They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  The main problem was that I was still shaking in reaction to my second near-proposal in two months.

  I was still destroying the apples when Saoirse and his son walked in. Saoirse looked gruff and cheery as usual. “Good morning!” he said.

  “Good morning,” I said, with a guilty smile—I liked him very much and I knew turning down a job I’d begged for wasn’t likely to earn his respect—“I need to talk to you.”

  In the half-laughing, half-exasperated tone of someone who’s been through this conversation at least a dozen times, he said, “No! I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear it!”

  Relieved that he was going to have a sense of humor about this, I rushed on, “I’m sorry. I called home this morning . . . ”

  “Oh no! Don’t be doin’ that. You should never call home.” A twinkle lit his stern eyes.

  “And I got another offer . . . ” I continued.

  “Ohhh no,” he interrupted again, obviously enjoying the suspense.

  “I’m getting married!” I said, beaming.

  “Aw, that’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard,” he said with good-humored disgust.

  “No, it’s true.” I turned to Marcella, hoping for forgiveness. “Now, wouldn’t you say that’s a better offer?”

  She only smiled, looking simultaneously pleased and disapproving.

  “Well now, it might be a better offer and it might not be,” Saoirse said. “It depends on who’s making the offer.”

  “I promise I’ll come back to Dingle someday with my fiancé so you can meet him.”

  “If you come back with him, he better be your husband, not your fiancé, or we’ll know it wasn’t a very good offer.”

  “I’m really sorry about inconveniencing you.”

  “Will you marry me, then?”

  “Sorry, you’ll have to get up earlier. I’ve already accepted the first proposal of the day.”

  Although I told Saoirse I’d stay for the day, Marcella and Saoirse’s son politely suggested I might as well leave. I had a feeling they were relieved to be free of my dubious assistance—although I will say, at least I didn’t ruin the scone mix. I thanked them for their understanding. Saoirse’s son shrugged.

  “Thank you. Most people who change their minds don’t offer to help. Don’t worry about it. It happens. And congratulations on getting married.”

  Those last words scared me. The idea hardly seemed real. But tonight my spirit is filled with the stillness that comes with a right decision.

  Even if New Mexico isn’t the right choice, this evening at Ballintaggart I saw the final sign that it’s at least time to finish my journey. That sign was Jerry from the States. Jerry’s been working in the kitchen of a local restaurant during the tourist season, but this evening he told me the restaurant is letting him go and he’s having trouble finding a new job. Jerry is forty-five, but he looks fifty-five. Although his face, clothes, and hair have the rumpled look of all backpackers, on him the look doesn’t communicate adventure, only a consummate weariness. He looks homeless. Maybe that’s because he is. If I had any doubt about my decision, Jerry cured it. I pictured myself at forty-five, working in kitchens and hanging out with people half my age. It was an equally weary sight.

  I’ll miss Dingle’s friendly people, spirited music, and numinous beauty. But I won’t miss spending a long, cold winter working a low-wage job. I won’t miss hitting the pubs each night amid people killing the blues with pints of ale. I won’t miss sleeping in a lonely bed in a cheap room. I can always find friendly people, beautiful scenery, and lively music whenever I want, wherever I go, because I’ve swung the door to my life wide open, and there’s no shutting it now.

  People have always passed in and out of my life without my knowing why. This year they’ve left so many marks on me, my soul must look like Lydia the Tattooed Lady. Tomorrow I’ll leave Ballintaggart behind, but the people I’ve met will come with me. An inky outline of their laughing, singing, open faces will remain indelible on the skin of my psyche.

  Tonight in the music room, Gareth asked, “So, did you talk to your feller?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did the conversation go all right?”

  “It went better than all right. I’m going home.”

  “Good for you,” he said with a firm nod. “Then it was probably all a good thing. It probably brought things to a head.”

  As news of my engagement spread through the hostel, I received congratulations all around, and requests for my story. The Irish Sisters sighed and pronounced it perfectly romantic: “It’s just the best news!” Jerry the Cook listened with the skepticism of someone for whom wandering the world has changed from adventure to fruitless search to resigned transience. He blew a cynical raspberry, “Sorry, I don’t believe in romance.”

  Gareth laughed, shaking his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s just funny,” he said. “One moment you’re on the phone accepting this marriage proposal, and the next you’re in the kitchen at this café chopping vegetables.”

  “And not chopping them very well, either,” I said. “My grandma always told me if I didn’t learn to cook no one would ever marry me.”

  “What a crrruel thing to say!” Vicki said, though I’d been aiming for a laugh.

  “Anyway, you were right, Vicki: I was Dingled. And it took a prince to break the spell.”

  Soon the music started and there was no more need to talk. As music washed over me, I thought about my journey. From Anchorage to L.A., from China to Ireland, I’ve come farther in the past year than in my entire life before. I’ve traveled more than 25,000 miles, according to maps. Off the map, no lines of longitude or latitude can measure how far I’ve come. I still have a long way to go, to the Four Corners, where New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah meet. I don’t feel as if I’m going home. Rather, I’m going to yet another place where I’ll be a stranger in a strange land. For me, it has always been this way. That’s one of the reasons I considered staying away from the United States: in foreign countries it at least makes sense to feel strange and out of place.

  But, although I doubt I’ll ever feel completely comfortable anywhere, I no longer mind feeling uncomfortable. Why do we value one emotion over another? On this journey, in my deepest moments of loneliness and sorrow I’ve found profound beauty, as satisfying and healing as my greatest moments of love and joy. I’ve spent too much time as a worshipper in the American Cult of Happiness. That’s only led me to an inauthentic life.

  Although he may have broken the Dingle spell, the truth is Sean has yet to propose. Not to worry. Sean is not the only one I love. As my heart beats in rhythm with the drums of Ballintaggart, and my journey floats through me like smoke, I remember falling in love with someone else I met along the road. Myself.

  Afterword

  I had planned a six-month solo trek around the globe, but it stretched to a year: eight months overseas and four in the States. My trip encompassed Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Mexico, China, Thailand, Nepal, India, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Ireland, England, and New York. Even after that, I didn’t stop traveling. It took me another year and four moves to settle into a place and a career that suited me. And it took Sean and me longer than that to get engaged.

  Sean and I each had a little farther to travel on our separate journeys before we could grow together. His battle to become sober continued for a couple of years, and my battle to stop reshaping myself to suit others continues to this day. One gift from my global trek was that I ceased worrying about the search for love. I’ve discovered that in a planet of seven billion people, love is not scarce. For me, love is no longer something to search for, but a place to come from.

  My trek became a training course in balancing self-efficacy versus mutual reliance, persistence versus flexibility. The longer I spent outside my comfort zone
, the more I realized security is an illusion. That freed me to become an author, something I had wanted to do since reading Little Women in third grade, but which I once believed was reserved for extraordinary people. I had thought it would take a big ego to strive to be extraordinary. Instead, it requires humility, a willingness to say, “I’m not sure how, but I have something to share and I’m going to share it.”

  I filled fourteen journals during my trek, and reshaping them into a memoir taught me that it’s possible to become the hero of my own story. I have committed to live the rest of my life that way. It’s not easy. I used to find inspiration in the Confucius quote, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I no longer see it that way. Great love requires sacrifice.

  ***

  My trek ended with the big-city pleasures of London and New York, and then off I flew to New Mexico. Although I felt excited to see Sean’s well-loved face when I arrived at the Albuquerque airport, I felt dismayed at my thoughts: “He looks older. Do I look that old?” There was a new gray hair or two at his temples, probably from worrying too much. There was a new line or two around my eyes from months in the sun. The planet kept spinning, and although I’d flown all the way around it in the opposite direction of that rotation, I couldn’t stop it.

  I didn’t realize how tense I’d been for nearly eight months until I let it all go and relaxed against him. I almost fell asleep right there in baggage claim, leaning against his shoulder.

  Sean took over my duffle into which I had stuffed my backpack. The duffle had picked up a duct-taped scar along the way after I’d dragged it through dozens of airports, train stations, and bus stations. It was the first time someone had carried that load for me, and I felt curiously light. As he dragged the duffle with one hand, he held mine with the other. His hand wasn’t much bigger than mine. I’d never noticed that before. We’re so fragile, I thought.

  It was a three-hour drive to Farmington, a small oil town in the northwest corner of New Mexico. We traversed open desert, where intermittent mesas rose like giant anvils from flat terrain. There was so much sky it made me feel small. I tried to call on the inner quiet I’d found on my journey, but instead chattered about my adventures until I was hoarse. As always, Sean was a good listener.

  When I fell silent, he said, “I’m still worried you’re going to be bored with Farmington.”

  “I don’t think I’m capable of being bored,” I said. “Anyway, I’m just really glad to see you.”

  We drove down Farmington’s Main Street, a microcosm of Small Town America: a line-up of dingy mom-and-pops, Wal-Mart, Kmart, a mall, a mesa, Taco Bell, Bank of America. Bored: the word carried a sense of relief. This dot on the map in the middle of a desert looked like a place where I would not feel compelled to get out and see stuff, a place where I could rest.

  At Sean’s studio apartment, I dropped my backpack in the entry and turned slowly to take in these new digs. Despite the ancient green-shag carpet and nearly non-existent furniture, he’d managed to make his surroundings pleasant for a guy on a small income. Sean liked all things Japanese, and the scant decorations reflected that.

  I had mere seconds to take in my new home before we made love with all the intensity of lovers long separated. Almost as good as the sex was contemplating a long, deep sleep in a bed where I knew I’d be staying for many nights to come, with no itinerary for the next day, or the next. The future could wait. Let tomorrow be the first day of the rest of someone else’s life. I folded my shape into Sean’s and slept the enviable sleep of a child after a long day at play.

  ***

  A month after I arrived, I broke out in hives. The unbearable itching made me restless at night, scratching until I bled. I had never had hives before. A friend suggested it was stress.

  I was still waiting for a marriage proposal. But that wasn’t what worried me.

  My feet still hurt so much from months of endless walking that I could barely stand up in the mornings. For the first hour of each day, I hobbled on both feet, as off-balance as if I had a nervous system disorder. But my feet weren’t stressing me out either.

  We’d moved into another apartment, yet I still didn’t think of it as ours, but his. As an unmarried, unemployed woman, riding in the passenger seat of his car, sleeping in his apartment, job-hunting and playing Mah Jongg solitaire on his computer, I felt that nothing was mine, or ours. Just his. But that wasn’t what bothered me most.

  Just before we moved, I’d been hunting for a can opener. Unfamiliar with Sean’s kitchen set-up, I randomly opened drawers. One drawer stuck slightly, then gave suddenly, so that I heard the muffled thumpity-bump of the contents rolling crazily around before I saw them: the drawer was full of dozens of little corks, wine bottle corks. They rolled to a stop as I stared dumbly. The world tilted. Panic rose in my throat. My eyes burned.

  When I was overseas I got lost every day, but that was nothing compared to this moment. I was not just lost, but a missing person. I slammed the drawer shut, frightened I might fall in, never to be found again. Thoughts rolled around my brain with the same crazy thumpity-bump as those corks. I considered grabbing my pack and leaving. I had no car, but surely I could find a way to the airport. I had enough money for a ticket to L.A. I could fly back to Alaska. Or just go to a hotel for the night. Anything! my head screamed. Just don’t . . . stay . . . here!

  Then reason whispered, Stop. Breathe. Think. I borrowed Sean’s bike, musing, Even this isn’t mine, and rode to the nearby Animas River. The forest was turning to the yellows and browns of fall, but to me it was the color of little corks crunching beneath the bike tires like dead leaves, floating down the river like toy boats, left behind by the geese like droppings as they flew south for the winter.

  Then the corks stopped rolling, and all seemed still but the river. I stopped the bike, stepped onto a small bridge over the gentle stream and looked down. The water rinsed away my panic as it whispered, You’re free. Free. Even if every drawer I opened for the rest of my life was full of other people’s corks. They weren’t mine, after all. I could stay or go. The choice was mine. With that, I decided not to make a choice until I gave Sean a chance to explain.

  When he came home I kissed his cheek, invited him to sit next to me on the bed, and told him about the corks.

  Sean gave me a direct look. “Oh, those are from a long time ago. When I quit drinking, at first I broke down and drank some wine occasionally. But I haven’t done that in a long time.”

  He’d never lied to me before, so I believed him. “Okay. I’m glad I asked.”

  But he was lying. Of course he was lying. He was an alcoholic. He started coming home drunk and provoking arguments. I felt betrayed, not by the drinking or the arguing, but by the lying from a man with whom I’d shared my deepest secrets, who had shared his with me.

  ***

  I flew to see my family in L.A., where I borrowed my grandfather’s truck. I spent the next two months driving Grampa’s Toyota pickup around the Desert Southwest: New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. I couch-surfed with friends, trying to avoid overstaying my welcome in any one place. Then, just before the New Year, I received an offer to become a reporter at a small newspaper in Taos, New Mexico. The pay was less than I’d made during my first year out of college. I took it.

  Sean and I spent New Year’s Eve together in Chaco Canyon, camping among ancient Native American ruins. A few days later, I loaded the pickup with the two-dozen small boxes that held the only tangible remains of my previous life: mostly books, photos, and clothes. Then I climbed into the cab and rolled down the window to say goodbye.

  Sean’s eyes were damp, but he managed a teasing smile. “Drive fast and weave in and out of traffic.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, then drove away.

  I had a four-hour drive across lonely desert to think.

  So I didn’t get what I wanted t
hat new year, but I wasn’t some wandering mendicant waiting for life to give me a handout. I loved and I was loved—I found balance in that. I still had me—there was a beginning in that. I saw the rolling Sangre de Cristo mountains just ahead, shy peaks reaching from naked high plains into cold winter sky—there was beauty in that.

  There, below the mountains, in the midst of the silver-green sagebrush, lay the crooked shadow of a deep crack in the earth: the Rio Grande Gorge. Ahead was the bridge that would take me to my new life. I pulled into the turnout and stepped out of the truck. The air was brisk but bracing after the stuffy heated cab. I walked to the middle of the bridge and looked down the battered curve of the gorge. Its rocky walls blushed at the chill touch of afternoon sun. Some 650 feet below, the great river looked small and motionless as a painting, the froth of the rapids wild brushstrokes of inanimate white paint. Then, as the roaring reached my ears and whispered, the water came to life.

  ***

  I didn’t stay long in Taos. I loved that soulful little adobe town nestled between mountain and gorge. Fell under the enchantment of hundreds of years of history passed down to the inheritors of Spanish settlers, Pueblo Indians, pioneers, utopians, and modern artists. Felt charmed when neighbors lifted a single index finger off the steering wheel to signal hello as we passed each other on remote roads. But it was the wrong fit, for several reasons: I felt uncomfortable with a colleague’s ethics, and after my journey had shown me my true self I was less willing to compromise on my values; what’s more, my small salary wouldn’t even allow me to buy a used car, much less travel; and, I worked so many hours I had no time for the memoir I had decided to write.

  So, after three months, I took a promising job as a TV reporter in North Carolina. That job sent me all over the state, from shadowy Blue Ridge Mountains to shimmering Outer Banks. Again, it was the wrong fit: I arrived in the midst of an ethics dispute between the news department and management; I was a loud, opinionated Westerner flailing amid soft-spoken, polite Southerners; and, although I love trees, I felt hemmed in by forest, surrounded, claustrophobic.