They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  When my grandparents divorced, Grampa sat me down in the family room to talk—not on his lap, in a chair across from him. He talked for a long time, but I tuned out most of the words. The only ones I remembered were, “Cara, don’t wear your heart on your sleeve like I have. You’ll only get hurt.” I was only twelve, but I knew what he meant. I set my jaw, and in my mind I replied, Fine. If that’s the way you want it. From that moment on I acted like I didn’t care, about any of it.

  One night, Mom (my grandmother) sat in the living room crying in the dark, and I tried to sneak past her to my room without her noticing. But she called out, “Aren’t you going to say anything? You’re not even going to try to comfort me?”

  I turned to her with a blank stare. “What do you want me to say?”

  “You’re cold, you know that?” she hissed.

  I turned away silently, walked to my bedroom, opened the closet door, crawled inside, and cried, muffling my sobs in a pile of clothes until I fell asleep.

  Likewise, when Sean told me, “It’s probably not a good idea to get too attached to me,” I set my jaw in that same firm line and thought, Fine. If that’s the way you want it.

  On one of the days after that, Chance returned. Sort of. I think. Like two balls of yarn pawed endlessly by kittens, at some point my dying relationship with Chance got tangled up in my growing relationship with Sean, until events got tied together in one confusing knot.

  Sean never said he loved me, although he acted like he did. Chance often said he loved me, although he acted like he didn’t. If this were about making a choice, none-of-the-above would seem the most reasonable option. But, in their best moments, the two choices before me seemed more reasonable than none at all. After years of failed relationships, I’d begun to believe that looking elsewhere would only land me in an equally humiliating predicament. After all, there was one thing all my relationships had in common: me. Maybe it wasn’t the men I was choosing, but something else I was doing wrong. Surely there were no two people more different than Chance and Sean. If I were missing some essential clue, I decided I’d prefer to figure it out now rather than go through it all again with someone new.

  As a horny thirty-something woman sitting atop a biological time bomb, I was no longer willing to consider celibacy as an option.

  So when Chance showed up on my doorstep, his eyes downcast, I invited him in. Though I opened the door wide, he seemed to squeeze himself through the gap like the final, reluctant dab of toothpaste that wanted to be sucked back into the tube. He sat on the couch arm closest to the door and said, “I’ve been miserable since the last time we talked. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I miss you. You were the one thing in my life I knew I could count on, and I blew it. I know this is my fault. I know you didn’t cheat on me. I know I drove you out of this relationship. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”

  “I got back together with Sean.”

  He leapt to his feet, his eyes inflamed. “I knew it! You couldn’t even wait two weeks for me?”

  “I’ve already been waiting three years for you—waiting for you to stop being the guy who breaks up with me once a week. You want me on Monday, then dump me on Friday.”

  He continued as if I hadn’t spoken, “I know you, Cara. Your problem is you can’t spend five minutes alone. Well, you know what? That’s why you’re going to end up old and alone, just like your grandmother!”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  I’d never before seen Chance put the lid back on his self-control once he’d removed it. But this time he did. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I promised myself I wasn’t going to get mad. I’m sure the only reason we keep hurting each other is because we love each other.” This schizoid logic has been foisted on the world by romance novels, love songs, and wife beaters since long before I was born. But I was no longer buying it.

  “I can’t promise we’ll get back together,” I said. “But I’d be willing to go to counseling with you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. You won’t get back together, but you expect me to go to counseling? What’s the point?”

  “We’ve tried to be together and we’ve tried to split up. But we just keep ending up here, having this same conversation. Maybe a counselor will help us figure out how to get back together and stay together, or how to split up and stay split up.”

  ***

  We stayed split up and each found our own counselors. Mine was a diminutive, doughy, middle-aged woman with grey hair, a grandmother who seemed more like the kindly Hallmark variety than my own.

  Each time she asked how something made me feel, I had ten answers: “I wasn’t angry when he said that, just hurt. Okay, maybe I was angry . . . He reminded me of my dad. Well, at first he reminded me of my grandpa . . . It felt the way it did when my mother moved away . . . Come to think of it, it was more like the time my second step-mom told me I couldn’t stay with my grandmother anymore, because she was going to be my mother now . . . Anyway, the weird thing is, no one in my family ever drank, so how come you think I keep ending up with alcoholics?”

  The counselor had a few answers of her own, which always sounded logical but didn’t feel like they had any bearing on the ambiguity of my experiences.

  So, one weekend, I decided to stop my internal struggle and seek an external escape—no more analyzing old feelings, just breathing fresh air. I packed my car with camping gear and headed for a town called Hope. At first, the irony didn’t occur to me. Hope was simply a place where I’d not yet been, just a couple of hours from Anchorage. As I traveled down the finger of Turnagain Arm, then hooked back up the other side, I decided hope was the bravest of emotions. It seemed fitting to travel alone as I tried to find it again.

  You could say I grew up with hope: Hope was the name of the grandmother who raised me, though no one called her that. I just called her Mom. Right before I went camping, I phoned her to confess the triumvirate of doom I’d created.

  “It’s terrible having to choose between two men, isn’t it?” she said.

  “That’s right—I forgot,” I said. “You went through something similar, didn’t you?”

  At seventy-three, Mom was still an exotic beauty: half Mexican and half Chinese, with large, wintry brown eyes that slanted at the corners, and buttery skin that looked like it belonged to someone twenty years younger. Years ago, as a young woman in El Paso, she left a fiery wake wherever her high heels clicked, turning lovesick men into blackened cinders. She was oblivious to her effect on men, until years later, long after the flames had cooled. Years later, she often sighed over the beauty she once had, but never experienced. An orphan, she grew up among aunts and cousins who clucked in pity over the mixed heritage that made her singularly unattractive. Like the ugly duckling, having never seen anyone else who looked like her, she believed them.

  Hope was born not of love, but of violence. Her Mexican mother was raped at fourteen, although some of the man’s legitimate children later claimed she was only a victim of her own libido. The man was no stranger to the girl. He was her sister’s husband, a Chinese man of thirty-five. She gave birth to Hope at fifteen, then died of tuberculosis at seventeen. For many years, the family told Hope her father was dead, too.

  Hope was two years old when her grandparents took her with them from El Paso to East L.A.. Her grandmother died shortly after, and her loving “Papá” often left her at the mercy of aunts and uncles who only grudgingly accepted her, the family embarrassment. As soon as she was big enough to reach the stove, the sink, and the hamper, her aunts expected her to cook, clean, and take care of their children. In return, they shared a roof with her, for which she was expected to be grateful, regardless of the rats that lived in that roof—she woke one night to the tickle of whiskers on her neck, grabbed hold of the rat, and threw it across the room.

  Feeling unwanted, except for the services she could p
rovide, she withdrew into a persistent silence. Hope gave up on love.

  When she got pregnant at seventeen, love had little to do with it, only loneliness. The father stayed around just long enough to pass on twenty-three chromosomes, then vanished. Hope gave birth to a son: my dad.

  After she spent a few years as a factory seamstress, a sympathetic aunt told her she should ask her father for help. “Father?” Hope asked. “I have a father?” Her aunt confessed the family secret: Hope’s father was not only alive, he was a man she’d always thought of as her uncle, and he owned a Chinese restaurant in El Paso. She sent him an angry letter, asking why he’d left her orphaned all those years. Though he never denied it, he sidestepped directly acknowledging she was his daughter. But he did offer her a job. In hope of starting a new life, she took her son on a train to El Paso, where she waited tables at her dad’s restaurant, rented a one-room apartment, and went about the frightening task of raising a child alone.

  When she was twenty-eight she met my grandfather, an army man seven years her junior who frequented the restaurant, one of the few men not intimidated by the hot blaze of her passing. Henry was a Korean American, but he’d grown up in Hawaii, and his unguarded nature must have thrown her off hers. At six feet tall, he had a laid back, swaying gait, as if he walked to the sound of internal island music. He was frequently surrounded by people, and his unhurried manner, his deep, ready laughter, his listening expression—even when he was the one doing the talking—all suggested he would always make time to visit with an old friend, or make a new one. It was a charisma that owed nothing to pretense.

  When my grandmother started dating my grandfather, she was in love with someone else. But that man wasn’t the marrying kind; Raúl only wanted an affair. In the 1950s, accepting such an indecent proposal wasn’t the best way to impress family and friends. On the other hand, she was an unmarried mother whose family already believed her a fallen woman. She figured no one had to know what she and Raúl were up to in the wee hours after the night shift. For a time, she and the love of her life “lived in sin”—thrilling, heart-pounding, dizzyingly happy sin.

  Then one night she told him that she needed “more,” and that if he couldn’t give her more he shouldn’t come back. Tears streamed down his face, but he left without argument, or offer.

  Shortly after that, Henry started taking her out: to the movies, to lunch, for long walks. Smitten by Hope’s shy, though carefully tended, beauty, after just a few months he asked her to marry him. She liked Henry. Everybody did. But it wasn’t love.

  She told me, “You know how they say, ‘When you’re in love with someone, every day is like the Fourth of July’? Well, there were no fireworks.”

  “So what made you decide to marry him?”

  “I asked your father who he’d prefer to live with, Henry or Raúl, and you know what he said? He said, ‘I think you should marry Henry, because I think he’d treat you nice.’”

  Just a week before she was to be married, Raúl showed up, looking as if he hadn’t slept in months. He told her he loved her and missed her dreadfully, and he pleaded with her to marry him after all.

  “So if you loved him why didn’t you marry him?” I asked.

  She paused. “I guess I didn’t think he’d make a good husband. But for the first few years I was married to Henry, I still thought about him.”

  “Did Grampa know about this other guy?”

  “I think he knew I’d been seeing someone else. And when I accepted his proposal I told him, ‘I like you, but I’m not in love with you.’ He said, ‘That’s okay, you’ll learn to love me.’ And you know what? I did.”

  Then, after twenty-three years of marriage, Grampa met someone else. He told his wife that she was “cold” and that he could no longer live with her distance. I don’t know if he’d ever mentioned this to her before he decided to leave, but I got the feeling he was from the “if you loved me you’d know” school of thought. Although she’d grown to love him, perhaps she’d never stopped wondering if she’d settled for less, and perhaps he’d known it all along. Or perhaps her love-famished childhood had never given her an understanding of how to show love.

  I often found her icy and forbidding myself. The frost deepened as she went through menopause and I entered puberty. Occasionally the ice thawed long enough for us to scream at each other, about how I was an inconsiderate slob and she was impossible to please.

  One day she said to me in a fit of pique, “You know, I think part of the reason Grampa left was because of you. Because he couldn’t stand all your arguing.” Years later I told her how much that statement upset me. I expected her to cluck with remorse and explain that she’d only spoken in anger. Instead, she pondered for a moment before stating with conviction, “Yes. I think that was true. Part of the reason he left was because you lived with us. Raising another child at our age put a strain on our relationship.”

  When I was growing up, she wasn’t the type to readily dispense hugs and kisses. By high school, I grew determined to change her. I took to randomly sneaking up on her and throwing my arms around her the way I used to when I was a little girl. She tried to find something to do with her arms in return, but they never rested comfortably anywhere. She usually settled on a chuckle and a pat on my arm.

  As a young woman, whenever I told her about my hopes for my own life—the guys I was interested in, my college plans, my career opportunities, my dreams of travel—I was crushed by her apparent lack of interest. She seemed to stare right through me, as if she were consummately bored and merely waiting for me to finish. When I was done gushing about my latest plans, she would ask, “Have you seen any good movies lately?” Later I wondered if, while I was speaking, her inward gaze was focused on the exotic destinations she never visited, the career she never had, the campus she never walked, the guy she never married.

  The day before I drove to Hope, I asked her, “Did you make the right choice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her answer scared me. Seventy-three years old and she still didn’t know?

  ***

  I arrived in Hope at about five in the evening, quickly found a campsite, and started the hike to Gull Rock. I knew the walk would take three hours round-trip and I’d barely make it back before dark, but I couldn’t resist the beckoning gleam of amber afternoon light. The trail rose along a ridge above Cook Inlet, thick with trees that seemed to brood over thoughts more troubling than mine. Their roots reached across the winding path like the bony fingers of old men, trying to trip me as a mean-spirited joke. Several waterfalls did trip over the old hands, but fell laughing down the mountainside as if, unlike me, they got the joke.

  The further I moved up the trail, the fewer returning hikers I met. Fewer and fewer people foolish enough to push the daylight this far. About halfway down the trail, I met a young man coming the other way who warned me, “There’s bear scat on the trail ahead, so be careful.” I pictured a bear singing scat like Ella Fitzgerald, “Boppity-be-bop, be-bop, be-bear!” I kept walking, singing to make noise, until I spotted the bear scat lying in the middle of the trail. I stooped down to study it as if it might reveal something. Finding nothing about this particular bear turd that suggested an imminent attack, I looked around warily and continued.

  A half-hour later, I broke free of the trees and stepped onto Gull Rock, a promontory that looked across the inlet at the great furrowed brow of the Chugach Range. I could hear the tide rushing in. The ocean stampeded the cliffs in a frenzy that would have been deadly to anyone ignorant enough about Alaska to stand on the rocks below. Within moments, massive boulders that had risen several feet above water were completely submerged.

  Farther out, a small grayish-white shape rose from the inlet, sending up a spout of water. In a heartbeat, it happened again a few feet away. Then off to the front, then behind, again, again, again. Some twenty to thirty beluga whales glided by, surfacing and
diving, surfacing and diving, riding the tide like surfers cruising an unseen wave, chasing the fish that were being swept up Turnagain Arm.

  Surely this gathering of seafaring family and friends was repeating a pattern. If they hadn’t been here before, their ancestors had. Likely none of them suffered any angst in knowing that this waterway would not take them anywhere new. I looked around the cliff. There was no one but me . . . and the whales. I drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh so loud it made me wonder when I’d stopped breathing. My mind was more silent than silence as I watched the last of the whales pass, their smooth backs glistening like pearls in the last of the day’s sunshine.

  Feeling that I’d seen what I’d come to see, I turned back down the trail. That’s when I knew. I still had no idea which man to choose, but I was now sure there would be a moment when a choice would choose me. I would ride the tide in the direction it carried me. I would move in the direction where I was likely to be fed, and I would avoid the direction that led me into rough waters and struggle. Maybe, as long as we seek the truth, there are no right or wrong choices, only the choices we make and whatever comes after.

  Sheer Madness

  thirty-five years old—pokhara, nepal

  When I stepped onto the guesthouse roof in Pokhara’s early morning sunshine and saw the snow-covered Himalayas for the first time, I felt like the first child seeing the first mountains that ever collided and thrust their way skyward. Unbelievable that these white-robed celestial giants sprang from the same planet as other mountains I’ve met, and there have been many.

  I spent a good part of my five days in Kathmandu searching the backpacker message boards, checking online, and pumping everyone I met in an effort to find trekking partners. I’ve continued the search since I arrived in Pokhara last night. This is how things are done among lone travelers. That’s not to say it works.