It’s 1985 and pampered psychotherapist Lauren Olive loses her job, the love of her life to his hairdresser and is forced to move to a backwoods bungalow as a drug couselor in a rural jail.
Escape Routes
by Marsh Rose
Genre: Historical Women’s Fiction
It’s 1985 and psychotherapist Lauren Olive, a pampered Baby Boomer in the California wine country, has never owned a bank account, lived without a man, or seen the dark side of life. But after she loses her job, and then the love of her life abandons her for his hairdresser, she’s forced to move to a decrepit bungalow in the backwoods and accept work as a drug counselor in a rural jail.
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Lies and Love in Alaska
by Marsh Rose
Genre: Women’s Fiction, Romance
To stop the meddling of her matchmaker friends, divorcee Annalee fakes an affair with an Alaskan bush pilot whose profile she has seen in a magazine about bachelors in that rugged environment. The plan backfires when he appears in her small California town and lures her to his remote cabin with stories about the magnetic pull of the Last Frontier and the promise of lasting love.
In ways she never imagined, she finds herself falling for both the pilot and Alaska in spite of the bears, blizzards, peculiar neighbors, pyromaniac ex-girlfriend, stack of love letters hidden in a pantry and evident truth to what they say about single men in Alaska: the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Before Annalee can sever her ties in California and move north, a shocking telephone call from an unknown woman rocks her world and catapults her into a whole new way of life.
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ESCAPE ROUTES
CHAPTER 1
Sunday, April 7,
1985: “He gives you an allowance? That’s reckless.” --
My friend Bridget
I
would have never grown up if the love of my life hadn’t left me for his
hairdresser. In fact, there were a lot of things I never would have done:
fixed a toilet, slept with a motorcycle racer, been arrested, learned to cook,
bought a house or made peace with my parents.
I was always puzzled about what to call our relationship. Today I’d say I
was living with my significant other or my domestic partner but we didn’t have
those words back then. “Living with my boyfriend” would have
sounded ridiculous given that I was nearly 30 when we met and he was
35.
My mom and dad called our arrangement “shacking up” but they said it with a
smile. That was important to me. While I complained to my friends
about my parents’ over-protectiveness, secretly I was never comfortable with a
life choice until I knew they approved. In fact I had been filled with
trepidation in my first year with Aaron when I took him back to Philadelphia
for Passover to meet them. Although he was a JFK look-alike and a university professor and a psychologist, I feared they
were disappointed in our lifestyle and they’d let it show. We were, after
all, living in sin in San Francisco, that malignant ganglion of sex and
drugs. But they met me at the airport with the usual volley of kisses and
cheek-pinches, and at dinner my father accorded Aaron the seat of honor at the
head of the Seder table even though Aaron was Irish and bewildered.
I had been his
teaching assistant in graduate school. We hooked up the day he found me
sobbing in the back row of his classroom, distraught over the end of an affair
with a musician I swore would be the next Kris Kristofferson. Aaron had
long legs and a boyish grin and thick chestnut hair that fell disarmingly over
one green eye, causing him to constantly flip it back in a graceful pas seul of wrist and neck.
He could have had his pick of arm candy among his worshipful students and
admiring colleagues but he chose me, a diminutive, frizzy-haired, myopic
daughter of Russian immigrants. Ten years later we had become one
of the rare couples in our generation whose relationship had survived the
permissiveness and excesses of the recent past: free sex, open marriages, the
whole suppurating end result of The Summer of Love.
By the early 1980s, Dr. Aaron Prentice was on a tenure track at the
university. I had survived the rigors of getting my psychotherapist’s
license – a master’s degree and a lengthy internship – and was seeing clients
at Changing Times, a non-profit counseling agency housed in an old Victorian on
a side street in town. I could have sought a more lucrative position in a
psychiatric hospital with its endless chaos and demanding bureaucracy but I
chose the lesser-paying quiet ambiance of a small local clinic. My
clients’ issues were typical of our middle-class, middle-aged population.
Loss of a parent, a cheating spouse, a wayward teenager. No violent
paranoid schizophrenics, no one thinking they were Mother Mary. I enjoyed
pleasant relationships with my colleagues and never thought about work on
weekends.
Aaron and I bought an upscale townhouse in Santa Rosa, a city in the famed
Sonoma County wine country north of the Golden Gate Bridge. There, we
lived the lives of established DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids) in the pre-Dot.Com
era. Good wine, good but not excessive food and sophisticated, well-read
friends. On Saturday nights his students dropped by for Merlot and
Chardonnay, hors d’oeuvres and energetic debates. Our décor was a meld of
flea market chic, exotic gifts from travelers and carefully collected objets d’arte. The academic tomes
and literary classics on our living room bookcase kept company with ancient
Native American artifacts and Austrian blown glass. Our throw rugs were
from the Andes.
Aaron did the grocery shopping and cooking. His mother was a noted chef
and cookbook author in Carmel and he was taught from an early age to be
masterful in the handling of sauces and herbs. He told me that some of
the most vitriolic arguments he’d had with his wife throughout their disastrous
brief marriage were about who controlled the kitchen. In contrast I had
segued from my parents’ house to the college dorm, back to my parents, then a
mercifully brief span alone during which time I typically ate a full meal only
on dates. The rest of the time it was take-out standing over the kitchen
sink. By the time Aaron came along I was more accustomed to being fed
than to feeding. I was content to let Aaron take the helm at the stove.
Instead I did the laundry, dishes, and quite a bit of dusting. All
those objets d’arte.
Aaron with his full-time professor’s salary easily assumed responsibility for
our bills. My slim income went toward the little luxuries we both
enjoyed; the best coffee, whale-watching at a bed and breakfast overlooking the
sea. I simply handed my paychecks over to Aaron. If I needed money
for some personal luxury – a hand-embroidered blouse from an artist in North
Beach, some highlighting in my hair – Aaron gave back what I needed.
Bridget, my best friend and former college roommate, was not among the many who
envied me. “You have nothing in your own name?” she said. “What if
he gets hit by a truck? And he gives you an allowance? That’s
reckless.”
But nothing would go wrong. I was cherished and secure in the arms of a
man everyone adored. I wanted nothing more in life than to go on
appreciating the bounty. That was until Aaron announced he was
leaving me for the beautician who did his hair.
************************
LIES AND LOVE IN
ALASKA
PART ONE
CALIFORNIA, 1989
Chapter 1
The Odds Are Good
It was the day after Christmas.
Annalee Perkins leaned on her counter and listened to the rain pinging into a
galvanized bucket in the next aisle. She dreaded the coming hours. Only Valentine’s
Day was as demoralizing as the holiday season at Home And Garden Land. Around
her, fellow H.A.G.L. workers drifted in, hung their sodden rain gear and began
to prepare for the long day ahead.
The intercom roared to life.
Feedback sliced along the cinder block walls, then Annalee heard the voice of
her boss Marvin. “Stupefied,” he thundered. “Five letters, sixty-three down,
third letter Z.” Marvin began each day with the morning paper’s crossword and
he seldom finished it alone. There was a moment of silence, then a reply boomed
from the bookkeeper’s microphone.
“Dazed.”
Annalee sighed. Her knees
ached and she felt older than her 40 years. Reluctantly she shifted her gaze to
the window. Outside in the rain, ten women had formed a line at the door. Their
clothing, from muddy blue jeans to elegant pants suits, represented the wide
range of incomes in the rural northern California wine country. But their faces
wore nearly identical expressions of dismay. Each woman carried an object—a
bathroom scale, a hose attachment or a set of crescent wrenches, some with
festive wrapping paper still attached. When H.A.G.L.’s hangar-like doors
opened, they would stride to Annalee’s counter and imply that she, maven of the
complaints department, was somehow to blame because their husbands or lovers
had shopped for Christmas gifts at the hardware store when they should have
been at the jeweler’s. Then Annalee would spend the day issuing return
receipts, doling out refunds, pleading for stock boys and occasionally
reassuring a crestfallen customer that the customer was indeed worth more, so
much more than this offensive dashboard cover and matching automotive cup
holder and trash receptacle.
“Men,” Annalee murmured. “They can
not accomplish even the most simple requirement of love. A gift.” She
congratulated herself. Never again would she find a brightly-wrapped garbage
disposal brush under the tree. And while she would pass Valentine’s Day alone,
she would not open another box with a bow to find a selection of AA, AAA and D
batteries.
She reached for a shop broom and
turned to her immediate chore, sweeping up the evidence of mice. H.A.G.L. was
damp and drafty to the loyal but long-suffering staff, but for all other
species its accommodations were a luxury relative to wintering in the muddy
field outside. So with the freezing December rains came a parade of insects,
amphibians, birds, bats and rodents to join the swarms of customers.
Someone called her name. She looked
up to see her friend Ivy, The Duchess Of Kitchenware, with her faux tiara
anchored in her hair by a rubber band under her chin. "Got something
for you," she called. "Meet me in the staff lounge for
lunch." She waved what appeared to be a magazine. Knowing Ivy, it
would be something in the realm of dating, being single, or women her age
finding love. Or at least sex.
Annalee sighed again.
* *
*
In the H.A.G.L. staff lounge
Annalee and Ivy unpacked their lunches. Tuna sandwich and tea for Annalee, Diet
Pepsi in Ivy’s lunch cooler along with a jumbo package of potato chips.
“Have some chips,” Ivy offered.
“You know, it’s too bad they didn’t leave the showers when H.A.G.L. took over
the building from Greyhound.” She gestured at the wall where shower stall
dividers had stood. “If the bus drivers could clean up in here, why couldn’t
we? Hose a layer of that H.A.G.L. dust down the drain and be dewy fresh for the
afternoon rush. Should there ever be an afternoon rush.”
“Showers would be good as long as
we don’t get our hair wet. I think Marvin bought that last lot of hair dryers
from gnomes on an island where they don’t have electricity. Anyway, let’s get
it over with. What’s this important article you brought for me?”
Ivy fished in her purse and
withdrew the slick publication she had brandished that morning. “It’s not just
an article, Annalee. It’s a whole magazine. I think you’ll like it.”
“And that’s why your eyes are
squeezed up like when you’re talking about your next round of gum surgery. Hand
it over.”
Annalee took the magazine and
glanced at its cover. She saw an auburn-haired man smiling into the
distance. He wore a red ski parka with its hood encircled by a ruff of white
fur trim and his arms were around the neck of a white dog with strange blue
eyes. Behind them was a sled and in the background a white mountain range.
Annalee fanned the pages. She saw nothing but photographs of individual men
over sparse paragraphs of print. Puzzled, she returned to the cover and then
laughed. “Alaskan Bachelors! What is
this, a mail order groom catalogue for Eskimos?”
“Nothing like that,” her friend
said soberly. “It’s the biggest thing in the singles scene, way better than
personal ads in the paper. It’s on all the talk shows and in all the
bookstores, Annalee. All the men in there are single. They live in Alaska
where there aren’t any women, or hardly any, and you can meet them through the
magazine. And it’s perfectly safe. The people in the magazine interview
them to make sure they’re not weird.”
“You’ve been reading this yourself,
haven’t you? I can just hear Mike. ‘Sure, Ivy, what the hell. We’ve been
married ten years, good a time as any to bring some fresh blood into the scene.
I’ll just mosey on down to the bus depot and pick up our Alaskan bachelor and
his sled dogs while you put the moose in the oven.’ Oh, look, someone’s been
kissing this picture. I see lipstick and it’s your shade!”
“Annalee, come on. It’s been
five years. Your husband and that slut he ran off with have had two kids
already and you’re still hiding from relationships. Everything you wear is
black or brown. No makeup, no accessories, no jewelry other than your wedding
rings that look like a row of klieg lights. You’re like a Civil War
widow. Do you know what some people call you?”
Annalee grimaced. “‘The Widder
Perkins.’”
“Right. So take off the goddamned
rings, put on a red dress and let a nice man get close to you. It’s bad enough
you moved back to your childhood home when Brad dumped you. Leave the past. Go
forward, Annalee. It’s 1990 next week, a whole new decade!”
“Ivy, please. You know my
parents need me to watch the house while they're away, and the singles scene
for women my age is just foolishness, fantasy and sometimes danger. Do you know
of any available man our age who isn’t alcoholic, crazy or secretly married?”
Annalee reached for the pepper mill and vigorously ground it over her sandwich.
“Here in San Amaro a new lover’s moves in bed would be common knowledge because
his most recent ex would have confided to the checkout clerk at Vera’s Market.
And outside the circled wagons of San Amaro? It’s not just a jungle out there.
It’s another planet. Remember Marilyn’s so-called boyfriend Geoffrey?”
“That was an exception, Annalee.”
“Marilyn finding out two weeks
after they got together that Geoffrey was born Gloria and had placed third in
the women’s open golf tournament at Chula Vista? Not all that exceptional, Ivy.
And Lorene’s boyfriend from Los Angeles?”
“Get out! He used to be a woman?”
“No, but she told me he asked to
wear the peach lace thongs he’d spied in her underwear drawer. And what about
Francine? Gives up six generations of Roman Catholicism, joins a singles vision
quest and all she gets is hepatitis from drinking bad river water.”
“You’re just focusing on the
negative. And besides, all those women were losers. Look at you, with those
long legs and red hair. You can get any man you want.”
“Thanks but even if it were true
there’s too much technology. Everywhere you look it’s breast implants, lip
plumping, thigh reduction. I don’t need the competition. The whole
thing just leads to misery. There’s no one out there for me. I mean, what
are the odds of me finding a good man?”
“The odds are good, Annalee. But
you’ll never know if you don’t try.” Ivy met her friend’s eyes and held them
while she reached down to slide Alaskan
Bachelors closer to Annalee’s side of the table.
Annalee rolled her eyes and shoved
the magazine into her purse. “Let’s get back to work, Ivy. There are blenders
to blend, gaskets to gask and H.A.G.L. workers to sell them.”
* *
*
That night Annalee gazed at her
bedroom ceiling in the dark. A quarter moon had plied its course across her
window and now only its silver light cast a dim glow in the room where she had
slept as a teenager—sometimes waking with thoughts similar to those she now
tried to still. Relationships. Long ago it was her desire for romance and now
it was her desire to avoid it but many of its chores and puzzles were oddly
similar. What to give up, what to withhold.
Ivy and her schemes. The most
recent wasn’t the worst but it was bad enough. She had convinced an old
classmate to come from San Diego under the pretext of attending their high
school reunion. “Just let me introduce you to Henry, Annalee,” Ivy had pleaded.
“He could play any musical instrument in the high school band just by looking
at it. ‘Henry The Great,’ the band leader used to call him.”
Henry the Great had whined about
Ivy’s cooking, barely glanced at Annalee, and left two days early. Annalee
alone was pleased with his early departure. Possibly some internal medical
problem, she theorized. He seemed sanitary enough but his fishy-smelling breath
could stop traffic. And Ivy’s third cousin Barry, the engineer from Seattle.
Annalee finally conceded to a phone conversation. On the predetermined night,
Barry phoned and spent an hour alternately vilifying and glorifying his
ex-wife. And Annalee couldn’t imagine being intimate with a man whose hobby was
exotic snakes. His description of his atrium with its climate-controlled haven
for pit vipers made her imagine something cold slithering up her leg. There
were too many women her age out there competing for men, left single by the
devastation and permission of the 1960s and 1970s. No relationships forged in
her generation seemed to last, and she was disheartened by the pathos of
personal ads, singles bars, and her persistent matrimonial agents.
Annalee shifted again in bed. Her
shoulders were suddenly chill and she pulled the covers higher. For five years
her mother and Ivy and their friends had initiated a parade through her life of
single, middle-aged sons, nephews, cousins, neighbors, all divorced and
desperate, or gay and in the closet, or separated and angry, or not available
because of another woman or a secret vice or in one case a 50 year old man who
had never had a girlfriend, lived in his parents’ basement and collected teddy
bears. And that ridiculous “male-order” magazine from Alaska, now bundled up
with the discarded newspapers and circulars in the recycling bin in the garage.
Annalee’s thoughts rolled to a halt
and she drummed her fingers on the sheets. What if, she thought, she could stop
this incessant meddling in her life with one well-placed demonstration of its
futility. Just a harmless prank. Those men in Alaska... they were all desperate
up there. Surely one would respond to an overture from a middle-aged
hardware store employee. She could write to one of those men. Lying
there in the dark, Annalee played with the idea. She would never have to meet
him in person, just leak the intrigue to her social world. Her long-distance
liaison would temporarily be all things to people who loved her. Her parents
would believe she had found someone. Ivy would be thrilled to hear his
fascinating letters read aloud in the staff lunchroom, the drama of the Last
Frontier, bears, violent weather, long eerie nights. The town would cease
gossiping about her pathetic solitude. And soon, the denouement. Perhaps
with help from a discreet private investigator, her Alaskan bachelor would be exposed
as married, psychotic, addicted to alcohol or heroin or sex, emotionally
married to his mother, a felon hiding from the law, a deadbeat father hiding
from his kids, and/or simply too antisocial to be relationship material. All
middle aged men who were out trolling for single women were like that. At their
age why else would they be seeking love? Or at least sex. Then her matchmakers
would agree that Baby Boomer dating was unrealistic. Ivy would apologize for
nagging. Her mother would accept her as she was. The town would leave her
alone. She would be vindicated.
But no. Annalee sighed and turned
over to sleep. Even for a harmless prank the idea was risky. Annalee no longer
took risks.
Marsh Rose is a freelance writer, psychotherapist and college educator. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including Cosmopolitan Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Carve Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, and New Millennium Writings where she took first prize for creative nonfiction in 2018. This is her second novel. She lives in the north San Francisco Bay Area with her greyhound, Adin.
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The excerpts sound great. I would enjoy reading this.
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