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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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