The Wilder Life Read online

  I’ve always appreciated the way Nellie’s hatefulness evolved with age. By far my favorite/most dread-evoking Nellie moment is in Little Town on the Prairie when, years after her ignominious scene back at Plum Creek (remember the “Country Party” chapter—the crab, the leeches, the screaming?), she shows up on the first day of school in De Smet late, and fashionably so:She had grown taller than Laura, and she was much slimmer. She was willowy, while Laura was still as round and dumpy as a little French horse.... She wore a fawn-colored dress made with a polonaise. Deep pleated ruffles were around the bottom of the skirt, around her neck, and falling from the edges of the wide sleeve. At her throat was a full jabot of lace. Her fair, straight hair was drawn smoothly back from her sharp face, and twisted into a tall French knot.

  This, along with the illustration on page 130 of the classic old books, inspired both terror and admiration in me when I read them as a kid: terror that in a few short years my worst enemies might turn suddenly, gloriously swanlike, catching me unawares and at the very depth of horsey dumpiness. The admiration, of course, was for Nellie’s outfit. The descriptions were a little confusing—I had no idea what a polonaise was, or what color was fawn—but I understood she was clad in a full-body armor of high hauteur. You might wonder what happened to her trademark curls; perhaps her powers enabled her to will her own follicles into whatever form she required. It’s also clear she’d stepped up her game and ditched the frivolous ringlets and ribbons for the deep pleats of contempt. As a kid, it made me wish for a first-day-of-school outfit that could make me as impervious. To hell with Gloria Vanderbilt jeans; surely having a jabot of lace at your throat meant nobody would mess with you.

  The character of Nellie was based on three different girls Laura knew in real life. One was a storekeeper’s daughter in Walnut Grove; the second was the first girl’s school-yard rival, a spoiled girl from New York (and like the Nellie of the books, she wound up in South Dakota a few years later). The third, a girl whose family homesteaded outside De Smet, had for a while competed with Laura for Almanzo’s attention: she was the one who’d come along on the buggy rides until Laura finally made Almanzo choose, just as she did in These Happy Golden Years. The fact that Nellie wasn’t any one person but rather a composite of three of the real Laura’s antagonists’ worst traits makes her even more terrifying, some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts.

  Of course, Nellie Oleson’s always seemed just a tad unreal in her various TV and theatrical incarnations. When the rest of the cast is wearing their farm duds and sensible calico dresses, you can always count on Nellie to appear in a sort of ruffled drag, a preponderance of frills and bustles and twirling parasols and convolutedly feathered hats. It calls up a brief preschool memory of mine in which I’d decided, during dress-up time, that a hat I’d put on conferred upon me a whole new persona. “I’m a bad girl,” I announced proudly. “Because I have a hat.” I don’t know exactly where I got the idea that Bad Girls Wear Hats (sounds like a Raymond Chandler novel, doesn’t it?), but I must have picked it up from one female villain or another on TV, must have intuited that being bad and female came with a wicked and conspicuous sense of fashion.

  On the NBC Little House on the Prairie, Alison Arngrim as Nellie Oleson goes beyond mere style. Some of the early episodes are queasily accurate portrayals of mean-girlness, like the one where Nellie torments a stuttering girl by pretending to befriend her and inviting her to join her exclusive club, only to demand that she say a tongue twister as her initiation ritual. Arngrim’s performance is precise enough to trigger your own old traumatic memories of past cruelties (mine involves a girl named Sabina Stuven and the question “What kind of jeans are those?”), but at the same time you can’t help but feel a delight at having survived them.

  It’s no surprise that Nellie is vanquished on a weekly basis on the show—either by offscreen punishment (you really don’t want to know the extent to which Little House on the Prairie spanking references have been lovingly cataloged on YouTube), or by any number of hilarious TV comeuppances. After a while, though, you come to appreciate that Nellie gets to be Nellie.

  At American Girl Place I looked around at all the girls with their parents, especially the ones with their mothers. Had a place like this existed when I was a kid, my mom probably wouldn’t have taken me. I likely wouldn’t have expected it, either—I considered our family to be above such Nellie Oleson-esque entitlement even as I was slightly envious of it.

  When I was the same age as Laura in On the Banks of Plum Creek, my mother was in school, writing papers after dinner and after I went to bed. At night she lived behind the noise the electric typewriter made. I knew she was doing important things, understood this with the same unwavering conviction that Laura had whenever Pa said it was time to move. I knew that sometimes you could go to school and discover that you didn’t have a jacket when everyone else was wearing a jacket, just like when Laura and Mary found out that their dresses were too short, and I knew that it would be all right in the end.

  In my world, my mother was both there and not there the way Ma was a mere glimpse on the cover of On the Banks of Plum Creek: there she was in the doorway of the dugout, working away, while right above her Laura was on her own, running through the grass over their invisible house.

  If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

  It seems like there are two different kinds of Little House fans: those who claim their favorite book is These Happy Golden Years and those, like me, who don’t. To be sure, I love the book, in which Laura embarks upon a slow, subdued courtship with Almanzo Wilder and marries him at the end. But I love the other parts more—Laura’s stint teaching school out at the miserable settlement where she boards with crazed, knife-waving Mrs. Brewster; the treacherous ride home with Almanzo where both she and the horses risk freezing to death; the terrible and surreal summer storm they encounter on one of their buggy rides. I get the sense that other people find Laura and Almanzo’s romance more enchanting than I do. Almanzo’s a great guy and all, but he’s the inevitable guy, biding his time between blizzards and school terms, waiting for the engine of the book’s narrative to slowly wind down to the happy golden ending with the brand-new house with the fancy plastered walls and its pantry drawers full of silverware. (Well, okay, I really like the part where she gets to have that pantry.) But somehow there’s a feeling that the world gets smaller, narrowing down to the view out the front door where Laura and Almanzo sit at the very end of the book.

  Could it ever have been otherwise? I suppose not. Then again, there was Cousin Lena, who let us see other possibilities.

  It’s a little hard to place Lena if you haven’t read the books in a while. She appears for a few scant chapters in By the Shores of Silver Lake, when the Ingallses travel out past the end of the train line to a railroad camp in Dakota Territory. They meet up with relatives, and Laura discovers she has two cousins, the children of Aunt Docia’s husband. One is Lena, just a year older than Laura but infinitely more experienced at this new life of tents and shanties and railroad men. She says wicked words like “gosh,” sleeps in her clothes—“We’d just have to put them on again in the morning anyway,” she says—and races at breakneck speeds in the buggy she drives (SHE DRIVES!) and on the black ponies she rides bareback that she can mount while running.

  The few days that Laura—and we—spend with her are intense: Laura takes lessons in bareback pony racing and learns new songs about young men who “can very obliging be.” That’s right, for the first time in Laura’s Little House girlhood, males are on the horizon, even if they’re distant still: sometimes they’re vaguely threatening, if the songs and Pa’s warnings are to be believed, and sometimes, if they’re Big Jerry, the half-Indian railroad worker, they’re kind of beautiful, as Laura watches him ride into the sunset one afternoon. Lena is there through all this heady confusion, part of a world where anything could happen: you could be married off at thirteen, marry
a railroad man instead of a farmer, not marry at all.

  We hardly need for Ma to explain to Laura, in so many words, that Lena is a bad influence. She’s what Ma would call “boisterous” and what a feminist scholar like Ann Romines could call “problematic to the narrative.” In her book Constructing the Little House, Romines points out that Lena is a threat for showing Laura “that there might be another way to be an American girl.” But like so many of the threats throughout the Little House books—wolves, Indians, swift creeks—the danger that a girl like Lena presents is something to be savored briefly, like a piece of Christmas candy. Once the railroad camp breaks for the winter Lena heads off to parts unknown with her family (and a wagonload of goods swiped from the company store), never to be seen again in the series.

  Out of everyone in the books, Lena was the character I wanted to be the most. Naturally I often identified with Laura, but when it came to imagining myself physically in the stories with Laura, it was as Lena. I suppose it was because I could tell that different worlds were converging during their short acquaintance, the way it would be if I could be friends with Laura. And then, I always sensed that Lena was not from Laura World but another girl protagonist visiting from an epic story of her own, one that was just as vivid as the Little House books, and perhaps even wilder, more tempestuous and windswept.

  As it turns out, the life of the real Lena Waldvogel was indeed something of a saga. Although she was Aunt Docia’s stepchild in Silver Lake, Lena was her biological daughter (the relationship was changed in the fiction, probably to explain why she never appeared in earlier books). Lena’s father had gone to prison when she was an infant; he’d fired his gun through a closed door at some men he thought were coming to rob him and killed one of them. Docia divorced him and some years later married Hiram Forbes (aka Uncle Hi in the book), an alcoholic, with whom she had several children. The family moved around even more than the Ingalls, and twice—once in Missouri and then again in Minnesota—Docia and Hi tried to leave Lena and her brother Gene in orphanages. By the time Lena was in her teens she was on her own, working in Wisconsin. “She’d learned from life how to take care of herself,” says Donald Zochert in Laura.

  Without knowing any of this I could only guess at what Lena’s stories were whenever I read the books as a child. When I got to the Lena scenes in By the Shores of Silver Lake, the world—suddenly it wouldn’t be just Laura’s anymore—would open up; suddenly I’d sense a vast, unwritten expanse, one that my mind could claim. As it happens, Silver Lake is the book where the twelve-year-old Laura’s imagination starts to flourish, when she starts to see beyond the literal truth in the world she describes to blind Mary—who, in her typical stick-in-the-mud fashion, would rather her sister not take poetic license when describing things like a man riding horseback in the distance:“Laura, you know he [Big Jerry] couldn’t ride into the sun. He’s just riding along the ground like anybody.”

  But Laura did not feel that she had told a lie. What she had said was true too. Somehow that moment when the beautiful, free pony and the wild man rode into the sun would last forever.

  The fictional Lena has a foreverness to her, too, though it seems the real-life Lena and Laura had never kept in touch. In her book, Romines mentions finding a letter in the Wilder-Lane archives that Lena, by then married and living in Nebraska, had sent to Laura after reading Silver Lake and recognizing herself as a character. “Dear Mrs. Wilder If you are my dear cousin Laura Ingalls—Please just write me a line and I can then write to you in a more personal manner.” If Laura ever wrote back, no record exists. Nothing else about Lena except that glimpse across the distance.

  I think ultimately what makes the Little House girlhoods so compelling is that they’re real girls’ lives reimagined. Silver Lake hints that the kind of life Lena led was a rough and overworked one, but somehow it seems equally true that she was as free as those black ponies. Laura herself gets to see more of the world as a fictional girl than she ever did as a real one: she goes with Pa to see the railroad grade being built in the “Wonderful Afternoon” chapter, but in her correspondence to her daughter while writing the book, the elder Laura admits she never would have been allowed to watch.

  Of course, the fiction allows for other truths to come through. Consider, for instance, the narrative of girlish horse lust that begins in Little Town on the Prairie and runs alongside the slowly (very slowly) developing relationship between Laura and Almanzo. Oh, yes: long before it’s appropriate for Laura to even notice Almanzo, she’s digging those Morgans of his. When their courtship finally commences in These Happy Golden Years, nothing unseemly ever happens in that buggy seat, but there’s plenty of hot action at the other end of the reins, thanks to Almanzo’s frisky new team, Skip and Barnum. “They are not as much fun when they behave,” Laura says at one point. “It is pretty warm to excite them so much,” Almanzo says at another. Whew! If you don’t believe me, get the audiobook version of These Happy Golden Years and listen to Cherry Jones work herself up reading the “Singing School” chapter. Hear her breathless, mounting excitement as Laura and Almanzo sneak out of the church early to relieve some of Barnum’s pent-up energy. “Driving Barnum”: so that’s what the kids are calling it these days. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

  As sublimated as things get in Laura’s teen years, I think the fact that her character gets to mature at all is one of the unsung virtues of the Little House series, something you can’t appreciate until you consider that when Laura Ingalls Wilder began By the Shores of Silver Lake, her daughter, Rose, who edited and helped her throughout her writing career, advised her to make Carrie the new protagonist. Since Laura’s character was now twelve and presumably too old for the reading audience, Rose reasoned, perhaps younger sister Carrie could be the new Little House Girl, so to speak. You can tell it makes sense from a publishing standpoint. In fact, it sounds downright American Girl, to think of girls’ lives as interchangeable components in telling the story of girlhood. Laura objected. “We can’t change heroines in the middle of the stream and use Carrie in place of Laura,” she wrote in a letter to Rose. She was right.

  Back at American Girl Place, my friend Kara and I had finally finished looking over all the doll things. I still wanted Molly’s dinette set. Kara is part Lakota Sioux and thought it was pretty stupid that the Native American doll, Kaya, had mostly wild forest animals for her accessories. “Oh please, she’s an Indian, not Dr. Doolittle,” she sighed. We’d both been pretty charmed by the new 1970s doll, Julie, whose stuff included a tiny fondue set and tennis-shoe roller skates. “I had those,” I’d gasped.

  But now we kept stopping in front of the biggest display cases, which didn’t have dolls in them or merchandise of any kind. These were chambers a little bigger than a phone booth and each one showed a corner of a room from an American Girl’s life, filled with historically correct details and strewn with ordinary things—all of them life-sized, or at the very least, girl-sized. Kirsten’s corner had log cabin walls and a quilt-covered chair where she’d left her knitting; Molly’s had 1940s kitchen cabinetry. The idea was that you could almost stand in each girl’s place and inhabit her life, if you believed enough in her things.

  I didn’t think any of it would have an effect on me. But Julie’s display, showing a corner of a ’70s-era girl’s bedroom, was pretty uncanny, with a lava lamp and bricklike vintage cassette recorder on the modular side table that was just like the ones my parents had. The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn’t help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else’s. Julie was just a character, of course, but on the shag carpeting of her room sat a boxed set of the Little House paperbacks, the ones with the blue covers, just like mine. One of the books was splayed open next to her beanbag chair.

  I liked this Julie, I decided. She wasn’t real, but she was reading By the Shores of Silver Lake.

  5.

  There Is
a Happy Land Far, Far Away

  I WASN’T SURE about taking a plane to see the Little House on the Prairie. It felt a little off, somehow not the proper way to get to a spot so closely associated with land—all those trudging, earthbound frontier struggles with their wagon-lurching river crossings and trades of tired-out horses. It didn’t seem quite right to just zip down there, all tidy and trackless, with no trace on the land for a faithful brindled bulldog to follow me. If I had a brindled bulldog, I mean.

  But the plan was to fly to Springfield, Missouri, and then drive three hours into Kansas. I was renting a car, and figuring out an unfamiliar car stereo system requires something of a pioneering spirit, yes? I would take a day to drive to Independence and back, and then the following day I would take a short trip east of Springfield to Mansfield, Missouri, Laura’s adulthood hometown, where she and Almanzo built Rocky Ridge Farm. By all accounts the museum at Rocky Ridge was one of the major Little House destinations, the home of Pa’s fiddle and other important relics.

  I was going alone this time: Chris had a lot of work deadlines that spring and was going into the office on weekends. It was just as well—he was usually up for anything, but if I was going to see all the Little House stuff there’d be five more places to visit. Wouldn’t he have to stand around a lot while I swooned over old quilts? It was probably better to give him a break. It wasn’t like he made me go to all the experimental music shows he went to see in Chicago, the ones where guys hooked up microphones to pieces of sheet metal and kicked them around the stage. (Though it really is the sort of thing you have to see at least a few times in your life. Like Almanzo’s chores in Farmer Boy, it builds character.) Anyway, going by myself meant I’d be free to gaze at Pa’s fiddle for hours on end if that’s what I felt like doing.