One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “Empty soda can, very useful,” Walter teased when I pulled it out. I had, indeed, taken it from dinner. We were talking quietly, hoping our voices were muffled by all the bedding.

  “Smart,” I said when he showed me From the Mixed-Up Files. “For research. And moral support.”

  “Good thinking,” he said when I showed him that I’d brought the Ikea catalog. I’d also brought playing cards and a camera. Walter had brought binoculars and a first-aid kit that appeared to be just three Band-Aids inside an Altoids tin. I’d brought my Swiss Army knife. Walter had brought the walkie-talkies we’d discussed in our planning stages. (Neither of us had a cell phone.) I took one of them now and put it in my backpack, and he nodded.

  We’d both packed notebooks and pens, headlamps, and water bottles. Walter teased that we were the kind of kids who would row away to a deserted island having brought with us a high-SPF sunscreen. We really were.

  We burrowed down into all the pillows and blankets and flipped slowly through the Ikea catalog together. I swear, if I had a tail I’d have been wagging it. “We’re at Ikea, reading the Ikea catalog,” Walter said, shaking his head, and I laughed. My mom teases us about the ways we haven’t changed, and it’s true. We’ve always liked to ogle a catalog together: Lego, Playmobil, Hammacher Schlemmer. Even something called Oriental Trading Company, although that one tends to depress us weirdly, with its twelve-packs of glow-in-the-dark plastic crucifixes and luau party supplies and inflatable cowboy hats. But there’s nobody I’d rather be that kind of depressed with than Walter. In fact, maybe there’s nobody besides Walter who would even understand that kind of depressed.

  Do you know how you can just feel completely strange in the world sometimes? Like everyone’s one way and you’re another? Or like there’s some translator chip that someone forgot to program you with, and other kids joke about stuff and you don’t know what they’re talking about? Or the teacher says something random—like maybe in science she’s talking about genetics, about an experiment with “smooth and wrinkled peas”—and you suddenly hear your own laughter, the only sound of laughter in the room, coming from your own freakily laughing face? (Walter calls that particular thing the laughing-out-your-laugh-hole problem.) My parents once assured me that grown-ups feel that way too. “Thanks, guys,” I said, teasing. “It’s very reassuring to know that this is a permanent condition, rather than a phase I’m going through.” But the thing is? I never feel strange with Walter. I mean, never when we’re hanging out, just the two of us, obviously. But also never if he’s even just in the room with me. He’s like my own personal normalizer, and if he’s in my class at school or at a party with me, or in a group of people, I can relax and just feel all right in the world.

  “You’re Frankie’s knight in shining armor,” my dad once said to Walter. He’d shown up at my swim meet on a Friday afternoon, and even though I’d swum terribly and was, in fact, a terrible swimmer, I yelled happily when I saw him. Walter had nodded at my dad. “I know,” he’d said seriously. “She’s mine too.”

  “KOPPAR table lamp,” Walter was saying now.

  “Same,” I said, even though I’d closed my eyes for a second, just to rest them.

  “TVINGEN hand towel,” Walter said.

  And I said…well, I don’t actually know what I said next.

  “Frankie, Frankie.” Walter was shaking my shoulder. “Frankie, wake up! We fell asleep.” I saw the glowing numbers of Walter’s watch in the dark: 8:58. The lights were out in our loft, and there was a roaring sound. When I peeked out, I could see a guy with a cap on and earphones, and a vacuum cleaner strapped onto him like a backpack. He was moving slowly through the showroom with his nozzle, passing it over the couches and carpets. When he reached the far wall, he turned off the machine, and the sudden quiet almost spooked me.

  I felt like I could smell the vacuum cleaner—a metallic thickness, like the kind that’s in the air before a thunderstorm.

  Walter put a warning finger to his lips, took out his notebook and pen, scribbled something, and showed it to me. How will we know when he’s done? he’d written, just as, with such perfect timing I almost laughed out loud, we heard the scratchily unmistakable sound of a switched-on walkie-talkie, heard the vacuum guy say, “Final clean. Nine o’clock checkout. Building all clear.”

  And I wrote back, That’s how.

  My dad likes to tell this story about the first time they took Walter and me to see fireworks—how we were so excited we couldn’t stop talking. My dad does a really funny imitation of our squeaky little preschool voices: “Is it going to be such a big, big spway of lights acwoss the whole entire sky?” “It’s going to make such a loud, loud sound! A loud, loud noise, even!” On and on. We couldn’t shut up, apparently, and we had our little Fourth of July glow bracelets on and we were singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and squealing, we were so excited, sitting together on our blanket under the deepening blue. And then finally it was dark, and the first fireworks spangled the sky with a huge splintering boom. When Walter and I didn’t say anything, the parents looked over and saw that we’d fallen asleep, leaning against each other with our thumbs in our mouths.

  I guess we hadn’t changed that much. We’d started our big Ikea adventure by falling asleep.

  But we were awake now, and we were loose in Ikea. Because we’d lost an hour, we rushed at first, grabbing our backpacks and creeping down the ladder, crouching behind a fuzzy blue couch at the bottom, like spies. As far as we could tell, lights were on in some places, and other parts of the store looked dark. The vacuum-cleaner smell had evaporated, and now the store smelled like it did in the daytime: cinnamon-y and new and very, very clean. It was super quiet. My voice, when I used it, sounded loud in my ears: “Cool” was all I said, and Walter whispered back, “Cool. And creepy.” “Showroom tour?” I asked, whispering now, and Walter whispered back, “Showroom tour.”

  The first thing we wanted to do was—don’t laugh—just, kind of, sit in all the showrooms. Most of them are like a single room in a house—a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room. But our favorites are the ones that are like a whole miniature apartment—yes, a tiny house—with a little kitchen and table and living area and sleeping loft, all right there in a space as big as a single room. We crept into one now, breathless and half expecting to see someone. But after a few minutes on the couch, we relaxed a little bit, pretended we lived there. “This is my dream color scheme,” Walter was saying. “Everything white and black and gray, with the little purple details—the cushions and the blankets. If this were our house, I’d be so glad we’d decided to decorate this way.”

  There was one of those classic lotus-shaped light fixtures above us—the kind that looks like a big white plastic flower. They are one of my very favorite things about Ikea. “You could get a light fixture like that, if you wanted,” my mom said once. “They’re not even that expensive. Ask Grandma for your birthday.” But the thing is? I don’t want it in our kind of shabby house with all its old, mismatched stuff. I want the light fixture here, where it looks perfect with everything else.

  Walter and I stood up and wandered into a different pretend apartment. “This is my exact not color scheme,” Walter said in a loud whisper. “Barf green. Depressing fake plants everywhere. A cowhide or fake-cowhide rug. A horse-racing poster.” He sat down on a black leather couch.

  “I hate leather furniture,” he said. And I said, “That’s because you’re a vegetarian and you’re morally opposed to leather.”

  “And because it’s nasty,” he said. “It’s very manly, though,” he added. “I mean, you’ve got to give it that.”

  We sat quietly for a minute. “You’re going to be surprised to hear me say this,” Walter finally said. “But I might be kind of done sitting in the showrooms, at least for now.”

  “Good timing,” I said, “because I am too. Where do you most want to go next?”

  “Bedding department,” Walter said. “I want to pile up all the comforters, l
ike, tons of them, and jump on them and hide under them.”

  “Epic blanket fort,” I said. “A mature and important plan. Come on, then. It isn’t exactly going to build itself.”

  We looked both ways, darting through the deserted showroom from couch to couch. When we rounded the corner into the area with all the bed displays, it was dark. Not pitch-black dark, because light was still filtering in from other parts of the store, but kind of twilight-dim. “Perfect!” Walter said. “This is just how I pictured it. It’s cozier this way.”

  We decided that what we really had to do first was lie in every single bed, so we kicked off our shoes, dumped our packs, and started making the rounds. The beds were all so incredibly inviting, with loads of pillows, all stacked and arranged just so. “How come my bed at home always looks like the kind from a prison cell or like a cot from the Madeline books?” I asked Walter, lying back on a particularly cushiony bed that was covered in a gray polka-dotted comforter.

  “ ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines,’ ” Walter said dreamily, quoting Madeline.

  “Yes, okay, but seriously. I try to prop the pillows up all ploofy and nice, but it always looks so flat or something.”

  “Maybe because you actually sleep on it?” Walter offered. “Or because it’s an actual real bed and you only have two pillows instead of”—he craned around to count them all, including the little decorative ones—“um, eleven?”

  “Maybe,” I said, and sighed. We hoisted ourselves up and plopped down on another bed. Another awesomely comfortable bed.

  “It’s like ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’ ” Walter said, stretching. “Ahhh. This bed’s juuuust right. Only we feel like that about every single bed.”

  “Remember when we were little,” I said, “and you told me you wanted a water bed?”

  Walter laughed. “Yes. I would never put sheets on it, though! Then how would I see all the pretty fish?”

  Walter had somehow imagined that a water bed was going to be a kind of aquarium, but one that you got to sleep on. So then I imagined it that way too, only after that we went to a birthday party where we’d heard that the parents actually had a water bed. “Excuse me, but where is all your pretty, pretty fish?” Walter had asked politely, after we’d snuck into their bedroom to peel back the sheets. “And why is your water bed not see-through?” The parents explained why, and they were actually really nice about it, but we were very, very disappointed.

  Now we lay on flowered beds and swirled ones, on paisley and striped beds, dark beds and pale, and on each one I lay back and closed my eyes and imagined how my life would be if that were my bed. I mean, I’d still be me, of course. The girl who all the town librarians knew by name. The one who liked algebra and looking at online restaurant menus and at the huge album of Mr. Pockets’s baby pictures. The one her fifth-grade teacher described as “A very diligent student. Responsible, well behaved, and conscientious. Generally well liked, but with limited substantial peer friendships.” This was on a report I found on my father’s bedside table. “Oh, Frankie, honey, don’t read that,” my mom had said, finding me reading it. “I think that some of your teachers stress out about you not being part of, like, a big group of girls talking about lip gloss or French braids or whatever. It’s so stupid. I know you know that.”

  I did know that. But if I had this bed, all these pillows, everything so clean and nice, then…what? I think I’d feel like I was floating. Like everything was just right, all the time. Even though it would only be a bed.

  “Can you be, like, a professional bed tester?” Walter asked. “As a career?”

  “I know!” I said. “I was just wondering that. Actually, I was wondering something kind of different, which is whether you could just be an Ikea design consultant, where they’d call you in to look at stuff, and you’d say if you liked it or not. That would be my dream job, I think.”

  “You’d be terrible at it, no offense,” Walter said. “You like everything.”

  This was kind of true. I couldn’t even put my finger on why I liked everything so much. It had something to do with the fact that none of my stuff was here—even though I liked my stuff, right? Or I wouldn’t have it. Would I? All my collections. All the stuff I wanted, but then actually having it made everything feel so cluttery and tiring.

  When Walter and I were six or seven, my parents took us to a geology exhibit at a museum a couple towns over, and we stopped at the souvenir shop afterward. For three dollars, you could fill a little velvet drawstring bag with colorful polished stones from a huge barrel, and Walter and I both decided to do it, digging the money out from our coin purses and paying for the bags before spending thirty or forty minutes filling and refilling them with different collections of shiny pink and green and blue rocks. It was so much fun. Only once we’d settled on our choices, we got back in the car and sat quietly with our rock bags for a few minutes before Walter said, “I guess I really just wanted to pick out the rocks. Because now that I have them? I don’t actually want them that much.” I felt the exact same way. Sometimes I think that’s kind of what stuff is like. You want it until you have it, and then it’s like the light inside it goes out.

  “ ‘Memory foam’?” Walter was saying, reading the tag on a pillow. “Do people have a lot of memories about foam? Does foam have memories of its own?”

  “Deep,” I said.

  Walter started stripping the beds, piling pillows and comforters on the floor. I grabbed big armfuls and added them to the pile until it was a shoulder-high heap of colorful, patterned softness. Walter was bouncing up and down on one of the beds, and he suddenly leapt high into the air and landed with a cushiony thud on the bedding mountain. I scrambled up onto the bed and sproinged into the pile after him. We took turns. We jumped at the same time and landed together in a muffled, laughing heap. We lay on our backs, slowly sinking as the air escaped, the pile deflating beneath us while we got swallowed up in pillows and quilts, like quicksand, but made of cotton and feathers.

  “Do you remember when my dad used to tell us the ‘Princess and the Pea’ story?” Walter asked now.

  Of course I did. Walter’s dad was the most incredible storyteller, and he could tell you a story you knew inside out—“Rumpelstiltskin,” say, or “Rapunzel”—in such an exciting way that you’d be on the edge of your seat wondering what would happen next, even though if you stopped to think about it, of course you actually already knew that the straw would get spun into gold or that the princess would tumble her braid out the window and be rescued.

  “That was always one of my favorites,” I said. “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty feather beds!” I spoke in Walter’s dad’s deep storytelling voice. “I think it’s kind of funny. I mean, I know they’re trying to prove she’s a real princess or whatever. But it always seems like the kind of person who wouldn’t be able to sleep because of a pea under her twenty feather beds would actually be super annoying to live with. I couldn’t sleep a wink because I could hear an ant walking around in the toolshed!” I laughed at my own example. “Also, confusingly, I always pictured, like, a soft green pea, instead of a hard dried pea, which made the whole story that much more strange and amazing.”

  Walter was quiet. I’d been staring up at the ceiling—or at the industrial tangle of pipes way up where a normal ceiling would be—but now I flipped over onto one elbow to look at my friend. His eyes were closed. “Oh, Walter,” I said, and shook my head. I draped my arm over him and squeezed his shoulder. “Walter.”

  You’re going to hate this, that I left this part of the story out until now. But the thing is? Walter’s dad is dead. He died at the end of last year, from brain cancer. It was quick and it was terrible, and Walter and his mom and Zeke were sad beyond sad. Were and are still. I know it’s nothing like how bad it is for them, but the truth is that my family has been really sad too. Walter’s dad was my dad’s best friend, for one thing. And for another, he was j
ust the greatest. Funny, fun, interesting, and even, if this isn’t too weird to say, crazily handsome. I once overheard my mom, in tears, saying to my dad, “Don’t you always feel like it’s the nicest and best people who die young? I mean, you’re never like, Oh well, too bad, but at least that guy was kind of a jerk.” Only she said something worse than jerk. When she saw me standing there, she said, “Oh, honey, sorry.” And I said, “That’s okay. I understand.” Which was true.

  “Do you remember the last time he told us a story?” Walter asked now, his voice thick, and I did. Of course I did. Walter’s dad had been propped up on their couch under a heap of blankets, with a mug of tea balanced in his lap—a mug that said, If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t for you. “I’m sorry, Frankie, but I’m feeling too low today to use the sad mug you gave me,” he’d said. It was, in fact, an especially tragic specimen from my collection, with lumpy hearts that the potter had stuck on and glazed a speckled brown. “But you know I love it.”

  It was the last week of his life, although we didn’t understand that yet, and I was over at their house because I was always over at their house. “You should tell Frankie that you guys need just-family time,” I once heard my mom say over the phone to Walter’s mom, but she told me after that Alice had said, “Frankie is family. And Walter could use her company, if it doesn’t make her uncomfortable to be here.” It did make me a little uncomfortable, to tell you the truth, but I gathered up my courage because I wanted to be there.

  Anyway, we were sitting on the floor, leaning against the couch, and Walter’s dad was pretty weak by then, kind of confused because of the pressure the tumor was putting on his brain, but he was telling us the story of Cinderella. I’m sure it sounds babyish, but it wasn’t. He was so good at exaggerating all the dark and peculiar parts of fairy tales—all the cruelty and terror and magic—so that you never felt like you were just skipping along boringly toward a happy ending. As he told it, the story always involved Cinderella rescuing herself. She doesn’t even end up marrying the prince in his version—they just become really close friends.