The Swedish Star of Death

God, I’m in a rotten mood. So rotten that I provoked one I hold dear into hissing “Fuck you” and hanging up on me (deserved, deserved.) So rotten that the badness is coming out, in the form of various (you know what? Since I started reading all those British blogs, I’ve become incredibly mindful of my American words with their American spellings. I want to borrow all sorts of charmingly British expressions, like “can’t be arsed”–which Americans can’t even PRONOUNCE, so I’m doubly intent on writing it–and, for this particular occasion, because it’s ever so much more lovely than “pimples”) SPOTS. One is right atop my nose, or at least it was yesterday. Today it’s not so much a nose with a delicate spot as it is a spot with a wee cowering nose hovering somewhere beneath it. Be very grateful that the burden of my internet anonymity spares you all from a photobooth shot taken in full sunlight.

I was in a fine mood yesterday, when it was warm and the air smelled like flowers. I think it may be time to move to Havana, whose daily temperature is ideal for human beings all year round. High 84, low 70, the paper insists, day after day (though I suppose my capitalist swine American newspaper can’t actually get down to Havana to check, so perhaps the whole thing is a dirty plot.) Ah, Havana. The sun, the sea. Why do we all seem so intent on living where the weather is horrid most of the time?

So I was a bitch to everyone all day, and now I’ve got the sour feeling that comes both from being horrid and from eating too much pickled herring from the place my long-distance friend Emma calls the Swedish death star, where I recently spent a small fortune. God damn it all to hell, that was never my intention. I’m trying to avoid buying more crap and spending more money and digging myself further into this mound of possessions, and yet I needed to patch a few holes still left by my ex-husband’s departure with various items, so off my younger son and I went. He loves Ikea.

I always start out thinking that Ikea is the greatest store on earth, and leave the place slumped in despair. Today it was the children’s section that made me choke up as if (as if!) I were preparing to weep–there were old friends, like my baby’s actual high chair, not to mention his actual crib. Strung from the walls were the newest riffs on his curtains and his comforter cover, with those weirdly jaunty Ikea creatures dancing round the hems. (The Swedish iguana? The vaguely maniacal pony that, on closer inspection, is probably a goat? The crocodile, a hungry gleam in his eye, edging closer to the pony/goat?) Ikea is where dreams go to die, I told consoling-windows friend later in the day, when we were both trying to figure out why, more than any other store in the entire Western world, Ikea makes brave people weak.

It’s where I went when I was idealistic and happy, I told her. And she knew what I meant. Once, we were both young with children and babies and no money, and a desperate urge to make our seedy little apartments more habitable. We find it rather endearing at such a remove–our vanished craving for a lovely, well-organized domain. We were good housewives once upon a time. We remember agonizing over the dogeared catalog, finally deciding to splurge and buy the damned toybox or shelf or whatever, then carrying it home triumphantly. We remember being sure that this very toybox, this particular shelf, was the answer to all our problems. Ikea was all we could afford, but it was more than we could imagine. Ikea was the key to happiness.

So where, you ask, is the toybox today? Upstairs, broken, incorrectly put together in the first place, shoved aside too quickly, hardly used. Poor toybox. I’d say it had a day of glory, but it probably didn’t even have that. Cheap furniture is not the answer to anything, it turns out.

Still, there they were in Ikea, all the young couples, carefully measuring sofas, writing things down on the handy Swedish notepad provided courtesy of the deathstar, taking a long time choosing. Their small children were flinging themselves joyously over footstools, sneaking into duvet-covered beds. I prowled the aisles restlessly, causing shudders and pointlessly taking up space, like Banquo’s ghost. I did not get out without spending hundreds of dollars, of course. But my son and I had an extremely civilized lunch–several courses, with marzipan and dill and salmon and special Swedeberry juice–and I snagged way too many little jars of pickled fish, as I mentioned.

Sum total: a blanket. A comforter. Pillows. Batteries. Auxiliary curtains. Glasses. Herring in various sauces. Daim chocolate. Fish eggs. Fish egg paste in tubes. Sheets. Shower curtains. A new saucepan, because I burned the old one last week.

Nothing, in other words, to change a life. Stuff to patch a life, but nothing optimistic, nothing hopeful. I haven’t moved beyond Ikea, but I’ve somehow moved beyond the state of mind that lets you fling yourself wholeheartedly into Ikea, that lets you invest in things that are bigger than a breadbox. I want that old feeling back again. I want the blank walls, the catalog with all the answers, the monumental trip with the carefully saved money, the getting home with the Allen wrenches and the burning desire to see how it LOOKS, now that you’ve finally made it your own.

I want to be my younger self again, is what it feels like. Not some other younger self, just mine.

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