1 Breakfast at Madeline's Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the table and started reading.
    I snatched the pages away from him. I knew I was being unreasonable, but I couldn't stop myself. Rob eyed me, annoyed, and I shrugged apologetically. "I'm sorry, Rob, The Penn wanted me to have it. I'll let you read it after I finish."
    "You're a nut, you know that? So why'd he want you to have it, anyway?"
    "How the hell should I know?"
    "Hey, I got it!" Rob snapped his fingers, excited. "We should, like, cover the wa lls with these pages. As a trib ute to The Penn. Be an awesome exhibit—better than this garbage, anyway," he added, pointing up at a por trait of a gargantuan Asian woman who looked like she was leering at me.
    I turned away from her. "That's a beautiful idea, Rob. I think The Penn would really have appreciated that."
    Rob nodded. "I'll clear it with the boss lady."
    As if she'd heard him talking about her, Madeline called out from the other room, "Or chicken if you want. We can always go with that, if you don't want salmon."
    "Either one is fine, honey," Rob called back, then whispered to me, "I'll thank God when this wedding is over."
    I laughed. "Don't worry, it won't be half as bad as going to the dentist."
    "Yeah, but at least when you go to the dentist, you don't have to wear a tux." He stood up. "Well, happy reading, dude. Let me know if it's the next Ulysses ."
    "I hope not. Ulysses is junk. James Joyce is the worst famous writer that ever lived."
    He threw me a disgusted look. "I don't know why we even let you into a high-class eatery like this."
    As Rob walked away, I spread Penn's writings on the table in front of me. It was a huge jumble. None of the notebooks, loose pages or scribbled-on envelopes were numbered. No way of knowing where to start.
    I decided to try a green spiral notebook that looked relatively recent. It was bought at Staples, which only opened up in this area about four years ago. I turned to page one.
    At the top of the page was the word Preface .
    I sipped my Ethiopian and dove in.
     
    It was a dark and delirious day in December, I read, when I first learned that my mother and father did not love each other.
    If only Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had stayed together. He was righteous anger and she was kindness. But how to harness the two? How to combine Tupac Shakur with Liberace?
    They say no two snowflakes are ever alike. But then they say a lot of things, and where's the proof? In my mother's case, 151 proof, the result of much research: The Cheapest Way to Ingest Alcohol. Studies show 151 Clear Sky beats MD 20 20, which has it over the generic no-name beers hands down.
    Myself, I go for Ethiopian, zero cents a cup where possible, until death do me part. Never touch clear sky or anything else, since the snow came down that day.
    Of course, all would have transpired otherwise in these days of waxless skis. No more carefully stored containers of red, blue, and purple wax, to say nothing of glisters and clisters, which were at issue that cold winter morning. All my father wanted was a simple little ski, but where was the clister? A man has a day off, just one day, and does he want to spend it looking around the whole frigging— frigging , not fucking , because they were simpler days then, and yet harder—house for his glister, or clister, memory fades, but stays with this thought: A man wants a substance, a substance to put on his skis, so his skis can glide, so he can fly, so the air rushes by, so the whish of the wind and the sn ow enters his soul, and the fac tory disappears and so does his wife and even his child—yes, I must say from this vantage point of time, yes, even his child.
    But Dylan will never marry Baez, and Tupac will never marry Liberace, except in heaven perhaps though studies show that heaven probably does not exist. For if they did marry, it would be like my father and mother, in contravention of the natural order. Do gorillas marry? Or baboons? And if they did, would the male work in a shoe factory all day? Highly un