and rose high, high on the
throat, to just under her chin. In it Ruth, with her soft, rounded chin and
strawberry blonde hair, looked like an illustration from the Home Journal. The
mirror and the salesgirl both told her so. She bought it knowing that Aunt Min
would purse her lips at the price.

On Saturday, early, she donned the dress, pinned her hair up under a small,
flirtatious straw hat, and told Aunt Min she was going on a picnic with a friend
from the 17th Street Methodist Church choir. Then Ruth was gone, gone to meet
her best friend Leda, Leda's brother Jonah, and Jonah's fiancee Pearline, to
catch the train to Coney.

Going to Coney. It was forbidden fruit; Aunt Min read the Police Gazette with as
much fervor as her Bible, and knew chapter and verse about the vice and
depravity practiced at Coney: men and women clinging to each other on the great
wheel, five-cent beers, freak shows. If Min had known where Ruth really intended
to spend the day she would have locked her in her room and read temperance
lectures to her through the keyhole.

The train ride felt endless. In the heat Ruth's hair began to come down in rosy
wisps, sticking to her cheeks and neck. She dabbed ineffectively at the beads of
perspiration on upper lip and brow with a handkerchief, stealing a glance at the
other women in the ear. All of them were flushed and moist, languorous in the
heat. Leda and Pearline giggled and poked at each other and at Ruth; Jonah slept
through their mirth with his boater drawn down over his eyes, the tips of his
waxed mustache gleaming in the sunlight.

When they got off the train it was all spread before them. Steeplechase and
Dreamland, Luna Park, the grand old resort hotels down the coast, the Boardwalk.
Revitalized by the freshening breeze from the water, Leda and Ruth immediately
wanted to run ahead. But Pearline wanted a lemonade, and to sit in the shade
with Jonah. So Ruth and Leda sipped lemonade and tried not to listen while Jonah
and Pearline whispered to each other on their side of the table. Ruth was
astonished at their shamelessness, but no one else seemed to notice or care.
Leda caught a man staring at her, and when she frowned he tipped his hat and
smiled, and Leda giggled nervously into Ruth's shoulder. At last, with lemonade
still sticky on their lips, they left the stand for the parks, Ruth looked back
over her shoulder to make sure the man had not followed after them.

For hours they rode the rides, squealing at every bump and whirl and
breathtaking turn. Pearline nestled against Jonah, shrieking until he tightened
the arm that circled her waist; Leda and Ruth clung to each other in delicious
terror. Under the grinning supervision of Tilyou's great clown they gorged
themselves on up and down and sideways motion. Then they went down Surf Avenue
to Luna Park to watch the Great Naval Spectacular, arguing which park was the
best. Leda and Jonah liked Steeplechase; Pearline preferred Luna's uplifting
spectacles. Then, at dusk, they came to Dreamland, and Ruth knew which park was
her favorite.

The clock downstairs strikes five o'clock. Ruth starts, looks up, remembers that
Peg is gone and that Peg's father won't be home from the lodge until late. She
has the house to herself tonight, big and empty.

They have done well, they own the house outright, even have a broker and stocks;
Peg went to a good school for young ladies across town, and Ruth has a girl in
three times a week to help with the house and do the heavy cleaning. It is more
than she ever dreamed of, growing up in Brooklyn. The house is big, the girl
won't come again until Monday, Peg has gone out against Ruth's wishes, traveling
with that fast crowd, college boys. Ruth can smell the danger of them when they
come to the house. Why can't Peg understand? What is it that drives her out to
parties, sends her home after midnight with gin breath unsuccessfully disguised
with peppermints? But even as Ruth thinks "I never . . ." the dress in her hands
belies the thought. She can remember the thrill of sneaking out, doing the
forbidden, going to the forbidden place. More: when she looks at the collar she
remembers the way it circled her throat so that her chin nestled in a ruffle of
lace. Remembers tilting her head until it was cupped by the lace as if it were a
firm, cool hand. Remembers the hand tracing a path from her ear down along her
throat, slowly and caressingly. Abruptly she looks away.

The dress, when she found it, was pink, jumbled in the comer with half a dozen
other garments, its soft fabric creased and dotted with greasy spots, a clump of
dust clinging to the fold of the bodice. On the high lace collar, so tiny one
could miss it, a stain in the shape of a perfect droplet, rusty red. Ruth shook
her head, trying to remember what it meant. It was hot in her room, stifling,
and the sunlight brought on a headache as she looked at the dress. Something. .
. . Aunt Min bustled in to borrow a pair of gloves for church and saw Ruth's
headache written clearly across her face. Then it was a matter of cool
compresses, Aunt Min's assurances that the Almighty would excuse her missing
Sunday services this once. Min herself drew the shades and dabbed at Ruth's
temples with lavender water until Ruth wanted to scream. Finally she went off to
church, the feather in her hat standing righteously erect.

The dress still hung over the back of her wicker armchair. As she stared at it a
whisper threaded Ruth's memory: rose pink lady. Who called her that? With each
glance at the dress the sense that she should remember was fainter, less
imperative. At last she got up and hung the dress in her clothes press and lay
down to wait out the headache.

When she awoke it was dusk, and the week stretched before her like a quiet road
at twilight. * * *

The world went away when you entered Dreamland and there was nothing but light
and music and people everywhere. They went first to the Venetian Canals, where
Pearline and Jonah rode the gondola, heads close together with the boatman's
uninterested chaperonage. Then Leda wanted to see the midgets; Pearline wanted
to see Creation. Ruth didn't care: everything was fine with her in Dreamland.

As they walked along they were hailed by the barker from the Congress of Living
Wonders. Jonah shook his head and pulled Pearline after him. Leda followed.
Behind them, Ruth looked over at the platform for a moment. She was about to
turn away when she saw a man looking at her. She blinked and he tipped his hat
and smiled. He must mean some other girl, she thought. But she hung back,
delighted and appalled to realize that he was looking at her. Of all the women
in the crowd he chose her to smile on. In the swirl and eddy of the crowd Ruth
stood rock still, looking at him. What does he want? she wondered, and answered
herself: he wanted something. That was what Aunt Min would say. Men always
wanted some unimaginable something. For the first time in her life Ruth
wondered, seriously wondered, what the something was.

He stood a few feet behind the barker, near the curtain at the back of the
platform. He didn't seem to have a part in the show; he was simply observing.
Ruth was so fascinated by the dark sparkle of the man and the flush of
excitement that made her blush, that she didn't see Leda and Jonah and Pearline
continuing on to the Creation pavilion, pushing through the crowd as oblivious
to her loss as she was to their absence.

He was dark and polished, like an onyx pebble. His pearl gray suit was fresh
despite the heat, his tie and collar crisp at his throat. His eyes were dark as
onyx and his smile had a cool, white light all its own. From the platform the
barker spoke insinuatingly, drawing the crowd in to see the Bearded Lady, the
Man with Two Mouths. As she pushed forward with them, searching for a coin in
her pocketbook, a hand at her elbow stopped her. He was there beside her, the
onyx-dark man, saying, "Keep your money, darling. It will be my pleasure."

Blushing, Ruth let him guide her into the show. Light from the incandescents
flooded the area unevenly, leaving dark pockets between the exhibits; they gave
a low sizzling noise which blended into the calls and sighs and shrieks of the
crowd and the performers. They paced leisurely from one platform to the next as
the barker's feverish baritone extolled the strangeness of this one, the
awfulness of that. Ruth listened with half an ear, distracted by the presence of
the onyx man at her side. His light touch on her elbow that kept her constantly
aware of things she had never known existed: heat and scent and male presence.

They strolled past the freaks and wonders and Ruth accepted each of them without
question because they were dressed in his glamor. He murmured softly into her
ear until she giggled nervously at his comments about the fat lady's beard and
the sword-swallower's wrinkled tights. His breath was hot in her ear, moving the
strands of her red hair against her cheek. When they came to the show's end and
the barker exhorted the audience to Come Again, Come Again, Ladeees and
Gentle-men, the stranger leaned close. "Rose-pink lady," he murmured. "Will you
take a walk with me?"

Then they parted from the audience and left the hall by a doorway in the rear,
their passage noted by the barker with a knowing glance. Her onyx-dark man led
her through an alley and out into the main street, and they sauntered like any
other summer beaux in the crowded lamplight. A sudden turn just past the
Hellgate, down an alley, and then he brought Ruth through a door and into a
dusty vaulted room. It was dim after the glare of the street; Ruth blinked
owlishly. She could make out wooden struts and draped canvas. There was a strong
smell of paint and varnish and moldy sawdust. Ruth turned toward the man only to
find him there beside her, very close. He traced the bow of her upper lip with
one long finger, a gesture which shocked Ruth and moved her in a way she could
not understand. When she closed her eyes she could feel his breath on her ear
again. Inside her something like Aunt Min's voice told her to run for her life.

"Rose-pink lady," he murmured again.

Ruth didn't move, except to tilt her face up to his.

Leda was waiting for her at the Beacon Tower.

"Where've you been?" she fluttered. "Jo and Pearlie are looking for you
everywhere, we thought you were lost. Ruthie, you all right?"

Ruth smiled and nodded and said she'd just lost them in the crowd. "Did you see
the midgets?" she asked.

Leda shook her head. They had been searching for Ruth. Jonah was fit to be tied.

"We'll have to come out again," Ruth said softly. "There is so much to see yet."

Then Jonah and Pearline found them. Ruth endured their scolding all the way to
the train station, and until they boarded the car back to Flatbush Avenue. She
slept on the trip back, stumbled into Aunt Min's flat, got herself to bed
somehow. Already she was thinking of next Saturday.

THE NEXT time it was all familiar: the parks, the paths that connected from one
to the other. The excitement that traced pathways along the nerves when you
first stood there at dusk surrounded by the lights and the smells and the sounds
and the tastes and the people. When they reached Dreamland Jonah took Pearline
and Leda off to the midget city and they agreed to meet at the tower at nine.
Ruth had told them she was meeting a friend from her church choir. Jonah may
have believed her; Pearline and Leda winked broadly and took him away before he
could ask too many questions. Helping Ruth, each girl borrowed a little of her
adventure, thrilled to their own illicit part in her drama.

From the gates of the park it took Ruth only a few minutes to find the Congress
of Wonders. By the curtains at the back of the platform she saw him, dark and
polished. His smile gleamed in the dusk, and Ruth's pulse began a slow, dramatic
hammering. He knew she had come to find him, she knew he knew. Everything would
move forward now from that knowledge.

He took her elbow and guided her forward, smiling solicitously.

"I don't know your name," she heard herself say. His eyes were very dark.

"Adam," he said quietly.

This time he did not take her to the backstage of Hellgate. Instead they walked
a thread through canvas tunnels, alleys, under the boardwalk and out onto the
beach. The ocean, overshadowed by the parks, glistened in the moonlight. He held
Ruth's fingers in his own cool, dry hand. After a while they took their shoes
and socks off and walked with the sand between their toes. They talked, then
were silent.

When she met the others at the Beacon Tower later she walked slowly, as if her
blood had taken on the rhythm of the sea. On the long train ride back to
Flatbush Avenue Ruth's hand floated at her chin and caressed the lace collar of
her dress.

That night she slept at Leda's. Her dreams were full of darkness and rhythm, the
touch of his hand, of his lips.

What is it about the college, about those boys that Peg finds so attractive?
Ruth frowns in the dimness of the attic. I should turn the electric on, she
thinks, but doesn't get up to flip the light switch. Those boys, most of them
cheap, stupid. They have raccoon coats and cheap Ford autos and Peg thinks
they're exciting. She'll waste herself on one of those boys, break her heart.
None of them will stay with her, marry her, take care of her. She needs a nice,
safe man like her father. She doesn't understand what I want to spare her.

Under her hands, which clench and twist, the fabric of the dress tears slightly,
releasing more lavender scent on the air. The summer I went to Coney, she
thinks. Over and over, every Saturday all summer long, with Aunt Min wondering
and worrying and silent as a stone, just looking down her nose on Sunday
mornings when I came home from Leda's. She stares at the dress in her hands and
slowly smooths the creases away.

During the week Ruth was quiet and thoughtful. She did her work quietly, didn't
spend much time talking to the other girls in the office. She browsed the shops
looking at dresses, but she had a superstitious feeling about wearing any other
dress than the pink one out to Coney. She went to choir rehearsal on Tuesday
nights and helped with Aunt Min's Friday socials, pouring out weak tea for hours
without protest. She carried her secret like an amulet against boredom and
frustration; it took so little to recall the feelings of Coney, the looseness
and languor, the hot urgent pressing of his lips against her throat. On Saturday
mornings she woke up, really awake, and dressed in the pink dress again, and
went to meet Leda and the others for the ride out to Coney.

After a few weeks, Leda suggested they go somewhere else on Saturday. To the
country for a picnic, to the city for a show. Ruth smiled and said perhaps, but
each Saturday they went to Coney. Pearline saw her fill and more of the miracle
babies and Jonah watched the end of Pompeii until he was sick of it, but as long
as they could sit in a gondola or on a wooden horse, pressed together, they were
willing to go out to Coney again. Leda looked out for young men looking at her,
but none did, no matter how she giggled and flirted her eyebrows. As the summer
went on Leda giggled less. Ruth didn't share her adventure with Leda, forgot to
ask if Leda had any beaux or flirtations. Leda, who had always been the forward,
kittenish one, began to look confused and hurt. Ruth did not notice.

August turned chilly for a few days, Aunt Min took her mantle from the back of
the closet to wear for church, and Ruth took to carrying a shawl with her. On a
Wednesday at the office, Leda told Ruth that she and Jonah had a christening to
go to that weekend. "We'll have to go to Coney next week," she said, not
bothering to hide her satisfaction.

Ruth panicked.

She went through the day thinking, how can I go out there? For a moment she
thought, maybe Pearlie will go with me. But Pearline would probably go to the
christening. Even if she didn't Pearline would never allow herself to be
abandoned at Dreamland while Ruth went off on her own. As she transcribed pages
of manuscript on the typewriter her mind was at Coney with him. How could she
get out to Coney? She even thought, perhaps Aunt Min? No, not until Hell froze
over, maybe not even then. The more she thought, the more it seemed that she
would really die if she couldn't get out to Dreamland on Saturday. Her thought
was rattled by the pounding of the typewriter under her fingers. After a while
even Saturday seemed too far off. What would he think when she didn't come?
Would he forgive her? Would he smile on someone else? Ruth imagined his
beautiful smile for someone else. She had to tell him she wasn't coming, that it
wasn't her fault or her idea. All afternoon the feeling grew strong, so that
fear fed more fear, and she couldn't stand it that she wouldn't see him tonight,
tell him everything, how Leda and Jonah and Pearline and Aunt Min were trying to
keep them apart.

At six o'clock she left the office with the other girls, Ruth turned left
instead of right. Leda, waiting for her a few steps away, called after her.

"Ruthie, whererya going?"

Without turning Ruth called back, "You know where I'm going."

What happened that summer?

The thought catches Ruth by surprise. What is happening to Peg right now, that's
more important than what happened twenty years ago on a beach miles away. The
answers seem intertwined to her, they stand on each other's shoulders, if she
can answer the one she'll know the other. Why did I keep this dress? The answer
comes: to remind me.

Of what?

The train wasn't full, but there were still people, even families going out.
Ruth felt they were looking at her, all alone with no friend, no chaperoned. She
pulled her shawl tighter around her and clutched her pocketbook in her lap. What
would she say to him? At the sight of him she knew her doubts would melt away.
Everything would be all right when she saw him. She twirled a strand of hair
around her finger and stared out the window toward the nearing glow of Coney's
lights.

When she got off the train it was all familiar but different. Fewer people,
fewer families. More young men lounging on the benches, eyeing her, calling out
Hello, Sweetheart and Looking for Me, Girlie? Even inside the gates of Dreamland
everything felt subtly wrong the music too sharp, the lights too bright, the
laughter too coarse and familiar. For the first time Dreamland was not an
enchanted village but a playground, loud and vulgar. She thought, it's not a
dream, it's a nightmare.

He wasn't at the Congress of Wonders. The barker saw her, all right: tipped his
bowler and smirked, and then pursed his lips in a soundless whistle as if he
knew something she didn't. She began to push her way through the crowd into the
freak show; the barker didn't try to stop her, no one demanded money. She just
pushed in and pushed through, ignoring the freaks, looking for a dark head, a
white smile. When she came out the exit she pushed on to Hellgate. All the
places he had taken her, the backstage areas, the cul-de-sacs between rides and
exhibitions, even the shadowy path under the Boardwalk were hard to find,
although she had thought she knew them.

When she reached the beach at last she was exhausted and bedraggled. The hem of
her brown twill skirt was soggy and stained, and her white shirtwaist was
creased and dirty. She held her hat in one hand; it had come off when she
climbed under the stanchions of the Boardwalk. Where are you, she prayed. Please
find me, please.

In the moonlight the ocean looked like a flat, tranquil mirror. A hundred feet
away she saw him, gray and silver in the moonlight, his back to her, looking out
at the ocean. Ruth gasped in relief and began to cross the sand. He turned at
the sound and she saw: there was a girl in his arms, pale and fair, her face
turned up to his. What was worse, Adam's face when he saw Ruth was perfectly
blank, as if he didn't know her at all. No fear, no explanation, no surprise. He
was smooth and implacable as an onyx pebble.

Ruth turned and ran.

They found her at the Beacon Tower, waiting for them. When Jonah put his coat
around her shoulders and Leda took her hand to lead her out of Dreamland, Ruth
smiled and cried, as if she was too grateful to them ever to stop smiling, and
too miserable ever to stop crying. She cried like a child, and felt like a
child, pathetic, small and weary. When they got her on the train she slept all
the way back, waking fitfully to clutch at Leda and weep again.

They brought Ruth home that night over her protests. Aunt Min's icy disapproval
vanished when she saw her niece's gray, miserable face. Leda and Mfn put her to
bed with a hot water bottle and a cool compress, and Ruth fell back into her
restless sleep. Her dreams were full of darkness and rhythm, of pulses and
heartbeat, the touch of Adam's white hands' on her, the weight of his body
leaning in to her; she dreamt of his breath cool in her ear, loosing a hot
churning excitement in her belly and between her legs. His lips, tracing a path
from her ear to her throat. His teeth, nipping gently, then piercing. Their
cries, together, as he took from her and she gave, yielding everything up to
him. His teeth at her throat, piercing neatly, releasing a flood of liquid heat
through her arteries. It was everything she had heard of love: he told her it
would only hurt once and then only pleasure, only joy.

The same joy she had seen him giving another girl in the shadows cast by the
lights of Dreamland, the blood a black smear across his lips.

She woke early the next morning. The sunlight was white on the counterpane,
unavoidable. Carefully folded on the chair by her wardrobe was the pink dress.
For a moment on waking, Ruth remembered it all, everything. Then, as if it were
blood seeping from an unseen wound, the memory began to leach out of her.
Finally her recollection of Coney, of the whole summer, was as white and
stainless as a bone.

When fall came Aunt Mfn packed the summer clothes away with lavender, as if to
pack it all away. She never asked Ruth about what had happened that night, but
it took weeks for the grim, suspicious look to fade entirely from her eyes. In
the spring, sorting through the clothes, Ruth saw the pink dress, shook her
head, put it back in the trunk. Not a style that wore well.

That winter, in December of '09, she met Peg's father. Dreamland burned down in
'11 and all that was left were the Coney Island waltzes she danced at her
wedding: "I'll see you somewhere in Dreamland, somewhere in Dreamland, tonight.
. . ." Ruth became a wife, then a mother. The Great War came and went. She had a
home, a family, a good life. If it was not an exciting life, that was all right.
The past shimmered in her mind as elusively as the lights of Coney Island and
were lost in the safe, sunlit now.

A CRASH FROM downstairs. Startled from her reverie, alarmed by the series of
thuds and crashes that are Peg making her way up the stairs, crying out
wordlessly for her mother's attention, Ruth hurriedly bundles the dress up and
shoves it back in the chest. She blinks in the light of the upstairs hall and
closes the attic door behind her.

"Peggy?" she calls down urgently. A slurring voice answers, tells her to go
away. Ruth follows the voice to the bathroom, where Peg is angrily scrubbing at
her collar.

"Don't start with me, Ma." Peg refuses to meet her eye, stares resolutely at the
mirror as she pokes angrily at a red stain on her collar.

Ruth stands for a moment, transfixed, the bottom dropping out of the world,
everything. everything coming back to her in a flooding rush of memory. "What
happened, baby?" she asks like a prayer. Trembling. she brushes Peg's hair back,
away from her face and away from her throat; sees the white, unmarred flesh. The
memory is replaced by a surge of relief so powerful she wants to cry. Ruth does
not pursue the memory but gathers her daughter into her arms, rocking silently.

Peg resists briefly. "Don't start with me, Ma! You were right, all right? He got
drunk, he started grabbing at me. I hate him, all right? Isn't that what you
want me to say?"

"No, baby, no," she says. "Hush, hush, it's all right now." Every hard thing Peg
says is forgiven. Ruth thinks, You don't understand. You can't understand. You
don't know how men can be.

Ruth knows.