1.No one can
know your real name.
2. Don’t stay in
one place too long.
3.If you sense
anything is wrong, go immediately to the meeting spot.
4.Keeping our
family together is everything.
5.We wish we could
tell you who we are, but we can’t. Please – do not ask.
At the start of Sidney Lumet’s Running
On Empty, the Pope family is about their home and their youngest son takes
the family dog and leaves him on the street. We don’t know yet the details of
why the Popes family is doing this, but it’s immediately clear that this has
happened countless times before.
I don’t know if Marit Weisenberg,
the author of This Golden State, a
book which basically starts the same way and has a plot that mirrors it, saw
the movie at some point. What is clear from her book is that Poppy, the
narrator of the story, never has and even she had she would envy the Pope
family. At least they are allowed to have dogs or possessions – or even know why they have to
keep running in the first place
When the book begins Poppy is
leaving yet another high school with the instructions from her father that they
are about to move again. Poppy is about to turn eighteen and she has been on
the road her entire life. She is resentful and upset at the way her life is
lived, angry beyond words and it takes only a few pages to learn why.
Her parents have been doing this
her entire life, never staying in the same place for more than a few months,
always going to a new place, never explaining anything. They have no access to
technology, they can’t use Wi-Fi, they can only go to places like the library
under their father’s strict guard and never take any books out. They only
communicate through flip phones that are at least fifteen years old. Poppy has
been going to school in so many states she’s practically lost count, only for a
few weeks or a couple of months at most, always lying about who she is, never
allowed to bring people home, never staying anywhere long enough to even make
friends in the first place. The life of Poppy and her eight year old sister is
so shut in that she tells stories of them fighting over catalogs in order to
deal with boredom.
This would be bad enough as it but
they have no idea why they are living this way in the first place. The set of
rules that I mentioned at the start of the book are facts that their parents
have drilled into their heads instead of anything resembling an explanation to
them. Emma, who is eight years old, can already repeat it without thinking.
Their control over this is so great that they have never even told their
children their real names (they are only referred to as Mom and Dad during the
novel and I will do the same)
As the book begins they are moving
to California for reasons that Poppy doesn’t understand but doesn’t bother to
question because she knows she will get no answer. By this point Poppy has
become in addition to the normal level of teenage rebellion, starting to
genuinely become frustrated about what will happen when she turns eighteen this
summer. Her father always deflects when the question is asked – he has done
this for years. Finally when they reach their destination Poppy learns about a
summer course at STEM that she wants to take. Poppy has learned by now that to
never ask for anything for herself, so he is understandably stunned when she is
allowed to do so.
Poppy spends the summer in an
advanced math course taught by a Russian ex-patriot named Professor Alexiev.
Alexiev is only thirty and she very quickly sees how talented Poppy is,
something that dismays Poppy as much as it gives her hope. She also meets a
young man named Harry Addison, who is immensely well-know to the students in
the class but not Poppy. Poppy’s first impression is that he is something of a
dilettante, and she wants to avoid him even more when she learns that he is the
son of one of the most ambitious prosecutors in the state. That Harrison is
attracted to her is something she ignores because if friends are never
possible, love is even more forbidden, even if she had the time to do so.
But she learns that Harrison is
interested in her, mainly because she doesn’t know who he is. She does
everything she can to avoid it, but in the middle of the summer, someone from a
tech company that deals with genetics offers her a free DNA test. This is an
opportunity to get the answers she’s been looking for without having to go
through the stonewall that are her parents so she steals one and Harrison
notices. Because he doesn’t ask any questions she takes the test, figuring it
will lead nowhere. For obvious reasons, it does.
Now I will leave the general plot
from Poppy’s perspective and look it from her parents. Neither of them are very
well defined in the book, and that may be design: Poppy knows nothing about who
her parents were and even less about who they are. She is understandably
rebellious and frustrated but given everything you might ask why she never
considers the idea of simply running away.
The obvious answer is she is so
removed from technology and her father controls so much of the money and identities
that she could not do it easily. But the larger point is that even now Poppy
has been so indoctrinated into her parents – and mostly her father’s mindset –
that even the idea of absence from her family for more than a few minutes throws her into a state of
terror and panic. She knows how horrible her life is but she also knows if she
dares to ask for anything she will be shut down.
We eventually learn that Harrison,
for all his privilege, lives under the immense pressure of an aggressive mother
and has been raised by an abusive father. Weisenberg does this deliberately
because Harrison recognizes when the truth comes out just how abused Poppy has
been, to the point that the idea of leaving her family is something that she
can’t even begin to take seriously.
Now I come back to rule number 4.
The idea that ‘family is everything’ has been drilled so hard into Poppy and
Emma’s heads that they don’t even bother to question that there’s anything else
but it. Both children are incredible clever and talented – Poppy has a great
mind, particularly for figures, Emma can read above her level and is an immensely
talented dancer. But Poppy is very aware
that, if things continue to go the way they are, the two of them will never
realize their potential because of how their parents have forced them to live their
lives.
There is also the fact that her
parents both seem to see them as the same children they were when they were
born. On Poppy’s eighteenth birthday, her father reminds her of how she looked
when she was a baby, something Poppy doesn’t know because they have never taken
pictures. “Would it still feel right to have my dad greet me on my birthday and
talk about me as if I were in pigtails?” she thinks. The presents she gets are
reflective of that – it is a blank notebook with an elephant on it. “Because I
was obsessed with elephants once and my family still thought I was eight.”
Poppy’s response is: “I’ll add it to my collection” – most of which has been
left behind when they are forced to move.
Poppy’s father completely misses
the delivery. As the book goes on, it becomes very clear that both Poppy’s
parents have been seeing what they want to see about their children their
entire lives. And it is that which truly makes them horrible parents – and horrible
people.
I will speak in vague terms of the
truth of Poppy’s parents and the reason they are running. What I will say is
that while Poppy thinks it is a truly monstrous thing, in the grand scheme of
things it is very insignificant. The crime took place in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11 and involved Poppy’s mother being connected to a ‘terrorist
group.’ Poppy’s mother comes from a very wealthy family. Her father was a
family friend, and as we have been led to believe has military training. There
was a crime to be sure, but her mother’s involvement was minimal and her father
merely guilty of bad judgment. It is the kind of crime that could easily be
beaten in court if you have assets and her family does and is clearly willing
to protect.
We also get the feeling that all of
the moving Poppy’s family has done over the years has had more to do with her father’s
paranoia than any actual threat. This is completely rational. The crime is not
the kind that commands a massive task force, and it was twenty years ago. There
is no Inspector Javert chasing them from state to state. All of these are the
things that any rational person would think of, and Poppy’s parents are not
stupid.
So why are they always running? Late
in the novel when Poppy learns the truth, her mother tells her they are doing
it because of their family. But it’s clear that’s a lie they’ve been telling
themselves for so long that they believe it. There are several reasons that
seem more likely.
The first, as long as they keep
running, Poppy’s parents never have to face the consequences of their actions.
This is far more important to her father than her mother; as we find out late
in the novel his entire reason for doing this is built on a house of cards that
he does not want to do anything to upset.
The second is that they want to
maintain the illusion that time has stood still. We eventually learn that her mother has a very great ability to maintain the idea she has complete control over
things and that in fact she enjoyed part of what was happening. Perhaps as long
as they keep moving she is living some kind of vicarious thrill. Her father,
who has always believed in protection and safety from this training, can keep
up his attitude as the savior of the people he loves – an illusion which keeps
getting thinner. That’s also why they never tell their children who they are
and what they’ve done: they want to maintain the illusion and by not asking the
questions, they can stay who they are.
And third as long as they keep
running, they never have to face reality. For all their repeating of how family
is everything, neither parent seems able to face the fact that at some point,
the child has to leave the parent. Late in the novel Poppy asks directly what
the plans for her future are. Her father says simply: “There isn’t one.” Poppy
realizes that her life would eventually be three adults raising Emma. And what
happens when Emma grows up?
The thing is, and it doesn’t even
occur to Poppy late in the novel, is that none of this had to happen. Her
parents are guilty of crimes, not her, not Emma. Even a life in foster care
would have had steadiness and consistently that her life on the run has been. And
as we learn there were other people in both of their lives they could have left
their children to even if they had wanted to either stop running or even turn
themselves in and face the consequences. At the very least, if they explained who
they were and why, they would not have had to face the inevitable consequences
of simple childhood curiosity. And it’s because of those very reasons that, by
the novel, Poppy’s family finally faces the danger they have avoided for
decades.
By the end of the novel, as is
always the case, they are about to run again even before that danger comes. I
will not reveal how the final chapters play out, though considering how these
stories tend to in fiction, you may have an idea already. It is melancholy and
bittersweet, but that is par for the course for these kinds of stories.
It does come down to rule number
four, as it has throughout the book. What I will say is that by the end of the
novel, we now know for sure that Poppy has learned that’s not true, but there’s
a lot of doubt as to whether her parents have – or if they ever will.
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