One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “Okay, okay,” my dad said. “We’re on it. We’re moving.”

  “Me too,” Zeke said, and scrambled up into my lap. He put his face very close to mine and touched the groove above my lip. “This,” he said, leaning in closer to whisper spittily into my ear, “is called your philtrum.” Seriously, that kid knows the weirdest things. “Shhhh.” He put a finger to my lips and shook his head. “Our little secret,” I said, and he nodded and winked at me with both eyes.

  We still had the Marketplace to go through, which is where all the little stuff is: the plates and frames and kitchen things. It’s one of my favorite parts of the store, and I’m not even sure why. I hear myself asking if we can get these totally random things, and I’m as mystified as my parents are. I want a multipack of tiny glass bowls, a blue spatula, a tiered serving platter that makes me feel like if we had one, we’d throw a tea party every day, with cupcakes and fancy little sandwiches. “Why do you even want a pair of rubber funnels?” my mom was asking now, and I truly didn’t know.

  “Um, awkward,” Walter said, and held them in front of his chest like boobs, which made me laugh.

  “Oooh,” my mom was saying to my dad. “Ceiling clips. We actually need these.”

  “What makes them ceiling clips?” I asked, and my mom looked at me blankly.

  “You know, because you can use them to close an open bag of potato chips.”

  “On the ceiling?” I was picturing bags and bags of chips clipped to the ceiling, but I didn’t even know why you’d want that. Maybe to save space?

  My mom sighed and showed me the package. “Sealing, honey. Sealing. With an S.”

  Oh.

  Meanwhile, Walter was holding up a casserole, reading the tag. “Chafing dish?” he said. “Ew. What do you do, just kind of rub it against your thighs until you get a rash?”

  “Not that kind of chafing,” my mom said, “but ew.”

  The parents were pretty much done with Ikea now. You could see it. We were at the candle display, pillars and tapers and votives, white wax in different shapes as far as the eye could see. There was a glass lantern I had my eye on—the kind of thing you would hang on a tree over your patio and when you lit it in the evening it would make you feel instantly like you lived in a magazine. “What do you think of this?” I asked my mom, and she said, “We could get it in case we ever have a patio!”

  “What time do they close?” my dad was asking, looking at his watch. Zeke was on his shoulders, slumping a little and holding two handfuls of my dad’s hair like they were reins.

  “I think eight,” Alice said. “An hour. Here, let me take him.” She reached up for Zeke. “Zekey, honey, don’t pull.”

  Back on the floor, on his own two feet, Zeke rubbed his eyes with his fists and frowned a cartoon sad-baby frown.

  “Look out,” Walter whispered to me. “Possible meltdown in Zekeville. This could work well for us.” I didn’t know what he meant about Zeke’s falling apart being a good thing, but I trusted he was right.

  The store was emptying out, and the shoppers who were left seemed to be collapsing, like windup toys winding down. We saw five girls asleep on a couch in size order—the oldest was our age—and then we saw their dad gently shaking them, one at a time. “Wake up, ladies, time to go.” In a flower-patterned armchair, a tiny boy in a Spider-Man costume was asleep in the lap of an old woman, who was also asleep.

  “ ‘Creatures are starting to think about rest,’ ” Walter said to Zeke. He was quoting Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book, and Zeke said back sleepily, “ ‘Two Biffer-Baum Birds are now building their nest.’ ”

  We headed into the warehouse to find all the things everyone was getting: the patio table (for our not-patio) and the shoe bench, packed flat in their cardboard boxes; the sofa cover; and some last-minute packages of dish towels and paper napkins. “Oh jeez,” Alice was saying. “Aisle three, bin twenty-seven, what the—? I see everything but the shoe bench. I see the coatrack. The hat rack. The shoe bench? Anybody?”

  My mom was looking too. “Here, here, Alice,” she said, leaning in to pull a long package from the back of a shelf. “This.” Alice smiled tiredly and made an exasperated sound in the back of her throat, and my mom hugged her. My dad had gotten everything we needed, and we pushed our giant ship of a cart into the line.

  “These, Mama? These?” Zeke was holding out bags of little Swedish chocolate bars, bags of Swedish gummy candies, and Alice kept saying, “No, honey. No. We’ll get you an ice-cream cone on the way out. No candy.” “What’s that cimminon smell?” Zeke said. “What is it? Is it cimminon buns? Can we get those?” Alice smiled. “Cinnamon buns. It is. Do you want that instead of an ice cream?” And Zeke pulled his eyebrows together, then shook his head. “Ice cream.”

  Walter and I were standing quietly together with our backpacks on. “You guys look like a criminal gang of two,” my dad said cheerfully. “What exactly are you plotting?”

  “As if!” I said, too loud, and Walter gave me a look. I laughed nervously out my nose, which made my dad laugh.

  “Jeez,” he said. “I was only kidding.”

  Walter dimpled his dimples at him, and my dad reached out a hand to rumple his hair.

  As Walter had predicted, Zeke was quickly becoming a puddle of melting preschooler. “These, Mama? These?” He was grabbing at more and more things—cookies, licorice—pulling his eyebrows together angrily every time Alice tried to pry something out of his little fists.

  “Honey, can you please take him to get an ice-cream cone?” Alice handed Walter a five-dollar bill. We took Zeke’s hands, swinging him between us as we walked. “Old McDonald had a ice-cream cone,” Zeke sang, while we waited in the snack line. Walter and I were playing the picking game, pointing into the refrigerator case where they sell packaged things you can take home.

  “Västerbotten cheese?” I said. “Not that I know what it is.”

  Walter pointed and said, “This, let’s see….What even is it?” He leaned in to look at the blue metal tube. “Herring paste!” he said. “Intriguing but gross. Can I just pick chocolate?”

  “And on that ice-cream cone he had a ice-cream cone!” Zeke was still singing. “With a ice-cream cone here, and a ice-cream cone there! Ha-ha, that’s what I sang, right, guys? That’s what I am singing! Right?” Walter bugged his eyes out at me, and I couldn’t help laughing.

  By the time Alice was done paying, we were sitting on a bench with our cones, Zeke’s dripping down his shirt in vanilla swirls and smears, but he was happy. “Help me to the car, you guys, would you?” Alice said, and Walter and I grabbed the handle of the cart and pushed.

  Alice was rummaging through her bag for the car keys, completely distracted as we steered the cart through the parking lot. She didn’t even look up when she said, “What did you guys decide about tonight?”

  Walter looked at me, his eyes wide. This was the moment. The bait and switch! We had actually practiced this very conversation. “Frankie’s mom decided it would be really helpful to her if we stayed there after all,” Walter said. “She’s testing a bunch of brunch recipes.” He paused, then added nervously, “Bunch of brunch! That’s a funny rhyme. Bunch of brunch! Brunch bunch.”

  Luckily, Alice had her back to us. She’d found her keys and was unlocking the back of the van. I caught Walter’s eye and made a finger-across-the-throat motion to get him to stop talking. “Anyways,” Walter said, “I think we’re going to Frankie’s. I mean, I know we are.” He really, really needed to stop talking.

  I panicked then. Did Walter want to be doing this? What was the code phrase? “Mixed-up files,” I said, and Alice said, “What?” and Walter said, “No. Unless they’re your mixed-up files, Frankie.”

  “They’re not,” I said. And Alice said, “Um, right,” her head in the car. “Okay. Let me know if we’re ever having a planet-earth kind of conversation.”

  “Mixed-up files!” Zeke yelled, and I laughed.

  “It’s probably just as well you’
re not coming home with me,” Alice said, “since Tired McFussypants could probably use a little one-on-one time. Right, Tired?”

  “I’m fuzzy but not tired,” Zeke said, yawning, and he put his arms out to get picked up. Alice buckled him into his car seat.

  Walter was squatting in the back of the van, and I was trying to pass him the boxes, even though some of them were really heavy. “Here, let me.” Alice took the other end of one and said, “Frankie! My gosh. Your arms are shaking. Take a break for a second.”

  My arms were shaking. “Oh, I’m just nervous because your son and I are about to go back into Ikea and spend the night there illegally by ourselves,” I didn’t say. I just said, “I know! I know. It’s so weird. Isn’t it so weird? How your arms shake? And you’re like, Oh my gosh, my arms are totally shaking!”

  Now it was Walter’s turn to look at me, to shake his head. I fake-slapped my own forehead and stopped talking. Walter climbed back out of the van, and Alice slammed it shut.

  “Okeydoke, kiddos. Call me in the morning, will you, honey?” She looked at him for a second. “Are you sure you and Frankie don’t want to come home with us? I’m going to miss you! Okay, okay. I know. I love you. Have so much fun.” She kissed Walter and kissed me, and we leaned in to say good-bye to Zeke before sliding the back door closed. “Thanks for all your help, you guys! Oh, Frankie, please thank your parents for me. I didn’t even really say good-bye to them.”

  She started to drive off, then stopped short, and the passenger-side window rolled down. Alice leaned over to yell something at us. “Walter! Oh my god! We didn’t get your desk chair!” She honestly looked like she was going to cry.

  “I totally don’t care, Mom,” Walter said quickly. “Now we’ve got an excuse to come back! We’ll get it next time.”

  Alice shook her head and blew him a kiss. “Walter. You’re the best! Love you guys!”

  “Love you guys,” we heard Zeke echo from the back.

  We waved as they drove off, doing our best impression of normal kids about to have a sleepover. Then Walter grabbed my arm, tipped his face up toward the sky, and made a crazy yelling sound in the back of his throat. “Hyperventilating!” he said. And I said, “Seriously?” And he said, “No! But I’m kind of freaking out.”

  “Me too,” I said. “But, Walter? If we’re doing this? If we really are? We’ve got to run back and say good-bye to my parents before they figure out that your mom’s not still here.”

  “We’re really doing this,” he said, and held up his fist, which I awkwardly bumped with my own.

  We ran back into the store just as my parents were finishing paying. “Mom, Dad, we gotta run! Alice is pulling the car around and Zeke’s falling apart!”

  “Oh, okay,” my mom said. “So you’re going there? That’s good. That’s nice for Alice. We can do the waffles another time. Come next weekend, Walter—can you?”

  Walter nodded, and my dad kissed me and said, “Call us in the morning?” and I said I would.

  Walter and I ran back out the automatic sliding doors and didn’t stop running until we’d rounded the corner away from the main parking lot and were completely, definitely out of sight.

  Walter and I stopped running and stood with our hands on our thighs, panting. Walter squeezed his side with his hand—“Cramp!”—then raised his eyebrows like, Now what? We’d been so focused on getting through the parent part that we hadn’t finished deciding what we were going to do next. I looked at my watch.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “The store closes in about twenty minutes. Should we go with plan A?” We needed to find somewhere to wait while the store finished closing—somewhere to hide while the cleaning crews came through, or the restocking people, or whatever happened in the time after the store closed. Plan A was hiding in the bathroom, like the Basil E. Frankweiler kids do. I imagined the scene like in the book, sitting on top of the toilets with our legs pulled up so nobody could see our feet dangling below.

  Walter nodded. “Yup,” he said. “Plan A.” He grabbed my arm and we started running the way we’d come.

  But just as we turned back toward the entrance, I saw the Subaru. I stopped short and grabbed Walter’s hand, and he said, “What—?” but then he saw it too. We flattened ourselves against the building, breathless, and watched my mom and dad wrangling a large rectangular box onto the roof of the car with a bungee cord. They were maybe fifty yards from us. Walter grabbed my arm and pulled me back behind the building, and we squatted down. “That was a close one!” Walter said, like we were in a movie, and I said, “Seriously.”

  We waited a few minutes, mostly just watching the second hand on Walter’s watch, but at some point he said to me, “Are you sure you want to do this? Because we could still totally catch up to your parents, if you’d rather.”

  I pictured the huge open cube of the store, full of all the fun we were planning to have. I pictured my door at home, without its doorknob. I pictured Walter picturing…okay, I couldn’t actually picture what Walter was picturing.

  And I said, “I do want to.” Because I did. Or at least I mostly did. But I added, “Same for you. It’s fine if you’re changing your mind. You know I’d understand a hundred percent.”

  He shook his head. “Now that we’re doing this, I almost feel like I need to do this, if that makes any sense.” It did. Or it mostly did. Actually, I’m not sure if I knew what he meant, but I nodded.

  Walter and I had once come up with an elaborate plan to have Puddle and Mr. Pockets meet. We were going to smuggle them out in their carrying cases and meet halfway between our houses, where we were going to take the cats out of their cases and hold them up, nose to nose, so they could know each other even just a little bit. “So that’s who I’ve been smelling,” we imagined them saying to themselves, after years of sniffing us when we got home from each other’s houses. Only when the time came to put Mr. Pockets in his carrier, I chickened out. I was so worried that he would get out, that he would get lost and be lost forever, and it would all be because of this stupid plan that wasn’t even really important. So I ran empty-handed to the meeting place, and there was Walter, running from the opposite direction, catless too, for the same reason.

  In other words, we had a history of chickening out.

  “Do you think the coast is clear?” I said, and Walter smiled and said, “How come every single thing either one of us says sounds like a line from Scooby-Doo?” It was true. It really was that kind of plan, with a funny cartoon feeling to it. We decided the coast was clear, and we turned back around and walked in through the automatic doors and headed up the escalator. The store was mostly emptied out, and I felt like everyone was looking at us suspiciously, even though I knew they probably really weren’t.

  Probably they were just thinking that the store was about to close and that they were never going to fit all the giant boxes in the car. Or they were thinking about how, once they got home, they were going to fight while they tried to follow the crazily confusing instructions for assembling their new furniture. At my own house, my dad would notice that there was one screw missing out of the thousand they needed to put together whatever they were putting together, and my mom would shake her head, drop it into her hands, mumble a long line of swear words. I was happy not to be hearing that.

  While Walter and I were walking purposefully through the store, we talked out the sides of our mouths, looking straight ahead. “Bathroom on the main floor or the lower level?” Walter asked sideways, and I answered sideways, “Main floor.”

  When we got to the bathrooms, there was nobody coming out of or going into them. The doors had stick-figure pictures on them: one with legs, one with a triangle. Pants, I guess, and a skirt. “I bet you love that,” Walter teased, pointing at them. I was kind of notorious for hating gender stereotypes.

  “Oh, I do,” I said. “Hang on. Let me tape a triangle to my waist so I know which bathroom to use.” I’d recently seen someone add details to an image like this—they’d drawn i
n the legs and sides of the body—so that instead of a skirt, it was clear that what the figure was wearing was actually a superhero cape flowing down around them. I loved that.

  We heard the crazy-loud hand dryer go off inside, and a woman straggled out, looking dazed. “Ikea zombie,” Walter observed, and I realized we were stalling.

  “Maybe we don’t have to hide in the bathrooms,” I said. “I mean, there have got to be a million better and, you know, less gross places to hide, right? Did we have a plan B?”

  “What about that loft bed in that one showroom?” Walter said. “The one with the pink everything? That was plan B. At least it is now.” Perfect. We turned back the way we had come, and headed for the showrooms.

  Once we arrived at the pink-everything loft bed, Walter grabbed my hand, then looked both ways before climbing the ladder. I did the same, and we found ourselves in a cozy nook beneath the pretend ceiling—a wooden platform filled with deep pink pillows and comforters, everything so fresh and new-smelling. A voice over the loudspeaker announced fifteen minutes to closing, and Walter and I looked at each other and shook our heads, smiling. We were doing this. And it was already perfect. It was already just so completely perfect.

  We didn’t really know how long it would take for the store to close or what would happen afterward. Were there security guards all over the place? Did they turn the lights off? Would there be a million people everywhere, cleaning and restocking? We had no idea. We peeked out from our nest every minute or so, and we could see various last-licks shoppers hurrying toward the exits, a couple of Ikea workers rushing by with their phones pressed to their ears. Meanwhile, Walter and I were unzipping our backpacks to show each other what we’d brought, organizing everything on top of the flower-patterned comforter. The whole night stretched out before us like a deserted beach—wide open, full of possibility, and maybe, I admit, a little lonely.