I’d be happy to go along with this, absolutely thrilled to misrepresent myself as a sophisticated city girl, if doing so didn’t mean laying claim to a tragedy that doesn’t belong to me in the same way it does to true Manhattanites. Still, some backpackers seem determined to intimately attach me to that terrible morning. What usually happens immediately after the New York cooing is the uncomfortable onslaught of 9/11 sympathy. In Ireland, it was pure, unchecked empathy offered up with a slow, sad shake of the head. That was in 2002. Now it’s 2003, and Bush has declared war on Iraq. Sympathy is still expressed, but after it come all the questions, none of which I can answer. All I can do is speak for myself, express my own regret and confusion, and feel the growing discomfort of that no longer being enough.
We reach our campsite just before sunset. Dinner our first night is a massive pot of stew into which our guide, Leah, tosses a variety of vegetables and an unidentifiable meat she claims is chicken. For dessert, I teach the Irish girls how to make s’mores. No graham crackers or marshmallows are on hand, so we put pieces of a Flake (an Australian brand of chocolate bar) between two mini-chocolate-chip cookies and roast them in a pan over the fire.
Around nine, when all the various fireside conversations have petered out, we unroll our sleeping bags (I surreptitiously but violently shake mine free of any lurking desert creatures). Leah hands out the swags (a waterproof shell made of canvas, similar to a tarp) that will serve as an outer layer to keep us warm. The temperature has dropped drastically since the sun set. I hop inside and zip myself up, then flip over onto my back. The sky is a planetarium of stars, completely unimpeded by clouds, trees, lights, or smog. It is the starriest sky I have ever seen. Soon the only sound is the others breathing, all of us cozy in our swags with full bellies, enveloped by the vast quiet. All along I’ve thought the best way to keep out all the voices in my head directing my life this way and that was to stay busy, to distract my brain from itself, but it’s this profound silence that releases me from worry. Only a single strain of thought runs through my head like a simple melody: this is exactly where I want to be, out here in the world. At some point I fall asleep, but I have no sense of exactly when, because I see that starry sky all night long in my dreams.
Leah wakes us up at four A.M. with determined perkiness. We pull together tea and coffee and toast, then stumble off to the ramshackle restroom, a tin structure housing two mirrors, two sinks, and two outhouse-style bathrooms. I am the last girl to finish getting ready, and although I take barely ten minutes, the campsite is eerily deserted when I emerge. No van, no swag, no backpacks, not even my own. It’s happened. I have been left in the middle of the Australian Outback. Now I’ll be bitten by a venomous snake and die a slow, painful death. As I am somewhat gleefully considering how sorry Carly will be for sending me out here alone, the van, an apparition out of nowhere, barrels toward me. It slows down long enough for Tobias and Stomatos to yank me inside, like in those films when the hero sprints to catch a moving train, before we are off again, racing to beat the sunrise we want to witness from a lookout point half an hour away.
The next three days are an unconventional routine of hiking, driving, sunrises, and sunsets. Each morning Leah hurtles breakfast at us with the same willful cheeriness, then we race off somewhere to marvel at the various shades of lightening or darkening sky. Hands down the best sunrise/sunset presents itself at Ayers Rock, or Uluru, as native Australians call it, the monolithic sandstone rock that graces at least half of all Australian postcards. I take no fewer than thirty photos each of the sunrise and sunset at Uluru. The sky turns so many magnificent shades of red so swiftly that I’m never sure where the pinnacle of beauty is. So I snap away, we all do, witnessing nearly the entire event behind our lenses.
Uluru holds great spiritual significance for Aboriginals, and they don’t want you climbing it. Our guide tells us this, as does everyone else who works at and around the rock. There are other reasons not to climb. It’s steep, the sun is merciless, and more than thirty people have died so far attempting it, even though there is a clearly marked section with a rope to hold on the way up.
Despite these compelling reasons, people do climb. When we arrive, a steady stream of ants is marching single-file up the rock. Our group chooses instead to do a four-hour walk around the monolith’s base, marveling again and again at its enormity and at such unforgiving heat when it’s not even ten A.M. Not only are you discouraged from climbing Uluru, you are also reminded that it’s not a souvenir. Yet people abscond with bits of red rock, stuffing them boldly in pockets and backpacks and returning home with them. Only something strange has been happening over the years. Tourists are returning the stolen sandstone in great numbers, posting pieces back, often at great expense, and begging the site’s employees to return them to their place of origin. The notes give detailed directions about where this or that rock was abducted, followed by profuse, shamed apologies. Since picking the forbidden fruit, terrible things have happened. One woman’s note describes a sudden illness, another a series of pets’ deaths. Trauma after trauma is related, each person convinced that these troublesome events are tied to the contraband.
It’s a satisfying form of justice. The rock is where it’s meant to be, where it’s fated to be. Its resolve to remain is like a force field—after all, it cannot speak for itself, and though the Aboriginals do their best to protect it, their warnings too often go unheeded. Or maybe the rock is more like a magnet calling itself home, bringing back the various bits of its lost body at whatever cost.
When I return from the Outback, I renew my job search. Luck strikes again days later, when I’m hired at a café to work the cash register and assist the barista during the busy morning shifts. The café is the bottom level of a massive office building in downtown Sydney, tucked down the street from the Parliament House, whose colonnaded verandah reminds me more of an old-time saloon than a government building, and a few blocks east of the Domain, the city’s large open space that hosts dozens of amateur rugby and soccer leagues, outdoor concerts, soapbox orators, and general lazing about.
My shift starts at seven A.M., which means—and I can feel the exhaustion creeping over me even at the memory—I have to get up at five A.M. to shower and eat, then walk fifteen minutes to the bus stop at the end of the Dawsons’ street to catch the six-twenty bus into the city. Getting up early for a spectacular sunrise is one thing, but this routine, well, it sucks. I must resemble a groggy noon-hour Patchi, but luckily, no one is awake to witness it—or have the unfortunate task of attempting conversation with me. The bus drivers here wear white kneesocks. That surprising uniform choice is all I’m capable of comprehending at six A.M. The first few mornings, the promise of the heart-stopping Sydney Opera House, rising like a beacon to my left as we cross the Harbour Bridge, is enough to keep me awake. But soon even this becomes routine. I drift in and out of consciousness, willing my body to wake me at the right stop. The upside is that I finish work at one-thirty P.M., giving me the afternoons free, and the pay is pretty good.
When I arrive at the café, I greet Joey, the barista, with a sleepy nod. He slips me two shots of espresso, which I throw back like tequila, visualizing the caffeine coursing through my veins. Even with the coffee, I’m never fully awake, just jittery. That doesn’t help my performance, which is—and this is an understatement—woeful. It is so woeful, in fact, that I wonder if I have imagined being a good waitress up until now.
My current position is not technically waiting tables. There is a restaurant section, hard white plastic tables with sleek, aerodynamically curved wooden chairs, where businesspeople gather in their summer suits for a quick lunch—a chicken sandwich with basil mayo, say, or a light salad Niçoise. But I’m working the breakfast shift, and the customers are in a rush to get upstairs to their law or tech or architecture firm, where they might order toast with Vegemite or muesli with yogurt, banana, and honey, but where they always line up in front of our shiny rectangular counter, with two hulking cof
fee machines at one end, and order a coffee of some kind. Their choices: cappuccino, flat white, latte, long black, double espresso, espresso, macchiato, piccolo, long macchiato, or Vienna coffee. Simple enough, except that it’s not, for several reasons. The first is that Joey has been working at this café for several years, and his brain is a hive of customer names and orders. Like any self-respecting Aussie barista, he knows them all, and he knows what they drink.
Joey moves with robotic precision, first running both hands from his temples to the back of his skull, matting down his loose shoulder-length curls, a lion coiffing his mane. He smoothes his long white apron, then places his hands on his hips and stares meaningfully at the coffee machine for a few intimate moments, two athletes in a huddle. Finally, ready for battle, he begins to make coffee. One right after another, they fly from his graceful hands, hissing steamed milk punctuated by the blunt knock of coffee grounds being dumped into the garbage can after two perfect espresso shots have been drained from them. All the while he calls out his g’days to the customers, asking them if they want the usual, which they always do. The regulars expect to have their coffee prepared and waiting for them by the time they reach me at the cash register.
Everything happens at warp speed, hundreds of suits revolving like a dry cleaner through the café doors. My job is to cap the coffees, give them to their owners, and make change with their colorful Australian dollars. Unlike waiting tables, though, there is no time to develop a rapport. It is a factory line, and one screwup throws off the whole team, the team being me and Joey and the screwup being me. I, too, am expected to know these customers by name and coffee preference, but their friendly faces all blur together, and after a few days, I recall only the two customers who have hit on me and a man on crutches. What’s worse is I can’t understand people’s accent, so I mistake “skim cap” for “skim flat” or “cap” for “mach,” all the while cursing Australians’ insistence on shortening words that are not overly long to begin with as Joey is cursing me for getting all the orders wrong and wasting more than I make all shift in mistakes. While Carly’s family seems to understand me fine, here people have trouble with my accent, too, calling me Rita over and over. Not being understood and not understanding them is infantilizing, and it’s even more disconcerting because we are supposedly speaking the same language.
It should be clear by now that Australians take their coffee very seriously. Starbucks went broke here, which pretty much says it all. So although they say “no worries” and smile politely at me when I butcher their order for the fifth time, Joey assures me that I have ruined their morning. One day it gets to be too much. I call out two cappuccinos instead of two skim cappuccinos, thereby causing Joey to nervously run his fingers through his hair, a precise coiffing, as I’ve described, meant to occur only at the beginning of the shift. This is not good. Next I hand two people the wrong trays, forcing Joey to make eight new drinks when they discover my mistake. He halts the line in order to scold me like a naughty puppy in front of everyone, and suddenly, I can’t cope. I flee to the bathroom, locking myself behind the red stall door to release my embarrassed tears. The owner, a minute Italian woman with copper-pot-colored hair, knocks gently.
“Do not worry,” she says. “When men get frustrated, they hit someone, and when women get frustrated, they cry.” I crack open the door. “Pull yourself together.” She places her child-size hands on my shoulders. “You really do make a lot of mistakes, no?” And I do, there’s no way around it.
My second job (as in Ireland, I need two, but instead of barely working part-time, I manage to log almost forty hours a week in Australia) is at an Indian restaurant called Aki’s, in Woolloomooloo Wharf on the eastern edge of Sydney. It’s fine-dining Indian cuisine—four words people don’t expect to hear strung together. The owner and head chef is a middle-aged Indian man who opened his first bustling restaurant in a Sydney suburb and has decided to stake his legacy in a strip of expensive eateries on the water. He hires me a week before the restaurant is set to open. When I arrive for my interview, plush maroon cushions are being fitted on long benches. An upstairs cocktail bar overlooks the larger dining area, where sleek black chairs surround white linen-clad tables. There is outdoor seating where you can watch the boats slide in and out of the harbor. I myself could never afford to eat here, but luckily we’re often fed heaping portions of butter chicken, sweet mango chutney, and crispy pappadums. Before each shift, the entire staff downs a shot of Sambuca.
“See how we are now?” the owner will say, sweeping his ring-adorned hand around the room. “What we are doing now, I want us to be doing always. We are a family, we eat as a family, and we drink as a family.”
At Aki’s, I perfect the art of folding a tablecloth in both the French and Italian styles, a skill I’m still hoping to be called upon to use one of these days. I learn how to delicately unfold a banana leaf in front of a guest, exposing the perfectly grilled piece of barramundi fish inside. And I wait on a number of famous Australians whom I have never heard of: John Laws (the Australian Rush Limbaugh), Andrew Johns (the best rugby player in the world, according to the Dawson men), and Neil Perry (popular TV chef). Most shifts I’m the cocktail waitress upstairs, where the rectangular tables are so low to the ground that I have to practically kneel in order to serve drinks, carefully lifting martinis one by one off the black tray balanced on my left palm. We all wear crisp ankle-length black aprons and black tops. One of the gorgeous Indian waitresses gives me a sheet of sparkly stick-on bindis, and I carefully center one on my forehead before each shift. This is not a uniform requirement. I just love the way they shimmer in my peripheral vision, as if I’m emanating my own light.
Hands down, the best part of working at Aki’s is its location. It’s at one end of a long wharf; it’s also opposite Russell Crowe’s house, and though I am vigilant, I unfortunately never catch a glimpse of him. Every shift I ask to work outside, please, and my day is a constant series of attempts to prevent the tablecloths from blowing away. With few customers wanting to sit in the hot sun and eat curry (not what we serve, but it’s what people think we serve, which makes for a pretty rough time unveiling an Indian restaurant in the middle of a Sydney summer), I am free to lean against the hostess’s podium and stare down into the ocean. It’s as difficult to describe the sea as it is a piece of music. I want to use undulating rhythms, words like “lilt” and “eddy,” but really what does that tell you about how I lost myself like Narcissus, somehow lost all sense of where I was or the time of day. I’d imagine pitching over the side, then shooting out like a spark under the water, past the wooden stakes of the wharf crawling with fish and seaweed, into the harbor, where the ferries circle, before finally making it out to the deep sea, where the color deepens from Sydney to Pacific blue and there is nothing but ocean for miles in all directions.
When I’m done with work, I sometimes saunter across the road to Harry’s Café de Wheels to devour a steaming chicken pie on a bench overlooking the sea while the pigeons dive for scraps all around me. Like the coffee, an Australian pie is an art form. The meat or vegetable is enclosed in a pastry about the size of a man’s palm, the bottom thick and doughy and the top greasy and flaky. The first bite is warm and buttery, the last a minor tragedy. My diet at this point consists mainly of the four major food groups: Indian food, chicken pies, Tim Tams (two layers of chocolate biscuits with chocolate cream filling in the middle, the whole sugary fiesta coated in more delicious chocolate), and mangoes, which I devour so voraciously that Muriel buys them by the box load. Is it any wonder I’m steadily gaining the fifteen pounds Carly has recently lost?
The restaurant is a better fit for me than the café, but I’m having a tough time focusing on the work. Maybe it’s the ocean, or the newness of Sydney, or the fact that the service industry here is not based on tips. Carly says the system is better. Everyone gets a fair wage. But I argue that a performance/reward system makes people work harder, go that extra mile.
“Why do
I need my waitress to go an extra mile?” she asks. “I just want to eat.”
“Because it makes people feel good.”
“Why do I need a waitress to make me feel good?”
“That’s the agreement,” I say. “You get to feel good—to feel like you’re the only customer who matters in the whole world—and I get a tip.”
“That’s demeaning.”
“For who?”
“For everyone involved.”
“No, it’s not. Plus, if you don’t get a tip, how do you know if you’re any good at your job?”
“I just do,” Carly says, thereby efficiently summing up our different personalities.
Unlike the Hole in the Wall (or any other place where I’ve worked), I don’t get into a restaurant rhythm in Sydney—going out with the other staff at night, waking up hungover, dragging myself to work, repeat. For one thing, the bus doesn’t run regularly past ten P.M., and it’s the only way to get home. When I take it at night, I have to creep back to the Dawsons’ house in the dark, no streetlamps on the suburban road to illuminate my path. But more than that, I simply prefer hanging out with Carly or, when she’s working, her parents. Sometimes I meet Pete at his office for lunch; he’s an accountant. Other days Muriel takes me to the fish market in Glebe, where pelicans line up like schoolchildren at the end of the dock, or we’ll go out for a leisurely coffee together. I find an easy place within their family. I fit.
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure Page 10