The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (18 page)

Muriel stayed on the island for one more year. She took a job as a dental assistant; her customers were quieter than women who needed their bangs trimmed—they couldn't jabber nonstop with all that metal in their mouth. The days stretched out before
her. Once again, she felt she had nowhere to go. She could see the future—how the lives of those around her might play out—but could not picture her place within it. One day she left because the pain of staying would not retreat. First she holidayed in Fiji with her sister-in-law for a few weeks, holed up in a bungalow where the outdoor shower required you to hold the chain with your teeth in order to keep water flowing while you scrubbed the ocean salt off your skin. Then she returned to Darwin—for once longing for something familiar—to start over. And then, amazingly, she lost everything again.

The day before Christmas Eve in 1974, Muriel drove into the bush to camp with some friends. It was midsummer. The heat was oppressive, and they couldn't swim in the ocean because of the jellyfish. They lounged atop thin mats and sleeping bags with their legs apart, drinking warm beer and trying not to move. They told stories and waited for the storm that was thankfully coming to cool them down. When it arrived the following afternoon, they hunkered down inside their truck while rain slapped the windows. Heavy unrelenting winds rocked the vehicle from side to side. “Something isn't right,” they whispered.

When they rode back into Darwin the next day, it was destroyed. “Everything was gone,” she told me. “Try to imagine being totally isolated in a town that was flattened. It just kept raining—no birds, leaves, trees, or clean water. It was as if an atomic bomb had gone off. Darwin was getting on its feet, and the cyclone blew all that away. It blew away all that past.” The gauge at Darwin Airport officially recorded winds of 217 km/h (135 mph) before being blown away itself.

Because of her dental training, Muriel was deemed essential personnel and required to stay behind to care for the injured. Everyone who didn't serve a function in the new Darwin—mainly those needing medical attention or offering it—were rushed out on planes. Then came the lootings, which lasted for a few days, but after that the town settled. It seemed to hit everyone
at once that all they had left were their lives. This changed people, some temporarily and some forever. Here is what Muriel learned: “I am strong. I survived.”

Again.

And she let go. By that I mean she no longer thought she had control over anything.

“If this is what life is going to be,” she said to me one night across the kitchen table, and to herself back then when she laid eyes on Darwin after the cyclone hit, “then bugger it.”

She traveled all over the world, on her own most of the time, and eventually found her way to Sydney. She had just turned thirty. When she met Pete in a pub she was as unencumbered as the day she left Darwin. Since she forsook Te Puke, she had experienced loss on many levels, in contrast to my own mother, who had been acquiring men, debt, degrees, and children during those same years.

I carefully observe Carly's parents together while I'm living with them. I examine their faces for signs of a woman who is still restless or a man exhausted by the effort of trying to settle down with someone who once lived for roaming the earth. But they appear genuinely happy and, an even more slippery acquisition, content. Because my parents' marriage and so many of those I grew up around lacked these traits, Pete and Muriel's relationship is a mystery I'm dying to solve. “Tell me how you met,” I beg them. “Start from the beginning. Don't leave anything out.”

And even though they repeat the story again and again for me, I cannot figure it out. I cannot pinpoint the forks in the road. I cannot see anything at all but coincidence and Muriel's tragedies piling up one after another. And then Pete. And her kids. And her house in Sydney. And happiness. And contentment. Maybe there is no formula at all, just luck and perseverance.

It's late at night on Boxing Day, the day after my first Australian Christmas. The Dawsons' annual barbecue is over. We've thrown all the prawn shells in the trash and collected all the paper plates and cups strewn about the deck. Earlier in the evening, Muriel and her friends uncorked a bottle of wine and challenged me to a game of Scrabble that ended when one bottle became three and Muriel knocked some of the pieces off the board with her elbow as she was bending down to give Sebby a scrap of chicken. Now I hear her in the kitchen dumping the last letters into the cardboard box. I'm cross-legged in bed, reading a guidebook. Tomorrow Carly and I leave for a ten-day road trip. After that, I'm backpacking alone for three weeks up the east coast. And then Carly and I will abandon Australia for South America.

When Muriel enters my room, she is crying fat, silent tears. She sits beside me on the edge of the bed. There is a small rip in the blue sheets, and she picks at it distractedly. “I used to play Scrabble with my sisters every Christmas,” she tells me. She inhales deeply, as if she can't get enough air.

I put my arm around her. I don't think I've ever had a moment like this with my own mother; never before have I sat beside her while she revealed something so simple yet so intimate and then reached out to offer comfort, asking nothing in return. We've grown further and further apart over the years. Her happiness has always relied on my successful display of daughterly duties. Do I love her enough and in the right ways? Do I appreciate her? Am I sufficiently grateful? No on all accounts, not by a long shot. For as long as I can remember, I have disappointed her, so I have put a wall between us in an effort to protect myself. In my anger, I've never taken the time to know my mother or really see her, and this hits me now that I'm with Muriel, with whom I have a relationship uncomplicated by history.

Both Muriel and my mother left unhappy homes. Both had a difficult, bullying parent. Neither had much money or opportunity. They were pretty much on their own. But whereas Muriel
seemed like a trailblazer, my mother's existence appeared to revolve around the series of men who supported her and my half siblings. I judged this narrative of my mother's life with the easy scorn of someone who has never physically feared her own parent or been forced to run away. But here with Muriel, it looks more like my mother was a woman doing the best she could to stay afloat. I feel myself softening the distance between us a little, even if we are an ocean away.

The house is quiet apart from Carly's wheezing in the next room. She's coming down with something. Mike has returned from Europe, so I'm in the guest room with the pullout couch that Sebby always pees on when he's displeased. Steve is off at a friend's. Pete is upstairs, drifting off to sleep.

“It's okay,” I say to Muriel. And then, because I don't know what else to offer her: “I'm sorry.”

Even the homes we leave on purpose, the families we break away from to be ourselves or someone else, call us back again and again, to a place that has long since ceased to be home yet still holds power over us. I know this myself now that I have left this place behind and have not yet created anything to replace it, if such a thing is even possible.

At the end of December, Carly and I leave for a road trip down south, winding our way along the coast to Melbourne and planning to spend New Year's Eve at a nearby music festival. Carly wants her boyfriend, Michal, to come, an addition I grudgingly accept because he's offered his car for the journey and Carly's beat-up Barina has been breaking down with increasing frequency. Michal is originally from Poland. He moved to Australia in his teens, and he and Carly met at university a few months ago when Carly dipped back into her undergraduate studies. She's technically a senior, I think, but our plans to travel around South America in a month will extend her degree indefinitely.

Michal is a cultivated eccentric who craves attention. He shouts random phrases like “bleeding cows!” and “berry deliciousness” when we're in the middle of dinner and everyone else is discussing movies or rugby. Carly's brother Steve, a straightforward, macho Aussie bloke, regards him with the mild disdain
one might a piece of lint stuck to his collar, while Muriel smiles politely and Pete asks, “What's that now, Michael?” perpetually mispronouncing his name. Michal responds by stroking his wiry goatee with two fingers and staring off into space.

To be fair, Michal is an artist, a talented musician, among other things. He plays guitar and writes quirky but compelling tunes about things like ingesting rotten lemons. Or he'll ask you a serious question, guitar strapped to his back, and right when you're considering your response, he'll whip the guitar around and start jamming his punk-rock tune “Concentration.” This song involves shouting the word “concentration” a few times while bullying an angry riff of chords, his pick flying off the strings. If you get annoyed and walk away, he'll follow, still playing. Your only option is to wait it out until he gets bored and moves on to someone else.

Carly thinks Michal is a hilarious genius, and regardless, “It's nothing serious.”

Well, then, I think, what's the point, especially with someone who is so much work to be around, who takes up the whole room with his mad melodies, Tourette's-like shouting, and squeaking balloon animals? Carly has no problem dating casually, while I, as with everything else, treat love with heartbreaking seriousness. It's got to be desperate, soul-searching movie love or nothing at all.

Michal and I share a lot of interests, music being the most obvious one. Even though I haven't touched my viola in months, I love a guitar-accompanied sing-along, and Michal is always up for that. But I childishly regard him the same way Sebby did me when I arrived at the Dawsons—as an unwanted intrusion. I'm jealous of him taking up Carly's time, and the fact that I find his personality insufferable is written all over my face, which puts Carly in a rather awkward position between us. Still, I resolve to be as tolerant of Michal's antics as possible on the road trip (no
doubt he gives himself a similar pep talk regarding me), and off we go in his white Ford Falcon packed with his guitar, a four-person tent, our backpacks, and an esky full of turkey and cheese sandwiches, me curled in the backseat with the window rolled down and my bare arm stuck outside to feel the wind.

Our first stop is seaside Kiama, two hours from Sydney, famous for its blowhole that shoots water up to eighty feet and, as Carly announces when we pull in to a parking lot, “home of the infamous no-legged seagull.”

I lean forward and poke my head between their seats. “Sorry, what?”

“I can't remember exactly what happened,” she says, “but the last time I was here, I choked and there was a no-legged seagull somehow involved.”

“Involved how?”

She shrugs, unconcerned with the details, while I imagine all the many strange ways a deformed seagull might cause someone to asphyxiate.

The blowhole is just that, a big geyser of water that shoots through a hole in some craggy rocks every three minutes or so with a loud whoomp, all the Japanese tourists whispering “ooohhh” each time and snapping innumerable photos. “This is a blowhole, not a bomb!” Michal shouts nonsensically into the rocks, and they inch cautiously away from us.

Carly and Michal don't want to stop in Canberra, but I insist. The two of them are up front with the maps, deciding our route as we go, and I can see if I don't put my foot down early on, I'm going to be the feckless kid whose parents drag her along to every blowhole from here to Melbourne.

“Fine,” Carly sighs. “But it's in the middle of nowhere, and there is nothing to do. I know—I've been there.”

Michal sings, “Oh, capital, oh, capital, we hate your gleaming politics!”

I ask them just what kind of crap-ass Australians we would be if we didn't make time for Canberra.

“Well, you're American, Michal's Polish, and I'm half-Kiwi,” Carly says, “so it's a pretty irrelevant question.”

“You're bossy,” I mutter.

Either she doesn't hear me or doesn't want to get into it five hours into a ten-day trip, but she doesn't respond.

“They should make cars out of chocolate so you can eat a piece of it while you're driving!” Michal shouts.

Canberra is four hours from Sydney and a good six or seven from Melbourne. It was the source of much past contention and controversy. Both Sydney and Melbourne vied for the position of Capital Territory. For the sake of Australian fairness, it was ultimately agreed that the capital be built between the two cities. The plans for Canberra were laid by Walter Burley Griffin, an American architect. Griffin worked for Frank Lloyd Wright before the two parted ways after a falling-out. The crux of their disagreement apparently centered on Wright's attempt to pay Griffin in Japanese prints for some design work, which does seem pretty bloody insulting.