Burning the Map Read online

  On most nights when we arrive at Sweet Irish Dreams, the Irish boys will muscle out a spot for us. Lindsey scoots to Billy’s side in the hopes that tonight will be the night. Kat prowls the place like a lion. I am one of the gawkers.

  A few years ago, I wouldn’t have blinked twice before climbing on one of the tables and shaking my thing. Now, though, I’m afraid that if I shake it too hard, I’ll send people and glassware flying. Still, I know that I’ve lost some weight, and I’m not sure whether it’s that or the charge I got from my night with Francesco, but somehow I must have plugged in the mental Vacancy sign on my forehead because I’m getting hit on by cute guys at an average of a few times an hour. I know this shouldn’t flatter me. Sweet Irish Dreams is a breeding ground for one-night stands, a fact no one tries very hard to cover up. But I am pleased, my anemic self-esteem becoming healthier with all the attention it’s being fed.

  I play a game with myself, trying to guess the nationalities of these guys by the style of the come-on, and I’m getting good at it. The German guys stand and stare for at least an hour and only walk over when their friends push them away like eleven-year-old boys on a playground. In sharp contrast, the Italians don’t have to think about it at all. Once they spot you and decide they want you, they just drop the lids of their eyes, lick their lips and sidle up to you without a word or a glance back at their group. The English blokes usually try the team approach with two or three guys at once, apparently trying to give everyone an equal shot.

  It’s the shy guys from the smaller countries that I like best, though, maybe because I can fool myself into thinking that they see something more in me than a reason to buy a condom. Lars is one of those guys. A tall, lanky Norwegian with curly, almost white hair, he strolls over to me one night as I come out of the bathroom. At least I think he’s going for a stroll, although he moves like a guy whose body has just sprouted two feet and whose limbs feel foreign to him.

  “Hello,” he says, ducking his head down so he can reach my ear.

  “Hi,” I say. I consider just walking past him, like I might with one of the Italians, but his face is earnest and open.

  “I am Lars.” He nods when he’s done with the sentence, as if pleased that he said it properly.

  “Casey,” I say, nodding back.

  He smiles a little, his gray eyes moving over my face, from my lips to my eyes to my hair and back again, which is completely unlike the Italians, who generally go straight to my cleavage. “May I buy you a drink?” He smiles a little more widely, and I’m sure he and his buddies practiced this line on the plane.

  I hold up my full beer and shake it a little to show him I don’t need one. His smile fades. I can see him wondering what to say now that his good line has failed him.

  “I have a boyfriend,” I say, but he clearly doesn’t understand. “Boyfriend,” I say again, louder, but it’s futile. I shrug and point to Noel and Johnny Red, who oblige by gesturing for me to hurry back.

  Lars nods, giving me an endearing, sheepish little shrug, before he lopes away.

  “What about us?” Noel says when I made my way back to our spot.

  “What about you?” I say, slipping onto a vacant bar stool between him and Johnny Red. Noel has tanned dark brown by now, the sun etching fine lines around his eyes. Johnny, meanwhile, just seems to multiply his freckles with each foray into the daylight, so that he’s become spotted to the point where the freckles are almost joined together.

  “Well, you don’t seem to fancy any of these blokes—” Noel says.

  “Not that you should,” Johnny Red cuts in.

  “No, no,” Noel says. “Bunch of pansies, but maybe you should consider one of us.”

  Noel and Johnny begin modeling their muscles for me, curling their biceps and striking weight-lifter poses, grunting along with each one. I laugh and clap my hands, leaning back and looking from one to the other like I’m trying to decide between the two. We’re yucking it up like that when Sin walks over.

  “What are you guys doing?” she says, shaking her head at the spectacle Noel and Johnny Red are making.

  “She’s trying to pick which one of us she wants to shag tonight,” Johnny Red says, striking another muscle-head pose, and he and Noel and I all crack up again.

  I notice that it feels a little peculiar, though, a little embarrassing almost, to be laughing like this with the Irish boys instead of Sin.

  One night, I meet an Australian girl named Nicky. We’d already bumped into each other at the bar and in the bathroom, so when she accidentally steps on my foot ten minutes later, we laugh and introduce ourselves.

  “We’re supposed to be friends, eh?” she says in her heavy, Aussie accent that I find endearing. She has spiky gold hair and a ripped, lean body.

  “Looks like it,” I say.

  We talk for twenty minutes, giving abbreviated versions of our life stories. It isn’t hard to shorten mine. There’s little more to say than, “I went to college, I went to law school, and here I am.” Nicky, though, has to condense years of travels and adventures. She’s been away from Sydney for three years, during which time she’s been to India, Morocco, South Africa, Europe, the U.S., and a handful of countries I’ve barely heard of.

  “How can you stay away from home for so long?” I ask her.

  She waves a hand. “Oh, it’s no big deal, is it? That’s what all me friends do. We run around the world for years and years, and then we go home and settle down.”

  “Wow,” I say, fascinated by the concept. “It’s like you’re escaping everything. You just get to run away.”

  “Ah, no, darlin’. It’s not like that, actually. This is all about finding, not escaping.”

  I scrunch up my face, unable to follow her.

  “See, this trip,” she says, “this living in hellholes half the time, never getting a hot shower, always being poor, it’s not heaven on earth or anything, is it? It’s one big learning curve. It’s learning about other people, other countries, and most of all, about me.” She keeps talking, describing the cesspool she lived in while in New Delhi and the job she took in Amsterdam that entailed selling space cakes in the Red Light District. She’d done all that, she tells me, to find out what she’s made of, what she can take, what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

  “Wow,” I say again, struck by the elevated level of her thinking, so clearly miles and miles above my own. I briefly consider moving to Amsterdam and selling hash brownies instead of practicing law in Chicago, but I can’t see how that would make me learn more about myself.

  I lose Nicky when I make another bathroom run, but her spiky hair and her lean frame keep coming back to me. Nicky is a true traveler, I realize, while I am merely a tourist. During the six months I lived in Italy, I’d seen the difference. I was a traveler back then, learning the language, seeking out places that weren’t in the guidebooks, meeting people whose families had lived in the area for hundreds of years. But I’m back to tourist status now, going to all the places every other tourist goes, meeting more Italians, Irish and English than Greeks, scratching the surface of a place rather than really digging into it. Come to think of it, this is how I’d led my life lately. Even my relationship with John is only scratching at the surface these days.

  Sometimes I imagine John here at Sweet Irish Dreams, standing in his button-down shirt, glancing around at all the craziness, shaking his head. He wouldn’t be curious about all these people the way I am. He’d simply find it amusing. John sees the world as straightforward rather than something with odd facets, hidden paths or alternative journeys. He doesn’t agonize, he makes choices. He doesn’t whine and moan when something goes wrong, he moves on. His parents, Gary and Mary Sue Tanner, still live in Butterfield, Iowa, the same place they’ve been for the last thirty years, in their nice little house and their nice little community with very few curves in the road. The funny thing is that although John has moved on to the big city, he still sees his existence the very same way.

 
And maybe that’s the big difference between us. John has already carved out his life, while I want more than I have now, more than I am now.

  13

  On our seventh full day in Ios, I decide to go into the village instead of lying on the beach. Ostensibly, I want to change money and buy postcards. The truth is I’m sunburned and sick of picking sand out of the various crevices of my body, and I’m also tired of the underlying friction between Kat and Sin and me.

  I can’t help but wonder if we truly will be friends forever, the way we promised in college, and that’s the thought that rocks me, scares the shit out of me, really, because if I don’t have them, I’m lost. I need them more than John, maybe even more than my parents. If my parents raised me into near adulthood, Kat and Sin picked up where they left off. They listened to me cry for days when I’d broken up with Todd, my high school boyfriend, and they’d come to watch me try out for the university debate team, taking me out for pizza when I didn’t even make the first cut. We’d done this for each other—quizzing one another before tests, waking each other up for exams, borrowing clothes and makeup and pick-up lines. We went home for holidays together and took turns making pans of birthday brownies. We relied on each other like newly assigned sisters until we seemed like family. But I still have so much left to do—lots of growing—and I don’t want to do it without them.

  I decide I’m being entirely too morose for a Greek vacation, and so during my egg whites and plain toast breakfast, I ask the group whether anyone wants to join me in town. The Irish boys immediately sign up, and once that’s done Kat and Sin opt for the trip as well. I know Sin is motivated by Billy’s presence, but I can’t help but hope that the friendship tide is turning back in my direction.

  The six of us hike the hill in the midday sun, our feet kicking up bursts of dust around our legs. By the time we reach the village, we’re hot and sticky. We stop at a plaza with a long, thatched roof, housing five or six stores that sell refreshments, postcards and trinkets. I pick out a few postcards for John, my parents and my brother, Danny. On Danny’s card there’s a donkey dressed in a fringed bikini with the words Dressed For Action In Ios across the bottom. I’m not even sure what it means, and I hope it’s not some thinly veiled reference to sex with animals, but I think Danny will find it funny. He’s a weird kid. Last year, he painted his dorm room blood-red and hot-pink. When I asked him exactly what look he was going for, he replied, “French Bordello,” as if that were the most obvious thing on the planet. All the rest of the postcards that I purchase show the blue skies, azure water and whitewashed walls of the village. It’s the first time I can recall seeing postcards that accurately reflect the beauty of the place. On second thought, I buy a few more to keep for myself.

  I find Noel and Johnny Red at another store, haggling with a leathery old man over some small hand-painted clay pots. When they talk the man down to a meager $4.00 a pot, I jump in and buy two for John. He likes authentic knickyknacky things like that.

  I carry my items to one of the picnic tables in the front of the plaza and sit down to write John’s postcard. Thank God there’s only about four inches of space to fill, because I can think of nothing to write other than, “I fooled around with someone else, someone amazing. I’m sorry.”

  I stare at the empty card. Finally, I jot, “Hi hon!” That seems cheerful and unlike an adulteress. Then I add, “We’re on the island of Ios now.” I get an urge to write a line from a Jimmy Buffet song that says, “The weather is here. I wish you were beautiful,” but I don’t think John would find it amusing. Instead I write, “Just sitting on the beach and drinking lots of beer.” I only have a sentence or two of space left, because I’m writing big, loopy letters. I add, “We’ll probably leave for another island in a few days. I’ll let you know where I am.”

  Now for the closing. I know I should write the standard line John and I always put on cards or notes—“L. U.A.,” our abbreviation for “Love You Always.” But just thinking about it panics me. It seems too glib, too much of a promise. It also sends memories rushing back, making me remember all the wonderful things about John. The John who spent three hours helping me through my notes for my federal taxation final. The John who burns CDs for me, filling them with Miles Davis and Ramsey Lewis tunes, as long as the word love is in the title. The John who makes me feel safe and warm. He used to do that, anyway. Lately, he’s been way too preoccupied with work or way too comfortable with me.

  I remember a conversation I tried to start with him the week before I left. I was smoldering inside with horrifying thoughts about my new law firm and the potential of getting sucked into a corporate wormhole out of which I’d never be able to crawl. But John was working as a lawyer, after all, and he liked it. He’d reassure me that my fears were groundless.

  “I’m scared of working for a living,” I blurted out. I was sprawled on his couch, bathing in the central air-conditioning, which was lacking from my stifling apartment, while he was on his leather chair with the Sunday paper. “I know it’s silly,” I said, “but I don’t want to turn into your average working stiff.”

  He curled down a corner of the sports section so that he could see me, and said, “You won’t,” then went back to the paper.

  Did he think he knew me well enough to just dismiss my fear as idle nervousness, or was he avoiding an unpleasant topic, one that might make him reflect on his own life? Each time I started a conversation like that, I mistakenly hoped he’d say, “What a fascinating idea. What exactly makes you uncomfortable? How can you address that? You’re such an amazing person, you will never be a failure.” Maybe what I really wanted was a therapist.

  I force my attention back to the postcard. I consider writing “I love you” at the end. Surely that’s the thing to do, something he’ll expect to see, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know if I mean it in the way I used to in the past.

  “Love, Casey,” is all I can manage.

  I buy some colorful stamps, slap them on John’s postcard and drop it in the mailbox before I can think about it anymore. After scribbling a few innocuous lines like, “Having a great time,” I drop in the postcards for my parents and Danny, as well.

  When I return to the table, I find the crowd nursing bloodies and screwdrivers. Kat is on the public phone set up outside one of the trinket stores, screaming with laughter as she speaks, most likely to Steve, her father. Similar to her relationship with her mom, Kat is more like a buddy with her dad than a daughter. They drink together, go to Cubs games together. I think they’ve even gotten stoned together. I used to think this all very hip and urban, compared to my more stereotypical suburban relationship with my parents, who wouldn’t know a roach clip if it bit them, but now I feel sad for Kat. Who was ever there to mother her, to take care of her? Certainly not Patricia or the Hatter. Sin and I have been there for her, but it seems as if she doesn’t want that of me anymore.

  “You’re up next, Casey,” Billy says, pointing to the phone. “We’ve all had our turn.”

  “Oh. Great.” I’m flattered that Billy’s remembered me, but I’m not prepared to call anyone. I know I should phone John, but just writing the postcard had been hard enough. Surely, if he hears my voice, he’ll sense my betrayal, and a phone call is not the place for that kind of conversation. I decide to call my mother instead. She isn’t one of those parents who expect me to check in every twenty minutes, but she’ll be pleased to be informed that I’m alive and well. Plus, I can use the high international rates as a way to head off a lengthy conversation.

  “It’s all yours,” Kat says to me when she hangs up. I take the screwdriver Noel is offering and walk to the phone. I’d never thought of drinking vodka while talking to my mother, but it seems like an idea long overdue.

  “Hello, hello!” I yell when she answers, not sure if she’s able to hear me.

  There’s an awkward clicking sound on the phone, probably some intercontinental cash register ready to charge me fifty bucks for this call. I hear my
mother bark, “Who is this?” in a gruff, scratchy voice, but maybe it’s the connection.

  “It’s me, Mom. Casey.”

  “Oh, hi, sweetie.” Her voice softens, and for a second I remember when she used to take care of me, listening to my woes and sagas, before it flip-flopped and became the other way around. “Where are you? How’s your trip going?” she says, causing me to fall further into the memory, because she sounds as if she really wants to hear, and I need so badly to talk, even if I don’t tell her everything.

  I plow into an ecstatic retelling of my travels, minus Francesco and my hospital visit, going on and on about the boat to Greece, which I embellish to “a gorgeous cruise ship” and the Sunset, which I describe as “palatial.”

  It’s only when I begin to slow the running of my mouth that I notice my mother is curiously quiet. Too quiet.

  “Mom, are you there?” I ask, raising my voice.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m here.” I wait for the flow of words to follow. For the last year, I don’t think I’ve asked my mother one question. She just talks about whatever happens to be in her head that day, whatever she did that day, launching into diatribes about the sales she hit at Bloomies and the latest product for hot flashes. Yet now I only get more of the annoying intercontinental clicking sounds.

  “So, what’s going on with you, Mom?”

  “Well, let’s see. What’s going on with me?” she says, her voice taking on a shrill tone. “Let’s see,” she says again, as if she’s really trying to remember. “Ah! I know what’s going on. The dog died, and your father moved out.”

  I freeze. My eyes take in Noel handing out another round of screwdrivers to the crew, everyone laughing at something he’s saying.

  “Wait. What do you mean? What’s wrong with Bailey?” Why am I asking about the goddamn dog?