What exactly did my sister’s “Welcome to the real world” toast mean? People back home were offering up these kinds of expressions for months before graduation, warnings that implied everything up until then was a wonderful dream from which you eventually have to wake. Is my time abroad a part of this dream? Who decides the parameters of this real world, where the initiation seems like self-sacrifice? Give up your personal vision of happiness in exchange for a collective vision: work hard, get married, buy a house, have a kid or two, diversify your portfolio, retire comfortably without burdening your children, die. For my generation of women, who have inherited the benefits of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ feminism, we’re supposed to want it all and to excel in each area of our life. Our opportunities are exhilarating and overwhelming, though my father’s new wife, a pediatric cardiologist, offered me her own piece of hard-earned life wisdom at that same graduation dinner: “Career, relationship, kids—now pick two.”
I share these conflicting messages with Carly.
“Fuck expectations,” she summarizes.
We clink our mojito glasses, the ice already melted in the burning afternoon sun.
Much later on, when she has let her college degree dangle unfinished for over five years, Carly’s parents will urge her to finish it up and be done with it. But here, we’re only twenty-two, and they don’t push any particular time line on her. It’s not that Carly’s life is entirely free of pressures. It’s just that she has a totally different relationship to her parents’ approval. She wants to please them, but it’s not the all-encompassing stressor it is for me, and she would never dream of giving up her own desires to make them happy. Pete jokes that he hopes she’ll become an accountant so he can rename his firm Daddy and Daughter, but the idea is so beyond laughable that even he knows it. Pete and Muriel often tell Carly, “We want you to do what makes you happy.” Although my own parents provided me the best education, the highest-quality music lessons, and an abundance of financial support, I never heard them utter these exact words. It is in Australia that I realize I will have to garner the strength to speak them to myself.
I have been keeping a secret from my parents—my acceptance to a master’s program in theater studies at Trinity College Dublin. I have a vague notion of wanting to write plays, though I’ve never written one. I applied for a spot at the end of my senior year, before I decided to come to Australia, when I saw no way to leave the country again without a purpose that would satisfy them. Trinity has let me defer my spot until the fall. I packed the letter in my suitcase. I showed it to Carly a few days ago. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked me. I didn’t know if she meant the piece of paper or the degree, but it didn’t matter, since I’ve been asking myself both questions.
I have always loved the validation that an acceptance letter brings, but when I received this one, I felt only emptiness. I think of my friend Adam, off at UCLA, pursuing his Ph.D. Whenever he finished an exam, he put all his textbooks in the freezer for a week. It was his way of saying, “Astronomy 101, you no longer rule my life.” (He wanted to sell the books back to the bookstore, so he refrained from anything more drastic.) I put the letter in the Dawsons’ freezer to see how I felt, but still it called out to me. I threw it under the bed with one of Mike’s dusty, forgotten socks. But I retrieved it a few hours later. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that letter, any more than I know what I’m going to do with the spot reserved for me, or this pressure I always feel to continually achieve certain goals that appeal to my parents more than they do to me.
Back in high school, Carly developed an interest in speed walking. The story goes that she picked it up and something like three seconds later had placed nationally in a competition. A few months after that, she dropped the hobby altogether, returning to her normal ambling pace, never looking back. It did not haunt her, like music did me. No one expected anything more of Carly—nor did she of herself—than to do what worked for her in the moment. And the fact that she had natural abilities in this and many other things did not make her feel beholden to them. Her parents supported her. They gave her opportunities. And she appreciated all of it without the intense pressure to please them that I’d always felt. It was in Australia that I started seriously considering my own private destiny as I witnessed Carly unapologetically pursuing hers at full speed.
“Hey.” Carly interrupts my thoughts by splashing some water in my direction. “Do you want to go to South America together when your visa expires?”
“Why South America?”
“Why not?”
“Let’s do it,” I say, just like that, because that guttural voice I’ve been coaxing out as I examine my options in Australia is shouting “yes!” so loudly that it’s the only word getting through.
I find Carly’s life philosophies incredibly alluring and her mother’s experiences unceasingly fascinating, especially because the early events of Muriel’s life are in many ways similar to my own mother’s, yet the outcomes are so different. In 1966 Muriel left home. She was eighteen, like my mother was when she ran off, and three years younger than Carly and I when we met in Ireland, similarly determined to break free of our lives. Up until then Muriel had been biding her time in Te Puke, a small country town in New Zealand. Muriel calls it a “little tinpot farming town.” I imagine it’s not all that different from where my mother spent her childhood in upstate New York.
Muriel always wanted to leave home. “My two sisters were rushed down the aisle at nineteen, like many girls in small towns in the 1960s, pre-Pill days. I knew I didn’t want that. My mother didn’t, either.”
Muriel’s mother had always wanted to travel, something she finally got to do later in life, after many unhappy years in tiny Te Puke. Some of this unhappiness must have rubbed off on Muriel, and maybe something like wanderlust was inscribed in her makeup, since not everyone who is unhappy walks away, and not everyone who walks away goes to another country. My mother made it only as far as Ohio for a few years before winding up back in New York, an hour’s drive from her troubled childhood home. But Muriel crossed an ocean. She boarded a boat to Australia the April after her eighteenth birthday and arrived on the shores of Sydney three days later with fifty dollars and a large cardboard suitcase. It was only at that moment, as she looked over the harbor to the nearly completed Opera House, where the half-finished sails that formed the roof were reflecting the afternoon sun—at least this is how I imagine the moment—that the full force of her current situation hit her: she was on her own.
She spent a few petrified nights at the local Salvation Army, lying awake on the other side of the three-quarter wall from the snoring hoboes they let in at night. After two weary days wandering the city alone, she went to the railway station and departed for Adelaide, seven hundred miles south. The British had precisely plotted Adelaide in a grid, the boxy, appealing inner city surrounded on all sides by green parks. It was orderly and precise, not like back in New Zealand, where it seemed like everyone had shown up and cobbled together their new lives.
The ticket cost Muriel most of the thirty dollars she had left, but there were distant relatives at the other end who offered to take her in. They had a daughter around her age, Joy, and as soon as Muriel had made a little money, the two of them journeyed up to Darwin, a young city at the top of Australia in the sparsely populated Northern Territory. Here they picked mangoes, rock melon, and tomatoes, depending on the season. Soon they looked like laborers—callused hands, tanned, strong thighs. They liked how they felt doing that work. When they left, it was simply because they were sick of the routine, ready for something new.
Muriel returned to New Zealand for her twenty-first birthday. Her sisters threw her a small party. One of them had given birth two more times by then, a baby on each knee and a toddler running through people’s legs as Muriel blew out the candles on her fruitcake. Her mother stood alone at the edge of the group, watching her daughter. Muriel glanced up at her and felt something akin to pity bu
t not entirely unrelated to annoyance. Everything in Te Puke was the same, but Muriel was different. Or maybe everything had changed and Muriel had, too, but in unrelated, incompatible ways. Whatever it was, she knew she was leaving New Zealand again, maybe this time for good.
Norfolk Island, located between Australia and New Zealand, seemed like a good place to start. The tiny piece of land, an eroded remnant of a basaltic volcano, had fewer than two thousand residents. One of them was Dan, a carpenter who adored fishing and took his small boat out into the choppy Pacific whenever he had the chance. Muriel had planned to stay on the island for a few months to earn some money for a big move to Canada, but instead she married Dan. Soon she was pregnant. She was twenty-four and working as a hairdresser on the island, feathering all the women’s hair. Her water broke early one morning. There were complications. The baby only lived a few days. A few weeks later, when she thought she had already lost everything, she lost Dan, too, proving there is always something more that can be taken away. He was trying to help a friend out to sea when his boat overturned. It was dark and Dan, fully dressed when it capsized, disappeared into the sea.
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 thi
s 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.
[11]
Our heroine, her trusty guide, and a goateed suitor depart the sunny suburbs of Sydney and journey south. The trio encounters malformed birds and cities, strange prostheses and mysterious landscapes. They welcome in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and four.
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.
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost Page 13