The Lost Girls (17 page)

“Hol, that's
not
all it's been and not all the trip will be, I promise,” Jen said. “Look, I know this might sound like an excuse, but being in really social places and going out a lot has kept me from worrying too much about Brian and what's going to happen when we get back to New York.”

“And I think that we've just been trying a little too hard to re-create our postgrad trip through Europe,” Amanda remarked. “Until now, that was the best month of my life.”

“Definitely—we
have
been treating our South America portion a little like an extended vacation,” Jen added.

“I know, and I don't want to ruin your good time,” I said. “We
should
be having fun—that's the point.” I went on to explain that I knew so many people who would have given their right arm to be without obligations like work and rent and romantic entanglements. “We owe it to ourselves to do more with this time. Sure, we could find a different pub to drink in every night, but what are we learning from that? How are we growing?” I finally was able to say flat out what'd really been bothering me: I wanted to push us beyond the lifestyle that felt most comfortable.

Jen put her hand on my shoulder, “Things are going to change after this leg of the trip, I'm sure of it. Soon we'll be volunteering in Kenya, where I'm pretty sure we won't have running water, let alone alcohol or backpacker bars. It's not going to be easy travel anymore.”

“Yeah, and thank God for that!” said Amanda. “If we drink one more
ron y
Coca-Cola Light at happy hour, I think I may have to bail on the trip before Holly does. I'm officially done, as of now.”

“Guys, I was
never
bailing!” I reminded them, laughing.
Then, to prove to the girls that I wasn't totally lame—and that they didn't need to stop enjoying themselves to appease me—I suggested we head to O Gravinho bar to sample
chopps
, Brazilian draft beer, and the country's famous sugarcane liquor,
cachaca
. They protested a little—but not too much.

As I took a sip of the
caipirinha
that my friends and I were sharing, my eyes met those of a guy wearing a straw fedora. His skin was paler than ours, and his long legs jutted out from underneath the table across from us. He sat with a Brazilian boy who was wearing a torn T-shirt and looked to be half his age.

“Where are you ladies from?” he called over to us. Jen, Amanda, and I paused for a moment before Amanda answered, “New York.”

“No way, really? I'm from Brooklyn.”

“Me too. I live in Williamsburg. Or I
did
,” I said, unexpectedly delighted to have stumbled across someone from my neighborhood after almost two months on the road.

“This is Igo.” He gestured to the boy, who was sitting silently beside him. “I'm Sam.”

We all introduced ourselves, and, after asking if he could join us, we pulled the tables together. He turned to Igo and spoke in Portuguese.

“
Oi
, Igo,” I said, grinning at the teen. He smiled shyly but said nothing. I turned to Sam. “How'd you guys meet?”

“He asked me for money, so I offered to buy him dinner if he practiced Portuguese with me.” Just then, another boy approached the table and pulled on Igo's arm. Igo said something to Sam in Portuguese before rejoining the band of boys across the street.

“How'd you learn Portuguese?” I asked, impressed. Spanish and French were much more likely languages for Americans to speak.

“Have you heard of capoeira?” he asked, offering me a roasted cashew from the paper cone he was holding.

“I took one class at my gym back in New York,” I said, popping a sweet and salty nut into my mouth. “But we saw guys doing the real deal yesterday on the beach.”

Sam explained that the sport had been started when African slaves tried to disguise intertribal fighting from their masters by playing the drums. “You could say they turned it into a sort of dance,” he said. “I got into training a few years ago in New York and started to pick up Portuguese during my classes.”

Jen asked what Sam did. He told us that he had just taken the bar exam and figured he'd travel for a couple of months before getting a job as a lawyer.

“That's cool—and really unusual,” said Amanda. “We've met tons of Israelis, Brits, and Australians—and a few American women. But we haven't come across many guys from the States who are taking long trips.”

“Yeah, why do you think that is?” I asked, curious to get his take on the mysterious lack of American males on the road.

Sam took off his hat and ran a hand over his shaved head before responding, “I don't know. Maybe it's because we're taught that men should be providers. And taking time off to travel means time away from work and therefore making money. Maybe guys are afraid they'll look lazy if they take an extended vacation.”

I'd never before thought about how reverse sexism and an ingrained sense of responsibility might discourage many guys from hitting the road. Mention famous American travelers, and my mind instantly went to male explorers such as Jack Kerouac, Bill Bryson, and Paul Theroux. But the reality is that most men probably reflect the image I have in my mind of my grandfather: a dedicated provider who spent more than thirty years working in a factory, who saw it his greatest duty to earn enough money to take his kids to the movies on Sundays and to help them pay for college. The only time he traveled abroad was to serve in the
army in World War II, and he never wanted to travel again if he could avoid it.

My grandmother, on the other hand, said she would've loved to have traveled more, but she'd been far too busy raising four kids and waitressing at night. Now, if the popularity of “girlfriend getaway” trips is any indication, more American women are hitting the road than ever before. Maybe that's because women are no longer restricted to describing themselves first and foremost as homemakers, wives, and mothers. I wondered if that was a coincidence or if there was a direct connection between a woman's ability to forge almost any path she chooses and her desire to take the one that leads beyond U.S. borders in order to gain perspective on which direction is right for her.

In this situation, maybe guys really did have it tougher. None of our friends or coworkers had accused Jen, Amanda, or me of shirking our responsibilities as future breadwinners when we shared our travel plans. True, some New York friends had questioned whether we'd be stunting our career growth, and Amanda's mom had insisted that Amanda would never find The One if she was traveling to a different destination every week, but in general, the close friends in our lives had thrown major support behind our plan. Many had even said they would do the same thing if only they could find friends to travel with them.

I glanced at my friends and then back at Sam. Had the people in his life been as supportive of his journey? I was just about to ask when Sam ordered us another round and answered the unspoken question.

“I think I could only get away with traveling for this long because I'd just finished law school, and people understand you might need to take a break before starting a career,” he said. “I also think some Americans tend to associate vacation with a week of sitting on a beach and travel with partying rather than exploration.”

Considering the jam-packed schedule that most Americans keep, it makes sense that many of them might view vacations as opportunities to escape and unwind rather than explore. And that's if we actually sneak away during the two weeks we're allotted. Back home in the city, it was almost a bragging right to be overscheduled. Statements like “I'm just so busy I don't even have time to sleep,” actually garner respect. I was impressed that Sam had created his own sabbatical of sorts.

Now he had a proposition for us. “I'm going to a capoeira class tomorrow at the Bimba school,” Sam said. “Bimba was a
mestre
, or master, who helped make capoeira legal again in the 1930s. Do you want to come?”

“We'd love to!” I said, turning to consult Amanda and Jen.
That
was the kind of stuff I wanted to spend my year on the road doing. “What do you think?”

“Definitely!” they agreed.

 

S
am became our adopted Lost Boy for the rest of our time in Salvador, accompanying us to capoeira classes that began with beating drums, chanting, and clapping. Because he knew about a lot of local events and could speak the language, he was able to show us a different side of the city than we'd normally have discovered on our own.

“Hey, do you ladies want to go to a soccer game tonight?” Sam asked as we walked out of the capoeira studio one morning, sweaty and sore from a week of training.

“I have to get some writing done,” Amanda said. “But you go ahead.”

Jen and I looked at each other and grinned. Jen had been a soccer player for most of her life, and the Brazilians seemed as passionate about
futebol
as they did about the annual collective party, Carnaval.

When we arrived at the local stadium later, firecrackers were exploding in the sky. “They shoot them off when someone scores a goal,” Sam explained.

We bought another paper cone of those roasted cashews I found so addictive and a draft beer, all for only about a dollar, and Jen and I linked arms as we staked out a spot on the metal benches. Men made up most of the crowd, so we kind of stuck out. The masses were screaming, stomping their feet, and clapping their hands. Trying to blend in, I echoed the cheers of the guys in front of me,
“Porra!”
(pronounced
boo-ha!
).

The men turned around to stare at me with wide eyes and gaping mouths. Sam just laughed. “What?” I asked, thinking my accent must sound ridiculous.

“Holly, that literally means ‘cum,'” he'd said. “You'll learn a lot of Portuguese at a
futebol
match, but most of it won't be for everyday conversation.” My cheeks grew hot and Jen punched me in the arm, delighted I was making a fool of myself.

“I'm not at all
embarazada
!” I told her, and she laughed again. Just then, a swarm of armed guards carrying riot shields and firearms escorted the refs off the field. “It's halftime!” Sam said.

“They take their sports seriously,” I noted.

“Things can get pretty violent if a fight breaks out—fans really defend their team,” he said. “It's not a good idea to wear a local team's shirt to a match, but wearing a foreign one is guaranteed to start conversation.”

I filed that tidbit of information away in my brain right next to “Never pull out cash in public” and “Don't drink the tap water.”

My head was pulsing with the beat of the drums that'd kicked off before a whistle signaled the second half. The matches seemed to be as much of a musical event as a sporting event.
Sam waved a Brazilian flag he'd bought on the way in, and I let myself get lost in the crowd's thundering cheers.

 

I
t was our final night in Salvador, and our group of four spent it dancing to samba and listening to live music at a street festival. We were sandwiched among revelers as Brazilians grabbed our hands in another show of openness that made me feel at home so far away from my own. Some guy gave me his hat, and I twirled around to the music, melting into the crowd. Jen, Amanda, and I showed off our hip-swiveling maneuvers for one another before two Brazilian women laughed at us
gringas
and demonstrated moves that appeared to require the absence of any joints in one's lower body. Part of Bahians' beauty was in their genes, and I was beginning to think that a sense of rhythm was also inherited.

Bass vibrated through the cobblestone streets, and I felt almost as if I were absorbing the energy from so many people celebrating in that open space. As I danced with Jen, Amanda, and Sam, our clothes sticking to our bodies in the humidity, I knew then it wasn't partying itself that had been bothering me.

As I was learning from the locals, who seized every opportunity to have fun, dancing and drinking and partying were just some of the many ways to celebrate being alive. While I still didn't want
every
night of our trip to be that, I loved doing it when it made me feel more a part of the places we'd come so far to see. Once we got out of the backpacker bars, parties were a way to connect with the locals.

Spending less than two weeks in Salvador had made it easy to believe the poet who called it Terra da Alegria, or Land of Happiness. With a steady lineup of parties culminating in Carnaval, the city felt festive, like Christmas in the tropics, and the
people seemed relaxed, as if the only place they had to be was right where they were at that moment.

Of course, our experience in Salvador came after the government prettified the Old Town to make it a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Before the government fixed it up, Pelourinho (which was supposedly home to the first slave market in the New World and actually means “whipping post” in Portuguese) had been awash in poverty, prostitution, and drugs. And the areas surrounding that section were still pretty broken down.

I thought of Igo and the other kids I'd seen begging on the streets. Then I thought of the woman who had taken my hand at the beach to show me the sunset. Maybe their warmth sprang less from happiness in the classic sense of elation or joy and more from their resiliency and a seemingly collective appreciation of the small things such as watching a sunset, drinking a cold beer on the beach, or dancing in the streets.

NEW YORK CITY
AUGUST–SEPTEMBER

F
ew experiences have ever moved me as deeply, and with such consistency, as crossing back into Manhattan after a long stretch away. Even if I'm exhausted following a red-eye flight, or depressed to find dirty gray snowdrifts piled alongside the highway, something changes the moment I spot the skyline rising at the far end of the bridge. It's like a booster shoot of adrenaline, a surge that reminds me how lucky I am to live here and how I've managed to become a tiny but integral part of this iconic place.

But rather than the rush I'd expected, on this trip home, all I could feel was a lead balloon rolling around on the floor of my stomach. As Holly, Jen, and I shot between the silver trusses of the 59th Street Bridge in a cab with a broken air conditioner, it hit me:
You don't live here anymore.

For the record, I hadn't wanted to come back here after Brazil. I knew that Jen and Holly wanted to spend some time with their boyfriends before we left on the next leg of the trip and that we had to pass through New York to make our connecting flight to Kenya. But though I could understand the logic, I couldn't come to terms with our return to town. Hadn't we just
said good-bye to all of our friends? Made a clean break from the city?

I planned to spend the next two weeks hiding out at my friend Sarah's place. She and her husband, Pete, had just bought a brownstone in a yet-to-be-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn and had insisted that I spend my layover with them. No need to convince me, since, unlike the girls, I didn't have a boyfriend to shack with. It was Brooklyn or bust.

Our cab pulled to a jerky stop outside Sarah's office on Madison and 68th Street, and I slid out to retrieve my backpack from the trunk.

“So I'll see you guys next week, right?” I said, handing my friends some cab fare. After spending nine weeks glued to one another's sides, it felt bizarre to go in separate directions.

“Yeah, we'll catch up at the Indian consulate,” said Jen. “Let's not wait until we get to Nairobi to get our visas.”

I'd barely waved good-bye before the cab pulled away leaving me loitering in front of Oscar de la Renta. It felt weird. While my Teva sandal tan, bandana headband, and grungy, overstuffed pack put me right at home in the company of backpackers, I felt sloppy and glaringly out of place here in the swankiest part of the Upper East Side. And come to think of it, in the Manhattan fishbowl in general. Trying to avoid eye contact with a matron walking two Yorkshire terriers, I hauled my stuff to the nearest pay phone and called Sarah.

“Schmanders! You're here!” she shrieked. “Where are you? Don't move. I'm coming right down.”

Within forty-five seconds, she'd flown down from her office and located me on the corner. “It's so good to see you!” she said, giving me a huge hug. “I figured you'd have this big ol' mama jamma bag, so I asked Pete if he could pick us up and drive us home.”

“Perfect,” I said, relieved to avoid the subway. “Wait…Pete's driving?”

“Oh, I didn't tell you? We bought a car!” Sarah beamed.

“Congrats, Sar! Sounds like you guys are really moving up in the world.”

“Yeah, right. We're really living large.” She made a face as she whirled her mermaid-length hair up into a messy twist. As usual, she had pulled together some funky-chic outfit that would seem over the top on me but looked amazing on her five-foot nine-inch supermodel frame.

“Yo! Ladies! Need a lift?” Pete pulled up to the curb across from us in a red Honda Civic hatchback.

“Hey, babe.” Sarah opened the passenger side door and gave Pete a kiss. “Look who showed up at my office. Can we keep her? Can we?”

“Hmm, I'll have to think about that,” he said, tossing my pack into the trunk. “So, what's up, Miss World Traveler? Hope you're hungry, because I've been smoking ribs for half the afternoon.”

As I'd recently discovered, in addition to his job as a psychotherapist and devoted husband, Pete was also an award-winning barbecue champ. On summer weekends, he and Sarah hauled several grills and smokers up and down the East Coast, competing for prizes with their team, Notorious BBQ. I won't lie: part of the appeal of staying with my married friends was the prospect of their nightly gourmet dinners.

Pete wasn't kidding. As soon as he nudged open their front door twenty minutes later, the sweet, charred scent of caramelized meat hit my nose and sent my taste buds into mouth-watering overdrive. It was all I could do not to rip off the tinfoil covering the plates, grab a piece of pork, and tear into it like a wild animal.

“Why don't you get settled in, cleaned up, or whatever, and we'll put everything out for dinner,” Sarah proposed. “It'll just be a few minutes.”

Stashing my bags near the futon (already made up with sheets and pillows), I couldn't help but feel a bit like Pete and Sarah's grungy kid who'd just showed up from two months of summer camp. I even had a big bag full of stinky laundry.

Even though she was two years younger than I, Sarah had always been the more mature one in our relationship. Giving myself a little tour of her very grown-up, very couple-y new place, it struck me just how differently our lives had evolved since college.

While I'd spent my early years in the city jump-starting my career, falling for (and subsequently disentangling myself from) my first very serious boyfriend, whirling through a new roster of guys, and eventually abandoning city life to go traveling, Sarah had lived more deliberately. After college, she'd moved to Manhattan, become an interior designer at an Upper East Side firm, met the love of her life, had a gorgeous destination wedding in Puerto Rico, bought a brownstone in Brooklyn, and landscaped the backyard that I was now wandering through. Sarah's life seemed as immaculately, stylishly in order as a display window at Barney's, while mine still looked as scattered and disordered as a sale rack at T.J. Maxx.

It wasn't that I felt envious of her choices or wished I'd done things differently. If I'd gotten married in my midtwenties like Sarah, I certainly wouldn't be traveling the globe with two friends, on my way to Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. But sometimes, like right now, I wondered what it might be like to walk in my friend's Marc Jacobs flats, just for a day…

 

S
omeone had tried to pull the front door shut as quietly as possible, but the click of metal snapped me awake. Sliding off the futon, I stumbled into the kitchen and found that Sarah had left a pot of coffee warming for me and a note next to it:
“AP—Home by eight or so. Help yourself to anything in fridge. BTW, we keep cigs in the freezer for guests, so feel free. Have a fun first day back in town!—Sar.”

Funny. I hadn't smoked much since we'd been roommates during her first year in New York, but it was just like Sarah to remember my tastes (and bad habits).

So what now? Except for the spinning of the ceiling fan above the table, the room was completely quiet. I realized I'd be alone all day. It was the first time that had happened in months. I took a seat in one of the four empty chairs and plotted what to do with myself.

When we'd booked these tickets home, I'd decided against sending an e-mail to friends to let them know I'd be back. It felt disingenuous to tell everyone I'd be gone for an entire year just to roll back into town two months later. It would be better if I stayed out of sight and used these borrowed days to catch up on all the writing I hadn't done in South America.

While I'd been away, I'd filled almost an entire notebook with half-fleshed-out ideas for pitches but had been growing too self-conscious to spend the hours necessary to transform them into full-fledged articles. I knew Holly didn't care when I slipped off with the laptop stashed inside my day pack—she'd brought her own to write her
For Me
column—but I couldn't pretend that Jen was indifferent.

Jen and I had diffused some of the tension between us in Rio, but it was clear that we still had a serious difference of opinion over working on the road. For me, crafting stories was a creative outlet, another tool for interpreting the world around me, but Jen had emerged as a travel purist. She believed the best way to experience a country was to live, eat, breathe, and sleep entirely in the moment—no electronics necessary.

Getting up to pour myself a bowl of Kashi Good Friends cereal, I wondered if Jen and I would ever see eye to eye on this
issue. Things between us had come to a head during our last week in Brazil, as the final editing deadline for our Web site article approached. It had taken us days longer to complete it than we'd expected, forcing us to spend afternoons hunkered over the laptop rather than exploring the islands off the coast of Bahia. After that, even I had to admit that taking on such a labor-intensive project while traveling might have been a mistake.

I knew Jen's suggestion to give up writing and assignments for a while made sense. Maybe I'd even have tried things her way if we had been on a two-week vacation. But we'd committed to this journey for an entire year, and I wasn't prepared to sever ties with the professional contacts I'd worked so hard to establish. Did I really need to disappear off the radar just so I could free up another hour or two each day for self-exploration? I couldn't understand setting aside my travel writing aspirations just when I begun having travels to write about.

Fired up and ready to get to work, I placed my cereal bowl and coffee mug next to Sarah's and Pete's in the sink and went over to my day pack to retrieve the laptop buried inside. I had a long, uninterrupted stretch of time in front of me, and I was determined to use it.

 

I
'm not sure how things went so wrong, so quickly.

My first few days in Brooklyn were exactly what I needed. I reveled in the newfound autonomy. I got a ton of work accomplished—pitches written, e-mails answered, blogs posted—but the novelty of so much solitude wore thin pretty quickly.

On day three, I had trouble getting motivated. By day five, I'd grown distracted and restless. I constantly leapt up to pour more coffee. Or to make a snack. Or to wash the dishes (lest Pete and Sarah find me a bad houseguest). Instead of writing, I
checked my e-mail obsessively. While I'd been hoping to get responses from editors, my only messages were “friend requests” for some Web site I'd never heard of, called Facebook.

When I'd started getting these messages several weeks earlier, I'd figured they were just spam and deleted them. Now, starving for distraction, I grabbed another cup of coffee, created a profile, and accepted the fifty or so requests I had waiting.

Within minutes, any plans I'd had to work that Friday were totally abandoned. I was dragged into a black hole of procrastination, devouring every scrap of information that my old friends from high school and college had posted on their home pages. I hadn't spoken with some of them since the day we'd graduated, but now I was eagerly learning every lurid detail of their adult lives.

The first pictures I saw were of my friend Celeste getting married on the steps of the Don Cesar Beach Resort, not far from where we'd grown up. Then the cute guy I'd sat next to in high school English holding his wife and their baby. My best friend from gymnastics as a kid—who now had a few kids herself.

Scrolling through the profiles, I was hit right and left with news of engagements and weddings and babies. I should have been happy for them, thrilled even. But sitting there in Pete and Sarah's empty living room, with the fan creaking and clicking overhead, I felt a kind of heaviness settling upon my chest.

Somehow, while I'd been distracted by other things—like getting on my feet in the city or inching up the magazine masthead—girls I'd once had slumber parties with had proceeded to grow up and settle down. I knew twenty-eight wasn't a shockingly young age to start a family, but because I live in Manhattan's bubble of eternal youth, it was easy to trick myself into thinking that I had years before marriage and kids would enter the picture. After all, if thirtysomething career women in New
York were still going out, sipping Cosmos, and dating a new guy every week, I still had plenty of time to get serious—right?

I clicked through several more profiles created by friends and colleagues in the city (who, thank God, were still single). By the time I'd worked through the list, there was still one person from my past whom I had to find, someone I'd been thinking about ever since we'd left for Lima back in June.

I wanted to know what had happened to Jason.

I'd started dating him about five months before the girls and I were scheduled to start our RTW trip. We'd both agreed in the beginning that it couldn't possibly turn into anything serious, but we both fell a little harder than either of us had expected to. He was the first guy I'd felt such a strong connection with since Baker.

In tears during our breakup, Jason promised to keep in touch and said that if we were both still available after I returned, we could try to pick up right where we'd left off. He'd sent me an e-mail shortly after we arrived at Loki hostel, which I took as a good sign. Maybe we
could
keep the door open for a relationship down the road.

We'd traded a few newsy e-mails since then, but something had definitely gone wrong after I'd sent a note saying that I'd be coming back through New York in August. That's when he'd just…evaporated. I couldn't figure out if he'd gotten busy or just missed my e-mail. So I'd sent him a second, ever-so-casual note on the day I'd arrived back in Brooklyn, asking him if he'd like to hang out.

Digital silence.

At first I'd been disappointed. Then pissed. I mean, we'd been in a relationship, and he'd been the first to reach out after I left—why was he stonewalling me now?

After checking his old MySpace page, it took me all of 1.3 seconds to figure out why I hadn't gotten a reply. There, right next to a new photo of Jason dressed in some ridiculous
sailor's outfit and faux mustache (which I seriously hoped was a costume), were the words: “Status: In a Relationship.” A little more scrolling revealed several gushy messages from some new GF, a mousy brunette who looked as if she'd yet to graduate college. And they'd posted a handful of disgustingly cute photos together. In one he was posed behind her as she held a puppy in her arms. A goddamn puppy?!