Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

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:

Who’d ever heard of that ride? Besides, it looked so fishy, tacked up over the real ride. And no one was waiting in line. Usually, at least half of the clever zigzags, designed to give the impression that you were constantly on the verge of entry, were filled. And, for that matter, none of the pretty teenagers with color-coordinated Swiss outfits (which were actually supposed to look German, but I was too young to understand why) were standing at the entrance to the ride, grinning and helping people on and off the boats. And there weren’t even boats . There was only one long, narrow black canoe. The single attendant was a slender man dressed in a clam-colored suit, with eyes the color of ice and skin like pecans.

How long had he been standing there?

But I wanted my strawberry drink, and the submarines. I glanced at the large wristwatch of the white-haired woman who had just sat down on the bench. Ten-fifteen. Plenty of time.

I walked toward Adventureland, wanting to vanish in the crowd, thick and inevitable as a river, colorful as the flowers themselves.

Was that elegant attendant Sammy? I about-faced, until I could see him again. He waited so calmly, unimpressed by either the crowd or the crowd’s neglect of his ride. It looked scary, the unpopularity, the lone man. Next door was the Mad Hatter music and the wild caterpillars of Alice in Wonderland: you could see the bright worms careening crazily on the huge leaves out front, the end of the ride, which put the riders on display—not a usual Disney feature—but was actually a play for time, my idea, to get you used to the real world again after all that wonderful stuff inside. Like being a spy and getting deprogrammed.

Come to Sammy’s Snowland!

The voice was thin and eerie, like those fugues they played in Music Appreciation.

I was attracted by the same strangeness that was repelling me. And who had spoken? The impeccable gentleman was stiff and aloof, and patient.

I hesitated, listening to the wild laughter and promises of the ever-optimistic Mad Hatter.

But the mysterious lure of Snowland was too much. As though fate itself were pulling me by a steel cable tied to my heart, I marched over and sat in the canoe. Nothing really bad could happen at Disneyland . The elegant man did not offer assistance, nor would he take my coupon. With one gray-gloved hand, he gestured to another tacked-up sign: