The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (36 page)

At night we stay at a little hostel twenty-five hundred meters up in the mountains, nothing but snow-covered peaks in all directions. Aurelian stays for dinner, then heads back to Mendoza for the night, leaving Carly and me as the only guests. We wrap ourselves up in front of the stone fireplace and drink one hot chocolate after another. The steaming glasses are delivered to us filled three quarters with whole milk and a big chunk of half-melted chocolate. We assume the drinks are included in our fee, but at the end of our stay, we get a bill for the eight we consumed within forty-eight hours, mostly in front of the perpetually burning fire with old reruns of
Friends
playing on the small TV.

In the morning, we wake to snow. Inches have fallen while we
slept, and the whole place seems buried away like Brigadoon. Because of the direction of my travels, I've missed winter back home and haven't seen snow in over a year. For Carly, it's been much longer, so we head out to kick around in it. It's not the kind of heavy, sticky snow good for making snowmen, but Carly manages a miniature one complete with a button nose. She steps back to admire her work and is congratulating herself on her ingenuity when a dog emerges from out of nowhere like an apparition, trots over to the snowman, and pees directly on it.

“He's ruining my masterpiece,” she grumbles. “Oi, dog!”

“Maybe he's just turning it into performance art,” I joke.

Back in Mendoza we decide to go paragliding. Carly loans me the ninety pesos to come with her, since I've budgeted my final days down to the last penny with no wiggle room.

Paragliding feels nothing like skydiving or bungee jumping. Whereas both of those activities were accompanied by the adrenaline of free fall, paragliding is floating through the sky. We glide like condors attached to our blue half-moon parachutes. The guides strapped behind us control our movements while we stare down at the slowly approaching land. Even the first race off the cliff, where we must catch the wind precisely, is in surreal slow motion. When our sneakers leave the ground, the wind catches us and carries us up for a few seconds like a parent lifting a toddler to embrace her. For thirty minutes we make our lazy way to the ground. Thirty minutes soaring, riding wind currents that lift us higher and lower. At the bottom, people are lying on their backs in the flatbeds of parked trucks. Most of them are paragliders, but some obviously just like to watch the bodies float down to earth for entertainment, or maybe to see the look of someone who has just experienced the awesome sensation of flying for the first time.

I leave for Buenos Aires by myself. Carly wants to stay for a few days to take a paragliding course so she can fly alone, but I have plans with Martyn. Even though Carly and I will each see each other soon, this smaller parting registers the larger one to come. I charge the ultimate luxury to my credit card, a seat on a bus whose plush seats recline all the way back, and sleep almost the entire way to Buenos Aires.

I don't see much of the city this time, at least not during the day. I do see lots of my hotel room, where Martyn and I set up house, the contents of our backpacks strewn across every available surface. He and his friends have rented rooms in a hotel instead of a hostel, fancier and more expensive accommodation than anywhere Carly and I have stayed in our three months in South America. The room Martyn and I share even has a quaint balcony that overlooks a tiny shop where teens gather after school lets out, smoking and gossiping like teens anywhere. In the bathroom, our toothbrushes sit side by side. I purchased a painting in Cuzco that I hang on the wall, desperate to make it feel like a homey apartment the two of us share. We are in love, in the very beginning part of it, when you don't ever want to separate your body from the other person's.

Since the story of Martyn and me could fill another book entirely, and because this is not a love story and I do not wish it to be, let me simply summarize our week in Buenos Aires. We fit. When he curls up behind me, his knees lock perfectly behind mine, his arms offer exactly the right amount of embrace—somewhere between protection and ownership, desire and comfort. Our physical match is met by an emotional and intellectual one. With Martyn, I hold forth some of the philosophies I've been honing since beginning my travels in Ireland almost two years ago, about universal health care and the travel practices of American youth, about my country and the way I was indoctrinated to believe that America was number one in everything, but actually people in other countries have what we have—and
sometimes better—about my obligations as a daughter, about the ways that I have put my faith in all the wrong things and now I am hopelessly lost but at the same time realizing that's okay so maybe that means I'm not lost at all, just searching.

“I'm afraid I'll lose this freedom when I go home,” I confess.

“Your life is your own,” he says, exactly what I need to hear.

Martyn is twenty-seven, five years older, and more comfortable in his own skin than anyone I have ever met. While I'm prone to being tied up in existential knots, he is entirely at ease in the present moment. He is a vortex of confidence, straight talk, and irresistible charm. I want to hold on and never let go. To him I am a passionate twenty-two-year-old, exuberant and searching and in love with this travel version of myself. Maybe that's why we met when we did, when I had come so far on my own. When we say goodbye, neither of us talks about the future, afraid we might not have one after Buenos Aires.

Carly arrives three days before my flight back to the U.S. Muriel is there, too, in time to see me off. The two of them are headed back up to Peru, where Carly is planning to try her luck a second time at Machu Picchu. The three of us stand outside the open doors of the airport shuttle, dusk descending on the city, and try unsuccessfully not to cry.

“Oh, Rach,” Muriel sighs. “What will you and Carly do without each other?”

I honestly don't know. In all of my travels, she is the common thread. I knew initially that I needed her more than she needed me. She had arrived at precisely the right moment, when I was floundering and longed for someone to show me there was another way to live my life. But somewhere in South America, I stopped needing her as a guide, and we became equals. That's how we are leaving each other—and as best friends.

In the end, we don't say goodbye at all.

“Let's make a pact,” I say. “We'll meet every five years in a new city.”

“If not before then,” Carly says.

“If not before then.”

We throw our arms around each other and blubber into each other's hair. I flash on an image of us in Paris when we're ninety, sipping cappuccinos in the sun—old, arthritic women who have seen every corner of the world.

I have only three pesos in my pocket and no way to get more when the agent at the airport announces the departure tax is close to twenty U.S. dollars.

“I don't have it,” I tell him.

“You must pay this tax,” he says. “Or you cannot leave.”

“I can't,” I insist. “I have no money.” I have nothing, I think, no money, no possessions to speak of, nothing concrete to show for myself. Yet other than the departure tax, I've got everything I need. The agent and I stare at each other.

“Please?” I try again.

“Next!” he yells.

“How much do you need?” This question comes from the pretty Argentinean woman behind me, clutching her small son by the hand. The man repeats the figure, and before I can protest, she has handed him a few scrunched bills. “Shame on you,” she tells the agent. “Can't you see this young girl is just trying to get home?”

I arrive in New York City during rush hour. I'm staying at Erica's tonight and having dinner with her, Tara, and Jen in a few hours. The city is a live organism: jackhammer accents, manic jostling, the odors of fried meat mixing with sweaty, hurrying bodies. A sea of people march in every direction, chattering to one another or into cell phones, punctuated by the constant beeping of car horns. I tuck myself out of the way to catch my breath and lean my backpack against the side of a high-rise. A trail of suits and skirts flows in and out of the building. Suddenly, I feel self-conscious about my handmade Andean sweater and ratty fisherman pants, my cheap flip-flops.

“Excuse me?” says the one person in Manhattan even more dazed than I am. She's brandishing an enormous map. “Can you tell me where Lincoln Center is?” Being addressed on the street in English is disorienting, like Spanish was those first few weeks. I have to think my answer before saying it aloud.

“That way.” I point confidently to my left. The South American trait of claiming you know the answer to a question no matter what has apparently rubbed off on me, since I'm only half certain Lincoln Center is in fact in that direction. I've only been to NYC a few times. I barely know where I am myself.

I find my way to Erica's aunt's apartment, where she has been living the past few months until she finds her own place. Erica is at work but has arranged for the doorman to let me into the beautiful one-bedroom in a geriatric neighborhood on Seventy-fourth and Madison. It's sparsely decorated, like a hotel room, or like an apartment someone resides in only a few days a month (as Erica's Connecticut aunt does) or who works so much she's hardly ever home—as Er does.

The far wall of the living room is a row of tall windows stacked above an inviting bench piled high with decorative pillows. This is where I ensconce myself for the next few hours, blissfully watching the people on the streets below without having to hear any of the city's noise, like a silent film.

In the afternoon, I take a long, hot shower. The city grime between my toes streaks down into the drain. Erica's body wash is from some boutique store I've never heard of. The brand is a blossoming blue flower, and it smells like lemon. I lather myself up three times, then let the steaming water slowly wash it away. I take a nap in Erica's enormous, soft bed. Even after showering, I feel as though I'm not clean enough for the immaculate apartment, so I stay atop the covers instead of wriggling beneath them.

When Erica arrives home around seven, I'm munching Triscuits over the sink, trying not to get any crumbs on my one semi-clean shirt or in the spotless apartment. She is dressed in a charcoal skirt and jacket. Her long curly hair is tucked back in a straightened ponytail. When she slips off her black heels, I notice the faded Prada label.

“Friend!” she shouts. We hug fiercely. She's always been slender,
but now she's model-thin, all sharp angles. “Tell me everything about the last nine months,” she says.

We sit on the couch, and I tell her about Carly and the Dawsons and Martyn. I tell her about the Outback and bedbugs in Peru. I tell her about Hans and his fear of knots. Every few minutes she checks her blinking BlackBerry, sends a text, then puts it back on the glass coffee table.

“What about you? How is your job?” I ask.

“Awful,” she says, smiling. “I work all the time. I leave at seven and usually get home at midnight. Once every few weeks, we have some stupid project due and I have to stay there all night. I haven't slept over five hours in the last six months. I barely have time to eat.”

She does seem jittery, like a person who doesn't get enough sleep and food. And she seems distracted.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Wait until I get promoted and then leave.”

“How long will that take?”

“Maybe six months, maybe a year.” She shrugs, sends another text.

“Where are we going tonight?”

“To a little Italian place in the West Village.”

“What should I wear?” I ask her, knowing that what I have on is pretty much my only option.

“It's New York casual,” she tells me, sends another text. I feel like I've landed on another planet.

Tara and Jen are waiting for us at the restaurant. They've secured a round table by the window and ordered us a bottle of Australian Shiraz to celebrate my return. More hugs, more catching up. Tara loves her job teaching at the 92nd Street Y. “Cutest kiddies ever,” she summarizes. Jen's job in finance isn't quite as demanding as Erica's, and she doesn't hate it quite as much, but she doesn't exude any sort of happiness while talking about it. “It's a living, you know?” she says.

I tell more stories. I describe the adorable squirrel monkeys that ate out of my hand in Bolivia, my raucous jeep tour to the salt flats, the magnificent
totora
-reed floating islands. I cannot stop talking about my travels, bubbling over with enthusiasm and epiphanies, even after my friends have run out of steam for polite “uh-huhs” and their eyes have glazed over or they are staring drowsily at their wineglasses. In the last nine months, we've moved in completely opposite directions, and I'm wondering if we have anything in common now other than our shared college years. We're catching up on the big events of our lives, but I've missed almost a year's worth of the small ones, which are what most female friendships need in order to survive. I wonder what Carly's doing at this moment.