The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost Read Online Free PDF Page A

somewhere close by, the aroma of fried fish spills out onto the streets like a thick haze.
    My new hostel is at the end of the main street. Outside the front door, a violinist tunes her instrument, case open and ready for donations. If my dad were here, he’d toss a dollar in. “So it won’t be you one day,” he’d say, half joking.
    I started begging my parents to buy a piano when I was five, after my father played a recording of a haunting Chopin nocturne at dinner one night. My great-grandfather was a pianist who accompanied silent movies, so maybe my musical inclinations were genetic. Or it could have all started with my mother. When she was pregnant with me, she read the emerging literature on the connections between music and intelligence and often placed a pair of large headphones around her expanding belly. I can see her rocking back and forth in our favorite chair, eyes closed and head back, an old quilt across her lap, absorbingBeethoven into our bloodstreams. She adores “Ode to Joy.” Pure and direct communication, accessible without being ordinary, that’s how Leonard Bernstein described it, though I’ve never asked my mother why it spoke to her.
    My parents decided it was safer for me to try out the guitar first: smaller, less risky an investment in case the music thing turned out to be a whim. Also, my father had a guitar. We could play together, they reasoned, my dad conveniently forgetting that his instrument was more of a shrine to his sixties youth than anything currently getting much use. His father-daughter folk-duet dream died hard. Classical guitar, where you use your fingers instead of a pick to delicately coax the sound from the strings, and not rainy-day Bob Dylan songs, is where my heart was from the very beginning.
    I was eight when I first laid hands on a viola, practically ancient in the world of string beginners. When I first dropped my long, thin bow down onto the strings, coaxing out deep, rumbling sounds from the belly of my instrument, the notes were wobbly, lilting at the edges of the pitch as opposed to cutting right through the center of it like they’re supposed to—but I didn’t care. In the beginning, all noises were equally beautiful and fascinating because I was making them. I’d press my nose against my horsehair bow and inhale the rosin slathered on. When I practiced for long stretches, the tips of my left fingers became stained charcoal black where the strings of my viola dug tiny canals into the soft flesh. Only my thumb remained pink, arched against the wooden neck that extended out from my viola’s curved body, which protruded from my own jaw. In this space, squeezed between my left shoulder and chin, we fit together like puzzle pieces. For a long time, I remained convinced that it was us—us bendable humans—who were made for violas and not the other way around.
    Once in a while my parents came upstairs after I finished practicing. My father would take out his neglected guitar,scratched and dull, and strum it while we sang Eagles and Peter, Paul and Mary songs. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was by far my favorite, even though my mother sounded so sad when she sang it. She has a beautiful voice—soft but operatic. I searched their faces. They smiled at each other and at me, and I thought it must be the music making them feel that way, because outside that room, they frowned a lot.
    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