The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (10 page)

Life is flexible and beautiful to Tara, while Jen sees the world through slightly depressed glasses. I yin and yang between them, my energies shifting like a mood ring depending on who I'm with. And then junior year I meet Erica, who fits me just right. She's a transfer student, too, though a year behind me. We bond immediately over our shared confusion regarding the Italian language.

“What did she just say?” I whispered to her the first day of class.

“I have no idea. I'm just saying
sí
like everyone else.”

“I think she's asking us about the weather.”

“Then she should just look outside and stop torturing me.”

I imagined life at an Ivy League university as one long stretch of parsing Hegel and pondering mind-expanding ontological questions, but instead I find myself in a land largely populated by rich sons and daughters more interested in designer handbags and fraternity parties than the brains they possess. Jen, Tara, and Erica aside, I can't find much to hold on to here; besides, I'm still reeling from leaving music school. My father the academic is thrilled that I've transferred to this elite institution, so I do not tell him one does not belong here simply because one attends. While any bright and diligent student can walk away with the degree, legitimate entry into this world depends on a specifically calibrated economic/social/regional pedigree, and the Friedmans from Syracuse, New York, simply have not inherited it.

At some point I am forced to ask myself, like all toiling away in the humanities, what I am going to do with my English degree. Yes, I have read far and wide. I can quote Marvel and Swift, Frost and Plath. I've been steeped in Austen, Dickens, and Dostoevsky.
I have committed certain pieces of wisdom to heart, most recently Oscar Wilde's “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.” As my senior year draws to a close, I turn in my honors thesis: “Staging Silence: Reimagining the Women in Shakespeare's
Othello.
” Yet precisely how a theoretical, experimental feminist rendering of a Renaissance play relates to my post-college plans remains unclear.

The English major “teaches you to think creatively and flexibly, to interpret, to analyze and communicate,” my father tells me. However, it does not appear to come with a job title other than “poor shmuck who majored in English,” and I'm pretty sure that's an unpaid internship. Maybe I should become an academic like my father. He gets to write books on pretty much whatever strikes his fancy, have summers off (not
off,
they all tell me, we're
working
), and spend a good portion of his time on a college campus in a kind of perpetual studenthood. But when I think about the years of my life involved in obtaining a Ph.D.—though it is a pursuit with a clear and definitive goal, and that appeals to me—I can't get excited about it. For starters, reading is such a pure thing, such blissful enjoyment, that I don't know if I want to professionalize it and risk, as with music, losing it on some level.

I poll my other English-major friends for ideas. Michelle is finishing up at Vassar. She considered going into publishing, but a recent depressing internship—the literary equivalent of Erica's archiving monotony—has convinced her otherwise. She, too, is contemplating her next move and, in the meantime, has accepted a nine-to-five job at an accounting firm in her hometown. When she graduates, she's moving back in with her parents in New Jersey. My friend Adam, who took to donning a red smoking jacket for inspiration while we were penning our theses (his on Poe), is off to Los Angeles to start his Ph.D. in American literature. He shrugs. “I have to do something.”

We all do. It's what is expected. Besides, we have healthcare to
worry about. And student debt. And making a contribution to society, making our parents proud, making something of ourselves that we can hopefully believe in.

Graduation day arrives like an unwanted houseguest. Inside the football stadium, parents crouch on hard white bleachers, hoping their camera lenses will zoom in fast enough to capture our speck-sized faces whizzing across the platform. It's nearly impossible to tell us apart in our cream gowns, so they flash our names on a large screen above the stage while a man adept at successfully pronouncing polysyllabic names under pressure introduces us. Our smiling professors sit in neat rows at the back of the stage. Their set faces remind me of those Semisonic lyrics—“You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”

Two nights ago Jen, Tara, Erica, and I met one last time at our favorite local bar. We drank gigantic glasses of red wine and mulled over our post-college lives. Like hordes of other Penn grads, Tara and Jen are moving to Manhattan. Jen has been hired by Bank of Scotland and is anxious. “I start in three weeks. Can you believe it? Goodbye, summer vacations. Do you think I should go on Jdate now? I have a friend of a friend who's getting married to a guy she met on there. I don't think online dating services are pathetic anymore, do you? How else am I supposed to meet someone after college?”

Tara is spending the summer in Denver with her family before starting her job as a kindergarten teacher's assistant at the 92nd Street Y. “Woody Allen's kid is starting in the fall,” she tells us in a hushed voice.

While Jen will make enough money to dull the pain of twelve-hour workdays, Tara's teaching gig pays too little to cover her expenses, so her parents have agreed to subsidize her rent. Tara is the least spoiled rich kid I know (she even has a personal philosophy against expensive underwear and T-shirts), but even
she isn't willing to give up her city dreams over a little glitch like cash. Bohemia may not be dead, but no one I know from college has any interest in roughing it. Erica is working for a family friend who owns a real estate company. She still has a year of college left, and I deeply envy her this extra time to figure things out.

What are my plans for the summer? I'm staying right here in Philadelphia. My friend Bindi is heading to Washington, D.C., for an internship, and I'm subletting her minuscule studio apartment. I've gotten a job as a bartender in an Irish pub not far from campus, a sad attempt to re-create my lost Galway summer.

After the graduation ceremony, my family heads to Old City for dinner. I bring Erica to help me keep an eye on everyone. My parents have been divorced for six years, and each believes he/she has sacrificed the most personal comfort in order to have one joint meal. It is no exaggeration to relate that I have been dreading this dinner since my first day of college.

Up until this point, I have been distributing my time equally between my relatives: Independence Hall with Mom's side, Rittenhouse Square with Dad's, breakfast with one group, lunch with another—all punctuated by blissfully quiet taxi rides that I never want to end. “No rush,” I want to tell the driver. “In fact, why don't you move into the bus lane, and we'll really take our time.” I rest my head against the dirty leather and pray for red lights.

My parents, in true competitive form, have brought an equal number of allies, seven relatives each. Erica and I occupy the middle chairs across from each other, cutting the two sides neatly in half. We are Switzerland. Every time someone rises to walk to the other side of the table to chat amiably with someone from the past, I stare at Erica with alarm, and she mouths “It's okay” across the table.

When we sneak away to the bathroom, I announce that I'm eloping.

“With who?” she wants to know.

“Not now. I just mean when the time comes. This way we won't all have to be in the same room together ever again.”

“It's really not that bad,” she says, bending toward the mirror to apply more mascara. “Everyone is getting along great.”

She is right, actually, but I am less prepared for things to go well than badly.

Back at the table, everyone has a glass of bubbling champagne.

“Welcome to the real world,” my sister toasts, and everyone laughs but me.

If at this point I revealed that I never saw Carly again, it would not surprise anyone who has traveled. Our time in Galway was brief, a matter of weeks, and our friendship incited by proximity and personality. But it turns out our two lives were not nearly finished running parallel. While I returned to college, Carly continued traipsing through Europe, Morocco, and Asia for the next few months. She sent emails from Paris and Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Laos. Eventually, though, her funds ran out, and she went home, too.

We've been out of touch for several months when my cell phone rings a few weeks after graduation. “So. You've finished uni. Good on ya. Now—when are you coming to OZ?”

“Carly!”

“Owzitgoin?”

“Pretty good, I guess. Well, shitty, actually. I'm stuck in Philadelphia, waitressing, no clue what to do with myself.”

“You're not stuck anywhere,” Carly declares. “C'mon. Stop whinging. Listen, work for a few months. Save up and book your ticket to Australia. Mike's gone O.S. until December, so we've got
a spare room. You can stay with my family and travel all over Australia.”

Mike is Carly's twin brother and “O.S.” stands for “overseas,” where he has recently ventured for his own version of Carly's gap year. Everything this past year had been so blurry that the sheer force of the statement that hurtles through my brain next hits me like a wayward pigeon: I want to go to Australia. The clarity of it, after so much indecision, is dizzying. I had gone to Ireland on a whim to try to escape my life, but some hidden piece of myself was uncovered there. Being a stranger was invigorating. Maybe I am a traveler. There's only one way to find out. There are, of course, some practical issues to address.

“Will you take me to the set of
Home and Away
?”

She laughs. “Just book the ticket, mate.”

The Sydney airport is all wrong. In Dublin and New York, the security agents are pale and lifeless. They begrudgingly scan suspicious bodies with beeping wands or eye you accusingly after discovering the pair of tiny cuticle scissors you've unintentionally smuggled in your carry-on luggage. “What's this?” they ask, as if they don't already know, then drop it with a ping into the metal trash can. You expect to be treated like a piece of gum on the bottom of someone's shoe at the airport. After all, it's a serious place where very serious business is happening. You strip down to a single layer of clothing, remove your shoes, pack your toiletries in minute see-through bottles, extract your laptop from its carrying case, look as serious and nonthreatening as possible, and hope you make it from point A to point B without incident. Post-9/11, that's all we ask.

But in Sydney, it's different. All of the very serious business is happening here, too, but people are tan. They're helpful. They're
smiling.
Even the beagles sniffing your bags for drugs seem to be grinning pleasantly. The one exception is a morose X-ray technician who scolds me for not declaring my vitamins as “organic medicine,” but she's unconvincing, like an actor playing a character whose motivation is unclear.

The passport control agent is a painfully good-looking Brad Pitt type with lean, muscular arms. His bronze skin glows like he was at the beach mere moments ago, and if he shook his thick blond curls, flecks of sand would fly out. I am adrift in those curls, blissfully unaware that my tangled dark hair is unattractively matted on the left side of my face, on which I've been dozing for the past twelve hours.

“Where are you staying?” he asks.

“In Sydney.” I bat my sleep-crusted eyes at him. Surely his next question will be “What time should I pick you up?”

“Where in Sydney?”

“Ummm … near the beach?” Carly's address is scrawled on a piece of paper somewhere in my bag, but my synapses are all jet-lagged.

“Okay,” he says patiently. “Bondi Beach?” He's willing to keep this up, but it's clear our date is off.

“Yes, that's the one!” (Carly lives in the complete opposite direction of Bondi Beach, actually.)

“Is a mate picking you up?”

When I say yes again, he seems satisfied. At least a geographically challenged American won't be wandering around his country unattended.

Here is what you should know about Australia. It's rotten with kangaroos. In Sydney, the government employs a handful of roo-shooers whose sole responsibility is to shoo them off the Harbour Bridge around five
A.M.,
before the daily commute begins. It's a dangerous, delicate job, because if you cross a kangaroo,
your reward is a swift kick in the gut. Australia is also home to the infamous drop bear. Delicately perched in any number of native trees, these creatures (which resemble koalas) have been known to descend onto the shoulders of many an unsuspecting tourist. You'll notice the locals give the trees a wide berth, and you should, too. They'll claw your eyes out, given half a chance. Hoop snakes are perhaps the most terrifying of all. This creature grasps its tail in its mouth to roll after its prey. Contorted like this, it's terrifyingly fast. One was once clocked at over sixty miles an hour. The hoop snake has a stinger on the tip of its tail, so highly venomous that any unfortunate tree it brushes past instantly withers, turns black, and dies. If you encounter a hoop snake in the wild, run uphill. That's the only way to escape.