The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (6 page)

Whoops. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to get back to the Internet café. My father and I have a minutiae-sharing relationship,
always have. We're two peas in a book-loving, film-going, pun-making pod. So my initial instinct is to spill my guts to him.

I stare at that last line, stewing in the sorry reality my words have created. And then something very weird happens. As if I'm engaged in an eerie session with a Ouija board, my index finger slides toward the delete key, seemingly of its own accord. It pauses for a second and then presses down, erasing my email letter by letter, until “I” is all that's left standing. From there, I begin again.

I hit “send.” I don't know how to reconcile my urge to relate in the melodramatic detail that is our shared currency that I'm lonely and full of doubts with this new part of me who has held this information back and instead written a falsely cheerful email. Although I didn't recognize it then, this simple act was the beginning of the necessary process of truly striking out on my own. This summer away was my idea, however ill-conceived, and
I knew if I even hinted that I wanted to come home, my father would happily scoop me up and save the day. I could picture us hunkered down at the kitchen table back in his new Chicago apartment, discussing my future, eyeing each other across the fake fruit. The clock is ticking, after all. Soon I will be out there in the real world. I don't have an exact image of this place, though I understand it involves having my student healthcare taken away, and I'm pretty sure I no longer get an allowance.

If I asked his opinion, even if I just hesitated long enough to give him an opening, he would gladly decide my future for me. Being a professor, like him, is an ideal, predictable existence. So why not apply for Ph.D. programs now? Junior year is the perfect time—no aimless lag between undergraduate and graduate degrees. Or maybe I could get a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house in New York, another popular job choice for bright-eyed English majors. He knows a few people, could call in some favors. Although we might decide on any number of career objectives now that I am no longer planning to be a professional musician, it is highly unlikely—no, we most definitely would
not
decide—I should spend a purposeless summer in Ireland. Why do I want to do this? What, exactly, is the point?

While my father's incomprehension is based on practical concerns for my future, my mother's hinges on hurt feelings.

“Why don't you come home for the summer?” she asked before I left. She means move into a spare room in the robin's-egg-blue house she recently bought with her new husband. It's set back on sixty acres, a few miles farther into the upstate New York countryside than where I grew up, a large enough piece of land for a garden and for my stepfather to hunt without fear (mine, not his) of accidentally shooting someone. Alongside her question about my absence is the unspoken accompanying question I can never figure out how to answer: “What have I done to drive you away?”

I don't want to face any of my parents' questions, so I send my
mother an email with the same forced bright tone and log off. Besides, choosing this rosier version of my present state makes me feel a little more optimistic. And things
are
actually looking up on the job front. Yesterday afternoon, dripping wet and defeated after three hours of pavement pounding, I wandered into in a dingy little pub off the main drag. The place was deserted save an old guy in a red Patriots hat chatting away with a nodding young bartender drying pint glasses. A few seats down, a middle-aged man with puffy red hair sat hunched over some documents. He turned out to be the manager, Brian. I must have applied to every bar in Galway, so when he, like so many before, informed me that they weren't hiring, I found myself embarrassingly on the verge of tears. My soggy clothes and matted hair, sneakers so soaked they squished, must have added to the picture of pathos urging him to reconsider.

“Please,” I begged. “I'll do anything.”

His eyes were friendly, but I didn't think I had a shot in hell.

“Where are you from?”

“New York.” I sighed, unsure whether I was strengthening or dooming my case.

“New York!” Suddenly, he was animated. “Ahh, New York is brilliant. Right, I'll tell you what. I'll give you a trial shift—just because you're a New Yorker—and we'll see how it goes. Come back tomorrow night and we'll put you on glasses.”

So now I've got a night's work at a dim, dreary bar called the Hole in the Wall—exactly the type of time-forgotten place I imagined as the setting for my gloomy days in Ireland. Of course, I have no idea what it means to be “on glasses” or what I'll get paid for this mysterious position or even how long I'll work, but I don't want to give Brian enough time to change his mind or realize I'm from the cows-and-pastures part of New York, not the bright-lights part it's clear he's conjuring.

“Thank you thank you thank you!” I shout, backing out the door. In my excitement, I salute him, though I have never saluted
anyone in my life, no doubt leaving him with the impression that he has just made a very big mistake.

But more than this new bit of luck, going home, so appealing an option when I arrived in Dublin, now strikes me as a solution that might not solve anything, that might, in fact, be the opposite of what I want. The fact that I can't sift through my own emotions and desires to figure out what precisely I
do
want is so infuriating.

As I'm gathering up my things to leave the Internet cafe, I notice a torn piece of paper tacked onto the pushpin-battered wall.

A small fortune, considering my lack of income, but it's still cheaper than remaining in the hostel. Like the job hunt, the apartment search has proved difficult. Even after waiting in line for hours with all the other desperate would-be renters to grab the latest copy of
The Galway Advertiser,
then throwing elbows to secure the nearest pay phone in order to inquire about the few rooms I can afford, I find that most of them are already taken, snapped up before the classified ad's ink has dried. I've looked at only one place so far. The rent is 325 euros a month plus utilities—an even more impossible sum. Plus, although my potential male roommate seemed nice enough, the apartment reeked of dirty socks, and there were unidentifiable red hairs circling the drain when he showed me the shared bathroom. Like my prospective job at the Hole in the Wall, the apartment on Presentation Road feels like my last hope.

There's a number with a name next to it: Carly. I rip it off the wall before racing out to call her. Every woman for herself.

“Can I come see the place, like, now?” Desperation drips from my voice.

“No worries. Whenever.”

“Great! I'll be right there! Just give me twenty minutes.” I slam down the pay phone with such nervous enthusiasm that the elderly woman manning the hostel's front desk clucks reprovingly at me before returning to her dog-eared romance novel.

It's a rare afternoon of blue Irish skies, at least for now, so sunbathers are perched on the River Corrib's grassy shore at the edge of the city center. The girls stretch back on their elbows, T-shirts yanked above their translucent bellies. The boys tap soccer balls. I hurry across the stony bridge to the other side of town, a section of Galway that is more residential, less packed with pubs and shops, than where I've been staying.

Carly is smoking a cigarette on the stoop when I arrive. Fine blond hair hangs halfway down her back. She's wearing a snug faded blue sweatshirt and dark blue jeans, a little ripped in the knees. She eyes me with surprised detachment, as if she has forgotten our recently organized appointment, but it's cool, she wasn't doing anything at the moment anyway.

“Hey,” she says. “Come on in.”

She shows me the room we would share. A tan backpack is spread out across her bed, its front section unzipped and tossed back like a curled tongue. The small bedroom houses two slim beds and a compact closet. An ugly green checkered curtain hides a sliding glass door that leads out to a little patio, where you would have a lovely view of the canal if someone hadn't decided it would be a splendid idea to erect a wall instead. Two rusty folding chairs occupy the concrete box, along with one wilting plant, drowning in the daily rains instead of flourishing.

Carly, an Australian, is on a one-year trip around the world. “Mum did the same thing,” she tells me. “My grandmother, too.”

It seems she is descended from a long line of adventurous
women, whereas my own grandmother's biggest trip is her yearly winter pilgrimages to Florida.

“You're the first American backpacker I've met.” Her tone is positive, as if she's given me a compliment, which I guess she has (though my secret will be out once she sees my oversize luggage). Already I've been informed of a few particular American traits by others in the hostel: we are loud; we travel in big, obnoxious groups; we complain, demand, and laugh too heartily without just cause. A favorite statistic I've been quoted ad nauseam while traveling abroad: only 5 percent of Americans have passports. (It ranges from 3 percent to 10 percent depending on the teller, though the actual number is closer to 30 percent.) In short, we are not travelers. We are tourists—the ultimate dirty word among backpackers. And then there's our most egregious misstep: President George W. Bush. Oh man, do people hate this guy. The reactions of non-Americans to the fact that I come from the place that “elected” this language-butchering cowboy range from sympathy to disgust to stammering confusion. Often I must delicately extract myself from my government with surgeonlike precision in order to move the conversation to a new topic. If I'm feeling particularly impatient, I just give 'em the old 1-2-3: “Yes, I'm American. No, I didn't vote for Bush. Who here needs another Guinness?” Then I flash my toothiest American grin; no one radiates good cheer as Care Bear–brightly as we Americans.

“Want a cigarette?” Carly asks.

I've been noncommittally trying to quit for good since high school, when smoking was a statement of coolness unconnected to slight inconveniences like lung cancer, but I am auditioning for the role of the perfect roommate.

“Definitely.”

We head outside. Carly props one of the decrepit chairs against the wall, then hoists herself up on top. I follow her. It takes us several tries to light our cigarettes with a pack of graying
matches. We puff into the dusk and watch a swan family paddle purposefully downstream.

“See that railing?” she asks. A short distance to our right, a yellow guardrail lines the edge of the water. “Kayakers launch themselves off it.” She shakes her head. “It's bloody freezing in this country. Fucking lunatics.”

“Totally.”

I will agree with whatever you say. Just let me move in.

After another cigarette, we climb down to tour the rest of the apartment which is no more than a second bedroom that the two absent male roommates share, a grungy bathroom, and a small kitchen/living room. A washer is hooked up next to the sink. Wet socks and jeans droop from a clothesline suspended across the length of the apartment. In the damp Irish weather, it takes two or three days for anything to dry.

Carly plops down on the thrift-store leatherette couch, one corner covered in brown crumbs that bounce when she sits. I take the blue corduroy armchair stained with who knows what.

“The two guys who live here are decent blokes,” Carly says. “Portu can be a little full on. Within five minutes, he'll be telling you that Spanish men are the world's best lovers. But he's harmless. Patchi is from Basque Country. He's on holiday in Scotland right now. He's on the dole, that one, but not because he needs to be. It's just more than he would make doing anything else. Enough to go on holiday, right. And he's lazy. Bugger it. If I could get the dole, I'd take it, too. Bloody European Union.”

She shakes her head. I shake mine, too, though I have no clue what we're talking about.

A few hours later, I'm moving in with three strangers.

“Bloody hell,” Carly exclaims when I wheel Big Red into our bedroom. “That thing's massive.”