They Only Eat Their Husbands Read online

  thirty-one years old

  After the stifling cabin fever of my fifth Alaskan winter, the spring sun came hollering at my window, begging me to come out and play. For the first time, Sean’s girlfriend was off-again at the same time I was sans placeholder. Emboldened by spring fever, I asked him to join me for a bike ride.

  We rode Anchorage’s Chester Creek Trail out to Cook Inlet. The inlet and the still-snowy mountains looked gorgeous in the newborn sunshine, but I was distracted by Sean’s muscular thighs, outlined in skin-tight bicycle shorts. I didn’t have much chance to stare, however, as he spent most of the time riding behind me. That was a matter of politeness on his part; he was the stronger cyclist and wanted to keep me in sight.

  Sean was amused that I could keep up a steady stream of chatter while pedaling at, what was for me, a furious pace. “How can you breathe?” he asked.

  “I’m fine!” I turned to shout over my shoulder, almost zigging off the path.

  “Shouldn’t you keep your eyes on the trail?”

  “I’m fine!” I turned to shout again, zagging the other way.

  We talked about everything from the weather to the meaning of death, and one thing became clear: while his ex was off-again, Sean was still on. Every subject reminded him of something funny Ann said this one time, or something interesting he and Ann did together this other time, or something or other about Ann at one time or another. Although we went out together a few more times, removing his ex from our conversation was like trying to pull flies off a no-pest strip.

  It didn’t bother me all that much. I’d had three relationships in three years and I’d begun to wonder if I was destined to forever be the ultimate antidote to love. I decided that, until I felt more optimistic, I’d keep my relationships with men platonic. I told Sean all I wanted was friendship. Still, part of me hoped he might inspire me to give up this latest attempt at celibacy—my third, or was it my fourth?

  Soon after that, my celibacy experiment failed. But not with Sean. I met someone else, or rather, two someone elses. Sean didn’t seem to mind when my new love life became part of our conversations. He didn’t have a hidden agenda; friendship I asked for, friendship I got. It was kind of refreshing, getting what I asked for. I told myself that it was better this way, that if Sean and I had consummated my fantasy it would have killed our friendship.

  Alaska Escape Plan

  thirty-five years old—the inside passage, alaska

  Today, at my ferry’s last stop on the Inside Passage, I discovered a woman with no sentimental illusions about sex. The ferry anchored for three hours in Ketchikan, and I spent most of that time walking around Creek Street—the old red light district. Boardwalks amble over the creek, where old clapboard brothels and new replicas rise above the water on wood pilings. Creek Street has transmogrified, from a pack of flesh and booze merchants, to a gaggle of souvenir merchants. Just one little house refuses to give up its ill repute: Dolly’s House.

  Ketchikan’s most fondly remembered madam, Dolly Arthur, nee Thelma Copeland, was born in Idaho in 1888. Thelma left home at thirteen, moving first to Montana, then Vancouver. At first she waited tables, but soon discovered she could make more money from the attentions of her many male admirers. She moved to Ketchikan, changed her name to Dolly, and at thirty-one, set up her Creek Street establishment. Back in 1919, the surplus of Alaskan men was no myth at all, making the Last Frontier the perfect place to ply her new profession.

  During prohibition in the Roaring Twenties, Dolly did a booming business. She considered herself higher class than common whores, whom she claimed to detest. She called herself a “sporting woman” who sold booze and conversation. If she also happened to like a good roll in the sack, that was another matter. She was known to say, “I just liked men and they liked me, too!” She had the kind of beauty that was in vogue in Mae West’s era: big and busty with blond doll curls, which she wore well into old age.

  Today, Dolly’s pastel green home is a cloying anachronism. With its peeling pink-flowered wallpaper, pink lampshades, pink-shrouded brass bed, and the secret liquor cache in the closet, it recalls a time of innocent dissipation and good clean lechery—a time that never was.

  Creek Street was a rough place during its red-light days, which lasted into the 1950s. The little wooden bordellos were filled at various times with fishermen, loggers, and miners. Every night, music, ribald laughter, and rough voices floated over the water, while piss, bottles, and the occasional body floated in it.

  Ultimately, what set Dolly apart from the other girls on the boardwalk may simply have been that she stayed long after the party was over. After World War Two, Dolly shared her home with a man named Lefty for twenty-six years, off and on between loud and lusty fights. Lefty was a raffish longshoreman who called on more than one of Creek Street’s other gals, but Dolly took the philosophical view that at least “he always came back.”

  When the red-light district was put out of business in the fifties, Dolly became a respected member of the community. She had a foul mouth and foul temper, but she was generous, always paid her bills, and gave the town something to talk about long past her prime. She continued to receive gentlemen callers for many years after she retired.

  Dolly lived in the house at 24 Creek Street into the early seventies. She died in 1975 at the age of eighty-seven, leaving her home and furnishings to the town to use as a museum. It may be the only museum in the world that features bathtub curtains decorated with multicolored flowers made from French silk condoms.

  I don’t know if she came to the Last Frontier to find a man, but she certainly came to take advantage of their overabundant presence. In those days the odds were, indeed, good. And if the goods were odd, what could a sporting woman expect? I’m sure the idea of living a celibate life while surrounded by a passel of men would have made Dolly laugh.

  The Last Frontier

  thirty-one years old

  If I’m going to face the truth—and sitting on a ferry for three days is giving me more time for that than I ever wanted—I have to admit I probably wouldn’t be leaving Alaska if it weren’t for Chance.

  The first time I saw Chance, his body was flying upward into a pale blue spring sky. Kaitlin had invited us both to dinner, and when I arrived I spied him in the backyard, jumping on a trampoline with her two youngest kids. He was doing flips and giggling harder than Josh and Alexandra, who were eleven and twelve.

  So when Chance came into the house, breathless, bright-eyed, and tousle-haired, it’s no wonder I assumed he was younger than I was. I was thirty-one; I figured him at about twenty-five. He had frat-boy hair, flirty blue eyes, and a prankster grin. He was very gentlemanly as Kaitlin introduced us. Then he ran back outside to play.

  “So what do you think?” Kaitlin asked.

  “Jesus, Kaitlin, let’s see, based on our thirty seconds of introduction . . . he’s cute, and he’s charming, but he’s too young and too good-looking for me. He looks like a Ken doll. He reminds me of the popular boys who used to make fun of me at school.”

  He wasn’t twenty-five. He was thirty-three. And, as the evening drew on, he kept climbing out of the box I’d drawn to contain him. He’d traveled to exotic places and thrown himself into dangerous adventures and he knew how to tell a story. At dinner, we couldn’t stop laughing when he told us about his days as a trouble-making army brat: in the Philippines he had a pet monkey that sat on his shoulder and went with him everywhere; also in the Philippines, he once tried to make chocolate-covered lizards by dipping live geckos in chocolate sauce; in Florida, on a dare, he tried to swim through an underground drain and almost drowned.

  Growing up didn’t change him. On a snorkeling trip somewhere in the tropics, a small octopus wrapped itself around his hand and a battle ensued: “So I’m trying to shake the octopus off, but he won’t let go. Then I try to pull him off, but he just latches onto my other hand. So I try to bi
te his head off. Suddenly he turns and pushes his tentacles against my face. So I yank him off—sthlupp! But the tentacles wrap around my hand again. Now I’m mad, so I try biting his head off again—sthlupp! He grabs my face again.” He finally pried the octopus off, though we wouldn’t have tired of the story if the octopus had fought him for another fifteen minutes.

  Although I was amused by this oversized man-child, that wasn’t enough to convince me to try hooking up with him. For the next couple of weeks, Kaitlin pestered me to call him. I said if he were interested he’d have to call me.

  “It’s not like you gave him a lot of encouragement,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to date again. I need to get my confidence back up. I’ll tell you what, if someone else asks me out first, then later, down the road, I might have the courage to call him.”

  ***

  Two months passed. Chance didn’t call me; I didn’t call him. I forgot about him and resumed the celibacy dance with Sean. Then, as the summer days stretched out, I grew restless.

  I read somewhere that there were people who, unencumbered by romantic entanglements, actually enjoyed spending time alone. So on the Fourth of July, instead of trying to wrangle an invitation to someone’s, anyone’s, barbecue, I set out to prove to myself that solitude was not just a test of character to endure, but an opportunity to celebrate. To prove it, I spent the day with the largest horde of strangers I could find.

  Every July Fourth, tens of thousands of Alaskans swarm to the tiny fishing town of Seward to party in the streets, and to watch three hundred men and three hundred women run up and down Mount Marathon in separate races. Mount Marathon emerges from Resurrection Bay with the sudden thrust of all Alaska’s seaside mountains—a steep, grueling, three-thousand-foot dare. For Southcentral Alaska, the race is an Independence Day icon.

  I wedged myself into the crowds at the bottom of the mountain, to watch men wearing paper numbers leap down the mountainside. Even as all that sweat-soaked, dirt-stained testosterone rushed past me, it never occurred to me that coming to Mount Marathon to celebrate my celibacy might be a mistake.

  After the race, I wound my way through the crowded festival booths and went to the beach for a walk. The shore was packed with hundreds of people fishing and camping, children playing ball, and a circle of teens kicking a Hacky Sack. Looking past all those people to the sun-washed bay, I smiled, thinking, “What a great companion I’ve found in myself, a woman full of interesting thoughts, compatible and undemanding. Spending time alone really is satisfying.” Then a cute guy rode past me on a bicycle.

  Our eyes met, and he did that corny Hollywood double take that I thought no one ever did in real life. Later, when I turned to walk back toward the docks, we crossed paths again. This time I did the double take and we both laughed.

  “Did you just finish the men’s race?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I did.” He turned his bike around and backpedaled to cruise alongside me.

  “I’m impressed!”

  “It’s not like I was a top finisher or anything. I don’t usually do stuff like that.”

  “Well, you look like you do . . . I mean you have a runner’s body . . . I mean . . . ” I was surprised at how flustered I was.

  He was short and wiry, and I admired his athletic good looks. I also admired his love of challenge and the outdoors, which I assumed had brought him here. He smelled overly ripe, but I figured any guy would after running up and down a mountain on a hot day. As I listened to his slow laugh and stared into his arrestingly large, sea-colored eyes, I forgot how great it was to be alone.

  Scott was a living checklist of Alaskan cool: a carpenter who’d just designed and built his own house, a backpacker who’d traveled to exotic countries, a dog lover who owned a powerful Akita. He was the kind of dreamer who did something about it, and it was easy to imagine myself going along for the ride. So what if that ride was in a smelly old truck full of dog hair?

  He lived in Kenai, even farther from Anchorage than Seward. But in Alaska, so many towns are spread so far apart that Alaskans don’t think of a three-hour drive the way most people do. So we exchanged numbers. There was no reason to call Chance now. Scott seemed perfect, without the terrifying excess of charisma.

  A couple of weekends later, Scott drove to Anchorage—ostensibly to visit a friend, but he spent most of the weekend with me. We went on a bike ride along the Coastal Trail, my usual modus operandi as a serial first-dater. The sight of a moose on the trail, the sound of shifting gears, and the condensed versions of our life stories filled the day with companionable noise, and I was hooked. When we went to a movie the next day and he awkwardly held my hand in the darkened theater, I noticed he smelled like a men’s locker room. But I put it down to nerves.

  I drove to Kenai for a visit and he took me to see the house he was almost finished building. It stood on a wooded bluff overlooking the beach. The house was an airy, sunlit space of pale wood and clear glass, its cirque of oversized windows a paean to both the rising and setting sun.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “I never knew anyone who designed their own house before.”

  “Well, my dad helped a lot. And hopefully it’ll only be my house for a few years. What I hope to do, as soon as I move in, is to immediately start work on the next one. Then I’ll sell this one, move into the next one, then start another one, and turn the whole thing into a moneymaker. Then I won’t have to work for other people ever again.”

  “Your own person,” I said thoughtfully. I looked around me, imagining a tall plant in this corner, a large print on that wall, and myself curled up with a book next to the bay window.

  We went for a walk on the beach with his dog, Avy. The broad-shouldered Akita was theoretically under voice command. But when we passed a female golden retriever, Avy ignored his master’s voice and tried to mount her. The retriever’s owner, a young woman sunbathing in her panties and bra, jumped up and began screaming and uselessly flapping her arms. “Oh my God! Do something!” she shrieked.

  Scott jumped in and pulled off his dog. Then he turned to me and said, “Excuse me. This may look kinda strange.” My mouth dropped as Scott grabbed Avy by the front paws and flipped the huge dog on his back. He then straddled the animal until they were nose-to-nose, gripped Avy’s snout in his hands, stared the dog down, and shouted, “No! Bad behavior! No!” The dog tried to rise, but Scott forced him backward again, holding that position until the dog stopped struggling, whimpered, and licked his face. Only then did he allow his pet to rise. Scott then turned to me and smiled sheepishly. “I learned that from a dog trainer. Avy sees me as his alpha male, and if I want to teach him right from wrong I have to treat him the way an alpha male would by establishing a dominant position.”

  During the rest of our walk, Scott talked not about dogs, but about relationships. He told me his mother was an alcoholic and his father was a co-dependent, his ex-girlfriend was a co-dependent who recently went back to her abusive ex-boyfriend, and he (Scott) was a co-dependent with a habit of falling for women who treated him badly. He and his father had recently joined a twelve-step program together and Scott was an overflowing vomitory of the language of recovery: enabling, self-awareness, letting go, one day at a time, higher power . . . I’d never known a man who talked so much about relationships. I assumed it was a good sign: maybe someone so interested in the subject would be good at it.

  Back at his house—the dark and dingy one he was living in until the wood-and-glass dream house was completed—the walls were filled with photos of foreign countries he’d visited. On one wall, a group of Vietnamese children laughed down at me as my latest experiment with celibacy came to an end. I’d planned to wait, at least until I could convince Scott to put on deodorant, but I changed my mind for two reasons: long repression in the company of Sean, and the long drive home from Kenai.

  Some women would have called my next two mo
nths with Scott a whirlwind romance. It was more like a tornado of sex. I believed I was falling in love. But, after two months of whirl, we ran out of wind. First our conversations turned dull. Then he stopped calling. I didn’t bother trying to find out why.

  “I’m okay about it,” I told Kaitlin. “It’s not like he was perfect. He kept talking about his old girlfriend, and the new self-help program that was helping him get over his old girlfriend, and how he was never again going to make the same mistakes he made with his old girlfriend. Besides, he had really bad B.O. Get this: he said he didn’t believe in antiperspirants or deodorants, because he read an article that said they interfere with the natural sex pheromones that attract women.”

  “Ewww! I could never date someone who had bad body odor. How could you stand it?”

  “I figured after we were together a little longer I could break it to him gently, tell him his pheromones weren’t as sexy as he thought. I just never got the chance.”

  Kaitlin was sympathetic, for about five minutes. Then she couldn’t restrain herself: “Okay, you said if someone asked you out first, to build your confidence, you’d call Chance.”

  “It’s been too long.”

  “I’ve got an idea. Chance does this sport called paragliding. Why don’t you call and tell him you want to do a feature story about paragliding?”

  “I’m not going to do that!” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds unethical.”

  “Paragliding?”

  “No, calling him on the pretext of doing a story.”

  “No it’s not. It’s a legitimate feature. It’s a very cool sport, and it hasn’t been around that long. It’s perfect for TV, very visual. So, you’ll really do the story. Then later, if he seems interested, you can ask him out.”

  “Okay, okay. But what’s paragliding?”

  ***

  After Kaitlin sold me on the paragliding story, I called Chance and stammered my way through a pitch. I’d been a reporter for five years, and I was known for being aggressive, yet I couldn’t seem to remember what I usually asked on these calls.