One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “Remember the first time we came here?” Dad said. “And you were like, ‘Wow! Ikea is on Ikea Way! That’s such a funny coincidence.’ ” I laughed. I did remember. Of course, how it actually works is that they build the store and then name the road after it—Ikea is so big that it changes the cartography of the region where they build it—but I didn’t realize it at the time.

  Ikea, I happen to know, because I am obsessed with it, was started in Sweden in 1943 by a seventeen-year-old. Ingvar Kamprad, who was, in case you missed it in the last sentence, seventeen! And now it is the world’s largest furniture seller. There are 389 stores in 48 countries, and a few years ago, Ingvar Kamprad was listed as one of the world’s richest people. From the company he started when he was seventeen. That makes me feel like I’ve got about five years to figure out something really great to do.

  The big blue-and-yellow Ikea signs were coming into view, and my mom was squinting at them, trying to figure out which way to turn. “Overnight parking?” she said, and my dad laughed.

  “Overheight parking,” he said. “Like, for big, tall trucks. But it is funny to imagine spending the night here. You could sleep in one of the showrooms, help yourself to the meatballs!” My dad laughed again, but I couldn’t even pretend to. I mean, I think my heart literally stopped beating. “Right, Frank?” he said, and turned around to smile at me, and I tried to smile back and made a sound—“Ha! Ha!”—like a robot laughing. My dad raised his eyebrows at my weirdness and turned back to the parking situation.

  “Where are we meeting those guys again?” my mom asked as she turned into a narrow spot. “Couches,” I said. “We figured it would be a comfy place to wait if someone was late.”

  “Good thinking!” Mom said, and smiled at me in the rearview mirror.

  We walked across the parking lot and through those big automatic doors, and the world opened up into huge spaces and metal ductwork in the ceiling and total newness. The wonderful, amazing Ikea smell was everywhere: wood and cinnamon, potted ferns and coffee, and something that’s probably chemicals. “Smell that!” I said, inhaling happily. “That’s the Ikea smell!” My dad smiled and patted me, then made the twirly-finger cuckoo gesture next to his head, which made me laugh.

  We took the escalator up to the showrooms, wound our way through the life-size dioramas of kitchens and dining rooms, and arrived in the sofa section, where, sure enough, Walter and his mom were sitting together on a green velvet couch—the one Walter had picked from the catalog—like they were home watching a movie. Zeke was running in a huge spiral on a carpet with a huge spiral pattern on it.

  Walter smiled when he saw us, and Alice stood up to kiss us all. I said hi to Zeke, who was starting another spiral and couldn’t stop to greet us. “Zeke, honey, please,” Alice said. “I’m getting dizzy.” Zeke stopped short, flapped his arms around for a second, and then fell over. We heard his voice say, from the carpet, “Me too.”

  I saw immediately that Walter had his backpack. He was in. He was with me. I’d doubted him, but here he was.

  Alice gathered Zeke up, then stood and gestured to my backpack. “Isn’t Walter going to your house after?” she said.

  “I actually thought Frankie was going to your house after,” my mom said.

  “Oh, sure,” Alice said. “She’s welcome to.”

  “Perfect,” my mom said. “Either way is great with us. We can just figure it out later.”

  “Or they could just stay here,” my dad said, and the grown-ups laughed. My own personal heart stopped beating for the second time in ten minutes. Walter and I did not look at each other. Well, I don’t know what he was looking at, since I didn’t look at him. But I’m guessing it was anything but me.

  We were eager to check out our favorite spots, but the parents had to stop in the entryway area to study various boring pieces of mudroom furniture. Zeke wedged himself into a boot drawer, and when I saw him, he put a finger to his lips in that adorable, exaggerated toddler shhh sign. Then he said loudly, “I’m hiding.”

  “If only we could find Zeke!” my dad said, and Zeke laughed, because he’s easy like that.

  The adults were talking about shoes, surreptitiously removing their own to see how many pairs this or that bench could hold.

  Once Walter’s mom had figured out which model she was buying, she wrote down the number and name and color with the little stub pencil so that she could find the right flat-pack boxes later, in the floor-to-ceiling stacks of boxes in the warehouse. “Or, you know, not find them,” Alice said, laughing. “Which is much more likely.”

  You have to find everything yourself, cram it into your car, then screw everything together at home. It’s like a grown-up version of a make-your-own solar-powered car kit.

  Walter and I wandered away to sit on a couch and whisper about our plans for later. And, honestly? I’m practically too embarrassed to even tell you about them. They were so boring. You’d think that we’d be plotting all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, a giant warehouse all to ourselves! Right? But really we were just thinking about all the new furniture we wanted to sit on, lie on, all the stylish or cozy places where we wanted to curl up and relax. We were not exactly criminal masterminds.

  And, of course, because we’re like weird Ikea detectives, we ended up eavesdropping on some of the other shoppers. “Sure,” one man was saying, though you didn’t actually get a sure vibe off him. His face was very red, and the woman he was with had her mouth arranged in a short, straight line. “But what we’re really going to need—if you’re getting all this crap—is a bigger home.” Walter raised his eyebrows in a kind of exaggerated grimace. Kids love Ikea, but we’d noticed that it makes grown-ups want to kill each other. It’s like they want all the stuff, but then they really kind of hate it too.

  Walter got up to look at an odd wicker chaise lounge, which he lay down on. “This is not a comfortable piece of furniture,” he said. He closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. “Did you sleep much last night?” he said. And I said, “Oh, totally! For at least a single minute.”

  Walter laughed. “Same. It was like the night before Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or something.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said.

  Then Walter shushed me and sat up.

  “Kids.” My dad had come up behind us. “We were thinking about getting some dinner. Are you guys hungry?” We were. We were starving. Dad sat down on a wicker armchair, said, “Youch,” and then, “Hey, isn’t Zeke with you?” and I seriously thought he was kidding, until we said no. Dad stood up quickly then and said, “Uh-oh. Walter, let’s find your mom.” We stood up too, and we all began retracing our steps, winding through the other shoppers and calling for Zeke in a semi-loud voice—loud enough so he could hopefully hear us, but not loud enough to cause an all-out store panic. Not yet, at least.

  We found the moms, and we all split up to look for Zeke, peeking into chairs and beds, trying to imagine where you would go if you were a very small boy. The kids’ area seemed like an obvious choice, but it was pretty far from where we’d gotten to. Was he hiding in another drawer? A cabinet? We opened them all, calling softly. “Zeee-keee! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Walter’s mom briefly freaked out at the idea that he had climbed into one of the refrigerators and was suffocating, but they turned out to have special suffocation preventers that kept the doors from sealing all the way. One fridge did have a humongous freezer drawer that I looked in, but there was just some baby’s old pacifier in it. No Zeke.

  Walter heard him first. He stopped, put a finger to his lips. “Listen,” he said, and I heard it too.

  “Waltie! Mommy! I’m here! I’m fine! I’m almost done!”

  Walter furrowed his eyebrows questioningly at me, and I shrugged. “Zekey-Deke,” Walter called again. “Where are you?”

  “Here!” Zeke called, and we were definitely getting closer. “In here! Almost done! But they’re out of toilet paper. Can you get me some?”

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nbsp; Walter said, “Oh my god,” and his mom, who had caught up with us, slapped her hand to her forehead.

  “I can’t look,” she said, and we were all laughing already, shaking our heads and laughing and saying, “Oh no. Oh no.”

  We peered around a pretend doorway, into a showroom bathroom, and Zeke cried out, “You found me!” He was sitting on the toilet with his pants and undies scrunched down around his ankles. There was a bad smell. “Mommy!” he said. “Can you please get the toilet paper? I turded out a ginormous turd!” Walter’s mom had her hand over her mouth and was shaking her head, laughing completely silently. “All by my own self, Mommy! In the big-boy potty. Can we ride the escalator again?”

  It could have been worse. Yes, the other customers were hurrying by with their hands over their noses, peeking in and shaking their heads, but we got Zeke cleaned up without too much fuss. (“Thank goodness for this handy-dandy package of FANTASTISK napkins!” Alice laughed.) He was totally baffled by the experience. “Why is there a toilet that’s not for pooping in?” Zeke kept saying. “That’s crazy! Right? A toilet that’s not for pooping!” And the parents agreed that it was very confusing. My dad whispered to me, “Didn’t we see something like that on Jackass? Where the guy craps in the Home Depot toilet?” And my mom just shook her head and said, “I still can’t believe you let her watch that.”

  All things considered, the Ikea people were amazingly friendly about the whole thing. “We actually have a sign,” the floor manager told us, and he pointed to a little plaque next to the toilet: CUSTOMER RESTROOMS ARE LOCATED NEXT TO THE RESTAURANT. “But honestly? There’s a lot of overlap between people who use the showroom toilets and people who don’t read yet.”

  Finding our way back to the restaurant wasn’t as easy as you might think. “This place is like a maze,” my dad complained when we got to another dead end. We could actually see the cafeteria. We just couldn’t get to it without taking all these roundabout detours.

  And Walter and I couldn’t really walk past anything without doing a lot of nudging each other and pointing to things, nodding when we understood what the other person was excited about. The spinning chairs! The room full of bedding! The art supplies! The fleets of enormous couches! Our favorite showrooms! It was fun to be there with Zeke and the grown-ups, but I couldn’t wait for them to leave. Also, if this makes sense, I was dreading them leaving. Like that feeling you have when you’re in line for a roller coaster, dying to get to the front, but you kind of wish it would take even longer. I had butterflies in my stomach. Or something more like, maybe, dragons in my stomach.

  “What are you two up to?” my mom said at some point. “It’s like you’re naughty preschoolers all over again!” Walter giggled, which made me laugh.

  The cafeteria, when we finally got there, was pretty exciting just by itself. I’m not sure what it is about the food, but it is just so crazy good, you can’t believe it. You can get Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes and gravy and this yummy lingonberry sauce, all on a huge plate for cheap, and then for one more dollar, you can get five extra meatballs—which means that for two more dollars, you can get ten extra meatballs. “Are you going to go into one of your famous meatball comas?” my mom asked, looking at my crazy heaped-up plate, and probably yes, I was. Ikea meatballs are my favorite.

  Mom once made Swedish meatballs for me at home, with that same creamy brown gravy and everything, and when I bit into one, she was looking hard at me. “How is it?” she asked. And I said, “Oh my god, so good!” And she was actually mad! “I can’t believe you think they’re not as good as the meatballs at stupid Ikea!” she said. And I said, “I didn’t say that!” And she said, “But I know it’s true.” Which was annoying but accurate, even though my mom is an awesome cook.

  Walter evaluated the salads and took a spinach one that had strawberries and blue cheese on it. “Excuse me, Mr. Fancy,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Oh, sorry, did you want me to bite into a cow? Or a horse? Or whatever poor animal it is you’re eating?” Fair enough.

  Zeke was super excited about his moose-shaped pasta kid’s meal. “Can I really, really get that?” he asked, then he hugged Alice’s knees and said, “You’re such a sweetheart,” which made us laugh.

  I also picked out a pear-flavored soda, which came in a big can with a green pear on it. I have a semi-secret collection of cans, which drives my parents crazy because, to quote my mom, “We barely have enough room for our stuff, let alone for your collection of actual garbage.” I have a grape soda can from Japantown, and a Coke can in Arabic that a friend of my parents brought me back from Morocco, and a can from this terrible bitter soda called Moxie that we drank in Maine, and, well, lots of cans, actually. I was planning to keep this one too. “Please tell me you’re not going to keep that can,” my mom said now, and I shrugged and gave her my guilty smile.

  A confession: the cans are not my only weird collection. In the course of my life, I have, at different moments, collected the following things: dryer lint, cat hair, bottle caps, dust (in a Flintstones vitamin jar), sawdust, rubber bands, cactuses, miniature picture frames, postcards with cats on them, and—my one normal collection—state quarters. I was also currently obsessed with a small collection of what Walter called “sad mugs.” These were handmade clay mugs that we usually found at the Goodwill or garage sales and that looked like a little kid had made them in a beginner pottery class. They had drooping, lumpy handles, and they tended to be really large and really thick, glazed in various shades of brown and brownish green. They were completely not Ikea, and they totally broke my heart.

  We sat at one of the high tables by a window, the kind that has the tall clear-red stools that I love. The sky was starting to fade a little, and the twinkle lights strung above us looked so pretty. A Swedish flag flapped a little in the breeze outside. The meatballs were peppery and good, and I spaced out happily, not really listening to the grown-ups, who were talking about the lighting and what exactly made it so perfect, which got them to talking about Ikea and what exactly made it so popular.

  “One in three Europeans is conceived on an Ikea bed,” Walter announced. “I read it in my Book of Useful Information.”

  “What’s conceive?” Zeke asked. And Alice immediately said, “It means have an idea.”

  “That makes sense,” Zeke said. “I have lots of ideas in bed.”

  Walter smiled at me quickly, before Zeke could see.

  It was comfortable there, and I relaxed a little. We talked some and spied some more on other people’s conversations. A couple crept slowly by us, talking too quietly for us to hear. The woman had a long gray ponytail, and the man had electrical tape on the bridge of his glasses and a piece of cake on the tray that was balanced on his walker. Two forks. They were smiling.

  A girl with short bleached hair and a lot of pierced things—eyebrows and ears, lip and nose—sat with her parents, looking angrily out the window. The parents were eating, nobody talking, and I felt so bad for them. Teenagers. Oof. That would be Walter and me soon. Would we be like that too? I couldn’t picture it.

  A baby whose bib was ecstatically covered in food was yelling. “Ya ya ya ya ya YA YA YA YA YA!” “That is a noisy baby,” Zeke said, shaking his head judgmentally. “A noisy, messy baby.” Zeke himself was covered in juice and tomato sauce, but we had the good manners not to point this out to him.

  There were parents everywhere, blotting at everybody’s faces with napkins, holding babies up into the air to sniff at their butts, leaning over with forks and knives to cut up everybody’s food.

  All these people were here at Ikea, in the middle of their own lives—each person having a particular experience of it, just like we were. You could make up stories to explain what you were seeing, but you couldn’t really know, just like they couldn’t know, if they looked at us, how it was we were all related or connected, or why we were there. What it was we were there to do.

  At some point there was a loud barking sound, and I loo
ked up and saw a woman a few tables away, laughing with her head thrown back and a mouthful of French fries, completely bald. My mom put a hand on Alice’s shoulder, and they smiled at each other in a sad-grown-up way. “Oh, honey,” my mom said, and she wrapped her arms around Alice. Alice put her head on my mom’s shoulder, and I saw Walter look away.

  “It could just be how she chooses to wear her hair,” he said. His tight voice was uncharacteristically un-Walter-like. Usually he’s so gentle. “Or, you know, wear her…head. I’m just saying everything doesn’t have to be the saddest thing possible.”

  And his mom said, “True enough,” and smiled a less sad smile at him.

  Meanwhile, my dad was teaching Zeke to flip a coin, and he was getting the hang of it. “I’m unnatural!” he announced. “Head or tails!” he yelled, flipping a penny, which flew off and landed on the floor, and then, “Tails! But why am I unnatural?”

  “A natural,” my dad said, laughing. “It just means being good at something easily.”

  “I really am!” Zeke said, scrambling after the penny. “I’m so natural, right, Mom?”

  Alice laughed and said, “The naturalest.”

  After we’d eaten, Alice snuck back into line and got six pieces of pink marzipan cake, which she fit together into a kind of lopsided circle, then she opened a bag of squat little tea-light candles from her cart, put one on top of the sort-of cake, and lit it. We sang “Happy Birthday” and Walter blew out his candle, his eyes shut wishing-tight. Alice kissed him and said, “If your wish was a Mama kiss, it’s already come true!” Walter smiled. A thread of smoke snaked up toward the ceiling, and if this had been a movie, the camera would have lingered over it in a meaningful way.

  After eating is when you need to help the grown-ups rally a little, because they deflate like helium balloons, all their energy and lift gone suddenly. If they could drift down to the floor, they would. I clapped my hands. “Maybe you guys should get some coffee,” I said, and the parents laughed.