The Wilder Life Read online

  “Do you think we overdid it?” I asked Kara, as we walked by a woman whose sweatshirt was emblazoned with a moody trio of wolves. “I feel like Nellie Oleson on the first day of school.”

  “Oh, you mean the snobby one, right?” Kara said pointedly.

  I had to laugh. “Well, yes.”

  But never mind, this was still the fanciest Laura-related excursion yet. We went up the grand brass-railed staircase to the mezzanine lobby where two bluegrass fiddlers played a duet. There were even little beverage carts that served glasses of wine, and, for six dollars, a drink called the Half-Pint, a concoction of vodka, açai berry liqueur, and Sprite. We each ordered one immediately.

  “No matter what happens on that stage tonight,” I told Kara. “Just being able to have a Laura Ingalls Wilder–themed cocktail makes it all worthwhile.”

  “Hear! Hear!” Kara said. We clinked our plastic glasses together. The Half-Pint tasted like a prairie breeze, we decided, only fizzier.

  An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain, read the first line of the words on the screen. The Homestead Act of 1862 was projected onto a scrim that covered the stage, so that we could all sit in our seats and contemplate history while we waited for the lights to go down. The text was much abridged, of course: just the basics (free land, not to exceed 160 acres, must be age twenty-one or head of family, five-year residency required, some exclusions may apply, etc.) in two brief paragraphs. Be it enacted, began the first one. And be it further enacted, said the second. Below them, Lincoln’s signature gleamed forth. The words were in white, floating on the blue screen that was lit just like a sky so that it all looked like a divine decree, like an offer that nobody, least of all Pa Ingalls, could refuse.

  Next to us were two girls in track pants and hoodies; they looked to be in their late teens, both of them extremely pretty, like blond, bored angels. I would find out from talking to them later that they were two friends from Michigan. (“Upper Peninsula,” one of them said. “Our town is really small.”) They’d come here in a chartered bus to shop at the Mall of America, and while they’d hadn’t read the books or seen the TV show (“My mom has,” the other one said), they were here mostly because they’d always wanted to see a stage musical.

  One of them got up and went off somewhere; the other, the one sitting closest to me, snapped pictures of the auditorium until an usher came over and asked to see her camera. The girl stepped out into the aisle so I couldn’t quite hear their conversation, but after the usher left, she plunked back down in her seat and sighed loudly.

  “He told me I have to delete my pictures,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  I shook my head. “The show hasn’t even started.”

  “He said everything here in the theater is copyrighted,” she said. “Like what does that even mean?”

  I had no idea, I told her. It did sound kind of confusing.

  “It’s just a place,” the girl said.

  Little House on the Prairie: The Musical didn’t set out to dazzle the way Phantom of the Opera or a Bob Fosse production might. There wasn’t much to the set besides a bit of split-rail fence, a section or two of boarded wall for the shanty scenes, and behind it all the backlit sky. “Sweet and simple” might have been the operative term for the set design, as if Laura Ingalls Wilder had written the memo herself. Nevertheless, compared to the wobbly community-theater charm of the summer pageants I’d seen, the show was still stunning: in fact it seemed to pop. The opening number portrayed dozens of chorus members Going West in pantomimed wagons headed stage right. Even from where we were sitting in the mezzanine, everyone looked clear, crisp, and in high resolution, though of course we were there in person.

  The musical wasn’t based on the namesake book or the TV show. Rather, it was a composite of the later Little House books, from On the Banks of Plum Creek onward, with events compressed and rearranged into a two-hourish-long epic set in Dakota Territory. In this version, Mary goes blind during the Long Winter, and the prairie fires that always threatened throughout the book series claim the wheat fields of the De Smet settlers (Little House convention dictates that something always has to happen to the wheat).

  The story starts late enough in the Little House chronicle to have skipped all the problematic Indian stuff in Kansas, though Dr. Tan, the black doctor, is borrowed from one of the earlier books in order to make the cast more multicultural. At one point Laura yells something to Pa like, “We shouldn’t have taken the land from the Indians back in Kansas!” and Pa bows his head.

  I glanced over at Kara, who was smirking a little. “Ahem,” she said.

  Melissa Gilbert made Ma seem a great deal more fun than she probably was in real life, portraying a woman who still liked to dance a jig once in a while. (Of course, it helped that she didn’t have a tiny fourth kid around, since Baby Grace had been written out of the story.)

  As for Laura, she was definitely of the “spunky” school of Laura Ingalls Wilder impersonation, stomping around tomboyishly in a patchy dress like some Pippi Longstocking of the Dakotas. The actress who played her was a petite young woman who had that boundless, almost improbable-seeming musical-theater energy: she leapt and twirled and careened and even somersaulted across the stage prairie, sort of like Peter Pan in a petticoat. As impressive a performance as it was, it suddenly reminded me that I identify with Laura mostly from the inside, that usually I want to feel like her more than I want to see her.

  The story was easy to follow but somehow hard to recognize. People went west, including this one family, with this one girl and her two sisters. There was a house, and then a town, and everyone was proud and happy. Then came the blizzards and sickness and fires and lost crops. Mary went blind and Laura vowed to “be her eyes.” By the second act it began to feel more familiar: I heard lines I knew from the books and started to feel like I was there. A few things, of course, hadn’t changed a bit: Nellie Oleson was still the scene-stealer, overdressed and awesome.

  Over the course of the show, Laura’s dresses become longer and tidier as she teaches school and is courted by Almanzo, and the story becomes less about Going West and more about growing up. Near the end, Melissa Gilbert as Ma sings a ballad called “Where Did My Wild Child Go?” in which she entreats Laura to stay true to herself. It’s not a sentiment that’s ever articulated in the books, but something that a lot of people who read them, myself included, tend to feel about Laura. Of course, it might also be something that fans of the TV Little House on the Prairie feel about Melissa Gilbert (where did our little Half-Pint go?), but it was moving all the same, possibly because Melissa Gilbert’s voice wasn’t naturally as strong as her costars’, and you could hear that she was trying her very best under the bright lights.

  The curtain call included a standing ovation.

  “I liked that,” said the blond girl next to me when the lights went up. Her friend had vanished again. “It makes me want to see more musicals.”

  Kara thought it was fine, but she still wanted her land back.

  As for me, I enjoyed it, but it left me feeling a little empty. I knew the show was supposed to give you That Laura Ingalls Wilder Feeling, the spirit of a girl and a country as together they struggled to be both settled and free. Certain ideologies aside, it was not terribly different from my Laura World, but I felt like the music and the lights and the voices and Abraham Lincoln’s autograph had somehow inflated everything beyond recognition, turned it all into a billowing dream from which I’d had to shake myself awake.

  “But it’s a musical, right?” I was saying to Kara on the drive back. “And I’m not really a musical person.”

  “And you know, you have to be true to yourself,” Kara said.

  I was glad we were going through Pepin on the way home. Since we had to go through Wisconsin on the drive back to Chicago, the route allowed an opportunity to revisit my first Laura Ingalls Wilder destination. The museum had been closed for the winter when Chris and I were there in March; no
w, in late October, it would be open only another week before the season ended.

  “We’ll just pop in and check it out really quick,” I told Kara.

  It was nice to see the little town again, this time in the fall afternoon sunlight that made the lake glint intensely enough that we had to shade our eyes as we drove down the hill to the marina. The town had been so subdued back in the late winter that already my memory had been conflating it with its nineteenth-century incarnation, morphing it in my mind into a sort of literary ghost town traversed only by curious visitors and phantom covered wagons. Of course I had been wrong: people in Pepin ran Sunday-afternoon errands and had motorcycle clubs and got burritos at the gas station. Somehow last winter I hadn’t grasped this, but today it heartened me in a way I hadn’t expected. Pepin lives!

  The Laura Ingalls Wilder museum here was one of the more eccentric homesite museums, with a mix of TV show memorabilia and random donated antiques on display. Next to an LHOP lunchbox was a pig’s-bladder balloon, which looked papery with age and slightly crumpled and not nearly as horrifying as I’d imagined.

  Kara found a binder with biographical information on each member of the Ingalls family. A well-meaning history buff had written the biographies in accordance with a strict and curious template (which I shall paraphrase):When Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Pepin, Wisconsin, on February 7, 1867, nobody had any idea that she would one day be known as the world-famous author of the Little House books. All her mother and father knew is that they loved her very much [etc.]. . . . When Carrie Celestia Ingalls Swanzey was born in Montgomery County, Kansas, on August 3, 1870, nobody had any idea that she would one day be known as the sister to Laura Ingalls Wilder, world-famous author of the Little House books. All her mother and father knew is that they loved her very much [etc.]. . . . When Caroline Lake Quiner was born in Brookfield, Wisconsin, on December 12, 1839, nobody had any idea that she would one day be known as the mother to Laura Ingalls Wilder . . . [etc.]

  “Why write six different passages about each member of the Ingalls family when you can write one and just fill in the blanks?” Kara pointed out.

  I bought a sunbonnet at the museum store, my sixth one.

  “I had a feeling you would buy one on this trip,” Kara said, as we walked back out to the car. “I bought something, too.” She went through her bag in the backseat and pulled out a feathered headband, the kind they used to sell in dime stores for playing cowboys and Indians. “Picture time!” she said.

  I started laughing. “Oh my God,” I said. “Yes!” We put on our mythical headgear and took pictures of ourselves standing together in the parking lot. It seemed a fitting way to end the trip.

  “Didn’t you say there was a log cabin somewhere around here, too?” Kara asked, when we were back in the car.

  I’d forgotten about that: the Wayside cabin a few miles away to mark where Little Housed in the Big Woods had taken place. “Oh yeah, do you want to see it?”

  She shrugged. She hadn’t read the books. “I figured you’d want to see it again.”

  I’d thought so, too. All I had to do was drive a little ways down the highway—I still remembered where to turn—and then go the seven or eight miles up the county road to where the cabin stood. I considered it for only a moment.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s not bother.” There didn’t seem to be any point. Somewhere along the way I’d stopped believing that the story was there. Anyway, it was time to head home. We drove out through the fall foliage that was so picture-postcard vivid that—I told Kara—I didn’t even care that they weren’t the Big Woods. I told her a little bit about how I’d spent all last winter dreaming about a place that looked like the Garth Williams illustration.

  “And you knew it wasn’t true, right?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “But part of me kept sort of believing it. I don’t know why.”

  It felt strange to admit that. All this time I’d been letting friends think that my Laura Ingalls Wilder thing was just a kooky kick of mine, the way people in the ’90s got into swing dancing and saying “ring a ding ding.” Why not make sunbonnets my own retro schtick? But I’d gotten teary at pageants and had something of an identity crisis in De Smet. I had a bundle of slough hay that I kept in a supermarket bag in the spare bedroom closet, the hay that had once been the haystick from Ingalls Homestead, and sometimes I liked to pick it up and smell its clean, dry scent. I was serious about this. Serious in a way that could make people wonder.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. “Do you think that there’s something you’re trying to figure out with all this?” she asked.

  I kept my eyes on the road. “Yes,” I said.

  12.

  Unremembered

  SOME OF OUR FAMILY VACATIONS, I remember, had included side trips in which my mother visited one of the places where she’d lived as a girl. Because of my grandfather’s army career, my mother and her family had lived in California and Maryland and Kansas and Colorado and Germany, wherever he’d been stationed—sometimes in base housing, sometimes off base, dozens of places. She used to joke that she didn’t know how to spring-clean because she never lived anywhere long enough. It was true. She lived in the first house she and my dad bought in Oak Park for two years, and it was the longest she’d ever been in one place.

  The next house after that was the house where I grew up, and we lived there for eighteen years. It was the only house I knew, so my mom’s old life was unimaginable, even with the glimpses I’d gotten on our family trips—these odd detours down side streets of Silver Spring, Maryland, and Leavenworth, Kansas, where my dad drove the car slowly while my mother scrutinized the houses and checked the numbers against the addresses she’d typed up. “I think it’s here on the right,” she’d say.

  I only vaguely remember the houses. A few were bungalows, or boxy military-base houses. Once, in Leavenworth, we stopped in front of a stately brick officers’ house, but for the most part the places were unremarkable. Sometimes there wasn’t even a whole house to look at, but a set of wooden steps leading up to an apartment. My mom pointed out one such place to me and my brother. “That’s where your aunt JoLee had to sleep in a closet,” she told me. Sometimes the place was gone and we looked at a parking lot. “Oh, well,” my mom would say. I don’t remember ever getting out of the car.

  It was not a long time ago that I lost my mother. Or when I’d first found that copy of Little House in the Big Woods at my parents’ garage sale, or when my parents moved to the house they’d bought in Albuquerque, where a short time later, my mother succumbed to her cancer. It was in January of 2007 and it was not unexpected. We’d known at Christmas that it would be her last one. She said then that she was glad she’d made it out to New Mexico—which she’d considered a paradise, the Sandia Mountains visible from the high bluff where my parents lived—but she wished she’d had more time. She knew she wouldn’t be living there, in their wonderful house, for much longer; she wouldn’t have lived there even a year.

  “Goddamn it,” she said at Christmas dinner.

  Then she was gone.

  A year after that, I picked up a book from my childhood and found a trail I wanted to follow.

  There was no explicit association between the Little House books and my mother, though. As far as I know, she’d never read them as a child; I remember hearing her speak only about how much I adored them, whereas, she said, she’d loved Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. There’s no shared experience or specific memory; she never said, “all’s well that ends well,” the way Ma did; there was nothing to indicate that my pursuit of all things Laura Ingalls Wilder would lead to my mother. And yet all along I wondered if there was some deeper reason I was doing all this, and for a while I suspected it might be, at least in part, because of Mom.

  That’s all it ever seemed to be: a suspicion. On those trips where I saw the places where my mother lived, I must have thought of Laura, too, of one little house after another forming the story of a life. I live
d my whole childhood in one place, a sense of security I can’t begrudge, but maybe I wanted nothing more than to always be leaving a place behind. Maybe I’d thought life was more visible if you could see all the spaces where you’d been. Maybe I still thought that.

  And then there’d been a moment at the museum in Burr Oak. In the parlor, Monica had showed us an old photograph of a woman named Mrs. Starr. I knew who she was from reading Pioneer Girl. She was a well-off doctor’s wife in Burr Oak who had once proposed to Ma that she adopt Laura, saying she wanted a little girl to help her around the house and keep her company, and perhaps also thinking that the Ingallses had more children than they could feed. Ma had politely declined, saying that she couldn’t spare Laura.

  I stared at the photo (Mrs. Starr was a stately-looking older woman, her face hard to read) and recalled reading in Pioneer Girl that the conversation between Ma and Mrs. Starr had happened in Laura’s presence. She wrote that it had made her feel strange and frightened. “It seemed to be possible that I could go on being me—Laura Ingalls—even without Pa and Ma and Mary and Carrie and Grace,” she’d said. It was a strange way to think about being alone, but it made perfect sense, and I’d suddenly remembered it, and remembered that my mother was gone, and how was it possible that I could go on being me?

  Maybe the Little House books have always been a way to unremember —a word that I kept coming back to ever since I’d read it in Laura, Donald Zochert’s book. This little unremembered house, he’d written. I know technically it means forget but somehow, in my mind, the definition changed. To me unremembering is knowing that something once happened or existed by remembering the things around it or by putting something else in its place. Laura Ingalls Wilder unremembered being hungry by writing Farmer Boy, and Rose Wilder Lane unremembered her terrible childhood by helping her mother write about hers. I unremembered my mom’s cancer and death in the Burr Oak cemetery. You don’t deny something when you unremember it, you just give it a place to live.