They Only Eat Their Husbands Read online

  We live in different worlds. I’ve never married and have no children; Kaitlin has had three marriages and four children. She has no problem dating a man just for sex and companionship, yet keeps winding up with men who want to marry her. I want to fall in love and get married, yet keep winding up in relationships based on sex.

  In spite of having so little in common, our mutual acceptance has never wavered. Yet I didn’t realize how close we were, until her eighteen-year-old daughter’s body was found in McHugh Creek four years ago. Someone had raped April, then chased or pushed her off the cliff above. Murder drew a stark chalk outline around my friendship with Kaitlin. Then again, maybe she didn’t become my closest friend until that time, when she needed me and I felt the Elysian gift of being needed. I can still see Kaitlin doubled over and howling, as if she recalled the agony of labor pains eighteen years distant and felt her daughter being ripped from her again. At that moment, my friend was more exposed than if she were naked; sharing that moment would bond us for life. Whatever connected us, for the past few years we’ve managed to talk for an hour almost every day, crying and giggling and divulging every last secret.

  This evening, as our voices bounced off the white, nail-scarred walls of my empty apartment, the rooms echoed with the distance that would soon separate us. Trying to escape the hollowness, we locked up the apartment and walked to Westchester Lagoon to watch the sunset. Somebody had drained the water from the lagoon. It was an ugly, swampy hole, instead of the sparkling lake where, until yesterday, I used to go on my daily run—past purple fireweed and Canadian geese, down to the Coastal Trail that runs alongside the cold, metal-colored water of Cook Inlet.

  “Westchester Lagoon is empty and Cara’s leaving. What a terrible day,” Kaitlin said.

  “I called Chance the other day to say goodbye,” I said.

  Chance is not only my ex, he’s the ex before my last ex. So I imagine most people would have replied, “What made you do a stupid thing like that?” But Kaitlin isn’t that kind of friend. Besides, I think she’s always felt guilty that she introduced me to Chance, even though I’ve always reassured her that I didn’t blame her. Whatever she was thinking, she merely asked, “So, how’d that go?”

  “He told me he and Sheila are buying a house together. But in my mind what I heard him say was, ‘You see, I can make a commitment to the right woman, just not you.’”

  “Yeah, well if she’s his idea of the right woman, you’re well rid of him.” Even if his new girlfriend were a missionary, Kaitlin would have found something wrong with her, and for that I was grateful.

  “At least my relationship with him helped me grow in a lot of ways.”

  “Really? It seems more like you shrank. I think he destroyed your self-esteem.”

  We slowly walked back to my car, which was piled high with clothes and luggage. Kaitlin handed me a box. “I got you a going away gift. Don’t worry, it’s not another self-help book. I know you’ve sworn off them. But I had to get you some kind of self-help.” It was a road safety kit for my car. We laughed too hard and held each other too tight.

  “It doesn’t seem real, that I’m leaving,” I said. “I can’t believe I won’t get to talk to you every day anymore.”

  “Give me another hug,” she said, threw her arms around me, then pushed me away. “Now leave, before we start crying.”

  As I pulled away, I rolled down my window and called out, “Thanks for being my friend!”

  On my way out of the city, I stopped downtown to take photos of familiar sights, the things I’d always considered too ugly or depressing to photograph before: the homeless Alaska Natives on 4th Avenue, less painful to think of as parodies instead of people; the misshapen Performing Arts Center with its garish trim of flashing red and green rings, which the people of Anchorage boast is one of the ugliest buildings in town; the condemned, pink McKay Building, which the city keeps threatening to blow up but never does, much to the disappointment of the TV news community—we love it when people blow shit up, without the guilt of death of course.

  As with all my relationships, the city’s uglier aspects seemed to disappear as I left. The fading sunset cast a glow of longing over Cook Inlet, illuminating the gold Arco building, as the city hung suspended in semi-darkness. Across the inlet, a veil of twilit shadows softly blanketed Sleeping Lady; many people argue that Mount Susitna doesn’t look like a lady at all, but tonight I could see her.

  The increasing dusk suited my mood as I turned my back on Anchorage and headed up the Glenn Highway toward the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Yellow and gold fall colors fled past my windows. Like me, they too had lingered in town well past their season.

  I took the Old Glenn Highway turnoff, where river and mudflats glistened in the faint glow of the Alaskan night. The Mat-Su River had eaten away more of its banks this summer, and continued to threaten people’s homes. During my time in Alaska, several houses have fallen into that changeling waterway, as mighty hunks of bank have given way to the river’s hidden power. Several people have tried to sue the borough for failing to inform them that a giant river on a floodplain might have the temerity to change course over time. But tonight the river looked almost tame, as a gentle rain began to fall in the valley.

  I only drove for an hour before stopping in Palmer for the night; the sky was turning a blacker shade of dark and I didn’t want to miss a last glimpse of anything on my way out of Alaska. I checked into this fleabag motel, then drove to Carr’s and bought a pint of coffee-and-fudge ice cream. I devoured the entire pint while sitting up in my squeaky motel bed, watching a repeat of The X-Files. With each spoonful I began relegating Alaska to the past.

  I’ve changed since I first came north, in ways that I needed to change. Nonetheless, I’m leaving the same way I came: alone. I used to think that if I strove to become a better person, life would become easier, the answers more apparent. Not true. I’ve only succeeded in emptying the 5-foot 2-inch vessel I once thought of as me. Westchester Lagoon is empty, and so am I.

  But surely the lagoon won’t stay empty forever. Surely it only waits to be cleansed by the next tide. Maybe as I continue down the highway, the world outside my car windows will fill me with a new vision, as refreshing as clean, cool, clear water.

  The Last Frontier

  twenty-six years old

  As the tires on my red Honda Civic propel me into the future, the world outside my window is a mirror of the self I hope to become: moving forward, ever-changing. But as my thoughts wander, the world of memory is the only mirror in which I see myself as I am. So I keep looking in the rearview mirror, peering into my past, trying to see how I ended up on this road.

  When I first arrived in Alaska on January 1, 1990, I had to redraw my grandiose self-portrait of the courageous adventurer. Southeast Alaska was not the frozen wasteland I’d expected. The region’s most pervasive feature was the Tongass National Forest, a mountainous, temperate rainforest threaded by fjords. In winter, the dark green mountains and islands of the Inside Passage were laced with heavy snow; in summer, they were an effusive tangle of verdant life wrapped in heavy mist.

  In the capital city of Juneau, the cracker-box houses and shops were a whimsical chalk painting, perpetually melting in mushy snow or drizzly rain. In winter, state lawmakers buzzed with a pioneer passion for democracy. In summer, towering white cruise ships dwarfed Gastineau Channel and flooded the city with tourists. There was a movie theatre, a McDonald’s, and a mini-mall, although furniture had to be ordered from “Down South.”

  I didn’t live in the kind of place I’d pictured: a metal Quonset hut hung with icicles and beset by cruel winds. Instead, I rented a room on Douglas Island, in a three-bedroom zero-lot-line, which I shared with a man, a woman, a German shepherd, a black lab, and a green parrot. The perfidious parrot’s rousing pre-dawn chorus of, “Good-morning-accckkkk! Good-morning-accckkkk!” eliminated the need for me to set an alarm.


  When I first arrived, I was so immersed in the mist-cloaked, emerald mystery of Juneau that at first I didn’t sense its edges. It’s not possible to get in or out of Juneau by any means other than boat or plane. After a few months, it hit me: I couldn’t simply hop in my car and drive somewhere else when the mood struck, as if I’d checked into the Hotel California. When I felt that way, I’d take my car north on the main drag as far as I could go—about forty miles. This was called going “out the road,” a road that never could take anyone out of town, but only mimic the feeling. Juneau is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever known, but even paradise should have an escape route that doesn’t require a plane ticket.

  Yet what I felt wasn’t claustrophobia, because in another sense, Alaska was bigger than imagination could contain. Beyond the mountains that hemmed Juneau in sat one of the largest ice fields on the planet. Sometimes, after work, I drove up Douglas Island and parked my car across the channel from Mendenhall Glacier. As I stared at the glacier, which glowed like a medieval ice spirit in the dusk, I felt dawning in me a belief in my own secret possibilities. One clear night as I drove home from work, the sky came alive, undulating and eddying in ethereal shades of red and green that appeared and disappeared like capricious spirits. Leaning over the steering wheel to stare up through the windshield, I nearly drove off the road. I swerved just in time, but continued to gaze up at the hypnotists that had nearly killed me. They were merely the northern lights, but I couldn’t shake the idea that I was watching angels dance.

  For the first few weeks I was fascinated with maps and globes. I’d moved to a place so far away that makers of U.S. maps usually relegated it to a box in the South Pacific, so that millions of schoolchildren spent years under the erroneous impression that Alaska was an island next door to Hawaii. On globes, Alaska curved along a different horizon from the world I’d known, reinforcing my feeling of dissimilation from the people who lived in that other world.

  Many locals seemed suspicious of outsiders like me, which was understandable because we rarely stayed in Alaska long enough to be worthy of their attachment. Newcomers received the disdainful Native nickname, Cheechakos; old-timers received the prized nickname, Sourdoughs. My Cheechako shortage of friends and Juneau’s damp, windy cold often kept me indoors, where I immediately gained ten pounds gorging on the four basic comfort foods: mac-and-cheese, spaghetti, pizza, and chocolate. I wallowed in suffering as if I had discovered it.

  Like many Alaskans, from Cheechakos to Sourdoughs, I indulged in the belief that I was unique and extraordinary. There are Alaskans who deserve such adjectives: the Alaska Natives, who’ve carved an exquisitely hard existence from ice and tundra; and the pioneers, who came to the Last Frontier to rediscover harmony with nature, forge an independent lifestyle, or build a new enterprise. In my case, the belief that living in Alaska made me special was pure conceit: I only came here because I couldn’t land a job anywhere else. But I needed that minor conceit to survive; being special was the only thing I could balance against the cabin fever and overwork that soon threatened to release the oddball who lived inside me, endlessly pacing and yammering to herself.

  The weird engineer who wore his bedroom slippers to work at the TV station, even in the snow, was a reminder never to indulge in too much time alone with my thoughts. So I made the only friends I easily could: other journalists. Some were firmly planted in Juneau and suspected that I planned to ditch them as soon as a better opportunity came along, which, of course, I did. Others, like me, came to Alaska for their first job and first big adventure, and didn’t plan to put down roots. Our camaraderie had the intensity of friendships made during military boot camp—a shared, but fleeting, trial by fire. We got together to sing karaoke at The Waterfront, eat Tex-Mex at The Armadillo, engage in conversation and debate at the Heritage Coffee Company, and bond over our banishment from normal life.

  I retained but one connection to my previous life: deep fear and stress. Only the source had changed: the seemingly simple task of making it to air every night. When I first arrived, the news director had just given his notice. It was such a tiny news department that he also happened to be the only other reporter on staff. For one week he showed me the ropes. Then he left. The following week, another reporter showed up.

  Cheryl was a tall, perfect-breasted beauty with auburn hair, studious but sin-tempting hazel eyes, and the barest hint of sultry Louisiana bayou on her otherwise citified tongue. She had no idea, until she walked in the door and I threw myself at her in panicked greeting, that she and I and one photographer would be the only people putting on an entire newscast.

  Cheryl and I did all the reporting, writing, and producing, most of the video editing, and some of the shooting for the nightly news. She also anchored sports, while I covered weather. On our first day together, a pair of powerful hands seized my heart as I thought, “We’re not going to make it!” On the heels of that panic came a cool, determined calm, as another self replied, “Of course you’ll make it. Because six o’clock will come, whether you’re ready or not, and you will be on the set.”

  It was a realization that would help me in the months to come, as Cheryl and I literally ran through town covering the legislature, Alaska Native rights, gay rights, halibut fishing, timber clear-cutting, salmon spawning, and garbage bears. I stood among piles of processed human shit at the town’s sewage dump, while Cheryl waded through the bullshit of state government and told me the local gossip: which lawmakers were sleeping together, which reporters smoked dope, the dozens of men who asked her out.

  She was attracted to brilliance, and fell for a newspaper reporter with a knack for metaphor. Tender hearted, but sharp-tongued regarding fools, she vociferously disapproved of everyone I dated.

  We became friends quickly as we lived several years of experience in nine short months. Together we plowed through the stress that threatened to plow through us. We regularly laughed, cried, shouted, swore, and threw things—we had no idea that those last three gave everyone around us the mistaken impression that we hated each other.

  One day, as we argued over the best way to cover a story, a young administrative assistant turned to us with doe eyes and said in a tremulous voice, “I wish you two would stop fighting and try to get along.” She sat down in a huff. Cheryl and I stared at each other and burst out laughing. Neither of us thought of it as fighting, but as lively debate. This wouldn’t have been a problem in a regular newsroom, but the station was so small that sales, accounting, and news were all carried on in one large room. Often, we were still putting on make-up when the control room hollered, “Sixty seconds!” and we rushed to the desk to shove microphones up our blouse fronts and welcome the audience to The Southeast Report, without a second to spare.

  In the middle of one newscast I turned to do a live interview with an assembly member and, after introducing him, drew a complete blank: “Thank you for joining us. The first thing I’d like to ask you is . . . uh . . . is . . . ahem . . . excuse me . . .” I shuffled my scripts, trying to find the cheat notes I kept for just such an emergency. But that evening, in my crazed rush to get to the news desk on time, I’d buried my notes beneath my scripts, and a quick search wouldn’t yield them. My face started to burn. I stared at the assemblyman in horror. He didn’t look any too thrilled either. The faint sounds of laughter drifted down the hall from the control room, where the director had fallen out of his chair and was on the floor giggling and kicking his feet.

  It lasted a gut-twisting twenty to thirty seconds, an eternity in TV news. Then the assemblyman saved me. “I’ll bet you want to ask me . . .” I don’t remember the subject. I only remember smiling at him like an idiot and saying, “Yes,” in a tone suggesting that was exactly what I’d planned to ask all along and my career wasn’t flashing before my eyes.

  Cheryl, though more poised and together than I, was not immune to the foibles of small town news. One night, she was getting ready to t
ape on the set, frustrated as usual with one technical problem or another, and didn’t realize her microphone was prematurely live. In the middle of a family sitcom the word “Fuck!” blasted through living rooms all over town.

  Cheryl was a savvy journalist, who liked the work. Yet she confessed she never could completely shake her inner Louisiana girl, who’d rather be shucking peas on her grandmother’s porch than racing to make a live feed. That girl occasionally popped up in the newsroom. Perhaps the most memorable time was the day she came flying into the studio on roller blades to tape an interview with the governor, who was already on the set. Both she and the governor laughed heartily, as she barreled into the news desk, unable to brake.

  “I’m a Type-B personality in a Type-A career,” she once confessed to me. “Sometimes I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself.”

  I was a Type-A personality, and I didn’t know why I did any of the things I did to myself. The worst thing I did to myself had little to do with work. One reason I came to Alaska was to escape a terrifying man. It didn’t occur to me I might have run in the wrong direction.

  ***

  I didn’t come to Alaska to find a man. But there were just so many of them, it was hard to avoid tripping over a few.

  In the Lower Forty-eight, the belief that Alaska has an excess of men has given hope to many a lonely single woman that, if all else fails, she can always pack up and head north. In some small villages the “more men myth” is true, with ratios as high as four or five guys to one gal. But there are few careers for a single woman to pursue in the Alaska Bush. In bigger towns, the manhunt fantasy falters, as the numbers hew closer to one-to-one, although yes, there are a few extra men.

  Both in the city and in the bush, there’s a well-known saying about Alaska’s male-to-female ratio: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Many of the extra males are the same kind of men who, once upon a time, would have been toothless gold prospectors, grizzle-haired hermits, or drunken roustabouts. Among the rest, there do exist passionate, exciting men with a sense of adventure, and only a few are actually dangerous, but good luck sorting them out.