The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost

by Rachel Friedman

  “Want a cigarette?” Carly asks.

  I’ve been noncommittally trying to quit for good since high school, when smoking was a statement of coolness unconnected to slight inconveniences like lung cancer, but I am auditioning for the role of the perfect roommate.

  “Definitely.”

  We head outside. Carly props one of the decrepit chairs against the wall, then hoists herself up on top. I follow her. It takes us several tries to light our cigarettes with a pack of graying matches. We puff into the dusk and watch a swan family paddle purposefully downstream.

  “See that railing?” she asks. A short distance to our right, a yellow guardrail lines the edge of the water. “Kayakers launch themselves off it.” She shakes her head. “It’s bloody freezing in this country. Fucking lunatics.”

  “Totally.”

  I will agree with whatever you say. Just let me move in.

  After another cigarette, we climb down to tour the rest of the apartment which is no more than a second bedroom that the two absent male roommates share, a grungy bathroom, and a small kitchen/living room. A washer is hooked up next to the sink. Wet socks and jeans droop from a clothesline suspended across the length of the apartment. In the damp Irish weather, it takes two or three days for anything to dry.

  Carly plops down on the thrift-store leatherette couch, one corner covered in brown crumbs that bounce when she sits. I take the blue corduroy armchair stained with who knows what.

  “The two guys who live here are decent blokes,” Carly says. “Portu can be a little full on. Within five minutes, he’ll be telling you that Spanish men are the world’s best lovers. But he’s harmless. Patchi is from Basque Country. He’s on holiday in Scotland right now. He’s on the dole, that one, but not because he needs to be. It’s just more than he would make doing anything else. Enough to go on holiday, right. And he’s lazy. Bugger it. If I could get the dole, I’d take it, too. Bloody European Union.”

  She shakes her head. I shake mine, too, though I have no clue what we’re talking about.

  A few hours later, I’m moving in with three strangers.

  “Bloody hell,” Carly exclaims when I wheel Big Red into our bedroom. “That thing’s massive.”

  A few days later, a second small miracle occurs. I get offered a few shifts a week at a nightclub where I deposited one of the hundred or so job applications I’ve littered throughout Galway.

  “You know how to work a till, right?” the broad-shouldered manager inquired at my brief interview.

  “Of course,” I said, nodding with supreme confidence.

  Like being “on glasses,” I don’t let on I have no idea what a till is, much less how it functions. Unlike the pub, which is a dive but turns out to be a lively, friendly student dive once the sun goes down, the club is downright seedy. At the Hole in the Wall, I show up in ratty jeans and any T-shirt I don’t mind stinking of beer for the rest of its natural life, but my club uniform is circulation-impairing black pants and a club-issued doily of a top that barely reaches my belly button.

  “I think it’s too small,” I tell the owner, one hand instinctively covering my stomach.

  “No love, it’s perfect.” He winks and shoos me upstairs.

  I bartend from ten P.M. to four A.M., mixing cocktails and fumbling with the till, which luckily turns out simply to be the cash register. The club is three stories with ugly black-and-white-striped walls and plush round red seats. Each floor is darker and louder than the last, until finally at the top, you can barely see your hands to pour the drinks. The more popular Galway clubs, like GPO and Central Park, are packed with sweaty, dancing bodies all night long. But the club where I work is not popular. It is some morally suspect millionaire’s hobby, and the girls who haunt its corridors are younger and drunker than the girls at other places. They bounce in around one or two after not getting in anywhere else or getting kicked out of everywhere else. They stumble around and flirt shamelessly with Simon, the cute redheaded bartender. Occasionally, the owner turns up with his creepy, balding friends. They gulp down free drinks with double shots, drape themselves across the bar, and leer at my exposed midsection.

  The owner insists we stay busy at all times, and he dissects our every move on the security cameras. If we’re not serving a drink to the dozen or so people who have shown up that night, we should be cleaning, slicing limes, or organizing the money so all the bills face the same way. At the end of the night, the bartenders sit side by side with the cash registers, counting our earnings under the boss’s watchful eye. I’m flustered by the rapid-fire calculations and exhausted because it’s four A.M. and I hate, hate, loathe it here.

  “I’m quitting!” I announce to Carly at least once a day.

  But my funds are dwindling fast, and I have made a pact with myself that I will not call my parents to bail me out. During my painfully long nights at the club, I often find myself recalling an Outward Bound trip I took when I was fourteen. It was two weeks of intense hiking, canoeing, and portaging with a dozen other teenagers in Maine’s North Woods. This little nature jaunt was not my idea. My parents were preparing to separate at the time, and they wanted to give me something else to “focus on,” as they put it. Why this something else had to involve possible bear attacks, I’ll never know, but many years later, my father revealed they also thought the trip was a good idea because I was developing a bit of an attitude problem—a spoiled teenager’s sense of entitlement. “We wanted you to appreciate what you had,” my dad explained, then paused ominously before adding: “By taking it all away.”

  The first night on our trip we had to canoe several miles to the campsite. This was after we had been forced to go through our backpacks and hand over the shampoo (one of Outward Bound’s mottos is to not leave behind anything in the environment that wasn’t already there) and electronic devices (apparently you couldn’t commune with the trees with Sheryl Crow blasting through your Discman). We had hiked what felt like three dozen miles in boots I had neglected to break in before the trip because, really, I don’t hike. And now we were barreling down the Allagash River in the midst of the century’s worst rainstorm. We were out there for hours, soaked and shivering, the rain beating us back with every paddle thrust. My arms ached; my head throbbed. I started to cry, but no one could tell because it was dark and pouring. I cried all the way to shore. When one of the guides gave me his hand to help me out of my red canoe, I couldn’t believe I had made it. I felt this huge surge of pride, the kind that comes with totally reimagining your limitations.

  Even though the physical demands of the club are nothing like Outward Bound, I find myself hearkening back to that night on the river because it’s taking that same level of mental fortitude to stick it out in this disgusting place. Like in Maine, determination takes over, determination I thought I lost after quitting music and was certainly not expecting to find within the uninspiring confines of this depressing Irish nightclub. Each time I cash my minuscule paycheck, I’m proud that I’m supporting myself financially for the first time, however shabbily.

  Life in our apartment on the canal is filled with delicious foreign food and cheap wine. We organize international cooking nights where we each contribute a native dish. I’m on my way home from a leisurely day of underemployment on just such an occasion when the aromas coming from our place assault me a few steps away from the front door: onions, garlic, parsley, and tomato. Inside, Patchi hovers over the stove, gently ushering the fragrant steam rising from a massive steel pot out the small kitchen window.

  Patchi’s soup has been simmering all day. At dawn I was annoyed to be awakened by blaring Spanish heavy metal and plates crashing around. Annoyance gave way to surprise when I found Patchi fully conscious in the kitchen at that hour, chopping carrots. Normally, he sleeps until around noon, when he emerges from his room looking like he lost a fight with an electrical socket. He’ll absentmindedly scratch at his ample chest hair for a few seconds, then light a cigarette and shuffle into the bathroom.


  Patchi’s early-morning soup preparations remind me of my mother, the only other person I’ve witnessed toiling over an evening meal before the rest of the house has risen. She’s a phenomenal cook who routinely presents food that looks like it belongs on the cover of Gourmet magazine, while the most intricate meal I personally have mastered is boxed mac and cheese.

  “Want to help me, Rachel?” my mother would ask when I was ten or eleven or twelve—probably she tried multiple times to teach me how to follow a recipe.

  My father would be parked in his big leather chair, grading papers with a special red felt-tip pen that I deeply coveted. I’d be next to him on the rug, reading, my knees curled against my chest, my back against his legs.

  “Thank goodness for your mom,” he’d say, winking down at me. “I can barely crack an egg.”

  “No, thanks,” I’d always tell my mom, first unconsciously but then knowingly making one of a series of choices between my parents.

  My mother has boxes of recipes, entire shelves of cookbooks organized by cuisine, then cross-referenced by chef and publication date. Each ingredient is precisely measured. She is skeptical about substitutions, while adding something new makes her positively dizzy with apprehension. Once when I suggested throwing in an uncalled-for handful of walnuts, she looked like she might faint. She grasped the edge of the marble countertop to steady herself. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she whispered in a tone that really meant “Hell no, you maniac—go spread your anarchy in some other kitchen where they don’t laminate their index cards.” For my mother, cooking is like classical music—beautifully predictable—while what Patchi is currently doing—tossing in a wide variety of vegetables and spices with no written guide to tell him when or how much—has the improvisational quality of jazz.

  Patchi himself looks as frenetic as his cooking. He is tall with wild, shaggy brown curls and could pass equally well as an eccentric Russian scientist or a prep-school misfit. Like Portu, Patchi is ostensibly in Galway to study English, but he has made little progress. Nor does he seem all that interested. While Portu constantly tries out new phrases and asks me to define certain words, Patchi speaks English only when absolutely necessary, using Portu as his translator whenever possible.

  The nights I work at the club, I don’t get home until four or five in the morning, just the time of day someone without a job strolls in, too. So Patchi and I spend a lot of time together in front of the television in the early hours of the morning, mostly watching Ireland’s version of Big Brother on one of our three staticky channels. Unlike the U.S.’s weekly edited hour of Big Brother, Ireland keeps cameras on the housemates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s boring but addictive. Usually, I fondle an open jar of Nutella. Every few minutes I absentmindedly spoon a fudgy glob directly into my mouth, forgoing a utensil for my finger when the idea of opening and closing the silverware drawer is simply too exhausting. One time around four-thirty A.M. we were knocked out of our trance when one of the contestants jumped into bed with his housemate for what he must have imagined (though, really, how could he?) was a discreet encounter. But mostly we just watch them sleep, half asleep ourselves.

  Portu works in construction and keeps a much more regular schedule. He kissed me lightly on the cheek when we first met, then, as Carly predicted, immediately informed me that Spanish men are the world’s best lovers. He thinks this is something I should be aware of, since I’m about to move in with an eligible Spanish bachelor. He is engaged in a constant conversation of seduction with our pretty Spanish neighbors, three luminescent women who spend hours with him and Patchi in the kitchen, cooking and yelling, although Portu would say they are simply talking. At all hours of the day and night, I walk into a boisterous kitchen, five chairs smashed around our scuffed table. Spanish flies in all directions like misfired arrows, making it impossible for me to understand who is talking to whom. The conversation grows in volume and enthusiasm until everyone is out of breath. Once I asked Portu how he understands what anyone is saying, but he just gave me a sympathetic look like I was, sadly, not very bright.

  Since Portu’s English is decent, Patchi’s is virtually nonexistent, and my and Carly’s Spanish is barely coherent, we spend a lot of our time together nodding and gesturing wildly while attempting to reconcile who owes how much money for what and who left his toenail clippings all over the couch again. By the end of each conversation, we always believe we’ve reached a consensus, only to relive our misunderstandings the following week when the electric bill has not been paid by the designated person or we discover Patchi sprawled languidly out on the couch, blissfully chopping away at his feet with rusty clippers.

  Patchi and Portu are terrible slobs. Their room is an explosion of clothes, empty bottles, and cassette tapes (apparently 2002 in the U.S. is 1990 in Spain and Basque). Both of them smoke nonstop and insist on crushing their butts out on our dinner plates. Carly and I strategically scatter more and more ashtrays around the apartment, but we never break them of this off-putting habit. Soon all our meals taste vaguely of ash, but by then I’m smoking so much myself that I barely notice. Unusual habits aside, they are extremely entertaining, friendly guys. Portu especially, his initial suggestive remarks more bravado than anything else, quickly becomes protective and dependable, like an older brother.

  “That man has nothing to offer you,” he concludes at a bar one night, gingerly extracting me from the nameless Irish guy I am drunkenly barnacled to.

  Even Spanish heavy metal, which Patchi blasts during the rare moments he takes time off from his busy dole-collecting schedule to help clean up the apartment, is growing on me.

  Portu’s addition to today’s meal is a Spanish tortilla. It’s like a quiche—yellow, thick, and eggy. I stick my nose a few inches from it and inhale deeply, wondering if this is what Spain smells like.

  “It’s finished soon—only three more months,” Portu says in English. He is much more proficient than Patchi, and I do not laugh when I correct his mistake, since last week I believe I asked him, in unintelligible Spanish, to “throw away any small children he found around the house,” and he showed grave patience while correcting me.

  Carly is preparing dessert. Three plates are piled high with lamingtons, an Australian concoction composed of sponge cake smothered in chocolate and coconut and filled with cream. She is elbow-deep in the sugary ingredients. I reach down for a taste, but her sticky fingers swat me away.

  My roommates’ creations cover every inch of the minute kitchen table. We have to balance our plates on the edge and support them with one hand while we eat. As usual, with the exception of the one night I offered up burned bruschetta, I’ve contributed only the wine—but lots of it.

  After our third bottle, we decide the best idea we’ve ever had is to play a round of Burro. In this game, you’re dealt four cards and you pass around all the rest in hopes of ultimately getting four of the same number. When a person achieves this magnificent feat of intellect, he or she sticks out her tongue. The last idiot to realize she is sitting at a table with three other idiots with protruding tongues loses. The loser acquires the letter “b,” then, “u,” then “r,” and so on to spell out the word “burro,” “ass” in Spanish. Whoever acquires all the letters first, loses. When Patchi is defeated, his determined punishment is to run shirtless around the apartment complex (apparently, the wine has transformed us into eight-year olds). We lose sight of him when he ducks behind the building, and when he reappears, he is inexplicably wearing only his boxers. When we ask him where his pants are, he shrugs and shakes his curly head around like he doesn’t even know where he is, much less his pants, of all crazy things. After this, we uncap the whiskey, and thus I remember very little about the rest of the night.

  Each of us hails from a different country, we have different languages and different accents and different reasons for coming to Ireland, but we fit easily together, as if we’ve known one another for many years. Or maybe it’s precisely because we h
ave just met and are bonded primarily by being travelers in the same place at the same time in our lives that it’s so simple to be here together, for the four of us to form a ragtag little family.

  [5]

  Our heroine considers some advice from her unnervingly wild new friend. She finds steady employment and an even steadier drinking habit, though it is not her intention to imply that the fine country of Ireland is in any way responsible for such youthful debauchery, other than to note that it does have a very high number of excellent bars in conjunction with an overabundance of rainy days. Our heroine might choose church, another fine, dry place in which to ponder life’s questions, but alas, she is Jewish.

  Carly has already been in Galway for eight weeks when I arrive. She endures the six A.M. breakfast shift, while I toil late nights, so our schedules don’t overlap much. She loathes her café job as much as I do the club.