The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (9 page)

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, then 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.”

Everyone around me is in their early twenties. No one has anywhere to be, so we stay at the bar, drink cheap beer, and play old Irish love songs on the jukebox. There seems to be no limit to our days together. I've never had so many friends at once, whom I've liked so well, as I did in Galway, where I once felt so lonely and knew no one at all.

“Time to get off the Guinness,” my boss, Brian, urges me discreetly one night, taking a gentle glance at my stomach. I look down, where my belly is indeed protruding more than when I arrived in Ireland three months ago. Back home, this kind of comment would have sent me spiraling into despair. Since middle school, I've struggled with body-image issues, like a lot of girls do, denying myself this or that and spending too much time pinching flesh in front of the mirror. So I'm shocked at this moment to realize that I haven't thought about my body in any self-punishing way in weeks, though by most standards I am woefully abusing it with cigarettes and alcohol. But my mind has twisted in a new direction this summer, and I've found it freeing these last few months to let go of some insecurities, large and small, or at least to put them on hold.

One night in early August, Eileen announces, “It's official, chicken. You're Irish.” I surge with pride, as if I have passed a particularly
difficult exam. It's exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long. It doesn't yet occur to me that this is simply my friend's way of expressing affection; she doesn't wish me to be anyone but myself, that, ultimately, I can't be. In Ireland, I become someone entirely different—a wild girl who stays out late, guzzles Guinness, tells coarse jokes, and says yes to every invitation. I let myself loose, a word that before never would have attached itself to me. That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either.

A week before the end of my endless Irish days, I call my father to test out the idea of staying. His silence blasts across the Atlantic.

“I don't understand,” he finally says. “You want to graduate a year late?”

“Yeah, it's just a year. Plus, I can get lots of great student deals if I'm still enrolled in college.” I'm repeating Carly's words, hoping I've imbued them with some of her unflagging confidence. Her mantra buzzes in my brain: What's the rush?

“Kiddo, I think you should come home, get your degree, and then examine your options.”

“I just don't know what I'm doing with my life, Dad.”

“Who does? I'll see you at the airport, okay?”

I'm not ready to go home, but I cannot locate the will necessary to defy him. I sigh heavily into the receiver. “Okay.”

When I arrive on U.S. soil, my body recoils like a vampire's against the American summer sun. I'm even more ghostly pale than usual from cloudy Irish weather and drawn-out days in Irish pubs. My physique—though it was never profoundly muscular even in my wildest gym days—has softened like an overripe banana after four months of physical exertion limited to lifting pint glasses. I pepper my conversations with expressions like “shite” and “fair play to ye.” It is my fervent belief that I have cultivated an Oscar-worthy Irish accent, though in reality I sound like the love child of the Lucky Charms leprechaun and Eliza Doolittle.

These summer souvenirs disappear a few weeks into my senior year of college, along with the rare moments of clarity collected in Ireland when I felt the freedom of a whole wide world opening up to me. The hours felt so expansive in Galway, like I was in an alternate dimension. Back home, time speeds up, and the unsettling feeling that it is running out attaches itself to me again, coupled with the paranoia that giving up music means relinquishing my one chance to be truly great at something, and now I will spend the rest of my life probably being—gasp!—ordinary.

Every morning I wake up in my dorm room thinking, Today is the day I will have a revelation about my life; today I will figure out what I am meant to be in the world. When nothing happens, I start making endless lists of possible careers, trying to take charge of my own destiny. I had a singular image in my mind for so long, could envision myself walking to orchestra rehearsals and teaching private lessons, but that picture is defunct now. Try as I might, I cannot see myself in my new future. Notebook
pages with incoherent scrawling litter my bedroom floor like lily pads.

“Oooookaaaay, then,” Erica concludes, popping her head in after class one night. “Time to quit popping the crazy pills and come out for drinks.”

While I was disappearing into a faux-Irish life, Erica had experienced an altogether different kind of unexpected summer. Her art gallery internship turned out to be one long stretch inputting old show catalogs into an antiquated computer program. She didn't get to handle any art or even watch other people handling it. This semester she signed up for business classes, the beginning of her calculated transformation into a finance analyst; art has officially been relegated to a hobby.

It's a practical decision, the kind many of my friends were starting to make regarding their futures, but it depressed me nonetheless. I struggled with a romantic notion I had secretly nourished since I started playing music—that to be happy, we must make a career out of what we love most. I imagined us all as musicians and artists and philosophers. The idea of taking a job simply for the money was startling to me, and I was naïve enough then to judge others for it, even as I was in the midst of my own existential crisis. At least they were taking action. I was totally paralyzed with indecision. I had surprised myself by boarding that plane to Ireland, then sticking it out there and enjoying myself. After returning to college, I had a vague notion that I could do more unexpected, world-expanding things (maybe without so much Guinness). Travel guides had begun to crop up like weeds amid my textbooks. Every few days, I bid impossibly low on Priceline for cheap international flights, disappointed every time my fifty-dollar round-trip offer to Paris was rejected. But this new desire was all jumbled up with the various “shoulds” awaiting me in the U.S.—voices from others and from my own confused brain telling me what to do out there in the real world. There were so many voices swirling around in my
head that I couldn't figure out how to strip them away and listen to the quiet yet insistent one humming softly in my subconscious, patiently waiting for an audience. It was that voice, I'm pretty sure, that led me to Ireland in the first place.

When I wasn't fretting over my life, I was studying. Ever since quitting music school in Boston, I had thrown myself into academics, the other area where I had always excelled, and was accepted as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania the spring of my sophomore year. I packed up my belongings and said goodbye to Copley Square and the Charles and hello to Ben Franklin and the Ivy League.

My first two friends at Penn were also transfer students. Jen, a five-foot rosy-cheeked spitfire, had upgraded from NYU but already knew scores of people at our new university. Some of her high school best friends are here, while the rest are sprinkled throughout New Haven, Providence, Boston, and New York City, which I do not realize until many months later are code for Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Columbia.

Tara, sick of the South, is a transfer from the University of Georgia. She is the first girl I've ever met who competed in honest-to-goodness beauty pageants, and she's the prettiest girl I have ever seen who isn't airbrushed. She has thick, curly black hair and foamy-green eyes. Her olive skin darkens exotically even on cloudy days, and her boobs look good in every top. Tara's only mortal quality is that she gains weight easily. To combat this, she survives on Clif bars and cafeteria salads and works out twice a day, although I find it hard to believe that an extra ten pounds would prevent men from running into solid objects when they pass by her any less than they do now. Tara doesn't have old friends here like Jen does, but she was in a sorority in Georgia, so she is an automatic member of the same chapter here. This provides her with a spontaneous social life. Even her good looks (an asset trumped only by family name) were not enough to overcome the religious barriers at her old school, where she was invited
to join only the one Jewish sorority, but at Penn, Jewish students are a dominant force on campus. Many of the elite sororities are self-segregated Gucci-clad Jewish girls.