The Museum of Intangible Things (9 page)

Zoe has an idea for the first stop on our adventure, and it requires getting to Exit 13A on the Jersey Turnpike. Believe it or not, we don’t know how to get to the Jersey Turnpike from where we live. We’ve never been on it. Even on the rare occasion that we drive to New York City, we take Route 80 east. If we go to the shore—which we rarely do because we live on a huge lake that provides us with our summer entertainment—we take the Parkway. The turnpike, she is mysterious to us.

We hear she is mostly gaseous, like Saturn. And that the gases swirl around you in fluorescent ribbons. We hear it smells like propane and pickles and manure, a vinegarish primordial swamp.

And the rumors, they are true enough. We find the turnpike in spite of having turned off our phones and the GPS. Zoe says we need to be entirely off the satellite. Off the grid. In case they start looking for us. She even makes me rip off the E-ZPass detector on the windshield. We’ll have to pay the tolls with our coins, listen to FM radio or sing to ourselves.

After we pass Newark Airport and I try to race some of the landing airplanes in my old LeMans that’s shaped like a roller skate, I see where Zoe is probably bringing me: IKEA. The closest we can get to Sweden on the New Jersey Turnpike.

It looms ahead of us, a bright blue and yellow beacon surrounded by flags. Something solid among all the gas. Land ho. “Is that where we’re going?” I ask Zoe.

“How did you guess?”

“We don’t really have room in the car to bring anything home,” I say.

“We’re not bringing anything home. We’re going to make this our home. Just for a night.”

“We’re sleeping here?” I had heard of people having dinner parties at IKEA just to see if the kitchen they picked would suit their lifestyle. IKEA is like that. It wants you to try things out. It wants people to be happy. It wants you to believe you
have
a “lifestyle.” It also fosters self-reliance. You pick your own stuff, you check it out, you build it. You take responsibility for your own design. “I didn’t know they let people sleep here,” I say in a dreamy sigh.

“Define
let
.”

“It’s a three-letter word for
allow
. We’ve been over this.”

“Sometimes you just have to take what you want. Park over here in the corner so no one will see the car.”

“No, Zoe.”

“Trust me,” Zoe says, staring at me.

“Have you read the diagnostic symptoms for bipolar disorder? You’re flagrantly displaying some of them.”

“I’m not
flagrantly
doing anything. I could actually be a lot more flagrant. I am showing some restraint, actually. And you need to be more flagrant. You need to be flagrantly insouciant. You care way too much. And because of that you will be paralyzed for life and miss out on everything. Please. Open the door and de-LeMans. Our first lesson is Insouciance.”

We walk across the emptying parking lot beneath the swooping, even at ten at night, gulls. They peck at discarded chicken bones on the pavement, grab some, wave them around, and then toss them aside.

“Look at them,” Zoe says. “Do you think they care about making a mess of the parking lot? They just get their needs met and move on. Insouciant.”

A plane lands on the other side of the highway and drowns out the competing noise of the road. We sneak into the exit door beneath this blanket of sound and are immediately comforted by the panacea of a climate-controlled box store. Away from all the movement outside, the kinetic energy. Inside, everything is still and solid. Furniture can at least be depended on for that.

Most everyone has left the building, and the management is flashing the lights and asking people to bring their purchases to the self-checkout lines. They have already turned off the big escalator that leads up to the showroom. We sneak into the heavy doors of the Marketplace and follow the arrows on the floor that lead us to the warehouse. We wind through a maze of dishes, pots, Tupperware, utensils, garbage cans, textiles, pillows, lighting, prints, frames, candles, and plants. In the textile section we hide behind some shower curtains, and Zoe, as if she’s the Ghost of Christmas Present or something, points to a couple taking their time deciding on a bathroom rug. Their backs are turned to their three children, who are cackling and throwing pillows all over the floor and jumping in their dirty sneakers from big pile of rug to big pile of rug.

“Do you think they care that their children are destroying property?”

“Obviously not.”

“Because they came here to get a bathroom rug, and this is the only time they have in their busy schedules to get a bathroom rug, and they can’t afford a babysitter just to go out and buy a stupid bathroom rug, and so they don’t really give a shit about their kids tearing around the store or the employees who will be late getting home because they can’t decide between the tangerine or the electric blue.”

“Insouciance?”

“Yes. It’s the art of not giving a shit. And you need to foster some of it.”

She’s right. It’s true that I care too much. Things stick to me and I cannot shake them off. And so I should stop caring. Insouciance. Go F yourself.

An IKEA employee in a yellow polo shirt saunters over and asks the couple to make their choice and make their way to check out. He picks up a juice box and some crushed Goldfish that the rogue children have left on the floor and shakes his head.

Zoe and I slowly and quietly step back so you cannot see our sneakers beneath the row of shower curtains. Zoe holds her finger to her lips as if I needed a reminder to keep quiet. Her shower curtain has patches of transparent plastic in its design, so she finds a clear spot and smooshes her face against it, trying to make me laugh.

When the final customers pay and leave, we hear the employees lock the doors, and someone turns up the stereo. I wish it were
Take a Chance on Me
by ABBA, just to complete my Swedish experience, but it’s not. It’s Green Day.

We wait for some yellow-shirted, potbellied blokes to sweep through our department with a push broom, and when the lights turn even dimmer, the stereo turns off, and the intermittent employee chatter subsides, we sneak out from behind the curtains. We still don’t talk, but Zoe signals me to follow her in silence. We sneak like soldiers toward the staircase that leads up to the cafeteria. Zoe runs, hunched over, to a corner, looks around, and then signals for me to follow her. Eventually we slingshot this way to the stairs. We stay close to the wall in case there are cameras in the center of the stairway and sidle our way up.

We practically crawl behind the chrome tray rails to the kitchen part of the cafeteria. Zoe pulls open a big stainless steel freezer and points into it. Bags and bags of Swedish meatballs. She finds me a plate, dumps about twelve of them out, and sticks the whole thing in the microwave. She only heats one plate. She takes it out before it beeps and very quietly narrates what she’s doing in “Swedish Chef” language (“snerkin smorkin snerkin smorkin”) as she scoops some lingonberry jam onto the plate, with a little parsley for garnish.

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.