Breakfast with Neruda

by Laura Moe

  “You know what my favorite scene is?” she asks. “When Holden wanted to erase all the ‘fuck yous’ scrawled on walls so his sister and all little children wouldn’t have to wonder what the expression means.”

  I liked that scene too. I dread every day when Annie finds out more ugly truths about the world, when kids call her racist names or refuse to make eye contact. Maybe The Catcher in the Rye is a better book than I remember.

  “Anyway, I didn’t know I could disappear for a while, even if it’s inside someone else’s head. So in a lot of ways Mrs. Silver ruined my life.”

  I laugh. “How?”

  “By feeding us stories that make you question everything, where you wake up and find you’ve been turned into a cockroach, or you choose to kill your own child rather than allow her to get taken onto slavery.”

  I nod, knowing exactly what she means. “Literature doesn’t ruin your life; it expands it.”

  “God, you sound like Mrs. Silver.”

  I shrug. “I’m a book nerd.”

  “Well, I never was until she got her mitts on me.”

  “So how many books did you take with you?”

  She sighs. “I could only fit four in my bag.”

  “So you took The Catcher in the Rye,” I say.

  “Obviously. Holden Caulfield started it all.”

  “What else?”

  She sits up and brushes the dust off her butt and moves down to the next patch of weeds. I stand up and wheel the trashcan to follow her. We plunk down and start digging again. “Well, I also wasn’t a big fan of poetry before her class because it was always the old dead guys like Keats and Milton or Shakespeare. But Mrs. Silver introduced us to Pablo Neruda, and everything I took for granted before like watermelons, which he called the green whale of the summer, or tomatoes that have sex with onions and flood the streets.” She stops and takes a deep breath. “It was like I’d been living in the dark and suddenly been granted a window.”

  “So you took a Neruda book.”

  “Duh.”

  “Which one?”

  “It was a toss-up between 100 Love Sonnets or Neruda: Selected Poems. I liked the picture of him on the cover of Selected Poems.” She places a hand on her heart. “Did you know he was like a rock star? Theo and I watched a film about Neruda. He wasn’t good-looking. Kind of short and chubby, but he had Paul McCartney eyes. And his poems made people all over the world worship him.”

  I think of the poems Shelly bought me for my non-birthday and Neruda’s amazing sequence of words, ordinary words, but when combined they say things like “your house sounds like a train at noon.” I guess if I were running away I’d take a Neruda book too. “What else did you take?”

  “Fahrenheit 451 is a small book with big ideas,” she says, “and it’s scary too because a lot of what Bradbury wrote about all those years ago is kind of happening now, like how people are all into reality TV and they don’t read anymore. And that character named Faber pointed out how we all have the potential to be happy, but we just aren’t.”

  I pull up a cluster of dandelions and wave them at Shelly. “And the last book you packed was On the Road.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You mentioned it in the bookstore that day.”

  “Oh yeah, I guess I did.” She smacks me with the thistle she has in her hand. “I kind of had to take it since Kerouac was the catalyst for the journey. Have you read it?” I shake my head. “Basically it’s a road trip where two close friends drive back and forth across the country. But there’s so much more that happens.”

  “Did you read it for class too?”

  “Oh no,” Shelly says. “Mrs. Silver told us she’d lose her job if she had us reading it because it’s full of sex and profanity.”

  I stand up and dust myself off. “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “To buy a copy of the book right now.”

  She laughs and pulls me back down. “Anyway, Mrs. Silver read us a few passages from it.” Shelly closes her eyes and recites, 'Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.' She opens her eyes. “Isn’t that wonderful?” I nod. “And then,” she lifts her hands, and says, “‘Marijuana floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer. That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.’” Her voice catches a little, and she looks at me. “I wanted to live inside those boogie woogie nights and discover their Spanish mysteries, you know?”

  “I get that,” I say. “So is that the reason you ran away?”

  She scrunches her face. “Not entirely. I mean, I got hooked on Kerouac and read all his books. But then I had a chance to go across the country with a friend of sorts.”

  “What do you mean by ‘of sorts’?”

  She sighs. “I found a Jack Kerouac page on Facebook. It was originated by this guy named Theo. He posted quotes and interesting stuff about Kerouac and the other beat writers sometimes. One of my favorites is, ‘It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist.’ Isn’t that great?” I nod. “Theo also posted puns like, ‘a will is a dead giveaway' and 'a bicycle can’t stand alone because it’s two tired.’

  He sounds like a tool, but I say, “Clever.”

  She nods. “I started commenting on his posts, and we began sort of an online relationship.”

  “Oh, shit.” I feel something gnaw inside me.

  “It’s not what you think,” she says. “He’s not a perv or anything. Theo’s a grad student working on his PhD in American literature. His dissertation is about Kerouac and the social significance of the Beats as a comparative modern literary renaissance of classical literature.”

  “That sounds . . .” I am about to say it sounds like a load of crap, but I want her to continue her story, and I don’t want to piss her off. “Cool. Go on.”

  “He told me he and a buddy were planning to recreate Kerouac and Cassady’s trips across the country, and he invited me to come along.”

  “Yeah, it’s always a good decision to get in a car with strange men.”

  Shelly smacks me in the leg with her spade. “Fuck you!”

  “Ow!” I rub my shin, where she left an anvil-shaped mark. “But you have to admit . . .” Shelly gives me murderous look. “Okay, tell me the rest of your story,” I say.

  She vigorously digs out another weed. “Not if you’re going to judge me.”

  “I won’t. I promise. I want to hear the rest,” I say. “And who the hell am I to judge? So what did you do next? Did you leave a note?”

  She looks at me from the corner of her eye. “Yeah. I said something like ‘By the time you get this I’ll be long gone because after all that happened I couldn’t stay here anymore.’”

  “So besides this Theo guy, what happened to make you want to leave?”

  “I found out the truth about myself.” She pauses. “I grew up thinking my family was fairly normal: two parents, two kids, one family dog. We lived in nice houses and took regular family vacations. On the surface my family is the American dream.

  “Yet as I said, I always knew something was off-kilter, like when Mason Lee came out freshman year, he told me he’d spent his whole life pretending to be straight because being different bothers people. I knew I wasn’t gay, but there was something alien about me. I just couldn’t figure out what. Then last summer, after I learned the truth about my myth, it was like the lid blew off and I was free to just go.”

  She is scaring me a bit. “What did you find out?”

  She stops digging. “Last June I started applying for scholarships. I know most people wait until they’re seniors, but there are some early scholarships for juniors. And this particular one required a photocopy of my birth certificate, so I went out to ask my d
ad about the documents.

  “He was sitting by the pool with his leg propped up, drinking a margarita. He had broken his ankle playing tennis when he tripped on a tennis ball.

  “My dad was always cagey about letting my brother and me look at the details of our lives. Maybe it’s the lawyer in him, but he didn’t like for Josh and me to be in his office unless he was there. He’d always say there were too many confidential documents in there, and he didn’t want to compromise anyone’s information.

  “But that day, maybe he had drunk one too many margaritas, or taken too many painkillers. I don’t know, but something blurred his judgment, and my mom wasn’t home to stop him since she was teaching a yoga class. So my normally cautious dad handed me the keys to his office and told me my folder was in the bottom drawer of his desk. He asked me to go get it, and said he would finish the application for me.”

  Shelly dusts her elbows and continues. “I loved the leather and polished wood smell of my father’s office. As a kid I often played on the Persian rug in front of his massive desk where he worked on legal briefs. It was like being in the president’s office. I’d sit there and eavesdrop on his phone conversations where he used big words like legerdemain and pari delicto. I liked that my father was smart. Anyway, I opened the drawer and noticed two thick, clear plastic envelopes, one labeled with my brother’s name and one with mine.

  “I pulled mine out. I knew it held my passport, medical records, and other important documents. Some of them I’d seen, but I’d never seen my birth certificate, so I pulled it out. I was kind of amazed how tiny my hands and feet had been. And then I read the parental information and the name on the certificate. It wasn’t mine.

  “I ran outside and handed the birth certificate to my father and asked, ‘What does this mean?’ He set down his drink and took the paper. His expression told me he’d been caught in a big fat lie.

  “I pointed to the name on the certificate and said, ‘Who the hell is Valentine Falls?’ My father sighed, and said, ‘We meant to tell you.’ ‘So I’m adopted?’ I said. ‘Sort of,’ he replied. ‘How does someone sort of get adopted?’ I asked. He explained that my mother had cervical cancer, and it was discovered when she was pregnant with Josh. After he was born she also had her cervix removed, and they couldn’t have more kids. Then my mother’s sister Karen showed up with her baby, but she was a drug addict and unable to take care of me, so she left me with the Millers.”

  I feel something pressing against my chest. “So your parents are actually your aunt and uncle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your name is really Valentine?”

  “It was, but they changed it to Michelle when they adopted me,” she says.

  “How old were you when this happened?”

  “I was just a baby, so I don’t remember.” She tamps down some loose soil. “As far as I knew until that day by the pool I was always a Miller.”

  I lean against one of the pillars in front of the building and let out a big breath. Shelly and I have more in common than I realized. “I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” I say. She shrugs, and does more digging. “Have you met your real parents?”

  “My father OD’d on coke before I was born,” she says, “but I found out where my mother was. Or at least where she headed after she abandoned me: San Francisco. So when Theo asked me to go on this trip, which included San Francisco, I thought, yeah, I can go meet her.”

  “So you ran away with this guy you met on Facebook.”

  She leans forward and her hair hides her face. “I know, it sounds dumb and dangerous now, but he turned out to be a really nice guy.”

  “Did you fall in love with him?”

  “I don’t think so. He was a lot older, for one. Twenty-four. And I was only sixteen.”

  “Did he know you were underage?”

  She brushes the hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “No. He thought I was a sophomore in college.” She stands up and moves down to the next bunch of weeds. “And I had a fake ID.”

  “Jesus,” I say. I start digging again. “How did you get there?”

  “We had to take my car because Theo didn’t have a car, and his friend Dale, who came with us, drove a piece of junk worse than your car. We stopped at a few of the places Kerouac wrote about, like Denver, Phoenix, and L.A., and met with some of their friends. They were all interesting people, like poets and artists and lit majors, and we stayed with some of them. And some places along the way were scary and beautiful.”

  “In what ways?”

  “We took turns driving all day and night. When we hit Kansas, we were in the middle of nowhere, and it was spooky. Like the three of us and the guy in the store were the last people on earth. And it was sunrise, which in Kansas, because it’s so flat, surrounds you in all directions. I wondered how Kerouac would describe it. I can picture him saying something like ‘the iridescent flat dawn of Kansas surrounded us as its itchy fingers pulled up the sun.’”

  “Nice,” I say.

  “And in Arizona, we stopped and slept outside one night, which was also kind of scary and wonderful. We pulled off the freeway into a campground near the Petrified Forest, and took a side road to this remote place. Even though it was only a few miles from the highway it felt like we were on another planet with its dusty red earth and cerulean sky. And even though it was hot, it’s true what they say about dry heat. It’s not as bad as the sticky heat we get here. But it gets cold at night in the desert, so Theo built a fire and it was like being in the Old West. We lay on our backs in sleeping bags where it was quiet and scary and exhilarating, with stars so bright. Other than our fire, it was totally dark. I ended up sleeping in the car, though, after Dale mentioned we could get eaten by coyotes.”

  I snicker, and she continues. “We stopped in L.A. for a couple days and swam in the ocean, then ended up in San Francisco, and it was exciting and fun.”

  “What kinds of things did you guys do?” I ask.

  “We went to coffee shops and bookstores to hear jazz and readings. Did you know City Lights Books has a whole floor of just poetry? Anyway, we also saw free concerts in parks, walked around the city, went to pubs, and met a lot of cool people.”

  “How did you get into bars?”

  “Fake ID, remember?”

  “Oh yeah.” I crack a smile.

  She sighs. “It was great until the money ran out. San Francisco is astronomically expensive, and even though we lived in crappy hotels, it didn’t take long to burn through our money.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “At first we stayed with a friend of Theo’s, then found a fairly cheap hotel in the Sunset District. It was in walking distance to the beach, and just walking along listening to the waves is nothing short of awesome. But it’s cold there in summer, and Theo and I had to buy winter jackets at a thrift store. Then Theo discovered bed bugs in our room, so we had to move. And this place was more expensive, plus my car got broken into. But I still loved San Francisco. I ended up selling the car because there’s nowhere to park and you can get a trolley or a bus to anywhere there. Since I didn’t have the title, the shady guy we sold it to didn’t give me much for it.

  “And even though we lived in a terrible room in the Mission District and survived on bread, fruit, and the McDonald’s Dollar Menu, every day felt like an adventure.

  “But soon the money issue got critical. Theo took a part-time job at the docks, partly to duplicate Kerouac’s experience and partly for the cash. Since I was a runaway with a fake ID, I couldn’t exactly get a regular job. And I was afraid to tell Theo the truth because I was afraid he’d send me back to Ohio. So I got a job in a laundry that hired illegals and paid cash. It was horrible work, but we both earned enough to survive. The only luxuries I allowed myself were an occasional latte and hair dye.

  “But when my hands got too raw from washing hotel sheets and table linens, I started to panhandle. I hung out near trolley stations on Union Square and looked for to
urists. All the while I looked for Karen, my mother. Sometimes Theo helped. Karen’s last address was in Haight-Ashbury, and she could have been one of the thousands of street people who slumped inside doorways or begged on street corners. But we didn’t find her there.

  “We walked around the Mission, Castro, Sunset, and Golden Gate Park and asked people if they knew Karen. All I had was a twenty-year-old picture I had stolen from my mom’s photo album. Nobody seemed to know her, but the people we asked were mostly high and wanted money.

  “One evening I showed Karen’s picture to a toothless woman sitting on the ground in Sunset near the Bed Bug Motel. She glanced at the photo, and said, “Most likely she be dead, honey. We don’t live too long out here. Myself, I got another year or so before I’ll either be dead or in jail.”

  “So you didn’t find your mother?”

  Shelly’s shoulders sag and she shakes her head. Her voice grows thinner. “No. And after three months of being broke and cold the charm started to wear off. I felt ragged and missed my family, and was actually relieved when I got arrested for panhandling outside Powell Street Station.”

  She leans against me and I wrap my arms around her. My hands are coated in dirt, but she doesn’t seem to mind when I stroke her hair and kiss the top of her head. I’m glad Earl hasn’t come outside to check on us. “Did you ever find out what happened to your mother?”

  She shakes her head and wipes her face. “But other than upsetting my family, I still don’t regret my journey.”

  “So how did your parents deal with it?”

  She pulls away and moves to the last clump of weeds. “After their relief of finding out I wasn’t dead, my parents wanted to kill me, but my father contacted an attorney friend there to get me out of jail, and they still sent me a plane ticket.”

  “What happened to Theo?” I ask.

  “He’s in Seattle now, working in a coffee shop,” she says. “Still working on his dissertation.”

  “He didn’t get arrested for kidnapping or harboring a minor?”