The Runaway
I think what I hated most about my situation was just how typical and predictable it was. Everyone, I don’t care if you are old or young, has heard the old stories about the young girl that gets angry with her parents and runs off on her own. She usually ends up running off with the boy of her dreams because her parents are Nazis, and their view on dating reaches back to like the 1800’s or something. Anyway, so the girl in all those stories runs off with this guy, and they end up having kids and everyone lives happily ever after, and the girl finally finds some part of herself she apparently lost, and blah, blah, blah.. Horse crap, is what it is.
The truth is, I ran off because I needed a little excitement. My parents and I, yeah we got along fine. We didn’t fight like some girls and their parents that I knew. Of course, that didn’t mean we talked at all. And it wasn’t for lack of love or anything that we didn’t talk. Well, in their case anyway. I guess I loved them. I mean, you can’t help but feel some kind of affection for the people who fathered you and birthed you. If for nothing else I guess it’s just some biological thing that goes on in your brain, something that you were born with whether you like it or not. I mean, a baby isn’t born to think it’s parents are morons. It doesn’t know if they are abusive or not, if mommy cheats on daddy, or if daddy drinks a little too much, or if mommy gambles away the family money at the casinos on the weekends. A baby doesn’t know if it’s being abandoned or neglected. I mean it would know it was hungry, but it wouldn’t really know why. A baby is born to accept love and affection of any kind. It doesn’t really understand that the people providing for it might be terrible human beings.
See, what ends up happening is that those babies start to grow up and become wiser. Somewhere along the way they might realize their parents really aren’t all that great. And naturally, disappointment is what follows. See, it’s not so much that a baby doesn’t know it’s being mistreated, or that its parents are crap; I think that it just expects that it won’t be mistreated. I think it expects that its parents are the best they can possibly be. What a god-awful surprise it is growing up, huh?
Anyway, everyone used to tell me I thought too much. I lost count of the times people would say, “Good grief, Rachel! I just asked a question, and you go off on this tangent about who-knows-what!”
After someone would say that, I usually didn’t talk around them much at all. I never had much patience for people who couldn’t listen.
Anyway, going back to my parents, we always had a weird relationship. Well, that was my opinion anyway. I don’t have any idea if they ever thought it was weird. I mean, I never asked them or anything. We didn’t do things that you see all those kids and their parents do in the movies. We never sat down and had dinner, or all went to the movies, or went and fished at some lake, or any of that sappy crap. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we didn’t every do any of that. Honestly, I can’t sit down and watch a movie where all the characters are all happy and sappy and gross like that. It makes me want to puke. “And they lived happily ever after,” has got to be the worst ending to anything I have ever heard of.
I guess the problem was that my parents thought that we did do all of those things. I mean not in the sense that they were crazy, and thought we went to the movies as a family when we really just spent the evening eating our own dinners in our own rooms watching our own respective TVs. I mean more like they thought we had all those sappy feelings and stuff that they have in the movies after a walk in the park.
My mom wouldn’t watch movies so much as she would read books. She didn’t read interesting books, she read like those super lovey-dovey romance novels. I walked in the house twice in one week and she was sitting in the living room in the same position both times sobbing. We are talking two and a half boxes of tissues sobbing. I went to my room and stayed there. Didn’t even come out to get food. I didn’t have even the tiniest bit of an appetite after seeing that.
Anyway, so I guess where things got weird with my parents is when they thought they knew me. They thought we had that relationship they had seen in those movies. Where the daughter is all smiles all the time about seeing her parents. They are really happy to be involved in her life, and she is very happy to let them. Ha..
My parents had this vision of me I guess. Not like they would put all this pressure on me to be something I wasn’t. There were times where I kinda wish that they had. Instead, they just had this idea that I was one of those cookie-cutter daughters, and they sort of just left me alone. Of the few friends I had at prep-school, most of them were always emotional wrecks. I would constantly hear, “My dad doesn’t like my boyfriend,” or, “Mom will ground me if I don’t get an A on this test.”
I guess I always found that to be strange. Not that I wanted my parents to be all over my butt about little things like school and stuff, but sometimes I couldn’t figure out if what I had was really all that much better. I mean, my parents would go months without even glancing at the tests and report cards I would bring home. Then out of the blue my dad would just ask, halfheartedly, “So, do you need any help with homework or anything?” as he was heading out the door for Wednesday night bowling. It just doesn’t work that way.
But back to my situation. I guess finally I just got fed up with it. I know if I told the story about running away to someone I met on the street or something, they would just assume I had taken off on my own to find someone that cared. Truth is, I really didn’t care that they didn’t care. After a while I think you just get used to being on your own. There were times when Dad would introduce me to some of his lawyer buddies and say, “Yeah, me and Molly are pretty proud of our Rachel!”
That always just made me mad. It always reminded me of some mayor walking up to another guy pouring concrete and saying, “Boy, I sure am proud of the way this sidewalk is turning out!”
I always imagined the guy pouring concrete would stand up, sweat pouring down his face, and punch the mayor right in the nose.
So in a sense you could say I snapped. I woke up early one Saturday morning and took the car. Didn’t leave a note or anything. About thirty miles outside of town I found some car in an old parking lot and switched license plates with it. I figured eventually someone would find me, my parents would probably pull out all of the stops to get me back. But I wanted this runaway thing to last as long as possible. I could envision my mother sobbing over my disappearance like she did her romance novels and the thought of going back to that made me nauseous.
The only thing I took with me besides the car was a twelve pack of bottled. I didn’t take a cent from my parents. Truth is, I really didn’t have a plan. I just knew if I had to stay in that house for one more day with those cookie-cutter people, I would snap for real and start shooting or knifing someone.
So that first day I drove and I drove and I drove. I drove until the gas light came on and I had consumed about a third of my water supply. The gas light came on when it was just about dark, so I found a place in the middle of nowhere off the highway. I parked the car on the side of this dirt road and pretty much passed out. Driving can really drain your energy sometimes.
When I woke up it was still dark. I didn’t have a watch or anything, but I figured it was just before sunrise. My stomach rumbled, and it was then that I wished I hadn’t been in such a hurry so as not to even grab some food. I got out of the car, stretched for a little bit, and walked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight, and I wondered how in the world I was going to find food with next to no gas and no money whatsoever. I had been too tired to notice it the night before, but I had managed to park on a road with big fields on either side. They were all fenced in, and I thought they were for farming or something. There was a big pole with some dark blob sitting on top of it about fifty yards farther down the road. Since I had nothing better to do, I began to walk towards the pole, simply out of curiosity. Before walking too far I could tell it was a sign and not a pole, and walking even closer I could make out that it said, “McCall’s Vineyard.”
I had read in school or somewhere that vineyards meant grapes, and I was only getting hungrier, so I hopped the fence and walked some more. Before long I found the vineyard. It may have just been the dark messing with my eyes, but it seemed like it just appeared out of nowhere. The vines of grapes snaked along the wooden frames, and they looked pretty eerie in the dark. They were full to bursting with fat grapes though, so I picked a whole bunch of them and sat down to eat.
I never would have heard him come up behind me in the dark; I was too busy stuffing my face.
“Well, are you enjoying yourself?”
I just about died of a heart attack. I jumped up, but didn’t run just yet. The voice really didn’t sound all that angry, more amused than anything. He looked for all the world like Old McDonald. Straw hat, overalls, scraggly beard, everything. He just kind of stared at me.
“Sorry, I didn’t know whose grapes these were. I can leave now.”
“Well, they aren’t mine, ma’am. I don’t care if you eat them or not, to tell you the truth. My job is just to water. I am pretty curious to know what a girl is doing out here at this time of night, though. The nearest town is forty miles north, so you must have driven.”
I figured I might as well come clean to him. After all, I didn’t expect to get away with this for forever. And I was hungry like you wouldn’t believe. “Yeah, I drove. I ran away.”
I thought it might kind of surprise him, but he didn’t even raise his eyebrows, “Ran away, huh? You ran away to a vineyard?” He kind of laughed.
“Well, no. I just stopped here cause I ran out of gas. And I was hungry.”
He nodded, “Well, yeah, it will happen that way. You can eat all you want; I don’t think you’ll make much of a dent in the grape crop. Why did you run away?”
“It’s complicated.”
He smiled, “Yeah it always is.”
He took off his hat and picked himself a handful of grapes, and then sat down in the grass, “I think I’ll join you.”
He began to pop them into his mouth one by one, and chew slowly. He motioned for me to sit back down, and for some reason I did. He eyed me for a little bit and then shook his head and smiled, “Perceptions are a funny thing, you know?”
“What?”
“Perceptions. You know, like the way a person sees the world. I have a lot of time to think nowadays, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about perceptions. Any time you ever stop to wonder why a person does something or acts a certain way, all you have to do is step back and look at things the way they perceive them,” his eyes glinted “and sister, I’m stepping back and guessing your perception of things is a pretty dismal one.”
I looked down, not really sure what to say.
He went on, “Now I don’t know you, so I’m probably wrong. But there’s only a couple reasons why a girl would run away from home that I could think of. One of them is a man, and I don’t think you are quite that type. And the other.. well..” he just looked at me then. I shifted a little, all this staring made me a little uncomfortable.
He looked away and ate another grape. As he chewed slowly, he said, “The reason perceptions are so funny is because more often than not circumstances shape them. Now if I was having a rough time of it growing these grapes, and they were mine, I wouldn’t care much for some strange girl coming along and eating her fill. Generosity is one of those things that tend to disappear when famine comes knocking.”
He kept chewing, I kept silent.
“It’s the sad truth that reality tends to take a hike when things get tough too. You won’t have to look far to find someone who just can’t handle how things really are. It’s easier to escape by just ignoring the problem, or better yet find a reality of your own that you can handle better. It’s pretty easy to run.”
I could feel him looking right through me again, but I still couldn’t look at him. “It’s a rare person you can find that actually understands how the world works, or for that matter even tries to understand. I’d be willing to bet most of the people on the planet will go to their deathbed without even really understanding why they lived.”
After a while, he stood up and dusted his overalls off, “Well, sister, I had better get back to my watering.”
I nodded and got up as well. Suddenly a hundred dollar bill came out of nowhere and he was pushing it into my hand. He put on his straw hat and looked at me, “Don’t you ever stop trying to understand any of it, sister.”
He turned around and ambled back into the darkness, and in a few seconds he disappeared.
I stood there for a minute looking after him, holding the money.
Then I too turned back around and walked. And then I drove.
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