The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

by Rachel Friedman

  Halfway through the summer, I’m still broke, so I take our friend Gerry up on his offer to hire me as a flyer girl. This involves precariously tottering around the cobblestone main street in three-inch heels doling out two-for-one drink-special flyers to groups passing by. I decide this will translate on my résumé to “promotions assistant.”

  Everyone around me is in their early twenties. No one has anywhere to be, so we stay at the bar, drink cheap beer, and play old Irish love songs on the jukebox. There seems to be no limit to our days together. I’ve never had so many friends at once, whom I’ve liked so well, as I did in Galway, where I once felt so lonely and knew no one at all.

  “Time to get off the Guinness,” my boss, Brian, urges me discreetly one night, taking a gentle glance at my stomach. I look down, where my belly is indeed protruding more than when I arrived in Ireland three months ago. Back home, this kind of comment would have sent me spiraling into despair. Since middle school, I’ve struggled with body-image issues, like a lot of girls do, denying myself this or that and spending too much time pinching flesh in front of the mirror. So I’m shocked at this moment to realize that I haven’t thought about my body in any self-punishing way in weeks, though by most standards I am woefully abusing it with cigarettes and alcohol. But my mind has twisted in a new direction this summer, and I’ve found it freeing these last few months to let go of some insecurities, large and small, or at least to put them on hold.

  One night in early August, Eileen announces, “It’s official, chicken. You’re Irish.” I surge with pride, as if I have passed a particularly difficult exam. It’s exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long. It doesn’t yet occur to me that this is simply my friend’s way of expressing affection; she doesn’t wish me to be anyone but myself, that, ultimately, I can’t be. In Ireland, I become someone entirely different—a wild girl who stays out late, guzzles Guinness, tells coarse jokes, and says yes to every invitation. I let myself loose, a word that before never would have attached itself to me. That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either.

  [6]

  Our heroine returns to her former life as a student, where she normally would be comforted by books and the lofty ideas contained therein, but finds herself unable to muster the necessary enthusiasm for anything but list-making and bellyaching. Somehow she finds the will to both graduate and entertain her relatives. An unexpected call answered.

  A week before the end of my endless Irish days, I call my father to test out the idea of staying. His silence blasts across the Atlantic.

  “I don’t understand,” he finally says. “You want to graduate a year late?”

  “Yeah, it’s just a year. Plus, I can get lots of great student deals if I’m still enrolled in college.” I’m repeating Carly’s words, hoping I’ve imbued them with some of her unflagging confidence. Her mantra buzzes in my brain: What’s the rush?

  “Kiddo, I think you should come home, get your degree, and then examine your options.”

  “I just don’t know what I’m doing with my life, Dad.”

  “Who does? I’ll see you at the airport, okay?”

  I’m not ready to go home, but I cannot locate the will necessary to defy him. I sigh heavily into the receiver. “Okay.”

  When I arrive on U.S. soil, my body recoils like a vampire’s against the American summer sun. I’m even more ghostly pale than usual from cloudy Irish weather and drawn-out days in Irish pubs. My physique—though it was never profoundly muscular even in my wildest gym days—has softened like an overripe banana after four months of physical exertion limited to lifting pint glasses. I pepper my conversations with expressions like “shite” and “fair play to ye.” It is my fervent belief that I have cultivated an Oscar-worthy Irish accent, though in reality I sound like the love child of the Lucky Charms leprechaun and Eliza Doolittle.

  These summer souvenirs disappear a few weeks into my senior year of college, along with the rare moments of clarity collected in Ireland when I felt the freedom of a whole wide world opening up to me. The hours felt so expansive in Galway, like I was in an alternate dimension. Back home, time speeds up, and the unsettling feeling that it is running out attaches itself to me again, coupled with the paranoia that giving up music means relinquishing my one chance to be truly great at something, and now I will spend the rest of my life probably being—gasp!—ordinary.

  Every morning I wake up in my dorm room thinking, Today is the day I will have a revelation about my life; today I will figure out what I am meant to be in the world. When nothing happens, I start making endless lists of possible careers, trying to take charge of my own destiny. I had a singular image in my mind for so long, could envision myself walking to orchestra rehearsals and teaching private lessons, but that picture is defunct now. Try as I might, I cannot see myself in my new future. Notebook pages with incoherent scrawling litter my bedroom floor like lily pads.

  “Oooookaaaay, then,” Erica concludes, popping her head in after class one night. “Time to quit popping the crazy pills and come out for drinks.”

  While I was disappearing into a faux-Irish life, Erica had experienced an altogether different kind of unexpected summer. Her art gallery internship turned out to be one long stretch inputting old show catalogs into an antiquated computer program. She didn’t get to handle any art or even watch other people handling it. This semester she signed up for business classes, the beginning of her calculated transformation into a finance analyst; art has officially been relegated to a hobby.

  It’s a practical decision, the kind many of my friends were starting to make regarding their futures, but it depressed me nonetheless. I struggled with a romantic notion I had secretly nourished since I started playing music—that to be happy, we must make a career out of what we love most. I imagined us all as musicians and artists and philosophers. The idea of taking a job simply for the money was startling to me, and I was naïve enough then to judge others for it, even as I was in the midst of my own existential crisis. At least they were taking action. I was totally paralyzed with indecision. I had surprised myself by boarding that plane to Ireland, then sticking it out there and enjoying myself. After returning to college, I had a vague notion that I could do more unexpected, world-expanding things (maybe without so much Guinness). Travel guides had begun to crop up like weeds amid my textbooks. Every few days, I bid impossibly low on Priceline for cheap international flights, disappointed every time my fifty-dollar round-trip offer to Paris was rejected. But this new desire was all jumbled up with the various “shoulds” awaiting me in the U.S.—voices from others and from my own confused brain telling me what to do out there in the real world. There were so many voices swirling around in my head that I couldn’t figure out how to strip them away and listen to the quiet yet insistent one humming softly in my subconscious, patiently waiting for an audience. It was that voice, I’m pretty sure, that led me to Ireland in the first place.

  When I wasn’t fretting over my life, I was studying. Ever since quitting music school in Boston, I had thrown myself into academics, the other area where I had always excelled, and was accepted as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania the spring of my sophomore year. I packed up my belongings and said goodbye to Copley Square and the Charles and hello to Ben Franklin and the Ivy League.

  My first two friends at Penn were also transfer students. Jen, a five-foot rosy-cheeked spitfire, had upgraded from NYU but already knew scores of people at our new university. Some of her high school best friends are here, while the rest are sprinkled throughout New Haven, Providence, Boston, and New York City, which I do not realize until many months later are code for Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Columbia.

  Tara, sick of the South, is a transfer from the University of Georgia. She is t
he first girl I’ve ever met who competed in honest-to-goodness beauty pageants, and she’s the prettiest girl I have ever seen who isn’t airbrushed. She has thick, curly black hair and foamy-green eyes. Her olive skin darkens exotically even on cloudy days, and her boobs look good in every top. Tara’s only mortal quality is that she gains weight easily. To combat this, she survives on Clif bars and cafeteria salads and works out twice a day, although I find it hard to believe that an extra ten pounds would prevent men from running into solid objects when they pass by her any less than they do now. Tara doesn’t have old friends here like Jen does, but she was in a sorority in Georgia, so she is an automatic member of the same chapter here. This provides her with a spontaneous social life. Even her good looks (an asset trumped only by family name) were not enough to overcome the religious barriers at her old school, where she was invited to join only the one Jewish sorority, but at Penn, Jewish students are a dominant force on campus. Many of the elite sororities are self-segregated Gucci-clad Jewish girls.

  Life is flexible and beautiful to Tara, while Jen sees the world through slightly depressed glasses. I yin and yang between them, my energies shifting like a mood ring depending on who I’m with. And then junior year I meet Erica, who fits me just right. She’s a transfer student, too, though a year behind me. We bond immediately over our shared confusion regarding the Italian language.

  “What did she just say?” I whispered to her the first day of class.

  “I have no idea. I’m just saying sí like everyone else.”

  “I think she’s asking us about the weather.”

  “Then she should just look outside and stop torturing me.”

  I imagined life at an Ivy League university as one long stretch of parsing Hegel and pondering mind-expanding ontological questions, but instead I find myself in a land largely populated by rich sons and daughters more interested in designer handbags and fraternity parties than the brains they possess. Jen, Tara, and Erica aside, I can’t find much to hold on to here; besides, I’m still reeling from leaving music school. My father the academic is thrilled that I’ve transferred to this elite institution, so I do not tell him one does not belong here simply because one attends. While any bright and diligent student can walk away with the degree, legitimate entry into this world depends on a specifically calibrated economic/social/regional pedigree, and the Friedmans from Syracuse, New York, simply have not inherited it.

  At some point I am forced to ask myself, like all toiling away in the humanities, what I am going to do with my English degree. Yes, I have read far and wide. I can quote Marvel and Swift, Frost and Plath. I’ve been steeped in Austen, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. I have committed certain pieces of wisdom to heart, most recently Oscar Wilde’s “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.” As my senior year draws to a close, I turn in my honors thesis: “Staging Silence: Reimagining the Women in Shakespeare’s Othello.” Yet precisely how a theoretical, experimental feminist rendering of a Renaissance play relates to my post-college plans remains unclear.

  The English major “teaches you to think creatively and flexibly, to interpret, to analyze and communicate,” my father tells me. However, it does not appear to come with a job title other than “poor shmuck who majored in English,” and I’m pretty sure that’s an unpaid internship. Maybe I should become an academic like my father. He gets to write books on pretty much whatever strikes his fancy, have summers off (not off, they all tell me, we’re working), and spend a good portion of his time on a college campus in a kind of perpetual studenthood. But when I think about the years of my life involved in obtaining a Ph.D.—though it is a pursuit with a clear and definitive goal, and that appeals to me—I can’t get excited about it. For starters, reading is such a pure thing, such blissful enjoyment, that I don’t know if I want to professionalize it and risk, as with music, losing it on some level.

  I poll my other English-major friends for ideas. Michelle is finishing up at Vassar. She considered going into publishing, but a recent depressing internship—the literary equivalent of Erica’s archiving monotony—has convinced her otherwise. She, too, is contemplating her next move and, in the meantime, has accepted a nine-to-five job at an accounting firm in her hometown. When she graduates, she’s moving back in with her parents in New Jersey. My friend Adam, who took to donning a red smoking jacket for inspiration while we were penning our theses (his on Poe), is off to Los Angeles to start his Ph.D. in American literature. He shrugs. “I have to do something.”

  We all do. It’s what is expected. Besides, we have healthcare to worry about. And student debt. And making a contribution to society, making our parents proud, making something of ourselves that we can hopefully believe in.

  Graduation day arrives like an unwanted houseguest. Inside the football stadium, parents crouch on hard white bleachers, hoping their camera lenses will zoom in fast enough to capture our speck-sized faces whizzing across the platform. It’s nearly impossible to tell us apart in our cream gowns, so they flash our names on a large screen above the stage while a man adept at successfully pronouncing polysyllabic names under pressure introduces us. Our smiling professors sit in neat rows at the back of the stage. Their set faces remind me of those Semisonic lyrics—“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  Two nights ago Jen, Tara, Erica, and I met one last time at our favorite local bar. We drank gigantic glasses of red wine and mulled over our post-college lives. Like hordes of other Penn grads, Tara and Jen are moving to Manhattan. Jen has been hired by Bank of Scotland and is anxious. “I start in three weeks. Can you believe it? Goodbye, summer vacations. Do you think I should go on Jdate now? I have a friend of a friend who’s getting married to a guy she met on there. I don’t think online dating services are pathetic anymore, do you? How else am I supposed to meet someone after college?”

  Tara is spending the summer in Denver with her family before starting her job as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant at the 92nd Street Y. “Woody Allen’s kid is starting in the fall,” she tells us in a hushed voice.

  While Jen will make enough money to dull the pain of twelve-hour workdays, Tara’s teaching gig pays too little to cover her expenses, so her parents have agreed to subsidize her rent. Tara is the least spoiled rich kid I know (she even has a personal philosophy against expensive underwear and T-shirts), but even she isn’t willing to give up her city dreams over a little glitch like cash. Bohemia may not be dead, but no one I know from college has any interest in roughing it. Erica is working for a family friend who owns a real estate company. She still has a year of college left, and I deeply envy her this extra time to figure things out.

  What are my plans for the summer? I’m staying right here in Philadelphia. My friend Bindi is heading to Washington, D.C., for an internship, and I’m subletting her minuscule studio apartment. I’ve gotten a job as a bartender in an Irish pub not far from campus, a sad attempt to re-create my lost Galway summer.

  After the graduation ceremony, my family heads to Old City for dinner. I bring Erica to help me keep an eye on everyone. My parents have been divorced for six years, and each believes he/she has sacrificed the most personal comfort in order to have one joint meal. It is no exaggeration to relate that I have been dreading this dinner since my first day of college.

  Up until this point, I have been distributing my time equally between my relatives: Independence Hall with Mom’s side, Rittenhouse Square with Dad’s, breakfast with one group, lunch with another—all punctuated by blissfully quiet taxi rides that I never want to end. “No rush,” I want to tell the driver. “In fact, why don’t you move into the bus lane, and we’ll really take our time.” I rest my head against the dirty leather and pray for red lights.

  My parents, in true competitive form, have brought an equal number of allies, seven relatives each. Erica and I occupy the middle chairs across from each other, cutting the two sides neatly in half. We are Switzerl
and. Every time someone rises to walk to the other side of the table to chat amiably with someone from the past, I stare at Erica with alarm, and she mouths “It’s okay” across the table.

  When we sneak away to the bathroom, I announce that I’m eloping.

  “With who?” she wants to know.

  “Not now. I just mean when the time comes. This way we won’t all have to be in the same room together ever again.”

  “It’s really not that bad,” she says, bending toward the mirror to apply more mascara. “Everyone is getting along great.”

  She is right, actually, but I am less prepared for things to go well than badly.

  Back at the table, everyone has a glass of bubbling champagne.

  “Welcome to the real world,” my sister toasts, and everyone laughs but me.

  If at this point I revealed that I never saw Carly again, it would not surprise anyone who has traveled. Our time in Galway was brief, a matter of weeks, and our friendship incited by proximity and personality. But it turns out our two lives were not nearly finished running parallel. While I returned to college, Carly continued traipsing through Europe, Morocco, and Asia for the next few months. She sent emails from Paris and Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Laos. Eventually, though, her funds ran out, and she went home, too.