One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “And there was a great and terrible glittering,” Walter’s dad was saying. “Like a thousand jagged shards on the palace steps. And the prince bent down and, lo and behold, it was not a brokenness there on the steps at all. It was the princess’s glass—”

  Walter’s dad shook his head, the way you would if there were a fly buzzing in your face. He gave us a puzzled expression. He wrinkled his nose and squinted.

  “Shipwreck?” he said, and shook his head again. “Wait, wait. Don’t tell me. The princess’s glass…shipwreck?” he said again, and laughed. “I know it’s not that. That’s, like, the Titanic. Ack, sorry, guys. This is odd. I see the other word, right behind that word, but I can’t seem to say it.”

  “Slipper,” Walter said, smiling, and his dad slapped his own forehead.

  “Duh!” he said. “Of course. Shipwreck.” And then he laughed and we laughed. Then he sighed and said shipwreck once more before saying, “I think I’m just going to say shoe.”

  That was not the last time I got to see Walter’s dad, but it was the last good time. After that, it was a lot of sleeping and drifting away. A little bit of muttering and not much actual talking. He was taking a lot of painkillers by then, and they made him even more dozy and out of it than he’d already been. He woke up once and said, “It’s like a phantom phantom limb. Everyone thinks it’s gone, but it’s actually still there!” before falling back asleep.

  I wasn’t there when he actually died, but Walter said it was weirdly peaceful. Walter and his mom and Zeke lay in bed with him. “And he just kind of went somewhere else. It’s hard to explain.” Walter had tried to explain it to me anyway. “I don’t know if I really believe in heaven or anything like that?” he’d said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “But I did feel like he was more going away than disappearing. So I guess I’m not sure what I think anymore. But don’t tell me that he lives on in my heart, Frankie. That’s what my mom’s aunt Ellen told me, and it was really kind of annoying.”

  “I would never,” I said.

  Walter squeezed my wrist and said, “Sorry. I know you wouldn’t.”

  At the funeral, my dad spoke and told the story about a trip we’d all taken together to Maine, and how Walter’s dad had said from his beach towel, as the sun was setting, “Everything I need is right here. Ocean, sand, air, friends, wife, kids, lobster rolls, saltwater taffy, clouds.” He was the kind of person who really liked to be happy, and was.

  Afterward, Walter had played “The Long and Winding Road” on the piano and everybody cried. Zeke lay awkwardly in Alice’s lap like a bag of arms and legs, then he leaned up and over the back of the pew to whisper to me and my parents the thing he’d heard everyone saying to his own family: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, Zeke, honey,” my mom had whispered back, crying. “I’m so sorry for yours too.”

  Now, in the bedding fort, seeing Walter so sad made my ribs hurt. “Tell me,” I said. I shook his shoulder a little, like I could rattle his feelings out of him. “Talk to me.” But he only shook his head, swallowed like he could swallow the feelings away. So I did the only thing I could think of: I picked up a pillow and whacked him on the head. A slow smile spread across his face and he sat up. “Oh no you didn’t!” he said, and he picked up an even bigger pillow and swung it around so that it thudded into me. We ended up throwing pillows and whipping them around, hitting each other and ducking and laughing so hard that I had to squat down at some point to catch my breath.

  “Oh god, are you peeing in your pants again?” Walter said, laughing, and I let him have it with a gigantic pillow. I pummeled him.

  “That was, like, six years ago. And we were on a Ferris wheel. And I was terrified!”

  “Just saying,” Walter said, and he crashed my head between two pillows like they were cymbals.

  We’d hit some pendant lamps above us, and they were swinging in crazy arcs, though they weren’t turned on, at least. And of course, like in a cartoon, one of the pillows split open so that there were feathers everywhere, spraying up into the air and then drifting down.

  “I feel like we’re in a giant snow globe,” Walter said, breathless, still hitting me methodically with a long body pillow that was like a giant white sausage. I fell backward onto what was left of our pillow mountain, panting, while the feathers floated past and stuck to our sweaty faces. Walter threw down the giant pillow, then leapt after it and landed with a phloomp.

  We propped ourselves up on our elbows to check out the damage. There were pillows and comforters and feathers everywhere, like a giant bedding bomb had exploded nearby. Walter pointed to a sign, and we laughed. It said NO PILLOW FIGHTS.

  “What now?” I said.

  “If this were a kids’ movie, we’d move on to the next scene and the cleanup would kind of just…happen.” Walter looked around and pulled his mouth into a comical grimace.

  “I know,” I said. “I feel like kids do crazy things and learn important lessons, but the boring details of what happens next don’t really make it into the stories.” I could practically hear my mom saying, “If you don’t clean it up, someone else is going to have to,” which was kind of annoying.

  But we cleaned up anyway, because we’ve always been Such. Good. Kids. We dragged all the covers and pillows back to the beds where they belonged. We remade the beds, tucking in sheets and blankets, re-creating the inviting piles of pillows as well as we could, folding up the extra duvets and shaking the feathers off everything. It was definitely not the funnest part of our adventure so far. It was, in fact, kind of like cleaning up at home, only bigger.

  There were still feathers everywhere, though, and Ikea didn’t sell anything helpful like a vacuum cleaner we could borrow. I pictured the guy we’d seen earlier, with the vacuum strapped to his back. There must have been cleaning supplies somewhere, but we didn’t know where to look for them. We tried one door that led only to a demo closet, a row of perfect, bare hangers gleaming inside. Another door led to a demo pantry, with rows and rows of empty mason jars. Walter sighed. “Sheesh,” he said. “There must be real stuff somewhere. But where?” We gave up. I tore a page out of my notebook and we wrote a note that said, simply, We are so sorry about the mess! We left it on top of the torn pillow. Then we picked up our packs and headed for the cafeteria. We were starving.

  Not to be all foreshadow-y, but this was around the time I started to have the feeling that we were being followed. It was when we were creeping toward the cafeteria. I’d hear footsteps behind us, or I’d think I did, but then I’d turn around and they’d stop. Or I’d see a shadow flicker across the wall, but it would disappear when I looked right at it. I didn’t say anything to Walter. There is nothing worse than someone contaminating you with their crazy worries when you’re just trying to have a good time. Or when you’re trying not to be too worried yourself.

  The cafeteria was amazing enough to distract me, though. I’ve thought a lot about the expression like a kid in a candy store. For one thing, when I was little, I imagined that exact thing all the time: going to a candy store and getting to have anything and everything I wanted. Marzipan fruits and all the different soda flavors of jelly beans and the maple-sugar maple leaves and sour gummy grapefruit slices. “What about chocolate?” Walter used to say, in a whisper, because we talked about it when we were supposed to be napping in kindergarten, and I’d shrug and whisper, “Nah. What about you?” And Walter would say, “Chocolate. Just chocolate. And also chocolate with marshmallows in it.” And then Mrs. Hawk would shush us and we’d put our heads back down on our nap blankets. “Also chocolate with coconut,” Walter would whisper. “And caramel. With chocolate.”

  But also, about that expression—kid in a candy store? The idea that you could have anything you wanted has always been very appealing to me. I guess that’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, who doesn’t it appeal to? It’s like how when I was six I confessed to my parents that I wished I could see more people naked, and my dad said, “Oh, Frankie
, honey, everybody wishes they could see more people naked.” It turns out that people all kind of want the same things.

  Now Walter and I really were like kids in a candy store, even though there wasn’t actually much candy there.

  The hot stuff had been put away, but we filled glasses with sour red lingonberry soda from the bright metal drink machine and helped ourselves to plastic-wrapped plates of Swedish cake: apple cake and almond cake, pink-iced slices of sponge cake and dark wedges of chocolate torte, little green logs of something and little coconut-covered balls of something else. Walter already had three plates of chocolate torte in one hand, a glass of soda in the other.

  I must have hesitated because Walter said, “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If we take all this stuff, then we’ll be stealing. I hadn’t thought about that before.”

  Walter nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that either.” He sighed. “I love how we’re willing to trick our parents and trespass and, hello, spend the night in Ikea—but not to take cake. But I get it. It’s wrong. I feel the same way.”

  “We could leave money,” I said, and Walter nodded. “Let’s.”

  Altogether it seemed like it would add up to six dollars and change, so I counted out the money from the little pocket of my pack and left it near a cash register, shrugging. “Yay for dork criminals!” Walter said, and high-fived me.

  “Speaking of dorks,” I said, “can we go eat in one of the kitchen showrooms? I’ve always wanted to eat at one of those nice high kitchen islands with the stools.” Walter flashed me a classic Walter smile and stuck his two thumbs in the air, and we crept out of the cafeteria.

  Walter followed me—which at least explained, for that moment, the being-followed feeling—to the exact kitchen I’d always loved: everything sleek and black and white, with sleek black stools pulled up to a sleek white counter. We set out our plates and cups, and Walter went around to the other side of the island. “How’s the cake, guys?” he asked in a pretty decent imitation of my mom. “Can you taste the food coloring in the pink frosting? I worry that you can actually taste it. Tell me if you can. Is it dry? I might have overbaked it.”

  “Dooon’t,” I groaned. “I am seriously not here so that we can act out scenes from my life with the recipe developer.”

  “Okay,” Walter said, laughing. “But you do know how lucky you are, right? I mean, your mom’s always like, ‘Walter, honey, I’m so sorry, but would you mind tasting this caramel popcorn I’m trying to figure out? And washing it down with this caramel milk shake?’ And, um, no, I don’t mind, actually! Plus, even regular dinner is good at your house.”

  This was definitely true, and I felt bad suddenly, because Walter’s dad used to be the person who cooked dinner in their family, and his mom was stuck taking over. “Who likes mac and cheese?” she always said, half joking, half apologizing, and Zeke would say, totally serious, “I do, Mom! It’s my favorite!”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Walter said, because of being a mind reader (at least of me). “I didn’t mean it like that. Just that I love eating at your house.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m glad.”

  While we sat, eating our cake, Walter figured out that spinning on the stools actually made them go up and down on some kind of giant screw. We spun and spun, racing our stools to the bottom and then back up to the top, until we were dizzy and laughing and cake crumbs were spraying everywhere. “I like the view from down here!” Walter kept announcing, before spinning his stool up like crazy and saying, “But I prefer it up here!” He was in his classic deranged-Walter mood, and for me it was like gulping air again after being underwater for too long.

  I ate my cake for a while, admiring the wall behind the stove. It was made of the prettiest blue-green glass tiles, which looked a little like sea glass, but not as frosty. Walter looked where I was looking. “I don’t even understand the point of the backwash,” he said. I laughed.

  “Backsplash,” I said. “That’s the fancy wall behind a stove. Backwash is when you take a sip of someone’s soda and some of it goes back into the can from your mouth.”

  “Dude,” Walter said. “Yuck.”

  The shelves above the stove were lined with canning jars full of dried beans and pasta and nuts—only when you looked closely, you could see that they were just photos of beans and pasta and nuts that had been stuck in the jars and kind of bent around. I thought about my kitchen at home—the canning jars filled with my mom’s actual good salsa and plum jam and bread-and-butter pickles.

  But I didn’t have time to get overly philosophical just then. Walter looked at his watch and grabbed my hand. “Oh man,” he said. “It’s almost midnight. What next, Frankinella?”

  What next was a doorknob. I had this idea, still, that I could get one here, and it would improve my life. I said this to Walter, and he said, “You should write a self-help book. Get a Doorknob, Improve Your Life!” I laughed. It really didn’t sound like such an inspired program for happiness. But I’d be lying if I told you that the massive display of drawer knobs and handles filled me with anything other than joy and longing. Row after row of perfect knobs, all organized like a grid on a wall of sparkling clear plastic. The knobs were brass and shiny steel; they were glass and ceramic and plastic in rainbow colors. You could pull the tester knob so that a little transparent drawer opened, and what was in the drawer was more of that same kind of knob. Ridiculous perfection.

  “Man,” I sighed. “I forgot how much I love this place.”

  Walter laughed. “Um, Frankie? No you didn’t.”

  I was touching a smooth turquoise knob, spacing out.

  “Uh-oh!” Walter said. “Did a case of the wanties come to Frankietown?”

  The wanties is what we call that sudden feeling you get when you have to have something. We get it all the time when we’re playing the picking game. I mean, in the craziest way. Walter and I can even get the wanties from this catalog called Petrossian that is, I’m not kidding, just a bunch of different kinds of smoked fish, which Walter doesn’t even eat, and also caviar, which neither of us has ever even tasted. The wanties come, and then you have to try to let them go. Once when I talked to my mom about spending some of my birthday money to order something from a toy catalog—I think it was a plastic gun that shot out plastic sushi, maybe—she said, “How about you sleep on it, Frankie? If you’re still thinking about it tomorrow, we’ll order it then.” Sure enough, I forgot all about it as soon as the catalog was put away.

  That’s what I was thinking about now, touching a display knob. How rare it was to feel actually satisfied by things, however nice they were. I didn’t really need a turquoise knob, however much I felt like I wanted it. What I probably needed to do was talk to my parents about the door situation, even though it made me squirm to imagine the conversation. And, like a metaphor for my nervousness, a shadow flitted into my peripheral vision. I whipped my head around to look, but there was nothing there.

  “What?” Walter said, nervous.

  And I said, “Nothing. I’m being plagued by my own conscience.” I laughed unconvincingly.

  “Did you see something, Frankie?”

  “No. I totally don’t think I did,” I said. And Walter pulled his eyebrows together just as we heard a rustling, or a maybe-rustling, like when you’re lying in bed, listening to a sound in the walls—mice, probably—but your cat is standing dead still on the dresser, with his ears pointed straight up, freaking you out a little bit.

  Out of nowhere, an alarm sounded right by us, and Walter grabbed my arm and yanked me into a bedroom showroom, pointed to a sign that said ROOM FOR UNDERBED STORAGE!, and dragged me beneath the bed frame.

  It was pitch-black. Walter’s voice floated into my face from an inch away, the sound of him whispering “Underbed storage,” which made me laugh. “You think underbed storage is funny?” he whispered, and then I couldn’t stop laughing, in that terrible way where you’re trying to be quiet so you’re laughing silently, b
ut then suddenly you have to take a big, gasping breath.

  “Frankie!” Walter shushed me, and I tried to quiet down so we could listen, but I couldn’t hear anything. “Do you think this is real wood or veneer?” Walter whispered, which was not particularly funny, but I started laughing again anyway.

  After a few minutes Walter whispered, “Oh my gosh, you are going to kill me.”

  “What?” I said.

  “That sound? I think I accidentally set the kitchen timer on the stove we were looking at. I think that ringing was just the timer going off.”

  A perfectly logical explanation! And yet, if there were a nervousness scale that went up to ten, I’d say we were at about a five at this point. You know, or a seven. As we climbed out from under the bed, Walter put a hand to his chest and said, “Heart! Still! Pounding!” but then became immediately distracted by a gigantic piece of furniture. He read the tag. “Oooh,” he said. “It’s a wardrobe! A wardrobe seems like such a cool thing. But maybe I’m just thinking of the Narnia books. The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

  Next to the wardrobe was a floor lamp that looked like a frilly nightie on a stand. It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen at Ikea. “I hope you like it,” Walter said, and smiled. “I already got it for you for your birthday.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said. “It’s like my grandma, but in lamp form.”

  The room was set up as a display of how grown-ups and children could share a single room in a small apartment: the kids’ sleeping area was sectioned off with a long white curtain, and there were pretty strings of flags draped around it. I loved it. The truth is that I’d slept in my parents’ room until I was way too old to. They kept a mattress on the floor for me, and more nights than not I ended up there. I stopped eventually because it just felt too babyish unless I was sick, but sometimes I wished I still could. Or that I still felt like I could, I guess, since technically I could have. Are you wanting to remind me that I’m the same person complaining about the lack of privacy at my house? I know. I don’t understand it either.