“I’m only working to make some euros to spend traveling around. The Australian dollar is worthless over here,” she tells me. “But I’m so bloody sick of the routine. And my boss really gives me the shits.”
Only young, foreign female backpackers work at the café, a population of Italians, Kiwis, and Australians whom her boss controls monetarily by paying them under the table and emotionally by insulting them so ferociously that someone is always in tears by the end of the shift, although Carly herself doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who cries at work—or ever, really.
Australians often head off to England for their gap year—a period of travel typically taken after college. Aussies have a yearlong reciprocal work visa agreement with England (when you’re taught about the American Revolution in grade school, no one ever lets on that dumping all that tea into Boston Harbor has, sadly, curtailed your Commonwealth visa options). Many of them fly over after graduating and spend the year working in London and traveling on the side.
For Carly, however, traveling is the main dish, and working constitutes the crusty bread rolls at the start of the meal. Always wanting to be different, she chooses Ireland instead of England and comes over to Galway to work for four months, then spends the rest of her time backpacking across the continent. Eager to be the first to go off and try something new, she hasn’t waited until graduation to travel for an extended period of time. I’m amazed to learn she has taken a year off in the middle of her degree to travel.
“What about your parents?” I ask, ready for her sad tale of exile.
“What about them? Mum’s the one who suggested the trip.”
“Wait … what?” It’s too much to absorb.
“Mate,” she says, “lots of people our age do this. Plus, my parents don’t expect me to finish college when my mind is on travel. I won’t get anything out of it anyway. University will be there when I get back.”
Carly attended school full-time her first year but hated it. She wound up there by default, not wanting to go but not having any other ideas of what to do after high school and no financial means to travel. Her second year, she took only a class or two and spent the majority of her time at three different part-time jobs, slowly but steadily adding to her travel funds. The pièce de résistance was selling her horse, Ken, a formerly unruly colt she had diligently trained. After that, she was off.
“But why are you traveling?” I want to pinpoint her goal, to figure out how she is justifying this diversion from her studies.
“Why? To travel. To see the world. What do you mean, why? Because I want to.”
I’m desperate to know exactly what her wants have to do with anything, but her definitive tone is intimidating. Carly has fearlessly forsaken the typical rhythms of adulthood that I feel pulling at me like quicksand, and struck out on her own. She blows along like the wind, a backpacker weighed down only by what she can carry. There is no plan, no predetermined outcome. She is confident and nonchalant in equal proportion to my paralyzing self-consciousness. I want to figure out how she has managed this.
I also want some of her boldness to rub off on me. For instance, Carly didn’t find the apartment we’re living in through an ad but rather when Patchi and Portu approached her in line at The Galway Advertiser and asked if she needed a room. She followed them back to the apartment right then and there.
“I mean, they could have been lying, I guess.” She considers this briefly, then banishes the unpleasant thought, confident in her ability to handle whatever comes her way. “But whatever. It worked out.”
I ask her how many people rang in response to the ads she put up, ready to bask in my victory against all the other potential roommates, knowing I’m the girl who was meant to live here all along.
“Mate, I put up one piece of paper in the Internet café. And you’re the only one who responded.”
I was constantly looking for signs about my life and thought that piece of paper was one of them. But Carly saw the note for what it was: a physical object expressing one person’s need to be fulfilled by another person’s inverse need, simple as that. It’s clear from the start that Carly’s world is black and white, whereas mine is ever-shifting shades of gray.
Our first few weeks in the house, Carly is aloof. Back home, I’ve always made friends fast and furiously. If we get along with someone, we American girls will throw our arms over each other’s shoulders and declare our undying devotion after the first twenty-four hours together. This innate enthusiasm is something my as yet unmade Irish friends will rib me about constantly.
“Are you excited?” I’ll ask about anything from a date with a cute guy to seeing a new movie.
“We don’t talk about being excited, chicken,” my friend Eileen will instruct, smiling. “In fact, I’m not sure we even get as excited as you Yanks in the first place.”
By then I’ll be immersed enough in Irish culture to be entertained by our cultural and personal differences, but Carly’s indifference strikes when I am loneliest and could really use a companion. She already has her own cozy little social group, and in the beginning she doesn’t make any effort to include me in it. Because she seems so carefree and confident, I assume she must simply dislike me, and it’s only many years later, when we discuss these first encounters, that Carly explains that her initial detachment was, surprisingly, shyness, a trait that doesn’t seem to mesh at all with her projected confidence.
When she’s not waitressing, she’s out with her Italian friend Gina or off to some new city on a day trip with Joanna—until she has an accident at work a few weeks into the summer. A fellow waitress tosses her a trash bag with protruding shards of glass that slice through her palm. Her hand is wrapped in heavy gauze when she unexpectedly returns home early one afternoon.
“Can’t waitress with a dodgy hand,” she announces, but she’s grinning. Disability is awarding her a tidy sum, and she doesn’t have to go back to the café for several weeks.
After that we’re both around during the day, and she finally warms up to me. In the mornings, we settle in at a local café where I learn Carly, too, is adept at the art of stretching a snack for several hours. We vent about Portu and Patchi constantly leaving the front door open when they go out—not just unlocked but actually wide open. We have learned the Spanish phrase cerrar la puerta solely to admonish them, but it has no effect. While Carly and I agree this is reckless behavior that invites burglars and other miscreants—plus, Carly is sure that’s how Patchi’s sad little marijuana plant got stolen—for Portu and Patchi, it’s simply a friendly invitation to anyone who might drop by, whether or not one of us happens to be home at the time. Carly and I also bond over the arrival of Scraps, the name we bestow on a stray dog who appears on our doorstep one day, alarmingly thin with tangled, greasy black and tan fur. We save the leftovers from our meals (hence his name) and leave him a little compost heap outside. At first he is standoffish—he’ll take the food but won’t let us pat him—but within a week he’s tolerating our embraces of his dreadlocked mane.
Carly insists I try Vegemite, a disgusting yeast spread Australians are reared on and feel disconcertingly nationalistic about. It makes me gag, but she’s convinced it will grow on me. She also introduces me to Home and Away, a dreamy Australian soap opera in which the characters discuss serious issues like teen pregnancy against an authentic beach backdrop with sand that glistens like diamonds and cushiony blue waves that definitely do not scream “abstinence.” And she answers my eight hundred questions about her life, which seems so different from my own. In particular, I’m intrigued by this backpacking thing. I want to know exactly how it works.
“Buy a pack. Buy a plane ticket. And then just go. It’s simple.”
“For how long?”
“As long as you want.”
“How did you decide where to go?”
“I thought of all the countries I wanted to visit and then picked some.”
“Is it scary traveling on your own?”
; “Scary how?”
“Like, what if you get lost?” This is a question my mother asked before I left, and it rather unhinged me because I have little faith in my ability to get unlost.
“You can’t get lost when you have nowhere to be,” she says cryptically.
One night we’re in the kitchen polishing off our second bottle of bargain-basement cabernet when she asks why I’ve come to Ireland.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
“You don’t know? You traveled to a foreign country alone for four months, and you have no idea why?”
“I just needed to get away.” This sounds about right. I haven’t told anyone about the various internal and external pressures awaiting me back home. In Galway, I’ve pushed aside those thoughts in hopes that they will magically disappear.
“Something more than getting away made you come to Ireland, I bet.”
“Like what?” I ask, a little annoyed at being analyzed.
“Like … adventure,” she announces triumphantly.
I emit a surprised snort. I search the room exaggeratedly, pretending to try and figure out if there is someone behind me or if she really is talking to me. “You are so totally and completely wrong,” I tell her. “I look for lots of things, but adventure is not one of them.” I’ve read the Greek epics. I’ve armchair-traveled with Jack Kerouac and Bill Bryson and Che Guevara, so I know how to categorize the idea of travel/adventure, but it does not coexist with how I picture myself—a sheltered, scared, predictable kind of girl, definitely not a girl who has adventures. I come from rooted people, people who prefer chlorinated bodies of water and career paths.
“Well, it could be. You should travel. Have you even left Galway since you got here?”
“I went to Limerick that one day …” I say. It’s true I’ve been more living in Ireland than traveling here.
“Go see something! And you don’t have to go home, you know.” She’s on a roll now. “School, your friends, your parents, whatever it is you’ve left behind is all going to be there when you get back. But I would be one hundred percent positive you really want to go back, because once you do, it’s a lot harder to leave again.” I can tell Carly revels in being the wise life guide. When the student is ready, the crazy Australian chick will appear, or however the expression goes.
I had never considered not going home. Like dyeing my hair fire-engine red or getting a belly ring, this summer in Ireland was surely a small, contained act of rebellion, a momentary hiatus from what was expected of me. In musical terms, we might call these moments embellishments or ornamentations of the overall coherent, predictable melodic line that was my life before things began unraveling freshman year in music school. Could I really stay away? Even asking myself the question feels monumental.
“I don’t have any money,” I tell her.
She scoffs as if I have raised a concern totally unrelated to what she’s said, like lacking sunscreen in Seattle. “Get another student work visa. Where else can you go?”
I think back to the informational pamphlet I received with my four-month visa. “Well, I can work in New Zealand for a year or Ireland, England, and Australia for four months—”
“Come to Australia.” It’s a statement, not a question, as nonchalant a decision for her as deciding whether to wear her hair up or down that day. “It’s awesome. You can stay with me. Mum and Dad love visitors.”
Australia. I roll the word around in my head, trying to conjure up an image of myself there.
Less than halfway through the summer, Carly takes off to explore the rest of Europe and Asia, and I finally start getting enough shifts at the Hole in the Wall to quit degrading myself at the nightclub. Maybe it’s because I am the kind of person who is perpetually trapped inside the recesses of her own mind—always thinking too much—that I’ve always been drawn to working in restaurants and bars, where the tasks are routine and blissfully physical. Waiting tables has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Take the drink order, bring the drinks, take the meal order, bring the food, check in, get the extra pickles, another round of beers, dessert, then drop off the bill with a heartfelt thanks. Those customers depart and new ones shuffle in and you have to figure out how best to serve them. Do they want a funny waitress or one who is serious and knowledgeable or one who leaves them the hell alone? Most just want an unobtrusive, smiling one. I can smile or not. Knowing who they want you to be is straightforward. You just have to be observant.
I’m more graceful as a waitress than I am in real life, deftly carrying three pitchers in one hand and two plates in the other or expertly twirling around a co-worker at just the right moment to avoid a collision. And I love the transient atmosphere, packed with creative types, everyone believing they are there temporarily, a fleeting stop on their way to something better. We banded together to weather unpredictable tipping, long hours, and customers who often treated us like complete morons, especially at the Harvard Square brewery, where I waited tables one summer. It’s a skill I feel guilty about because it is blue-collar, nonintellectual work. My grandfather did not flee the Nazis so that I could serve food. My mother didn’t climb out of poverty so that I could revel in my abilities to concoct the perfect apple martini.
So although I know my parents wish I was doing something more productive with my Irish summer, I long to lose myself in the restaurant/bar world again. And the dimly lit Hole in the Wall seems like the perfect place to do it. The bar is directly in front of you when you walk in. Four or five stools, wood with worn fabric, are where the regulars park themselves. The old guy I saw when I applied for the job is a fixture. He comes in early and often stays until closing, growing more and more incoherent as the night wears on. He cackles, “I get up with the birds and I go home with the birds!” and workshops the same three stories on repeat, as if those three moments constitute his entire life. When he’s caught a cold, he exchanges his two-euro beer for hot toddies. Since he never swaps out the glass, you can tell how many he’s had by the number of lemons piling up.
The Hole in the Wall’s original rock walls have been plastered over, and now they resemble clotted cream. There is dark paneling everywhere, chipped wooden tables, and tiny windows with crisscross frames set deep into the walls like those of a fairy-tale cottage, perfect for when we pull the shades for a lockdown, where we hunker inside and drink until sunrise. The entire place has a fantastic slope. Walking into the back room is like an expedition aided by the dim lights of the old-fashioned gas lamps. The owner has hung pictures of himself with a multitude of winning horses taken during the yearly Galway Races, when the pub practically implodes with thirsty bodies. There’s Guinness paraphernalia everywhere: GUINNESS FOR STRENGTH and GUINNESS EXTRA STOUT. As at the Quays, the benches that line the walls resemble pews, though the upholstery is worn from an altogether different type of devotion. There is a rumor—told with varying degrees of supporting detail, depending on the teller—that many years ago a nun hanged herself in the attic.
“On glasses” turns out to be collecting the dirty glasses from around the pub and returning them to the bartenders to load in the tiny dishwasher. One night a bartender makes the mistake of unloading a still-steaming pint glass with cold hands, and it explodes inside his fingers, rendering them as useless as Carly’s for a few weeks. Unlike the club, the Hole in the Wall is packed almost every night. I push through overheated bodies to get at the stacked glasses that line every available shelf and threaten to topple off the rickety tables in the front room, where a few lucky groups have managed to score seats. I work for four or five hours at a stretch, sweaty and claustrophobic but elated to be employed.
After four trial shifts as a “glassie,” I convince Brian to let me train on bar. Ever the dutiful student, I scrawl the following notes in my journal after my first lesson: Bud, Hein, Carlsberg = lagers = fizzy, let tap run for one second then tilt glass under, also Tennent’s. Bloomers/cider—hold glass straight under tap. Guinness—tilt all the way for ¾ cup, let settle, t
hen glass straight under and push handle back = perfect top-off.
Even with my shifts at the pub, I’m forever short of cash, and Portu is constantly lending me rent money. When Carly leaves, Portu and Patchi replace her with a girl who is the cousin of a cousin of someone Portu knows back in Spain, leaving me the only native English speaker in the house. I start hanging out more with my new bartender girlfriends. Instead of my previous sober afternoons, my days are now one long stint at the Hole in the Wall. I bartend three or four or, if I’m lucky, five nights a week, then end up drinking there or at another bar for the rest of the evening. After midnight, we spill into the clubs, dancing more than I have before or since, buzzing from vodka and Red Bull. I sleep until noon, then meet the girls for “the cure”—the Irish logic of banishing your hangover with more drinking.
My friend Dee is a skinny thing with a small smile, lovely dark hair, and pale Irish skin. Her father was a bus driver for many years, the route from County Clare to Dublin and back, and she tells me how she and her younger sister learned to rollerskate in the aisles. Una doesn’t work at the Hole in the Wall with us but in the boots department at Top Shop. She’s blond and bouncy and enviably fake-tanned. When she’s drunk, she tells strangers she’s related to Kylie Minogue, since they share the same last name. Siobhan is studying to be a nurse, a pursuit that unfortunately involves many early-morning exams. Eileen is the wild one who rides a blow-up green dinosaur around the pub when she’s had too much to drink. (And we’ve always had too much to drink. Irish me turns out to be one hell of a drinker.) All the girls are funny and quick-witted, so much that I’m beginning to think of it as an Irish trait.
Halfway through the summer, I’m still broke, so I take our friend Gerry up on his offer to hire me as a flyer girl. This involves precariously tottering around the cobblestone main street in three-inch heels doling out two-for-one drink-special flyers to groups passing by. I decide this will translate on my résumé to “promotions assistant.”
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost Page 6