The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (14 page)

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.

Muriel and I exchange ideas—mine burgeoning and hers long-solidified—about healthcare, education, war, and travel, issues that, before now, I've barely considered. The world, of course, has changed dramatically since 9/11, and I'm of the right age and disposition to start giving this some thought, especially ensconced in a country with a perspective different from America's.

The current Howard government has sent Australian troops to support the war effort, a development increasingly unpopular with the people. While they are offering this assistance, Australians
find themselves (like other nationalities) under increasing scrutiny when they enter the U.S., and this further irks the nation of avid travelers. Headlines abound:
ATTENTION
,
PASSENGERS
:
QUEUING FOR THE LOO IS FORBIDDEN FOR 14 HOURS,
describing the new prohibitions against congregating near the bathroom during the fourteen-hour flight from the United States to Australia, and
SECURITY RANKING FOR ALL U
.
S
.
TRAVELERS
, outlining how all travelers boarding at U.S. airports will be given a score and color that rank their perceived threat to the aircraft.

“One day we'll all be citizens of the world! No more passports. No more visas,” Muriel declares one tipsy evening. We clink our wineglasses together, pleased to have solved many of the world's most pressing problems at the kitchen table.

Sometimes Carly meets me at Aki's after work. Damien, a skinny bartender, sneaks us the cheapest bottle of wine the restaurant sells, and we find some empty seats down at the edge of the wharf, past the slew of seafood restaurants offering high-priced oysters and king prawns.

Carly sighs. “I'm so sick of Sydney.”

“Sick of Sydney?” It seems impossible. To me, Sydney is an Eden. The sun wraps you in its warmth like an old baby blanket. Sure, it's a baby blanket likely to give you skin cancer, but after twenty-one years on the overcast East Coast, I'm willing to take my chances. The ocean is such a glittering shade of blue that I can't bear the thought of the murky, freezing Atlantic back home. We're so close to a handful of beaches that we swim in the ocean almost daily, an insane luxury. The first few times I got pulled under by gargantuan frothy waves, but I've learned how to duck below the water when they crash overhead. I swim farther and farther out, where the water grows calmer.

Swimming lessons are compulsory for all schoolchildren here, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of enthusiastic kids in matching red swimsuits out for their ocean recess. Playing dodgeball in the dead grass or sliding down a greasy fireman's pole set up in the
middle of an uninspired concrete playground, both activities I cherished in elementary school, seem a bit depressing when viewed through Australian sunnies. I'm settling in nicely to Sydney life. My normally pale white skin has reached back to what must be some long-lost Mediterranean roots and darkened admirably. My nose has broken out in freckles, something it hasn't done since the carefree summer vacations I spent at Club Med with my parents when I was a little kid. How could Carly possibly be sick of Sydney, a place I feel like staying forever.

“I need to go somewhere new,” she says.

If my own restlessness is a dull itch I can't quite scratch, Carly's is a gaping, bloody wound that refuses to heal. No matter how she puts pressure on it, in Bangkok or Marrakech or Prague, within a few days of her return to Sydney, it breaks wide open, the monotony of her native land gushing forth.

Carly has been home for a few months when I turn up in Sydney. She hasn't saved up enough money for another trip, but she's aching to hit the road. In the meantime, her reentry into Australian life has been bumpy. She's addicted to the rush of being a foreigner: new cities, new people, new food, new languages. Australia marks a return to the predictable—and a place where she doesn't quite fit anymore.

Carly has known for a long time that Sydney is not her place in the world, just as I have always suspected Syracuse, New York, isn't mine. The geographies of our childhoods don't quite suit either of us, something we have in common. But she's more displaced than usual after her travels. Everything here is the same, or so it seems to her, while she is definitely different after her journey. Her friends can't relate to her experiences abroad because they haven't traveled yet, so she's greeted by sharp loneliness back in Sydney.

“You're kind of the only person who gets me,” she says.

I am in that same place, where my ideas and experiences and desires are expanding. I'm in that traveler's space with her.

Carly longs to be back in the world of backpackers, bohemians whose values differ from those of the typical middle-class Northern Beaches Australian girl. She has never been compelled by the traditional trajectory of a short stint abroad, then back to Australia for the beach lifestyle: relaxed, comfortable, and predictable. She knows that her gap year was only the tip of the travel iceberg for her, and she's desperate for more adventure. Her mates are living a life of health, sun, and the day-to-day, which is all well and good, but Carly wants more of a challenge. Her friends are content in this environment, but she gained a more global perspective from meeting all sorts of travelers abroad. She misses talking world politics and philosophy. And she has become quite a minimalist, so it's hard to refocus on material desires. Although Carly would always have a shared history with them, she was out of sync with her childhood friends, and with Australia.