“Um, not really,” I said. “No.”
“A zip line,” Walter said again.
“No.”
“In the warehouse, maybe?” Walter was saying, like I hadn’t answered twice already. “Should we?”
“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”
“Right?” Walter said, excited, and I sighed, because what are you going to do?
How effective is it to say no to Walter when he is being fully Walter? Um, not at all effective. Plus, he was giving me the dimple treatment. “Come on, Franks,” he said (dimple, dimple). “It’ll be awesome.”
“I’m sure!” I said. “Plus, heights again! My fave.”
“It’s interesting,” Walter said, smiling, “how at first it was you that was trying to talk me into everything—only now it’s the other way around!”
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t help smiling back at him. “That is very interesting. Why do you think?” If I could bottle and sell a night at Ikea, I was thinking, I could call it “The Fun Cure.” I’d be a gazillionaire.
“Wait,” I said. “Did I end up agreeing to this? I don’t think I did.” I had suddenly found myself standing with Walter in the giant, echoing warehouse, looking up. “There,” he said, pointing to a steel beam in a high corner. “That’s one anchoring spot. Over to…” He scanned the ceiling, studying the network of beams and ducts. “There,” he said, pointing to a matching beam on the other side of the room. Remember: this is the kid of an engineer, so he also said some things to himself like, “If we account for the arc…” and “the definite integral,” while I pretend-yawned.
I’ll spare you the false starts. Because it took us a long time to figure out what to make the line out of. We walked around looking at everything, and we’d find a sturdy something—like a SÄVERN shower curtain support, say—but then it would be way too short. And Walter had calculated that we needed at least a hundred feet of line. We looked at an extension cord in the lighting department, but Walter concluded that we’d have to knot together twenty of them, “And then it’s going to be morning already.” We looked at a retractable clothesline, decided it was too flimsy. Walter shook his head, did a little math with a pencil stub.
“Hey,” I said, stopping short. We were passing through the textiles department, and there was a shelf with rolls of fabric stacked up on it. It was printed with geometric designs and foxes, with little owls and pretty leaves, all the nice Ikea things. “What about fabric, if we twisted it?”
Walter rubbed some of the sturdy fabric between his fingers. “Nice,” he said, nodding. “Yes.” He unrolled some, tugged on it to test its strength. “Do you know how long one of these rolls is?”
I thought back to helping out on a Thanksgiving photo shoot that my mom had styled the food for—pictured the art director unrolling a piece of acorn-printed fabric across the wall and saying, “If it’s a whole bolt, it should be a hundred yards.” I told Walter this and he fist-bumped me. “Perfect,” he said.
We picked a full-looking roll that was printed with a kind of wood-grain pattern—maybe birch—and we dumped it into a shopping cart and wheeled it over to the warehouse.
Fast-forward through Walter and me twisting a very long piece of fabric for a very long time, and then—also for a very long time—trying to figure out how to attach it securely to the beams. The warehouse is basically a grid of gigantically tall metal shelving, the same as at other big stores like Costco or Home Depot. Walter had scrambled up toward the top of a shelf and was leaning out to knot the fabric around a metal beam. I was standing down on the nice solid ground, sometimes covering my eyes with my hands, and sometimes yelling, “Walter, please!” as in Walter, please be careful and don’t fall and kill yourself. The fabric was surprisingly heavy and awkward, and I had to help feed it up to where Walter was standing.
Did you ever hear of Philippe Petit, the acrobat who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center? Walter and I read a picture book about him when we were little, and then we saw a movie about him too. I was surprised to hear how long it took them to rig up the wire, and how heavy it all was, even though of course it made sense. I was also surprised by the idea of it: that someone would do something so crazily dangerous, just because they really, really wanted to. With nobody forcing them, and nothing to gain but just the experience itself. Anyway, I was thinking of that now, feeling glad that we were in an Ikea warehouse rather than a thousand feet above street level. This was alarming enough as it was.
Walter and I, but mostly Walter, got the fabric rope knotted so that it stretched from a high beam about halfway up on one side of the room across the big open part in the middle to a lower beam on the other side. Picture a tightrope, but angled downward. Walter tried testing the strength of his knot and ended up on the ground with the unhitched fabric in his hands, saying “Oof,” and “Not actually strong enough.” Watching him swing out like that with the fabric reminded me of Mr. Pockets as a kitten: he used to leap up onto the curtains and then swing out the window and back in, making me fret so much about losing him that we had to get screens put in. (“I want to keep you for all nine of your lives,” I used to whisper to him.) Walter dusted himself off and climbed back up to re-knot the line.
Luckily, Walter’s dad had spent a few days a couple summers ago teaching Walter and me a lot of useful knots. He called it “Knot Camp,” and Walter’s mom would come home from work to everything in the house tied up and knotted together with various nylon ropes and cords and long pieces of twine. “Someone untie the fridge so we can figure out dinner,” I remember her yelling from the kitchen. (We ended up ordering pizza.)
“Get ready, Frankie!” Walter said, and hoisted me up out of a rocking chair I was sitting in. “Because we are going to ZIP-LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!” His face did not look uncrazy.
“Oh god,” I said. “You first.”
Walter had engineered a kind of bucket seat—like a baby swing at the playground—by cutting leg holes in a plasticky blue Ikea tote bag. His plan was that we would take turns sitting inside the bag, with our legs sticking out of the holes, and the bag would hang from its handles on the rope and slide across it to the other side. When he’d first tried it, the handles ended up producing too much friction to slide easily, so Walter had slid them onto a metal towel bar and threaded the rope through the towel bar instead. The metal glided easily, and the idea was that the person’s weight in the bag would keep the bag on the towel bar. Like I said, that was the idea, at least.
We were at the rope’s high side, hoping to zip over the big open space in the middle of the warehouse. There was some display furniture set up in it, but Walter had calculated that we’d stay safely above it. He scampered up the metal shelving, climbing over all the stacked bins and boxes of furniture pieces, until he got to the top. Awkwardly—like he’d suddenly turned into a baby giraffe—he loaded himself into the seat, first one leg and then the other, even though the swing started sliding before his second leg was all the way in. He zipped across the warehouse, first yelling “I’m not readyyyyyy!” and then “This is awwwwwwesome!” until he slammed into the shelving on the other side. “Wowza!” he said. “Rough landing, but that was AWESOME!”
“So you mentioned,” I said. I was laughing, but I knew what was coming next. He’d already run back across the warehouse to me. “Come,” he said, and took my hand. And what could I do but follow?
With much encouragement from Walter as he coached from behind me—“Don’t look down. Up, up. Keep looking up and reaching up!”—I climbed the shelving. Walter had lugged back the towel bar and the bag-seat, and then helped me into the bag. I put both legs in the holes before I let go of the beam and grabbed on to the towel bar.
Nothing happened. I dangled from the bag, but the bag did not move down the rope. “It’s stuck,” Walter said. “Push off the shelf with your foot—really push.” I did, and the metal bar started to slide, and I was—there is no other way to put this—flyi
ng! I was soaring! I was…falling. Walter made fun of me afterward, about how I just said “Oh!” kind of quietly, right before there was a terrible tearing sound as the bag ripped in half and I fell out—or started to fall, before grabbing onto the fabric rope itself and hanging there, one leg in the torn bag, my upper body clamped around the fabric for dear life while the towel rod clattered to the ground.
“Walter!” I yelled. And he said, “I see, I see, Frankie. Okay. All good. You’re good. Hang on nice and tight.” And he scurried down the metal shelving and disappeared. I looked down and wished I hadn’t. “Walter?” I called, more frantic this time. No response. Or, I should say, no voice responded. Because there was an answer, if you count the unmistakable beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up.
A minute later, there was Walter, my hero, driving up in a forklift. “Oh yes I did,” he said, before I could say anything like, for instance, “Have you completely lost your mind?”
It was one thing to do wild stuff; it seemed like something completely else to, you know, get ourselves killed. He was smiling like a crazy person—like the crazy person he was turning out to be—and he stopped with a jolt as he got close to me. “Luckily, the keys were in it. And double luckily, it’s the same as driving my grandfather’s riding mower. Hang on tight, Franks.” In a couple of jerky back-and-forths, he maneuvered the machine beneath me. “One sec. I gotcha. Hang on. I’m just going to push this…” The forklift zipped backward, veering off to the left. “Nope,” Walter said. “Not that, apparently. Whoa, holy rear-wheel steering!” He inched back below me, said “This?” and pushed a lever, and the forks dropped to the concrete floor with a loud clatter. “This!” he said, moving the lever the other way, and the forks came up, making a nice, comforting hydraulic sound. I planted my feet on them as soon as they were within reach, and Walter gently lowered me to the floor. “That,” he said, when I was safely back on the ground, “was epic.”
I remembered my camera and thought to take a picture of Walter then, perched up in the seat of the forklift, with the warehouse lights shining behind him, his smile as wide as the world.
Did you ever do that art project when you were little—the one where you paint a colorful picture and then cover the whole thing with a black crayon? It always felt so worrying to me at first, like I was ruining it. But then there was that feeling of scratching off the crayon with a toothpick, and the color was still there where I scraped, still bright, maybe brighter, even, against the dark of the crayon. That was Walter in this moment. Not unchanged by his sadness, definitely not, but with all his Walterness still there, still bright against it.
We ate a handful of strangely salty LÖRDAGSGODIS licorice fish while we discussed our next activity. “Maybe something, I don’t know, quieter?” I said.
“There are those metal beams above the cafeteria,” Walter said, grinning. “Beams, like balance beams! We could climb up and, you know, shimmy along near the ceiling!”
“Um, quieter,” I said. “More like watering all those tragic plants we saw back in the greenhouse, but, you know, a little less boring than that.”
“We could arrange a row of shopping carts and challenge each other to leap cart to cart around the store without ever touching the ground! Or, wait, we could ride the carts down the stairs, and—”
“Walter! Walter. In case you missed it, I just fell off a zip line.”
“Well, technically I rescued you before you actually fell, but right. Okay. I know just the thing. It’s a surprise,” Walter said over his shoulder while he dragged me back through couches and tables, bedding and chairs, and stopped short just inside a showroom bathroom. The walls were dark orange tile, and where a normal house would have just a regular sink for everyone to share and fight over, there were three separate sinks, like white mixing bowls, each one on its own little sink base, with a hook and a clean white towel hanging from it.
“Nice,” I said. “Especially if each person in your family requires their own sink. But, um, this really is a quiet activity. You know, admiring the bathroom.”
Walter looked at me and shook his head. “Frankie, you’re changing,” he said. “A week ago, you would have wanted to spend all night in here, touching every tile with your amazed finger.” He laughed. “And now you’re like, Ikea shmikea.” I laughed too, although it was kind of true. Not Ikea shmikea, but that the niceness of the stuff had worn off a little. “Anyway,” he continued, “this is not the whole of the plan. All will be revealed. Wait here.”
And Walter trotted off. During the couple of minutes he was gone, I looked at something labeled TOILET BRUSH, which grossed me out—like someone had borrowed your toothbrush, but to clean the toilet.
Also, I worried. Not about the toilet brush! About how this crazy adventure would end. How were Walter and I going to get home? How were we going to get out of this without getting in trouble? (Note to self: if you hate, hate, hate getting in trouble, then don’t secretly spend the night at Ikea.) We hadn’t come up with a real plan for the back end. Our short list of ideas—and it was very short—included hitchhiking and taking the bus, but we were scared to hitchhike, and we didn’t know if there was a bus. I’d made a mental note of the route as my parents were driving—but what were we going to do, walk the forty-five miles home along the highway? I think it seemed kind of inevitable, at least to me, that we’d end up calling our parents. That we’d get in huge trouble and just deal with it then. But I had not ever spoken this aloud to Walter. Honestly, I dreaded reminding him that our night would have to end.
My thoughts were interrupted by the hushed staticky sound of voices over a walkie-talkie. I grabbed mine and hit the power button. Nothing. I pressed talk. “Walter,” I whispered. “Come in, Walter.” Nothing. I fiddled with the volume knob, wiped the antenna on my shirt, held the speaker up to my ear. Still nothing. “Walter,” I said, one more time, louder, “Come in, Walter.” “Frankie,” his voice boomed—in my other ear, where he had crept up to scare me. “Geez, Walter,” I said, and he laughed. “I swear I heard something.” Walter shrugged and shook his head. “Just me and my awesomeness!” He spread out the stuff he’d returned with: four large watering cans, a packaged tub plug, and two fluffy white NJUTA bathrobes.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. Oh my gosh! Gardening in bathrobes? Did you think I was serious about watering the plants?”
“Duh. No,” Walter said. “Can you say pool party?” I looked at him. I looked at the bathtub he was pointing to. The regular-size bathtub.
“We can take turns,” Walter said. He was already fitting the plug into the drain. “There’s no plumbing in the demo bathrooms, as we already found out the hard way,” he said, and I laughed, remembering Zeke. “So we’ll just pop out to the real bathroom to fill up these cans with water, fill the tub that way. The pool, I mean. Good?” I couldn’t really think why not, although I did not have the best feeling about this plan.
There were many things that should have alerted us to potential problems. For example: you never really think about how much water is in a bathtub until you are filling it with watering cans. And the paradox is that a watering can full of water is crazily heavy, yet it seems to add only a microscopic amount of water when you pour it into a tub. We made many trips, and decided to be satisfied with about ten inches of water, which was not the original goal. Also, not to be super picky, but in catalogs the bathtubs are always filled with water that glows a magically enticing pale blue-green. But somehow the water we’d poured in had a kind of dirty scum floating on it, maybe from the dust inside the showroom. It didn’t give off a real “Leap in!” vibe.
I was also starting to think that sitting in ten inches of lukewarm water in Ikea, where you are not supposed to be, in the middle of the night might not—spoiler alert!—be really that fun. “This is such an awesome idea…,” I started to say.
“I’m sensing a big but coming on,” he said. He’d put a robe on over his clothes for no reason I could tell, and belted it. “Y
ou are not feeling this plan, Frankie. Maybe what we need is a pitcher and some glasses, maybe some twinkle lights, to get more of a party vibe going—” He stopped short and looked at me. I was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with my camera, taking a picture of him in his robe. “Wait,” he said. “Did you hear that?”
And yes. Yes, I did.
Now Walter and I were hiding behind a shower curtain in the demo bathroom next door to our swimming-pool bathroom, shaking and chattering like Shaggy and Scooby. If I’d had a tail, you would have seen it sticking out from the curtain, shivering in fear. “I am wearing a bathrobe,” Walter whispered to me. “I am in a real bathrobe in a fake bathroom in the middle of the night.” I laughed, put a hand over my mouth. Then I saw Walter’s eyebrows pull together. “What?” I said, and he shook his head. He pointed, and then I saw it too.
It was a dark line on the floor, and it was moving toward us. It was…what?
It was water.
Here’s a tip: if you have the dubious sense to half fill a furniture-store demonstration tub, and then you spook yourselves thinking that you hear someone again on the walkie-talkies, do not—as you are scooping up your backpacks and dashing away, one of you wearing a bathrobe—stop to absentmindedly unplug the tub’s drain. Just. Don’t.
Ironically, given how shallow we’d filled the tub, it turned out to be a lot of water when it all came flooding out—through the drain that was connected to exactly nothing. “Um, did you unplug the tub, Franks?” Walter whispered, and he smiled at me sadly after I nodded. “Drains don’t work so great without the pipes and stuff,” he whispered, and this was definitely true.
We grabbed armfuls of bath towels from all the nearby displays and mopped up the floor as best we could, but yikes. It was a lot of water. When we were about half-done, Walter suddenly stopped and put a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”
One Mixed-Up Night Page 8
