by Wendy Wunder
We take the plain, utilitarian, ceramic plate to the tables along the windows that overlook Newark Airport, and we watch the planes landing in the dark. Sometimes they seem to materialize from some other dimension. They seem invisible. Just rows of lights until they suddenly hit the ground and hurtle down the runway at impossible speeds. While we watch, some streaks of lightning flash through the bleak polluted skies of Newark and Elizabeth, illuminating their far-off urban landscapes.
“Uh-oh,” Zoe whispers. “I thought I had more time.”
“For what?” I whisper with a meatball still stuck in my cheek.
Zoe just shakes her head and looks off into the sky.
I am devouring the plate of meatballs, and I keep offering them up to Zoe, but she won’t eat them. I am begging her to take the last meatball. It sits happily on the end of my fork like an upside-down exclamation point, and I fly it toward her mouth like a mom feeding a toddler. Finally she takes the whole fork from me and jams the meatball in her mouth. She’s chewing it with difficulty when someone says, “Stop right there,” in a scary old-man voice. “What the hell are you two doing here?”
We freeze, deer-in-headlights style.
I am about to run. But Zoe turns on her faux-calm, smooth-everything-over voice. The one my mom used to use when she called the pediatrician’s office.
“Hello.” She stands up and looks at his nametag. “Hello, Officer Franz. Apparently no one told you about tonight’s inventory. We start at midnight,” she says, pretending to look at the watch she’s not wearing.
“Oh, no. There’s no inventory tonight. I would have known about that.” Officer Franz has white hair. His pants are pulled up almost to his chest. He’s wearing comfortable, black rubber-soled shoes, and I think he may be packing. A Taser at least.
“It was called at the last minute, with Black Friday approaching and all. Maybe you forgot,” Zoe says sweetly. “Hannah, you just stay there, and get started while I show Officer Franz the memo. I think Officer Franz is getting very sleepy, aren’t you?” Zoe says. I see her walk him around the corner as he yawns. She guides him toward the mattress department and then returns three minutes later.
“He’s asleep,” she says.
“What did you do, read him Goodnight Moon? You can’t just put a grown man to sleep.”
“He was really tired, I guess. Anyway. Here we are. What do you want to do first? And don’t you dare clean up that plate. You leave it there. Insouciance, remember. Tonight we do not care.”
I look down at the plate, glistening with brown gravy and magenta lingonberry goo. And I force myself to throw my napkin on top of it and walk away.
The first thing we do is plan our future interiors. We saunter through the showroom. I pick an avocado kitchen with a glass tile backsplash. Zoe picks one with dark wood cabinets and cherry-red accents. We circle the entire showroom, making our choices for each room, until I’m ready for bed too. We brush our teeth in the public bathroom and then snuggle into a four-poster bed called Leirvik. I am tempted for a moment to move to the bunk beds across the room, but I choose the four-poster because it seems romantic, except for the name of it.
I settle into my Leirvik bed with Gäspa sheets and a Gosa pillow. Zoe lies next to me. She’s pretending that she’s going to sleep with me, but I know she’ll sneak away as soon as I drift off. I can still feel her manic energy radiating off her in hot waves.
I want to enjoy my IKEA experience, but I feel like a dead flower. Like someone has drained the nectar of youth from my soul and left me brittle and old and ready to snap.
It physically hurts to think of Danny, and I can’t stop visualizing the scene in the basement. I’m so disappointed in myself for sabotaging it. If there was even an “it” to begin with. A tear slides out of the corner of my eye, and drops onto the pillow.
“You’re not being in-sou-ci-ant . . .” Zoe says in a faux warning tone of voice.
“I can’t help it.” I sniffle. “I’m so embarrassed by it all. Does this ever happen to you?”
“No. It’s not like that with me.”
“What’s it like with you?”
“I just want to lure them in, and once I catch them, I lose interest.”
It’s true. I’ve seen Zoe make a catch and then bat him around a little, like a cat playing with a housefly.
“What about Ethan?” I say, proud of myself for taking advantage of the opening she left me.
Zoe just stares at me, lowers her eyebrows, and points her finger at me like a gun. “Boom,” she says, faux shooting, her hand kicking back a little.
“See what I did there?” I say. “We were talking about boys, so I just nonchalantly mentioned his name. Because maybe you’ll feel better if you talk about him.”
She tosses and turns a bit and then gets out of bed and performs a few arabesques and a split leap, completely ignoring me.
“What’s with the ballet?”
“I don’t know. I’m suddenly feeling it. We should have taken lessons.”
“We did.”
“Oh yeah.”
“For three years.”
“That must be why I know how to do this,” she says and lifts into a double pirouette ending in fourth. “Ta da.”
“Bellisimo,” I say.
“Really, though, Hannah. This is your first heartbreak. It’s supposed to hurt. You’ll get used to it. Read me a story,” Zoe says, and I riffle through my bag and read her some Brothers Lionheart before I fall asleep and the book drops, corner first, onto the floor.
In the morning she quietly lifts the comforter off me, and I pull it back on and roll into a ball on my side. “Not yet,” I say.
“Now, Hannah. We have to scoot.”
“Did Officer Franz wake up?” I ask.
“Well, no. He’s not responding to stimuli.”
“What kind of stimuli?”
“Screaming in his ear. Wet willies. Noogies. Indian burns.”
“Is he breathing?”
“Yes. But we should get out of here.”
I can hear the rhythmic beep of an alarm coming from some far-off part of the showroom. I wipe the drool from the side of my face and pack my things back into my messenger bag and start making the bed.
“Leave it!” Zoe whisper-yells.
We scurry out to the warehouse “pick-it” bins, and in the center is an enormous rocket-ship sculpture made entirely out of different IKEA chairs. “Did you do that?” I ask Zoe. It wasn’t there last night.
“Come on,” she whispers.
“Using only an Allen wrench?” I ask as I gaze at it, walking backward. Zoe is pulling me through checkout to the frozen food section. She has baked me a cinnamon roll and hands it to me as she drags me to the exit.
It’s locked.
I jump up and down on the rubber mat, trying to activate the automatic door, but it won’t budge.
“We need a crowbar,” I say, but Zoe just sticks her hand between the panes of glass and something gives. The door slides open. We run to my turquoise beaten-up LeMans just as two police cars and a fire truck roll up to the IKEA entrance.
“Go that way,” Zoe says, and we sneak out of the back exit of the parking lot and merge onto the turnpike toward New York City.
AUDACITY
The tolls are killing us. We have to use a whole roll of quarters and two rolls of pennies just to get through the Lincoln Tunnel. Luckily we ate for free at IKEA. The cinnamon bun sits like a lump of clay in my stomach and will keep me full for at least six hours.
I love how as you approach the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel on its elevated C-curve Jetsons-like ramp, they give you a quick glimpse of the skyline before spinning you around and plunging you beneath the Hudson. You get to look across to the crystalline, pristine, pointy city twinkling like Oz and think, “In just ten minutes (or an hour, depend
ing on traffic), I will move from here, where nothing ever happens that’s good, to there, the center of the universe.”
It’s crowded today, the day before the big Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and people are filling up the tunnel like lemmings or cockroaches running from the light, ready to infest the streets just to look at . . . what? Balloons? Marching bands? What is the appeal? I guess it’s just another place to go to take pictures of your kids. It’s a Facebook opportunity. There are worse things to live for.
“Why do you want to go to the city today of all days?” I ask Zoe. It has taken me the forty-minute drive down the turnpike to accept the fact that I will miss school today and that the school newspaper will probably not go out. It’s a half-day, though, so I force myself to get over it.
“I have some unfinished business,” she says, trying to be tough and mafia-esque. She folds a piece of Juicy Fruit into her mouth and stares straight ahead, looking through a pair of aviator sunglasses that she may or may not have stolen from Officer Franz.
As we start to turn away from the view of the city and toward the entrance to the tunnel, our senses are assaulted by a giant black-and-white billboard for the revival of A Chorus Line, which is my favorite musical in the world because it is a meta-musical about a musical and because for some reason, I identify with the plight of these young people who want to believe they’re special. Like Zoe. She really needs to believe she’s special. I admire that about her. Because you have to believe you’re special before you can do anything special.
“I think what you need is a plan for the future,” I tell her now. “Let’s come up with a plan and next steps, and then we can go home for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“I had a plan,” she says.
“You need a Plan B.”
“Plan Bs are for losers.”
“Is it Plan Bs or Plans B? Like mothers-in-law?”
Zoe just nods a little, smirks, and otherwise ignores me.
We have to wait longer and pay more because Zoe ripped off the E-ZPass. The toll collector’s hand drops as I place the heavy rods of coins into it. She shakes her head at us, and Zoe says, “What? It’s money. You have a problem with our money?” The toll taker just gives us a pathetic laugh, and we pull away.
The old decrepit brick entrance quickly gives way to the space-age white tile and fluorescent lights of the Star Warsy tunnel. It’s as if we’re being transported to another dimension. And we are, because when we emerge, we get to a place where anything can happen and sometimes does. Which may have been a phrase from an old NYC brochure we had lying around the house, but I’m not sure.
You would think driving in New York is a scary thing, but it’s not. Especially in Midtown. The entire thing is a grid, so it’s impossible to get lost. Especially if you know which avenues travel uptown and which down and which streets go east and which ones go west. Once you have that down, and you remember to ignore the lane lines and go with the flow of traffic, the taxis will avoid you. So you just pull in and go. Like a red blood cell traveling in a vein.
“Where to?” I ask Zoe.
“Twenty-seventh and Seventh,” she says.
I turn right on Forty-second and another right on Seventh where it splits off from Broadway. It’s only ten blocks, but it takes a while. Miraculously I find a twelve-hour meter on Twenty-eighth Street. But that too sucks up a lot of our precious coinage.
We de-LeMans once again, and Zoe unfurls her spidery legs, steps to the sidewalk, and grabs a kids’ backpack in the shape of a green turtle shell from the backseat. She must have stolen it from IKEA, but this is the first time I notice it.
“Come on,” she says, snapping her gum.
She struts up to Seventh like a tall, svelte Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and without even thinking about it, takes out a spray can of blackboard paint that she must have also stolen from IKEA. She shakes it as we walk, the marble clonking around inside, until we come to the monolithic beastly home of the Fashion Institute of Technology, a solid brown brick on Seventh that straddles Twenty-seventh Street.
Zoe stops at a brass sculpture in the shape of a small skateboard ramp, topped on one side by a big elliptical donut and on the other side by the spherical donut hole. She doesn’t stop to think before spraying FUCK YOU across the base. She tucks the spray can under her arm and runs. I follow after her, down Twenty-seventh until she comes to a hideous white and blue archway built in front of the student center.
The campus has emptied out for Thanksgiving, so no one sees her as she shimmies like Spider-Man up the inside of the archway and in full daylight sprays the same thing on the underside of its white hood. She lets go, lands gracefully in a squat on the sidewalk, and we run again back to Seventh, turn left, and run upstream around the tourists toward Thirty-fourth and Madison Square Garden, where we can finally duck into Penn Station and hide out underground.
We’re squatting against a shiny black marble wall, trying to catch our breath. The station is shaped like an underground octopus. At the center are the ticketing booths and the big old-fashioned flip board announcing arrivals and departures. Branching out from the center are the hallways that lead to NJ Transit, Amtrak, or the Long Island Rail Road. Carved into the black marble walls around the periphery are bagel shops, pizza joints, newsstands, and random underground ethnic boutiques selling head scarves and sunglasses and incense.
“Oh my god,” Zoe says. “That felt good.”
“Are you kidding me? You are better than that!”
“No, you are better than that. I feel fantastic for doing it. Fuck them. They can’t control my future. I’m too good for them.”
“Zoe. I need to tell you the story of Colonel Sanders.”
“Who the fuck is Colonel Sanders?” You can tell she’s really amped up when she uses the F word a lot.
“The Kentucky Fried Chicken guy. He failed more than a thousand times with his Original Recipe until it finally worked out for him. You’ve only failed once. You just have to keep trying.”
“That’s sage advice coming from someone who didn’t try at all. I need to tell you the story of Audacity. It’s your next intangible thing. When someone screws you over, you need to have the audacity to fight back. Men get that. Women don’t. Today, we cultivate Audacity.”
I check in with Zoe’s eyes. The right one once again seems a little smaller than the left. Her pupils are glassy and unfocused. I thought this trip might ground her and help her come to terms with reality, but she hasn’t come back to Earth yet.
We spend some time chilling out underground at Penn Station. It’s a little less crowded down here. No tourist would even think of plunging into these bowels. And most of the commuters are home defrosting their turkeys, so what’s left are Zoe and me and a bunch of homeless alcoholics who smell like pee. Some of them congregate in the seated waiting area until a cop walks by and kicks them out. “Hey, go pick those off somewhere else,” he says. A matted-hair woman wrapped in her shelter-issued wool blanket stands up, still scratching as she shuffles away in her flip-flops.
I think about my dad, happy that at least he’s never gotten this low. Something keeps saving him before he completely destroys his life. He has some hope left.
Zoe ducks into a boutique and steals a fire-colored scarf, which she wraps around her head.
“That is not inconspicuous,” I tell her.
“It’s audacious, though, word of the day,” she says and continues walking through the station like she owns the place. On her travels through the hallways, she is not only audacious but resourceful enough to gather the tools she apparently needs for our next adventure: a Swiss Army knife, some black wool caps, a Polaroid camera, and two long, puffy down coats to use as sleeping bags. These she gets by begging some matronly women headed toward the LIRR. They probably have teenagers like us at home and they literally gave her the coats off their backs. At twilight she says we can go.
We wear the sleeping-bag coats, whose sleeves are too short for both of us, and fill the pockets with the hats and camera and Swiss Army knife, and we take the train to Eighty-first Street. A familiar stop for us: It’s the Museum of Natural History.
“The museum tonight?” I ask her. “Noah will be so jealous. It will be like From the Mixed-Up Files . . .” It was one of our favorite kids’ books, in which a sister and brother run away and sleep in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Nope. Not sleeping there. It’s where they blow up the balloons.”
As we climb up the dingy stairway from the subway to the street, we can hear generators humming, intermittent hissing, and the muted hustle of a crowd.
There, around the entire block that encircles the museum (a gothic Hogwartsy thing in the center), streets are closed off and clogged with them. They are round and jubilant and bouncy, and they are held down with giant nets. Men in neon-colored jumpsuits run around with hoses plugging them into different sections of balloon in the proper sequence, an arm here, a butt there, then a big red nose. Almost all the balloons are inflated: Buzz Lightyear, the Sock Monkey, a new little elf, with two or three still lying in flat, brightly colored splats on the sidewalk.
Tourist dads with their cameras around their necks and their kids up on their shoulders walk along a designated path to get a preview of the balloons. SpongeBob’s banana nose sticks out from beneath a net. Snoopy’s Red Baron aviator cap pushes against the ropes as if he’s trying to be born.
“This is so cool,” I tell Zoe.
“I knew you would like it,” she says.
We shuffle around the block with the crowds till we get to the back side of the museum on Eighth Avenue. It’s quieter over here because most of the inflation has finished. I see out of the corner of my eye that Zoe stops at Kermit the Frog.
“It’s not easy being green,” she mumbles, and I get a bad feeling about it. I suddenly know what the Swiss Army knife is for.
“No, Zoe, not this,” I say.
