The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (17 page)

Everyone laughs, but then what I've said registers with Muriel. “Wait—what's that, Rach? What's the last thing you just said?”

“Maybe it put it in its pouch and—”

“Put it in its pouch?” Muriel repeats. All three of them lean toward me with curious expressions. “Rach. What exactly do you think a dingo is?”

When I tell them it's a really mean-tempered kangaroo, they erupt with laughter. Carly is practically in tears. “It's—it's a wild dog, you idiot,” she says once she catches her breath.

“Crikey dick,” Muriel exclaims, one of my favorite expressions, beat only perhaps by “throwing a wobbly” (having a tantrum) and “up and down and in her lady's chamber” (having looked all over for something) and Pete's “strewth” (as in an exasperated “honestly” or an agreeing “ain't that the truth, sister?”). Crikey dick, technically a New Zealand expression left over from Muriel's upbringing there, is an expression of surprise that translates to something like “for heaven's sake.”

“Ohhhh,” I respond thoughtfully. I try to picture a thin, raggedy mean-streets dog (this gets easier when I see one a few months later), but as hard as I try, all I see is a hopping-mad kangaroo, teeth bared, claws gleaming, with a little baby bundle in its pouch.

The Dawsons' colorful wildlife encounters do not comprise even a sliver of the myriad differences between Carly's childhood and my own. Family vacations for the Dawsons typically involved road trips and camping in the bush. The five of them would pile into the car and head up or down the coast a few hundred miles, then pull over with their big yellow tent and gear and settle in for a few days of what Darryl Hannigan from
The Castle
calls “the serenity.” My parents did not camp. My dad likes to joke that “roughing it in my book is a hotel with three stars.” My mother appreciated nature as an activity, but not as somewhere one might hunker down and remain among the elements once the sun set, a cozy bed disappointingly replaced by the hard earth below your sleeping bag.

Carly's parents took the kids on a few extended trips when they were growing up, once pulling them out of school for six weeks to visit Europe, Egypt, Thailand, Canada, and the United States. It was unfathomable that my parents would take me out of school for anything less than emergency surgery (and even then we'd surely try our best to coordinate with a long holiday weekend) much less to head off on an extended cross-continental adventure. When I was little, travel was something we did as a family. Later, when my parents' marriage was disintegrating, we took separate vacations. I remember being pleased about being let off on my own, like a grown-up, at eleven or twelve, off to music camp or a week with a friend's family or a visit to my brother out in California. I felt tremendously independent and pushed aside any darker thoughts about the fragmenting of my family. I'm jealous of all the memories the Dawsons have together that extend up to the present.

Carly had stability waiting for her after living a travel life in flux for however many months. My life lacked this. My childhood home was sold. My dad had moved to Chicago with his new wife, into a condo where they converted the second bedroom into an office. And no matter how hard my mother attempted to make one of her spare rooms comfortable for me, I was still a guest. Maybe this was partly why I found the Dawsons' intact family so appealing, and appreciated the space I occupied in their lives so much, a space without any past to complicate it.

Life at the Dawsons' ticks along at one's self-appointed pace, and even though there are many new activities to occupy my time, Carly and I spend what feels like years' worth of yawning, lazy afternoons in the backyard pool. We make mojitos and spread ourselves across blue inflatable rafts. I spend a lot of time floating belly-up,
The Graduate
–style, pondering what I want in life. The answer is like a piece of candy with the wrapper still on. I know there is something delicious in there, something I really, really want, but I can't get to it through all the damn plastic that is formed by the myriad other voices in my head. Other times I consider nothing more profound than the warmth of the pool water or the swaying clothes drying on the line. But it's not like my wall-staring time senior year of college. In Sydney, I feel like a toy winding down as its battery runs out, a slowing accompanied by spurts of incandescent thoughts when it feels like there
is time enough for everything. The Dawsons provide a kind of sanctuary I didn't even realize I needed.

What exactly did my sister's “Welcome to the real world” toast mean? People back home were offering up these kinds of expressions for months before graduation, warnings that implied everything up until then was a wonderful dream from which you eventually have to wake. Is my time abroad a part of this dream? Who decides the parameters of this real world, where the initiation seems like self-sacrifice? Give up your personal vision of happiness in exchange for a collective vision: work hard, get married, buy a house, have a kid or two, diversify your portfolio, retire comfortably without burdening your children, die. For my generation of women, who have inherited the benefits of our mothers' and grandmothers' feminism, we're supposed to want it all and to excel in each area of our life. Our opportunities are exhilarating and overwhelming, though my father's new wife, a pediatric cardiologist, offered me her own piece of hard-earned life wisdom at that same graduation dinner: “Career, relationship, kids—now pick two.”

I share these conflicting messages with Carly.

“Fuck expectations,” she summarizes.

We clink our mojito glasses, the ice already melted in the burning afternoon sun.

Much later on, when she has let her college degree dangle unfinished for over five years, Carly's parents will urge her to finish it up and be done with it. But here, we're only twenty-two, and they don't push any particular time line on her. It's not that Carly's life is entirely free of pressures. It's just that she has a totally different relationship to her parents' approval. She wants to please them, but it's not the all-encompassing stressor it is for me, and she would never dream of giving up her own desires to make them happy. Pete jokes that he hopes she'll become an accountant so he can rename his firm Daddy and Daughter, but the idea is so beyond laughable that even he knows it. Pete and
Muriel often tell Carly, “We want you to do what makes you happy.” Although my own parents provided me the best education, the highest-quality music lessons, and an abundance of financial support, I never heard them utter these exact words. It is in Australia that I realize I will have to garner the strength to speak them to myself.

I have been keeping a secret from my parents—my acceptance to a master's program in theater studies at Trinity College Dublin. I have a vague notion of wanting to write plays, though I've never written one. I applied for a spot at the end of my senior year, before I decided to come to Australia, when I saw no way to leave the country again without a purpose that would satisfy them. Trinity has let me defer my spot until the fall. I packed the letter in my suitcase. I showed it to Carly a few days ago. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked me. I didn't know if she meant the piece of paper or the degree, but it didn't matter, since I've been asking myself both questions.

I have always loved the validation that an acceptance letter brings, but when I received this one, I felt only emptiness. I think of my friend Adam, off at UCLA, pursuing his Ph.D. Whenever he finished an exam, he put all his textbooks in the freezer for a week. It was his way of saying, “Astronomy 101, you no longer rule my life.” (He wanted to sell the books back to the bookstore, so he refrained from anything more drastic.) I put the letter in the Dawsons' freezer to see how I felt, but still it called out to me. I threw it under the bed with one of Mike's dusty, forgotten socks. But I retrieved it a few hours later. I don't know what I'm going to do with that letter, any more than I know what I'm going to do with the spot reserved for me, or this pressure I always feel to continually achieve certain goals that appeal to my parents more than they do to me.

Back in high school, Carly developed an interest in speed walking. The story goes that she picked it up and something like three seconds later had placed nationally in a competition. A few
months after that, she dropped the hobby altogether, returning to her normal ambling pace, never looking back. It did not haunt her, like music did me. No one expected anything more of Carly—nor did she of herself—than to do what worked for her in the moment. And the fact that she had natural abilities in this and many other things did not make her feel beholden to them. Her parents supported her. They gave her opportunities. And she appreciated all of it without the intense pressure to please them that I'd always felt. It was in Australia that I started seriously considering my own private destiny as I witnessed Carly unapologetically pursuing hers at full speed.

“Hey.” Carly interrupts my thoughts by splashing some water in my direction. “Do you want to go to South America together when your visa expires?”

“Why South America?”

“Why not?”

“Let's do it,” I say, just like that, because that guttural voice I've been coaxing out as I examine my options in Australia is shouting “yes!” so loudly that it's the only word getting through.

I find Carly's life philosophies incredibly alluring and her mother's experiences unceasingly fascinating, especially because the early events of Muriel's life are in many ways similar to my own mother's, yet the outcomes are so different. In 1966 Muriel left home. She was eighteen, like my mother was when she ran off, and three years younger than Carly and I when we met in Ireland, similarly determined to break free of our lives. Up until then Muriel had been biding her time in Te Puke, a small country town in New Zealand. Muriel calls it a “little tinpot farming town.” I imagine it's not all that different from where my mother spent her childhood in upstate New York.

Muriel always wanted to leave home. “My two sisters were rushed down the aisle at nineteen, like many girls in small towns
in the 1960s, pre-Pill days. I knew I didn't want that. My mother didn't, either.”

Muriel's mother had always wanted to travel, something she finally got to do later in life, after many unhappy years in tiny Te Puke. Some of this unhappiness must have rubbed off on Muriel, and maybe something like wanderlust was inscribed in her makeup, since not everyone who is unhappy walks away, and not everyone who walks away goes to another country. My mother made it only as far as Ohio for a few years before winding up back in New York, an hour's drive from her troubled childhood home. But Muriel crossed an ocean. She boarded a boat to Australia the April after her eighteenth birthday and arrived on the shores of Sydney three days later with fifty dollars and a large cardboard suitcase. It was only at that moment, as she looked over the harbor to the nearly completed Opera House, where the half-finished sails that formed the roof were reflecting the afternoon sun—at least this is how I imagine the moment—that the full force of her current situation hit her: she was on her own.

She spent a few petrified nights at the local Salvation Army, lying awake on the other side of the three-quarter wall from the snoring hoboes they let in at night. After two weary days wandering the city alone, she went to the railway station and departed for Adelaide, seven hundred miles south. The British had precisely plotted Adelaide in a grid, the boxy, appealing inner city surrounded on all sides by green parks. It was orderly and precise, not like back in New Zealand, where it seemed like everyone had shown up and cobbled together their new lives.

The ticket cost Muriel most of the thirty dollars she had left, but there were distant relatives at the other end who offered to take her in. They had a daughter around her age, Joy, and as soon as Muriel had made a little money, the two of them journeyed up to Darwin, a young city at the top of Australia in the sparsely populated Northern Territory. Here they picked mangoes, rock melon, and tomatoes, depending on the season. Soon they looked
like laborers—callused hands, tanned, strong thighs. They liked how they felt doing that work. When they left, it was simply because they were sick of the routine, ready for something new.

Muriel returned to New Zealand for her twenty-first birthday. Her sisters threw her a small party. One of them had given birth two more times by then, a baby on each knee and a toddler running through people's legs as Muriel blew out the candles on her fruitcake. Her mother stood alone at the edge of the group, watching her daughter. Muriel glanced up at her and felt something akin to pity but not entirely unrelated to annoyance. Everything in Te Puke was the same, but Muriel was different. Or maybe everything had changed and Muriel had, too, but in unrelated, incompatible ways. Whatever it was, she knew she was leaving New Zealand again, maybe this time for good.

Norfolk Island, located between Australia and New Zealand, seemed like a good place to start. The tiny piece of land, an eroded remnant of a basaltic volcano, had fewer than two thousand residents. One of them was Dan, a carpenter who adored fishing and took his small boat out into the choppy Pacific whenever he had the chance. Muriel had planned to stay on the island for a few months to earn some money for a big move to Canada, but instead she married Dan. Soon she was pregnant. She was twenty-four and working as a hairdresser on the island, feathering all the women's hair. Her water broke early one morning. There were complications. The baby only lived a few days. A few weeks later, when she thought she had already lost everything, she lost Dan, too, proving there is always something more that can be taken away. He was trying to help a friend out to sea when his boat overturned. It was dark and Dan, fully dressed when it capsized, disappeared into the sea.