The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (37 page)

After we've paid the bill, we stand around for a few clunky minutes outside the restaurant.

“So what's next?” Jen asks.

“Not sure, really,” I say. “I'm going to see my mom for a few days and consider my options.”

“My friend is looking for a roommate if you want to come to the city,” Tara offers.

“Come to the city!” Erica cries. “It will be so fun!”

“Maybe,” I say. “Who knows?”

“Either way, let's def get together soon, okay?” Jen says.

“Definitely,” I reply, though I have no clue where I'll be “soon,” and the exchange is rather halfhearted on both ends.

Jen and Tara air-kiss me on both cheeks. “Love you, girl,” Tara shouts as they are walking away.

In the morning I take the train upstate. The town is the same; that much can be counted on. There's Sno Top, the popular local ice-cream stand, which will open in a few months once the warm weather arrives. Next to it is the swan pond, behind that the local library. Farther down the road at the intersection, you can turn
right to go to the video or liquor store, left if you want to get a beer at the dive bar or have a meal at the only Chinese restaurant around. Across the way is Pavone's, the pizza place where I killed time with my friends when I was a teenager.

I grew up a few streets past the video and liquor stores. Turn left up a steep hill until you reach the very top, where my old house used to sit hidden behind trees. Our labyrinthine driveway was never paved, and I'd walk up and down it in my bare feet, convinced I could harden them to the point where pain would no longer exist. I was so proud of my callused heels—of their strength and functionality. I pictured myself walking across hot coals amid awestruck audiences.

I was ten years old when my mother began to work furiously on her garden, which up until then consisted solely of a few neglected azaleas. My mother proved to have the proverbial green thumb. Everything she touched in the backyard bloomed with enthusiasm, and we were awash in cherry tomatoes, green peppers, and squash. My father mostly stayed indoors, writing and grading. All that came to life in my father's study was his first book. Neither appeared overly impressed with the other's efforts.

When I turned thirteen, I asked my friends to write on my bedroom walls. Dylan's lyrics and Plath's poetry mingled with the intense and garbled insights of teenagers. Sometimes, while examining the work at night, I discovered lines I'd never witnessed being scrawled. While my parents bred plants and words, I grew miniature epiphanies on those scrapbook walls.

When I returned home from college for the first time, I found the written revelations housed in that room painted over in a sterile creamy white. My mother informed me she was selling the house. “Too many memories,” she said, as though that was a bad thing. The last time I saw my old house was two years ago. The new family had put up a basketball hoop and paved over the driveway. I knew the backyard no longer belonged to my
mother's tomato plants. They had cut down all the trees out front where I used to camp out and pretend I'd run away.

The few times I returned to my mother's new house during college breaks, I was inevitably drawn to the closet in the guest room, which housed my photo albums, old gushy letters to pen pals, various children's books, stuffed animals, and shirts I will never wear again (both because they no longer fit but also because sporting the quote
OLD COMPOSERS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECOMPOSE
is no longer as cool as it once was). Always under the guise of
finally
cleaning out this portal to my past, I would begin the slow process of rooting through my things, having forgotten three quarters of what was in there. Everything I touched was attached to a memory, and I went whizzing from one year of my life to the next. Here was the sweatshirt my dad bought me from the local college where he used to teach, there stood the
Nutcracker
collection from our old mother-daughter tradition of attending the ballet each winter. Eventually, typically when I was cross-legged on a bed that was completely covered in old pictures, journals, and the nostalgia party to which all my raggedy stuffed animals had been invited, I grew first exhausted from the emotional shuttling back and forth in time, then overwhelmed by my options to: 1) put it all away again, 2) throw it away (sometimes I manage to toss out an old Tiffany cassette or two, but never much more), or 3) go through the rest of the now disheveled closet. Most times I decide to stuff it all back in. Halfway through this task, I'd get bored and collapse on the couch to watch
Dirty Dancing
in one of the patchwork hippie dresses I used to wear to Phish concerts in high school. I always left my mother's house with the closet in disarray, items haphazardly stuffed back inside, but when I arrived for my next visit, the closet had been put back together, photo albums neatly stacked on the appropriate labeled shelf, old prom dresses hung up in order of appearance.

Upon returning to my mother's house after traveling, I instinctively move toward the closet. I open the door. An old shoe
box with the word “teacups” in my grandmother's handwriting stares back at me. But I don't remove anything. I don't even reach inside. For once it simply looks like a closet full of stuff I don't remember owning.

After nearly a week of sleeping away the days, my parents and I engage in a series of conversations about my future, my mother's in person and my father's over the phone. My father is secretly relieved I'm home. A Ph.D. in English might be just the ticket now. “It's in your blood,” he says ominously.

My mother isn't so sure. “Maybe you should talk to Ed's kids,” she says. Her husband's two grown children work in corporate advertising. “Tanya is working on the Philip Morris campaign right now, and you should see the perks she gets!” she tells me.

“Philip Morris, as in the cigarette company?” I ask her.

“Well, yes.”

“You want me to work for a cigarette company?”

“I didn't say that, Rachel,” she says, her lips tightening. “I'm just trying to help. You have to do something.”

I open my viola case. I haven't touched the instrument in over a year. It's the longest I've ever gone without playing it since I picked it up when I was eight. I bring it to my shoulder, put it under my chin. I draw out a long note. I play one of Bach's cello suites, letting my bow roll over the strings. I'm rusty, not precisely in tune. But I feel something stir inside me. Some ray of passion is still burning. I thought I had extinguished it that year in music school, but here it is again.

With my parents, I commit to nothing but another helping of French toast. I mumble incoherently about how I want my life to be different. When I can't take it anymore, I drive out to my sister's in Rhode Island. We dig our toes into the sand and stare into the ocean together, and I am grateful she doesn't ever ask me what my plans are.

I'm still in possession of that graduate-school acceptance letter to Trinity. One day I bring it to the beach with me. I ball it up
inside my left hand and dive into the freezing Atlantic. When I emerge, blue ink drips like alien blood through my fingers and streaks down my forearm. Guess I've made at least one definitive decision about my life.

One night I'm up late watching TV on my sister's beat-up couch when
The Wizard of Oz
comes on. It's been digitally remastered, so now the ruby slippers are incandescent red.
The Wizard of Oz
is the first film I ever saw. Other kids were terrified of the flying monkeys. They covered their eyes or ducked below the sticky cinema seats. But these creatures had no hold over me. No, what sent me into my father's arms was the scene where Dorothy's house gets caught up in the tornado. How would Dorothy ever find her way home if her house has disappeared? I demanded to know. Her entire family would move away without her; they'd forget her. And I never believed the ending, in which she clicks her heels three times and says, “There's no place like home,” then is transported back to her pre-Oz world. Even then I sensed that nothing would ever be the same, and this made me terribly sad. More perplexing was that the film wanted us to believe Dorothy's experiences in Oz were a fantasy. I asked myself then, as now: Could it all really have been just a dream?

What seems strange is how little going to Ireland was about traveling. Ireland equaled far, far away, not the beginning of some profound journey. In saying that, I realize that a part of me must also have been implanted somewhere along the way with the kind of curiosity inherent in people who ultimately stuff all their worldly possessions into a backpack and disappear for months at a time. What happens when we lose the things that anchor us? What if, instead of grasping at something to hold on to, we pull up our roots and walk away? Instead of trying to find the way back, we walk deeper and deeper into the woods, willing ourselves to get lost. In this place where nothing is recognizable, not
the people or the language or the food, we are truly on our own. Eventually, we find ourselves unencumbered by the past or the future. Here is a fleeting glimpse of our truest self, our self in the present moment. After that, maybe we can finally go home—or maybe not.

Before, some places just seemed too far, too difficult to reach, but once you start traveling, you never want to stop. You want to hear other people's stories, see where they live, eat their food. You realize—and of course it's a cliché, but like many clichés, it's true—the way we are all interconnected. Like music, that porous reality I could enter into even in my darkest moments. Back home, this other reality has been waiting for me: the job, the apartment, the bills, the permanent address. It feels heavy. Even the thought of it weighs me down. I'm not ready for that. It can wait. For me, at least. It's hard being home. I cling to the hard-won discoveries about myself that I've made these last months, but it's easy to get distracted. The old voices of expectation are there, waiting. Only I can decide whether or not to listen. I have to keep reminding myself over and over what I want. Carly was right. Ever my wise guide, she told me I was looking for adventure, and, well, even if I wasn't, it found me.

What I found on the road was a tiny piece of myself, the one I kept unknowingly shuttered for so long in order to play the many roles I thought were mine. It was no cyclone, but these past few years I had survived my own personal disasters and realized I was strong enough. I was on the other side. In this new place, I could hear the whispering voice inside my head growing louder,
my
voice—not those of my parents or teachers or Carly or Muriel, even—telling me to live my life without fear or worry or doubt that nothing was going according to plan, as though such a plan ever existed in the first place.

I never saw Carly Dawson again.

Just kidding. I saw her a few months ago, when I visited her in Colombia. She's living there now, doing what she does best: traveling, volunteering, and occasionally risking her life. She ended up staying in Buenos Aires for two years after we parted ways in South America. Since our travels together, she has set foot in dozens of new cities. She's been a bus driver, an ESL teacher, a telemarketer, and a master crocheter. During those same years, my own passport has filled up enough to have to send away for extra pages. I've lived in London; I've trekked through Thailand; I've snorkeled in Fiji. It turns out Martyn and I did have a future, though it was a long and windy one—as often happens when you fall in love with someone from a different country. It eventually led to a raucous wedding in New Zealand, a closet-sized apartment in Manhattan, and a very fat beagle named Tyler.

First I must thank the wild and lovely Carly, without whom my life would be infinitely less heart-stopping. Thank you for helping me with this book and for being my friend. Thanks to my husband, Martyn, who encouraged me throughout this process, and reminded me that just because I'm a writer doesn't mean I should wear pajamas all day. Thanks to my own parents, and also to Delia and Sandy, my second set of parents, and to Muriel and Pete, my Australian parents. And thanks to Erica, who is always there when I need her, as are all wonderful friends.

I'm insanely lucky to have my agent, Jane Dystel, who is always on my side, and answers emails faster than I can type them. I'm forever grateful to Miriam Goderich, who gave me a chance. Danielle Perez was a warm and intelligent editor, and Marisa Vigilante has been a dream to work with. My appreciation goes out to Beth Thomas, Beth Pearson, and Jane von Mehren—and to all those at Random House who made this book happen.

There are too many others to thank, and if this were the Oscars the music would have started by now: James Goodman, Mauro Altamura, Scott Bowman, Leslie Mitchner, Carol Sasson, Gordon Moore, Patricia DeAngelis, Margie Nichols, Pat Bentley, Diane Cook. Lastly, thanks to all those travelers who appear in the book. I hope you're still out there on the road somewhere.