The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (5 page)

Mostly, though, they stayed downstairs while I practiced, my mother making dinner and my father grading papers. When I practiced, I willed the music to reach them. I imagined the melodies drifting down the stairs and casting a happy spell over them like a net. Some days I didn't feel like practicing or didn't want to practice as long as I knew I must. But still I stayed up in that room for the requisite hours, whiling away the time with a book or journal. I didn't want to disappoint them. I wanted to be good. At the same time I knew that, although they loved music, classical viola was a foreign thing to them, to a large degree out of their grasp. And a secret part of me thrilled that it was all mine.

Like Galway itself, the hostel where I'm staying is smaller and less intimidating than the one in Dublin. The entrance archway is painted pale pink, and flower boxes sprout on the windowsills above it. Unlike in Dublin, my reservation not only exists but is extremely specific. I'm staying in room 114 in Bed 1. I insert my key into the door with a
RESIDENTS ONLY
sign and thankfully navigate only one flight of stairs to reach my room. Still I struggle to manage Big Red, hastily repacked this morning before my quick departure from Dublin.

My new hostel room is packed with four bunk beds. I booked an eight-bed dorm room this time instead of a four-bed one in the hopes of increasing my chances of girl roommates. Right now the room is blissfully empty, but I can tell from various items—hairbrushes,
a pink T-shirt, wedge-heeled sandals—that there are girls staying here. Again I wonder about the mysteriously small backpacks parked all over. Where are these travelers headed and for how long? I don't think of myself as one of them, just a girl in Ireland with a ridiculously oversize suitcase.

I immediately feel more at home in Galway than I did in Dublin. No, not at home, exactly, but somewhere simultaneously foreign and intrinsically comfortable. There's no pleasant Canadian to keep me company, but I realize I actually want to go out and explore the cobblestone streets, pop into one of the unfamiliar bookstores, grab a floury pastry at the bakery I passed on the walk here. Plus, I need to start looking for a job and an apartment. This hostel is a little less expensive than the one in Dublin, but not much. If I budget twenty euros a day for food and twelve for my lower bunk bed, I have about two weeks before I go broke.

Galway's nickname is City of the Tribes, after the fourteen merchant families who bandied it about during the Norman era. It became the foremost Irish port for trade with France and Spain during the Middle Ages and the place where, many years later, George Moore traveled to meet up with William Butler Yeats to collaborate on a play. (I know this last random fact because I once randomly came across a diary entry of Moore's during this trip in which he called Yeats's laugh “one of the most melancholy things in the world,” a spectacularly depressing description that has stuck with me.) Only a few feet from my hostel, the fast-flowing River Corrib gushes by, and if you turn left, you'll hit the Spanish Arch, an extension of the imposing, protective city walls that were constructed in the 1500s. If you look across the water from this point, you can see what's left of the Claddagh, an old fishing village that used to be all thatched cottages and Gaelic speakers and is these days know for its signature rings.

Perhaps I'm distractedly mulling over Galway's history, or examining
the quaint shops and already filling pubs, or pondering how Ireland has enough old castles that it can convert the extras into banks, but one minute I am confidently wandering my new streets and the next a pigeon flies straight into my forehead and knocks me to the ground. I'm sitting dazed on the cobblestones when a few kindly old Irish gentlemen, marveling at the impressive statistical improbability of such a thing happening, help me to my feet.

“You all right, love?” one asks.

“Did that seriously just happen?” I say.

“He got you bang on!” which in Ireland means right square in the bull's-eye that apparently is my face.

It's a startling beginning to an otherwise drowsy day. I walk. I window-shop. I stop by that bakery for a piece of brick-dense Irish soda bread. And I shyly enter a few bars and restaurants to ask if they're hiring and hand over my carefully printed résumés, which are regarded with the same level of scrutiny one might a coaster.

“Come back in three weeks,” they say, or “Try next door.”

The sun emerges only in weak spurts, but it stops drizzling by late afternoon. Turns out it doesn't rain all day long in Ireland, as I had imagined initially, but it does rain for a portion great or small of each day, leaving one to conclude that being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going. It's chilly, more like early spring back home than summer, and I wrap myself in my heaviest wool sweater. When my stomach begins growling, I follow the delicious fish smell near my hostel to its source, McDonaghs, and order fish and chips to go. I douse my meal in vinegar, which, unlike the miniature packets of ketchup and tartar sauce, is plentiful and free. I've never had to calculate my portions so precisely, have never had to worry about how spending a measly euro on condiments will strain my meager budget.

Tucked away once again in my still thankfully empty room, I drag a chair up to the small square window. I unwrap my dinner
and balance the contents on my lap. Already grease is starting to seep through the newspaper wrapping. Inside a deep, rich batter hides a piece of light, flaky cod. Thick potato wedges are getting deliciously soggy in the vinegar. The meal sinks like a stone in my stomach, just the thing after a long day wandering around a damp city. It's the end of my first whole day truly alone in Ireland, and even though I can tell already that I fit better in Galway than in Dublin, I'm lonely. Again I consider what exactly I'm doing here.

Over the next week, I meet other travelers staying in the hostel, and some of my loneliness dissipates. First there's Jeff. When I open my eyes the next morning, he is on his stomach reading in the bunk bed across from me, apparently having just exited an Abercrombie & Fitch billboard—chiseled arms, thick hair, freckles on his tanned neck.

We run into each other in the common room later in the day. I've been watching TV for an hour with two girls I don't know. They didn't say anything more than “hey” when I entered the room, but they didn't tell me to leave, either. I had this idea in my head that some guests in the hostel “owned” certain rooms, like the really popular girls in middle school owned certain lunch tables, but it's not true. Anyone can sit on the beat-up couch and watch TV. Nobody stays in hostels long enough to lay claim to anything, nor is it something anyone is interested in. There are hostels I'll encounter later on in my travels where people hole up for weeks and months at a time, but this one, like most of them, is simply a brief stop on the way to somewhere else.

“You're in my room, right?” Jeff asks.

I nod.

“If you're not doing anything, I'm going out for drinks with my friends. Do you want to come?”

I don't know how long you have to be celibate before people
assume you're doing it on purpose, but whatever the threshold is, I have surely passed it. I haven't so much as kissed anyone in over a year, since I shouted “Good riddance!” as my ex-boyfriend stomped away from our fifth tequila-fueled breakup. All of that changes my first night out in Galway. Jeff and I make out enthusiastically in the hostel's hallway, in that pawing, slurred way that seems so sexy when you're hammered, until we get caught by security cameras. A cryptic Big Brother voice rasps through an intercom: “Guys, we can see you down here.”

In the morning Abercrombie & Fitch, like Matt the Canadian before him, is gone before I can say goodbye. This is fine by me, because I'm pitifully hungover. And embarrassed. I wait until all of my roommates leave before sheepishly sneaking out of the room.

The days begin to drift by. Late mornings I traipse around Galway, unsuccessfully applying for jobs. Every afternoon I wind up at a little café near St. Augustine Church, a few blocks from the busy main street. Here I always order the same sandwich—avocado and sun-dried tomato—and a cup of coffee, wolfing it down after subsisting until then on the hostel's free breakfast. Sometimes I leave after an hour or so, but often I stay two, three, or even four hours, eventually purchasing a scone to quell my guilt for taking up a table so long. I read or write or daydream or just people-watch, imagining the lives of passersby.

If ever there was a time before now when I woke up thinking, Now, is it Wednesday or Thursday?, I don't remember it. Since I was little, my schedule has been as regimented as soldiers marching down the lane, but not in Galway. New roommates chug like a locomotive through the hostel. Each day is a series of maneuvers around strange bodies to get in and out. At night I latch on to whatever new group has arrived and go out drinking with them. There's Paula and Marcel, beautiful traveling cousins from Puerto Rico; Michael, an American who has returned to Galway to pursue an Irish ex-girlfriend (I met her, and boy, is she out of
his league, I'm sorry to say); three Brits here for a quick weekend holiday; and many, many more who are traveling for weeks, months, or years at a time. We usually end up in a dim multilevel pub called the Quays (which I idiotically pronounce “kways” instead of “keys” for five days until someone finally corrects me). The interior was imported from a French medieval church, complete with stained-glass windows and rickety pews. It's a place with different moods. You can stand in the middle of a churning bar crowd or tuck yourself away at one of the tables in the corner. It stays open far later than most bars, which in Ireland close by midnight so you can get tipsy and still fit in a full eight hours of sleep before work the next morning. Often I find myself stumbling home at two or three or four in the morning—no school or job to stop me. But the best thing about the pub is the music. Almost every pub we patronize has live music multiple nights a week, and the Quays is no exception.

Music is predictable. It is exact. No matter your interpretation—the tempo or volume or speed of your vibrato—a B flat is a B flat is a B flat. This was infinitely appealing for an anxious, watchful, perfectionist little girl who desperately needed the world to make sense, for things to be orderly. Girls like me choose horses, or eating disorders, or literature—we choose any number of worlds within which to disappear, but that dangerous energy has to go somewhere. For me it was music.

The passion that inhabited me while playing—the way that bodies sway in time, eyes close, chests rise and fall—came naturally. And the physical act of learning to play the viola itself was a methodical process. It was a formula. Practice and you get better. Practice longer and you get better faster. As with school, I knew the rules. My relationship with music was straightforward. I wanted to play the viola, and it seemed to want me to play it. We were in harmony.

Until my freshman year of music school. In college I practiced and practiced and practiced, emerging from my cavelike studio in
the basement of the music building at the oddest hours. I was working harder than ever, but I realized in music school, surrounded by all these other amazing musicians, that I was no longer the best. Not now. Probably not ever. This hard truth took my breath away.

Music school was a seismic event that cracked my tough exterior, and apparently, my core was pure liquid terror. A few weeks into the semester, I started blacking out. I don't mean that I fainted during an actual performance, just that afterward I couldn't remember anything about it. When I played well, I was unable to explain it, as I was equally unable to explain my increasing failures. My body hurt all the time, and I no longer held my viola with the effortless adoration I used to. All my preparation was having the confusing, unpleasant effect of slowly but steadily draining my desire; the pleasure dripped out of my body like a leaky faucet I couldn't fix. Since I practiced so much—four, five, six hours a day—the skin under the left side of my chin was rubbed raw. It was red and unpleasantly thin to the touch, like an old woman's arm. After a few hours of playing, my shoulder would start to creep up, compensating for my weak chin. My back was sore and slightly hunched, and my neck protested my insistence on turning my eyes to face my fingers. I knew that I shouldn't need to watch them race along the strings. They're meant to find the notes feelingly, like a blind person, but I no longer trusted myself.

In Galway, at night, in the fiddle-soaked pubs, I can forget all this for a while. When I happen past a violinist in the street during the sober day, I feel a sharp pinch of sadness. I am full of regrets about giving up music. If I stand there listening for too long, I actually begin to feel a bit nauseated—as if the street is spinning. But there is something different about the nighttime bar music filled with exuberant fiddling and sweet guitars. The alcohol
miraculously strips away the harshest feelings I harbor against myself, and I can sink down bodily into the melodies again without all the mental angst. I haven't been able to do that in the longest time. So I drink to be social. I drink to bandage my bruised ego after another day of fruitless job applications. But most of all, I drink to feel music again—to drown in it.

I'm living a life in Galway that's entirely unfamiliar from the one I left back home. Surrounded by strangers in a foreign land, where no one knows or cares why I'm here or where I'm headed next, it occurs to me that I can completely reinvent myself. And Ireland me would like another Guinness, please.

I have not contacted my parents since shooting off a brief email my first day in Galway, nearly a week ago. My father has written me numerous times since then. In each subsequent message, the all caps and exclamation points have multiplied.