The Wilder Life (48 page)

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; now, 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):

“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.

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 lived 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.