“Only three D coupons!” June rifled through her booklet. “What a gyp!”
Stan cleared his throat and opened his mouth.
Linwood intercepted him with a look. Even through the opaque movie-star lenses, you could feel her gaze, heat waves rippling up from the furnace.
“We’ll buy more when you run out,” Stan said.
“You can have mine,” I said. “I only want to go on the A rides anyway.” Why was I feeling guilty? The A rides were pretty stupid, things you walked through and baby rides, with the exception of the train. Maybe I’d just ride around and around all day.
They all stared at me as if I were ill.
“I think the pancakes made me a little sick,” I lied.
Linwood placed her cool palm on my forehead. “Pet, you and June can go on the D rides together. We’ll buy more coupons after lunch. June, I don’t want you girls to separate.”
“But she won’t go on the Bobsleds!” June wailed.
“What about the submarine?” I asked.
June snorted. “It doesn’t really go under water!”
But who cared? It was so pretty, with the mermaids and the anemones. The squid was pretty scary, actually.
“We’ll meet in front of the Castle at twelve sharp,” Stan ordered. “After lunch, we’ll make sure you each get to go on the rides you want.”
Linwood nodded.
Stan sighed. Really, he had the worst of it, because now he would have to drag around from shop to shop with Linwood, particularly all the exotic stuff over in Adventureland, and he might have preferred even the rides to that. Sometimes she made him go on the Jungle Boat Cruise, which was the only ride she liked. It reminded her of her teenage trip with her mother, a cruise to Panama. I’d seen this wonderful picture of them once, dressed in long thin skirts, each of them wearing a huge round hat tilted steeply to the side: Linwood, as slender and elegant as a young horse, and Nana, her breast the smooth round shape of a robin’s. Eddie Cantor, a singer, had fallen in love with Linwood during the voyage, but she turned him down.
Stan had been to Panama too. When he got thrown out of Stanford for holding poker games in his room all day instead of going to class, he’d joined the Merchant Marines. He hated the Jungle Boat Cruise.
After Stan handed us each a dollar, June and I raced down Main Street, pell-mell for Fantasyland. The sun felt good on my face, and all the happy people made my heart lift. I tried not to think about the wax and the bones, even though I had this funny feeling, which I’d had a couple of times since The Bad Thing, that someone was watching me. Tommy? My skin went cold. But anyway, I couldn’t imagine Tommy at Disneyland.
Main Street was full of funny old shops—I barely glimpsed them as we whizzed by—that were supposed to look like the stores in old western towns, except that we’d actually gone to Tombstone, Arizona, once and I’d seen the OK Corral and the graves of Wyatt Erp and Billy the Kid. (I loved Billy the Kid. I’d had a crush on him for years, and still did, even though June had just read me the part in World Book where they say he was only four feet high and had a giant head and was a moron, like the guy on the cover of Mad magazine.) These stores were a lot nicer than the real stores in Tombstone, which were all dirty and had a funny smell, cold and sour, like the basement when it flooded. If I hadn’t been following June, I would have been happy to linger inside, eating that candy that looked like pebbles and smelling the sheets of beeswax that you used to make candles. And besides, all that would come later, after dinner, when we ate ice cream cones and waited for the fireworks, strolling back home, exhausted but rich with our day full of images and feelings. For days afterward, you’d shut your eyes and see huge flowers or glowing landscapes or witches extending their long green fingers.
That’s how I thought the day would go, when we crossed the moat to the Castle, and Walt crooned away about wishing on stars, and my spine itched with joy.
“Okay,” June said, once we were inside the Castle.
I tried to look at her instead of the guys selling stuffed Mickeys and Tinkerbell wings.
“I’m going on the Bobsleds.”
My stomach lurched. “I can’t—”
“I know,” she said. “Look. It’s ten o’clock now. We’ll meet back here at eleven. What’s the difference?”
“Linwood said—”
“What are you, a baby?”
I swallowed.
“Yes, you’re a baby. If you weren’t a baby, you’d ride the Bobsleds.”
The Bobsleds had terrified me out of my senses. My hands started shaking at the thought of going through that again.
“You’re being stupid,” June said, no pity in those eyes. “I’m meeting you here at eleven, and if you get into trouble or tell, you’ll be really sorry.”
With that, she turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd, in the direction of the Matterhorn.
Well, it was like this. Okay, I was nine years old, but I’d never been alone at Disneyland before. June had always wanted me along, so she wouldn’t have to sit in the carts with strangers.
For a minute I was scared, and then I shrugged. She was right; I was being stupid. I had a whole hour of freedom and a whole booklet full of coupons. What to do?
Go on a ride, obviously. And, again obviously, the idea was to pick a ride that June would never go on, in order to take full advantage of my freedom. The one ride that she unequivocally refused to take was Storybookland. What you did was you rode into the mouth of the whale, and, once inside, everything was tiny and magical, or so the postcards seemed to show. You got to see Cinderella’s little cottage and the burning houses of the Three Little Pigs, and so forth. It was all too cute and sweet for June; last summer I had tried to convince her that we could pick up some tips for the poodle village, but she snorted.
The crowd seemed larger and more colorful as soon as I started moving. Hard to shake the feeling that I could vanish away, follow any other family and become part of them. To my left was a family of five buying ice cream bars. The father was chubby and smiling, holding the hand of his blond baby daughter. The mother, rounder and plainer and even happier than the father, was handing Fudgsicles to twin boys, three or four years old. Maybe they would take me on as a kind of nurse?
I pulled myself away, but couldn’t really get what I was feeling. Did I want an eraser to descend from the sky, rub me out of existence?
On to Storybookland.
It was over by the exit to Frontierland, and you could hear the sounds of rifles being fired from the arcade (though I could never understand paying money so you could shoot a gun) and the shrieks of the raft passengers, floating over to Tom Sawyer’s Island. Only, as I rounded the bend, there was a sorry-this-ride-is-temporarily-closed sign suspended from the whale’s gaping mouth.
My eyes were full of tears before I’d even made sense of the sign. This was the ride I wanted to go on; no other ride would do. Tears ran down my cheeks, and through my mind went No one loves me and I never get to do what I want and I want to die.
I sat down on a Dumbo bench and sobbed away. My heart hurt, and my hands felt fat and raw. Why move? I could stay like this until someone found me.
Except that after a few minutes, you get bored with your own sadness.
What about the submarines? The submarines were okay, and June swore she’d never go on them again.
I got up from the bench, thinking about strawberry drink and a Snow White doll and whether or not Gaylin missed me at school, and glanced once more at Storybookland, but this was really strange. In front of the sorry-this-ride-is-temporarily-closed sign was a small, neat black poster with white letters: