The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (11 page)

All lies! Every word. (Except the part about kangaroos kicking you in the gut—that happens.) All this misinformation about Australia is compliments of Carly, who randomly dropped these faux facts in Galway, apparently for her own amusement. Now, four and a half months was long enough to discover the Irish's impressive gift of spouting complete bullshit with a perfect poker face. (Eileen once told a group of wide-eyed American college students that she had been to America only once, since it was such a long swim.) But Carly is the only Australian I know, and I consider us friends, which in America means she should have dissolved into sheepish giggles at some point. But she didn't. Thus, her tales have morphed into myth since we first met. So when I call her a few weeks before my October departure date, asking to be reminded again what to do in the event of a hoop-snake confrontation, she laughs so hard she starts to choke. “Mate! You don't still believe that, do you?”

However, just because these particular gems are untrue doesn't mean Australia is anything like Ireland, a country with no snakes (apparently, Saint Patrick drove them all away) or major variations in the temperature (the only way to tell the difference between summer and winter is to measure the temperature
of the rains, so the saying goes), whose tidy green belly can be traversed over the course of a leisurely afternoon. Although opinions vary some, it is generally agreed that Australia is home to at least six of the world's ten deadliest snakes. There are also the saltwater and freshwater crocodiles (“freshies” are less dangerous than “salties”—which aren't considered man-eaters but will happily take a nip/tuck here or there if bothered; so go the distinctions one must comfort herself with in Australia). As part of their standard coursework, school-age Australians learn not only how to navigate colossal, pounding ocean waves but also strategies for surviving a shark attack. Amazingly, a little unassuming guy, the box jellyfish, is quietly responsible for more deaths in Australia than snakes, sharks, and saltwater crocodiles combined. Perhaps most remarkable, the deadliest creature of all in Australia is—wait for it—the gum tree. That's right, a
tree.
Gum trees practice a form of triage where they cut off the water supply to one of their limbs if there is a drought, and there is always a drought in Australia. Eventually, the spurned branch dies and, with alarming frequency, breaks off and whooshes down onto an unsuspecting camper fast asleep in her tent, or crashes through the roof of a pensioner who has just settled in for a relaxing cup of tea.

But I don't know any of this yet. The only thing I really know about Australia once Carly has dispelled her tall tales is that it is a great open expanse of land, as big as the United States with one eighteenth the population. Ireland was a tiny island a mere jaunt across the pond, but it will take almost twenty-four hours to reach Australia. Somewhere over the Pacific, I'll lose an entire day and, an ever trippier feat, on the way back arrive earlier than I left. In Ireland, I was able to escape for a while, but in a place like Australia, I might truly be able to disappear.

A few weeks before my twenty-second birthday, I break the news to my parents that I'm leaving again.

“And then what?” my father asks.

I answer his question with one of my own. “Who knows?” I shrug and look up at the ceiling, as in “only the universe holds those heavy secrets, man.” I say, “I'm only twenty-one years old.”

These are Carly's words tumbling out, but treating my father like an oppressive regime attempting to get me to fall in line is easier than saying “I don't know.” All I know is that I want to leave again, though this time it feels distinctly more like running toward something than running away.

My parents are understandably confused, as anyone would be when caught in the whirlwind of another human being's one-eighty. Who can blame them? Australia constitutes an even bigger rebellion than Ireland for me because I have my degree now, though I have no idea what to do with it other than let my mother frame it, then allocate it to one of the cardboard boxes in her basement, storing sections of my life. Still, I'm a bona fide college graduate and can officially start my real life, whatever that means. And real life does not appear to be four months in Australia. Plus, contrary to my general conversion to Carly's mantra, “What's the rush?,” a part of me does worry about falling behind my peers, about further divesting myself of material goods through travel at the same moment when they are beginning to accumulate apartments and careers and relationships. I have no boyfriend. No childhood home to return to. No grown-up job offers (no doubt because I haven't applied for any). And now no degree to finish. I'm completely untethered. There is the smallest possibility that when I go to Australia, I might float away forever.

Despite their concerns, both of my parents, as always, find ways to support me. My mother donates frequent-flier miles. She cuts up thousands of tiny squares of paper—one for each mile—and
puts them all in a little plastic bubble container like the ones they hand out at weddings. When I open it, white confetti spills like snow into my lap. My father's graduation gift is five hundred dollars, and I have fifteen hundred saved in tips, enough to get me through my first month if the Sydney job market proves as difficult as the Galway one.

In certain ways, leaving is easier this time. I've proved that I can navigate new cities, cobble together a living, and convince a foreign bank to give me an account. (In Ireland this endless process involved stacks of documents from my landlord and employer, plus testimony from everyone I knew that I did, in fact, exist.) After Carly picks me up from the airport, I'll stay with her family for a few days while I get my bearings and find a cheap apartment. No deranged Irishman will stumble through my bedroom door at four
A.M.
My load is physically lighter, too. I exchanged Big Red for more practical luggage: one carry-on black suitcase and a real backpacker's backpack, shiny silver and black. It represents a change in the way I move in the world—a new mobility.

Carly is waiting for me after I make it through customs. She emerges from between two tall men in suits, remarkably transformed since we said goodbye in Galway a year ago. Gone is her uniform of holey khakis, drab wool sweaters and muddy sneakers. Now she's clad in neon-green shorts and a thin cotton tank top with
VOLCOM
splashed across her chest in big blue letters. Her formerly long, limp hair has been cut short; stylish layers frame her heart-shaped face. But it's not her haircut and outfit that make her unrecognizable for a few disorienting seconds. She has lost weight, a good fifteen pounds. She hugs me with tan, sculpted arms. I've missed this girl.

“Welcome to Australia!” she says. “Let's get out of this bloody airport.”

By the time we reach her car, I'm sweating. I flip my shoulder-length hair up into a bun, roll up my jeans. We throw my bags into the trunk (the “boot” here), then Carly yanks off her flip-flops and tosses them through an open window into the backseat of her little red Barina.

“Much better,” she sighs, as if the flimsy half inch of rubber between her and the ground were as constricting as Chinese foot-binding. She pushes in the clutch and brake with bare feet, throws the car in reverse. I've never seen anyone drive without shoes. I want to point this out, but I know I'll come across as prim and worried, so instead I say, “I can't drive a stick shift.”

“It's called a manual, mate. ‘Stick shift' is a bit rude.”

In Ireland I learned that “rude” can mean vulgar. After my first shift at the Hole in the Wall, I made the mistake of asking if anyone could give me a ride home instead of a lift home, essentially propositioning the entire male staff. It had taken a few confusing moments and a sympathetic girl bartender for me to realize my mistake. Now it takes me only a second to realize I've used a euphemism for male genitalia.

The Sydney sun is relentless. Growing up in upstate New York, one of the grayest parts of the U.S., meant whole weeks might pass with no more than a fleeting ray of light, a momentary sun escape before it was swallowed up again by dense, omnipresent clouds. In middle school, my friends and I heard a rumor that people who overdid the sunbathing in places like California and Florida were often instructed by their doctors to move to either Seattle or Syracuse, the same way Victorian patients were once encouraged to depart for the country to cure their urban ailments. We never verified these details. We didn't need to. Every day we saw the effects of a sunless city on people's dispositions. When you're little, you adapt pretty easily to your environment (especially when you have no point of comparison), but some of the adults we knew struggled mightily. Tanning was an incredibly popular antidote, and a few of my friends'
parents forever looked like they had just returned from the Caribbean, their brown faces oddly out of place shoveling a foot of snow from their driveway or bundled inside a heavy fleece jacket at the supermarket.

“Check it out.” Carly sticks her right arm out the open window to point. She smiles broadly, waiting for my reaction. Light ricochets off the Opera House's enormous sail-like appendages, which yawn and stretch toward the sky. The striking centerpiece of the city is set out on its own little tip of the harbor, and boats race past, leaving frothy white streaks. The color of the ocean is what could only be called Sydney blue, a soft, shimmering, incandescent shade that is so inviting, the bodily urge to dive in is overwhelming. It hits me that Carly's drastic physical change mirrors her environmental one. After spending your entire life in a place that virtually bathes you in beauty and light, how could she fail to be depressed in lively but granite-sky Galway? Being a die-hard bookworm, and later bar worm, I was at home in a place where the rain gives you an almost daily excuse to avoid any outdoor excursions, not to mention the fact that the most glamorous body of water in my childhood was the Erie Canal. But Carly dreaded those long, chilly days cooped up on an island where even the ocean held no appeal.

Now we are up and over the Harbour Bridge, where Carly teases me about the roo-shooers again, Sydney receding in the distance. Carly's family lives twenty minutes north in a suburb called Forestville. The landscape is greener than I expected. Ridiculously, I had imagined the whole country as one great desert, Australians camped out like Bedouins along the way. On the side of the road, a sign announces that the fire danger today is high, greater than low or moderate but not as treacherous as very high or extreme. The decades-long drought has intensified over the past four weeks. You have to wash your car on the grass to conserve water.

Carly's family lives in a typical suburban house. It's two stories,
cream with a green roof. But the backyard proves this is where the points of reference to the Northeast neighborhoods of my childhood end. There are three robust palm trees Carly's parents planted when they moved in over twenty years ago. A hammock droops leisurely between them. All sorts of exotic flowers are in bloom: hibiscus, hydrangea, bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, daises, may. Ripening fruit dots the mandarin, lemon, and orange trees. A blue-tongued lizard who lives under the rectangular pool is currently sunning herself on a section of concrete. A faint buzzing sound, crickets and other creatures I cannot yet identify, hums through the air, giving me the sense that the whole place is vibrating, teeming.

Sebastian, the family Maltese, greets us at the door. He licks my ankle once, then sprints away.

“Poor Sebby. He misses Mike,” Carly says.

We walk through the carpeted hallway, past her younger brother Steve's room, an explosion of T-shirts and smells not entirely unlike Patchi and Portu's man-cave back in Ireland. In the kitchen, I freeze. Carly's mom is naked.

Carly chuckles. “Mum and her friends made that calendar to raise money for a charity.”

“No
way
,” I whisper in awe.

My own mother won't even wear a swimsuit without one of those little matching skirts, much less go the Full Monty for strangers. Even though it is the beginning of October, Muriel is still on display in all her September glory, looking wistfully over her bent knee against an ocean backdrop.

“Dad won't change the month,” Carly explains before I have a chance to ask.

She leads the way to Mike's currently unoccupied bedroom. It's next to Carly's, with a wardrobe that abuts hers. It smells like fresh linens. All I see is the bed. I zoom in on the pillows, soft and plump. “Thanks, Carlz,” I slur, dropping my backpack.

Sebby plants himself in the doorway. He cocks his head to one
side, a look that says “And now you're sleeping in his room?” before promptly dismissing himself again.

“Are you tired, mate?” Carly asks me. “Why don't you have a little lie-down? I'll give you the grand tour when you wake up.”

I drop heavily onto the edge of the bed. “I'll just rest my eyes for a few minutes.”