The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

by Rachel Friedman

  Tucked away once again in my still thankfully empty room, I drag a chair up to the small square window. I unwrap my dinner and balance the contents on my lap. Already grease is starting to seep through the newspaper wrapping. Inside a deep, rich batter hides a piece of light, flaky cod. Thick potato wedges are getting deliciously soggy in the vinegar. The meal sinks like a stone in my stomach, just the thing after a long day wandering around a damp city. It’s the end of my first whole day truly alone in Ireland, and even though I can tell already that I fit better in Galway than in Dublin, I’m lonely. Again I consider what exactly I’m doing here.

  Over the next week, I meet other travelers staying in the hostel, and some of my loneliness dissipates. First there’s Jeff. When I open my eyes the next morning, he is on his stomach reading in the bunk bed across from me, apparently having just exited an Abercrombie & Fitch billboard—chiseled arms, thick hair, freckles on his tanned neck.

  We run into each other in the common room later in the day. I’ve been watching TV for an hour with two girls I don’t know. They didn’t say anything more than “hey” when I entered the room, but they didn’t tell me to leave, either. I had this idea in my head that some guests in the hostel “owned” certain rooms, like the really popular girls in middle school owned certain lunch tables, but it’s not true. Anyone can sit on the beat-up couch and watch TV. Nobody stays in hostels long enough to lay claim to anything, nor is it something anyone is interested in. There are hostels I’ll encounter later on in my travels where people hole up for weeks and months at a time, but this one, like most of them, is simply a brief stop on the way to somewhere else.

  “You’re in my room, right?” Jeff asks.

  I nod.

  “If you’re not doing anything, I’m going out for drinks with my friends. Do you want to come?”

  I don’t know how long you have to be celibate before people assume you’re doing it on purpose, but whatever the threshold is, I have surely passed it. I haven’t so much as kissed anyone in over a year, since I shouted “Good riddance!” as my ex-boyfriend stomped away from our fifth tequila-fueled breakup. All of that changes my first night out in Galway. Jeff and I make out enthusiastically in the hostel’s hallway, in that pawing, slurred way that seems so sexy when you’re hammered, until we get caught by security cameras. A cryptic Big Brother voice rasps through an intercom: “Guys, we can see you down here.”

  In the morning Abercrombie & Fitch, like Matt the Canadian before him, is gone before I can say goodbye. This is fine by me, because I’m pitifully hungover. And embarrassed. I wait until all of my roommates leave before sheepishly sneaking out of the room.

  The days begin to drift by. Late mornings I traipse around Galway, unsuccessfully applying for jobs. Every afternoon I wind up at a little café near St. Augustine Church, a few blocks from the busy main street. Here I always order the same sandwich—avocado and sun-dried tomato—and a cup of coffee, wolfing it down after subsisting until then on the hostel’s free breakfast. Sometimes I leave after an hour or so, but often I stay two, three, or even four hours, eventually purchasing a scone to quell my guilt for taking up a table so long. I read or write or daydream or just people-watch, imagining the lives of passersby.

  If ever there was a time before now when I woke up thinking, Now, is it Wednesday or Thursday?, I don’t remember it. Since I was little, my schedule has been as regimented as soldiers marching down the lane, but not in Galway. New roommates chug like a locomotive through the hostel. Each day is a series of maneuvers around strange bodies to get in and out. At night I latch on to whatever new group has arrived and go out drinking with them. There’s Paula and Marcel, beautiful traveling cousins from Puerto Rico; Michael, an American who has returned to Galway to pursue an Irish ex-girlfriend (I met her, and boy, is she out of his league, I’m sorry to say); three Brits here for a quick weekend holiday; and many, many more who are traveling for weeks, months, or years at a time. We usually end up in a dim multilevel pub called the Quays (which I idiotically pronounce “kways” instead of “keys” for five days until someone finally corrects me). The interior was imported from a French medieval church, complete with stained-glass windows and rickety pews. It’s a place with different moods. You can stand in the middle of a churning bar crowd or tuck yourself away at one of the tables in the corner. It stays open far later than most bars, which in Ireland close by midnight so you can get tipsy and still fit in a full eight hours of sleep before work the next morning. Often I find myself stumbling home at two or three or four in the morning—no school or job to stop me. But the best thing about the pub is the music. Almost every pub we patronize has live music multiple nights a week, and the Quays is no exception.

  Music is predictable. It is exact. No matter your interpretation—the tempo or volume or speed of your vibrato—a B flat is a B flat is a B flat. This was infinitely appealing for an anxious, watchful, perfectionist little girl who desperately needed the world to make sense, for things to be orderly. Girls like me choose horses, or eating disorders, or literature—we choose any number of worlds within which to disappear, but that dangerous energy has to go somewhere. For me it was music.

  The passion that inhabited me while playing—the way that bodies sway in time, eyes close, chests rise and fall—came naturally. And the physical act of learning to play the viola itself was a methodical process. It was a formula. Practice and you get better. Practice longer and you get better faster. As with school, I knew the rules. My relationship with music was straightforward. I wanted to play the viola, and it seemed to want me to play it. We were in harmony.

  Until my freshman year of music school. In college I practiced and practiced and practiced, emerging from my cavelike studio in the basement of the music building at the oddest hours. I was working harder than ever, but I realized in music school, surrounded by all these other amazing musicians, that I was no longer the best. Not now. Probably not ever. This hard truth took my breath away.

  Music school was a seismic event that cracked my tough exterior, and apparently, my core was pure liquid terror. A few weeks into the semester, I started blacking out. I don’t mean that I fainted during an actual performance, just that afterward I couldn’t remember anything about it. When I played well, I was unable to explain it, as I was equally unable to explain my increasing failures. My body hurt all the time, and I no longer held my viola with the effortless adoration I used to. All my preparation was having the confusing, unpleasant effect of slowly but steadily draining my desire; the pleasure dripped out of my body like a leaky faucet I couldn’t fix. Since I practiced so much—four, five, six hours a day—the skin under the left side of my chin was rubbed raw. It was red and unpleasantly thin to the touch, like an old woman’s arm. After a few hours of playing, my shoulder would start to creep up, compensating for my weak chin. My back was sore and slightly hunched, and my neck protested my insistence on turning my eyes to face my fingers. I knew that I shouldn’t need to watch them race along the strings. They’re meant to find the notes feelingly, like a blind person, but I no longer trusted myself.

  In Galway, at night, in the fiddle-soaked pubs, I can forget all this for a while. When I happen past a violinist in the street during the sober day, I feel a sharp pinch of sadness. I am full of regrets about giving up music. If I stand there listening for too long, I actually begin to feel a bit nauseated—as if the street is spinning. But there is something different about the nighttime bar music filled with exuberant fiddling and sweet guitars. The alcohol miraculously strips away the harshest feelings I harbor against myself, and I can sink down bodily into the melodies again without all the mental angst. I haven’t been able to do that in the longest time. So I drink to be social. I drink to bandage my bruised ego after another day of fruitless job applications. But most of all, I drink to feel music again—to drown in it.

  I’m living a life in Galway that’s entirely unfamiliar from the one I left back home. Surrounded by strangers in a foreign land, wh
ere no one knows or cares why I’m here or where I’m headed next, it occurs to me that I can completely reinvent myself. And Ireland me would like another Guinness, please.

  [4]

  Our heroine takes up residence with three strangers of various and unaccountable natures, one of whom is an entirely different kind of girl species indeed.

  I have not contacted my parents since shooting off a brief email my first day in Galway, nearly a week ago. My father has written me numerous times since then. In each subsequent message, the all caps and exclamation points have multiplied.

  Subject: Hello!

  Subject: HELLO?!!

  Subject: Worried!!

  Subject: SERIOUSLY! CALL ME!!

  At the height of his frenzy, he refers to himself in third person.

  Subject: PLEASE CONTACT YOUR FATHER WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHERE YOU ARE AND IS EXTREMELY DISTRAUGHT!!!

  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’m lonely. I don’t have any friends. The ones I make at the hostel keep leaving. I can’t find a job or an apartment. I’m running out of money. This trip was a mistake. I have no idea what I’m doing here or why I came. I want to come home.

  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’m alive! No need to file a missing persons report, Dad, I’m still in Galway—safe and sound. I’ve been hunting for jobs, meeting lots of interesting people, and seeing what there is to see in this small town. Yesterday I went to the bookstore and bought William Trevor’s The Hill Bachelors. Have you read him? He’s wonderful, understated, all restrained, bubbling emotions. I miss you and I’ll write more soon!

  Love,

  Rachel

  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.

  Female needed for 2-bedroom apt., 255/month, Presentation Rd.

  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.