Lost in the Funhouse (12 page)

Magda’s teeth. She
was
left-handed. Perspiration. They’ve gone all the way, through, Magda and Peter, they’ve been waiting for hours with Mother and Uncle Karl while Father searches for his lost son; they draw french-fried potatoes from a paper cup and shake their heads. They’ve named the children they’ll one day have and bring to Ocean City on holidays. Can spermatozoa properly be thought of as male animalcules when there are no female spermatozoa? They grope through hot, dark windings, past Love’s Tunnel’s fearsome obstacles. Some perhaps lose their way.

Peter suggested then and there that they do the funhouse; he had been through it before, so had Magda, Ambrose hadn’t and suggested, his voice cracking on account of Fat May’s laughter, that they swim first. All were chuckling, couldn’t help
it; Ambrose’s father, Ambrose’s and Peter’s father came up grinning like a lunatic with two boxes of syrup-coated popcorn, one for Mother, one for Magda; the men were to help themselves. Ambrose walked on Magda’s right; being by nature left-handed, she carried the box in her left hand. Up front the situation was reversed.

“What are you limping for?” Magda inquired of Ambrose. He supposed in a husky tone that his foot had gone to sleep in the car. Her teeth flashed. “Pins and needles?” It was the honeysuckle on the lattice of the former privy that drew the bees. Imagine being stung there. How long is this going to take?

The adults decided to forgo the pool; but Uncle Karl insisted they change into swimsuits and do the beach. “He wants to watch the pretty girls,” Peter teased, and ducked behind Magda from Uncle Karl’s pretended wrath. “You’ve got all the pretty girls you need right here,” Magda declared, and Mother said: “Now that’s the gospel truth.” Magda scolded Peter, who reached over her shoulder to sneak some popcorn. “Your brother and father aren’t getting any.” Uncle Karl wondered if they were going to have fireworks that night, what with the shortages. It wasn’t the shortages, Mr. M_____ replied; Ocean City had fireworks from pre-war. But it was too risky on account of the enemy submarines, some people thought.

“Don’t seem like Fourth of July without fireworks,” said Uncle Karl. The inverted tag in dialogue writing is still considered permissible with proper names or epithets, but sounds old-fashioned with personal pronouns. “We’ll have ‘em again soon enough,” predicted the boys’ father. Their mother declared she could do without fireworks: they reminded her too much of the real thing. Their father said all the more reason to shoot off a few now and again. Uncle Karl asked
rhetorically
who needed reminding, just look at people’s hair and skin.

“The oil, yes,” said Mrs. M_____.

Ambrose had a pain in his stomach and so didn’t swim but enjoyed watching the others. He and his father burned red easily. Magda’s figure was exceedingly well developed for her age.
She too declined to swim, and got mad, and became angry when Peter attempted to drag her into the pool. She always swam, he insisted; what did she mean not swim? Why did a person come to Ocean City?

“Maybe I want to lay here with Ambrose,” Magda teased.

Nobody likes a pedant.

“Aha,” said Mother. Peter grabbed Magda by one ankle and ordered Ambrose to grab the other. She squealed and rolled over on the beach blanket. Ambrose pretended to help hold her back. Her tan was darker than even Mother’s and Peter’s. “Help out, Uncle Karl!” Peter cried. Uncle Karl went to seize the other ankle. Inside the top of her swimsuit, however, you could see the line where the sunburn ended and, when she hunched her shoulders and squealed again, one nipple’s auburn edge. Mother made them behave themselves. “
You
should certainly know,” she said to Uncle Karl. Archly. “That when a lady says she doesn’t feel like swimming, a gentleman doesn’t ask questions.” Uncle Karl said excuse
him;
Mother winked at Magda; Ambrose blushed; stupid Peter kept saying “Phooey on
feel like!
” and tugging at Magda’s ankle; then even he got the point, and cannonballed with a holler into the pool.

“I swear,” Magda said, in mock
in feigned
exasperation.

The diving would make a suitable literary symbol. To go off the high board you had to wait in a line along the poolside and up the ladder. Fellows tickled girls and goosed one another and shouted to the ones at the top to hurry up, or razzed them for bellyfloppers. Once on the springboard some took a great while posing or clowning or deciding on a dive or getting up their nerve; others ran right off. Especially among the younger fellows the idea was to strike the funniest pose or do the craziest stunt as you fell, a thing that got harder to do as you kept on and kept on. But whether you hollered
Geronimo!
or
Sieg heil!
, held your nose or “rode a bicycle,” pretended to be shot or did a perfect jacknife or changed your mind halfway down and ended up with nothing, it was over in two
seconds, after all that wait. Spring, pose, splash. Spring, neat-o, splash. Spring, aw fooey, splash.

The grown-ups had gone on; Ambrose wanted to converse with Magda; she was remarkably well developed for her age; it was said that that came from rubbing with a turkish towel, and there were other theories. Ambrose could think of nothing to say except how good a diver Peter was, who was showing off for her benefit. You could pretty well tell by looking at their bathing suits and arm muscles how far along the different fellows were. Ambrose was glad he hadn’t gone in swimming, the cold water shrank you up so. Magda pretended to be uninterested in the diving; she probably weighed as much as he did. If you knew your way around in the funhouse like your own bedroom, you could wait until a girl came along and then slip away without ever getting caught, even if her boyfriend was right with her. She’d think
he
did it! It would be better to be the boyfriend, and act outraged, and tear the funhouse apart.

Not act;
be.

“He’s a master diver,” Ambrose said. In feigned admiration. “You really have to slave away at it to get that good.” What would it matter anyhow if he asked her right out whether she remembered, even teased her with it as Peter would have?

There’s no point in going farther; this isn’t getting anybody anywhere; they haven’t even come to the funhouse yet. Ambrose is off the track, in some new or old part of the place that’s not supposed to be used; he strayed into it by some one-in-a-million chance, like the time the roller-coaster car left the tracks in the nineteen-teens against all the laws of physics and sailed over the boardwalk in the dark. And they can’t locate him because they don’t know where to look. Even the designer and operator have forgotten this other part, that winds around on itself like a whelk shell. That winds around the right part like the snakes on Mercury’s caduceus. Some people, perhaps, don’t “hit their stride” until their twenties, when the growing-up business is over and women appreciate other things besides wisecracks and teasing and strutting. Peter didn’t have one-tenth
the imagination
he
had, not one-tenth. Peter did this naming-their-children thing as a joke, making up names like Aloysius and Murgatroyd, but Ambrose knew
exactly
how it would feel to be married and have children of your own, and be a loving husband and father, and go comfortably to work in the mornings and to bed with your wife at night, and wake up with her there. With a breeze coming through the sash and birds and mockingbirds singing in the Chinese-cigar trees. His eyes watered, there aren’t enough ways to say that. He would be quite famous in his line of work. Whether Magda was his wife or not, one evening when he was wise-lined and gray at the temples he’d smile gravely, at a fashionable dinner party, and remind her of his youthful passion. The time they went with his family to Ocean City; the
erotic fantasies
he used to have about her. How long ago it seemed, and childish! Yet tender, too,
n’est-ce pas?
Would she have imagined that the world-famous whatever remembered how many strings were on the lyre on the bench beside the girl on the label of the cigar box he’d stared at in the toolshed at age ten while she, age eleven. Even then he had felt
wise beyond his years;
he’d stroked her hair and said in his deepest voice and correctest English, as to a dear child: “I shall never forget this moment.”

But though he had breathed heavily, groaned as if ecstatic, what he’d really felt throughout was an odd detachment, as though someone else were Master. Strive as he might to be transported, he heard his mind take notes upon the scene:
This is what they call
passion. I
am experiencing it.
Many of the digger machines were out of order in the penny arcades and could not be repaired or replaced for the duration. Moreover the prizes, made now in USA, were less interesting than formerly, pasteboard items for the most part, and some of the machines wouldn’t work on white pennies. The gypsy fortuneteller machine might have provided a foreshadowing of the climax of this story if Ambrose had operated it. It was even dilapidateder than most: the silver coating was worn off the brown metal handles, the glass windows around the dummy
were cracked and taped, her kerchiefs and silks long-faded. If a man lived by himself, he could take a department-store mannequin with flexible joints and modify her in certain ways.
However:
by the time he was that old he’d have a real woman. There was a machine that stamped your name around a white-metal coin with a star in the middle: A_____. His son would be the second, and when the lad reached thirteen or so he would put a strong arm around his shoulder and tell him calmly: “It is perfectly normal. We have all been through it. It will not last forever.” Nobody knew how to be what they were right. He’d smoke a pipe, teach his son how to fish and softcrab, assure him he needn’t worry about himself. Magda would certainly give, Magda would certainly yield a great deal of milk, although guilty of occasional solecisms. It don’t taste so bad. Suppose the lights came on now!

The day wore on.
You think you’re yourself, but there are other persons in you. Ambrose gets hard when Ambrose doesn’t want to,
and obversely.
Ambrose watches them disagree; Ambrose watches him watch. In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way. Even if you had a glass periscope, the image of your eye would cover up the thing you really wanted to see. The police will come; there’ll be a story in the papers. That must be where it happened. Unless he can find a surprise exit, an unofficial backdoor or escape hatch opening on an alley, say, and then stroll up to the family in front of the funhouse and ask where everbody’s been;
he’s
been out of the place for ages. That’s just where it happened, in that last lighted room: Peter and Magda found the right exit; he found one that you weren’t supposed to find and strayed off into the works somewhere. In a perfect funhouse you’d be able to go only one way, like the divers off the high-board; getting lost would be impossible; the doors and halls would work like minnow traps or the valves in veins.

On account of German U-boats, Ocean City was “browned out”: streetlights were shaded on the seaward side; shop-windows
and boardwalk amusement places were kept dim, not to silhouette tankers and Liberty-ships for torpedoing. In a short story about Ocean City, Maryland, during World War II, the author could make use of the image of sailors on leave in the penny arcades and shooting galleries, sighting through the crosshairs of toy machine guns at swastika’d subs, while out in the black Atlantic a U-boat skipper squints through his periscope at real ships outlined by the glow of penny arcades. After dinner the family strolled back to the amusement end of the boardwalk. The boys’ father had burnt red as always and was masked with Noxzema, a minstrel in reverse. The grown-ups stood at the end of the boardwalk where the Hurricane of ’33 had cut an inlet from the ocean to Assawoman Bay.

“Pronounced with a long o,” Uncle Karl reminded Magda with a wink. His shirt sleeves were rolled up; Mother punched his brown biceps with the arrowed heart on it and said his mind was naughty. Fat May’s laugh came suddenly from the funhouse, as if she’d just got the joke; the family laughed too at the coincidence. Ambrose went under the boardwalk to search for out-of-town matchbook covers with the aid of his pocket flashlight; he looked out from the edge of the North American continent and wondered how far their laughter carried over the water. Spies in rubber rafts; survivors in lifeboats. If the joke had been beyond his understanding, he could have said:
“The laughter was over his head.”
And let the reader see the serious wordplay on second reading.

He turned the flashlight on and then off at once even before the woman whooped. He sprang away, heart athud, dropping the light. What had the man grunted? Perspiration drenched and chilled him by the time he scrambled up to the family. “See anything?” his father asked. His voice wouldn’t come; he shrugged and violently brushed sand from his pants legs.

“Let’s ride the old flying horses!” Magda cried. I’ll never be an author. It’s been forever already, everybody’s gone home, Ocean City’s deserted, the ghost-crabs are tickling across the beach and down the littered cold streets. And the empty
halls of clapboard hotels and abandoned funhouses. A tidal wave; an enemy air raid; a monster-crab swelling like an island from the sea.
The inhabitants fled in terror.
Magda clung to his trouser leg; he alone knew the maze’s secret. “He gave his life that we might live,” said Uncle Karl with a scowl of pain, as he. The fellow’s hands had been tattooed; the woman’s legs, the woman’s fat white legs had.
An astonishing coincidence.
He yearned to tell Peter. He wanted to throw up for excitement. They hadn’t even chased him. He wished he were dead.

One possible ending would be to have Ambrose come across another lost person in the dark. They’d match their wits together against the funhouse, struggle like Ulysses past obstacle after obstacle, help and encourage each other. Or a girl. By the time they found the exit they’d be closest friends, sweethearts if it were a girl; they’d know each other’s inmost souls, be bound together
by the cement of shared adventure;
then they’d emerge into the light and it would turn out that his friend was a Negro. A blind girl. President Roosevelt’s son. Ambrose’s former archenemy.