The Wilder Life

by Wendy McClure

  It wasn’t until a couple years later, long after I’d gotten through my mooniest phase of Little House love, that I found out that the book and TV show were indeed related. By then I didn’t care much, though it was a little disconcerting to watch Battle of the Network Stars and occasionally see some of the Little House cast members wearing tiny shorts and swimsuits. (You mean that woman with the Cheryl Tiegs legs was Ma?) Even if my family hadn’t been watching another channel I doubt Little House on the Prairie would have been regular viewing in our household, which tended to favor smartass sitcoms and gritty cop dramas over heartwarming family programming.

  Not that it hasn’t been sometimes confounding to have this parallel TV universe. More than once, a friend or acquaintance has gushed, “you mean you’re a Little House fan, too?” only to discover that we have two very different sets of memories. One of us is thinking of the time Laura taught a calf to drink from a bucket. The other is thinking about the Very Special Episode when some kid named Albert got hooked on morphine. The ensuing conversation often ends awkwardly, with one of us a bit disappointed that the real Laura Ingalls did not have an opiate-crazed adopted brother and the other feeling, well, just depressed. (Though she would like to know if the Very Special Episode perhaps also guest-starred First Lady Nancy Reagan as the head of Walnut Grove’s Just Say No Temperance Society. Because that would have made for an awesome show.)

  So maybe we don’t all remember the same prairie, but I’d like to think that there’s still a kinship. Just as pioneers kept relics from their distant homelands, the TV show holds on to plenty of the little things from the realm of the books: the calico dresses and the pigtails and the girls running through tall grass.

  Eventually I would love other books: I’d swoon through my lit classes, major in English, collect thin books of poetry, feel very close to Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Bishop. But only with the Little House series was I ever truly a fan, with wide swaths of my imagination devoted to the prairies of Laura World. A couple years later I became enthralled with Jane Eyre, and then, as junior high loomed close, the novels of V.C. Andrews (yes, I know: they’re creepy), but the fascination felt different. Instead of losing myself in a fictive world, I read my favorite books with the awareness that I was one reader among many, peering over everyone’s shoulders until the story came into full view. It was less intense that way. More normal.

  And so I moved on from the Little House books. I know that for a time—when I was ten, maybe—I’d reread most of them, feeling that I wasn’t finished. Then, at some point, I was. I left my claim behind, so to speak, back on the shelves of the Oak Park Public Library. (I can still mentally trace my steps through the floor plan of the building and find the aisle where the Little House hardcovers lived.) I’d gotten to an age where the future was more interesting. I went to junior high and high school and college and I mostly forgot the books.

  In some ways they stayed with me, in little twinges of recognition. I lived in Iowa for six years when I went to college and graduate school; by my last year in Iowa City I lived in the upstairs of a drafty old frame house with an ancient porcelain sink in the kitchen. It was the first time I lived alone and I loved it. The place was at the end of the street near the river. And, okay, instead of prairie I had a parking lot surrounding my house, a weedy expanse of crumbling asphalt, but there was something, I thought, exquisitely forlorn about it all. I had to sweep the floors constantly—they were painted wood with wide cracks between the floorboards, and whenever I did it I would think, Draw the broom, Laura; don’t flip it, that raises the dust. Ma had said that somewhere; I remembered that much.

  The spring I lived in that house there were lots of storms—it was tornado season, though they never came very close to town—and I kept stopping whatever I was doing to go outside and stand on the front steps and watch the brewing sky over the parking lot. Or I would drive out on the two-lane highway into the cornfields until I couldn’t see the town anymore, which took all of fifteen minutes.

  I’m making it sound kind of lovely, like I wore simple cotton dresses with cowboy boots and grew sunflowers and baked bread. But I smoked menthol cigarettes and occasionally was so broke I ran up my credit card buying microwave sandwiches from the QuikTrip convenience store. I was twenty-two. I was in Iowa to write poetry in the university’s writing program. There was a joke about how everyone who came to Iowa to write poetry wrote a poem about the endless expanses of the Iowa landscape, so then everyone made it a point to avoid writing a poem about the endless expanses of the Iowa landscape. Most everyone wrote postmodern poems instead. An awful lot of them were titled “The New World.” I wish I could say that was just a joke, but it wasn’t.

  Unlike the Ingalls family, mine had stayed put throughout my childhood. We spent nearly twenty years living in the same house, an early-1900s stucco two-story in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. My mother, who had been an army brat and had moved all over the country during her childhood, used to marvel at how settled we were, though of course it seemed perfectly normal to the rest of us. My father had grown up in Oak Park; my grandparents lived a mile or so away. Our house was on a street lined with giant old trees whose massive roots buckled the sidewalks, and I grew up with the understanding that everything around me had already happened, already built and already grown.

  The exception was my mother, whose life was a work in progress and constantly under repair. As I grew up, I watched her go back to school to finish college, then to graduate school, then to work as a psychiatric social worker in parts of the city that seemed to me as legendarily treacherous as Indian Territory. As hard as she worked, she also had a remarkable knack for physical calamity. She’d had knee woes, weight problems, hearing trouble, multiple surgeries, and a tendency to lose her balance so often that on family trips she’d joke that we weren’t truly on vacation until she’d had a good fall or two. (The scene in Little House on the Prairie where the log falls on Ma’s foot felt utterly familiar to me; didn’t things like that happen to everyone’s moms?)

  I was in Iowa when my parents finally left the Oak Park house, in part because my mom had broken her leg on the stairs. They moved to a one-story ranch house in another suburb, where they lived for the next decade. But they still had a notion of settling elsewhere. For years my dad obsessively browsed New Mexico real-estate listings on the Internet; my mom picked out bedsheets in Southwestern-themed patterns. They wanted to retire to a house in Albuquerque, some place with a view of the Sandia Mountains.

  I moved to Chicago after I’d finished school and settled down in my own way, living alone with my laptop and TiVo. I became a children’s book editor, and I wrote and published two books of my own (for grown-ups). The night after my first book came out I read from it at an event at the Double Door Lounge and met a guy there named Chris, who had a penchant for experimental music shows and hosting epic film fests out of his apartment.

  He came to my book signing a few days later to ask me out and brought an Esperanto guide for me to sign. (Later he explained he just wanted to get my attention. By then he already had.) Laura Ingalls realized that Almanzo Wilder was a worthy suitor when he drove his sleigh twenty-four miles across the prairie in subzero temperatures to bring her home from her teaching job on the weekends. I knew Chris was The One when he came to meet me at the airport even though we’d been on only two dates. It was a ten p.m. flight home from a business trip, and there he was in the baggage claim with flowers. Nobody risked freezing to death, but come on, that takes guts.

  During the same summer that Chris and I moved in together, my parents were getting ready to move to New Mexico at last. By this time they’d found their dream house with the view of the mountains. By this time, too, my mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. They wanted to move as soon as possible.

  “We’re still pursuing the dream,” my dad said matter-of-factly one night when he called to ask for help with their moving sale. “We’re just, you know, dreaming faster.”
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  “I know,” I said. Though, really, I didn’t.

  “You still want that TV cabinet for your new place?” he asked.

  “Yes, and don’t sell anything else until we get there,” I told him.

  Chris and I drove out to their place in the suburbs first thing in the morning. I wanted to help with the sale, of course, but I also wanted to grab whatever I couldn’t stand to see sold to strangers. Which, as it turned out, was nearly any object I hadn’t seen in twenty years, be it a scratched Pyrex bowl or a macramé owl or a Reader’s Digest home repair encyclopedia with a bright yellow cover that my brother and I had somehow found fascinating. (The Ingalls family loved to pore through Pa’s big green book of animals; we had Dad’s big yellow book of power tools.) All these things had emerged from a set of boxes stowed in the basement crawl space and were now strewn across tables in our garage, everything mundane but acutely familiar.

  I showed the yellow book to Chris. “Maybe we can use this,” I told him hopefully, even though it was our new landlord’s job to make home repairs.

  “If you’re going to take books,” my mom said, “you probably need to claim those, too.” She pointed to a box on one of the sale tables. She couldn’t get up from her chair to bring it over to me. At least now her hair was growing back.

  I went over to the box, which was full of my children’s books. They included The Adventures of Mole and Troll, a scuffed-up assortment of Little Golden Books, an etiquette book my grandmother had given to my brother and me, and a yellow-bordered paperback of Little House in the Big Woods that I’d forgotten I’d owned.

  I brought it back with me with a few of the other books and tucked it into a bookcase in the front hallway of our new apartment. I kept meaning to read it.

  Months passed, during which time Chris and I set up housekeeping and built up a rhythm of routines around our jobs, our chores, and the novel I had started writing, or was trying to write. The stuff I’d brought back from the moving sale became ordinary again, absorbed into the background with the rest of the normal clutter.

  I flew out to New Mexico twice that year: once with Chris, to see my parents’ new house and to celebrate Christmas, and then a second time on my own, to be with my mother as she died.

  When I flew home, Chris met me at the baggage claim and I sobbed uncontrollably into the shoulder of his down coat. In my carry-on I had a plastic Ziploc bag full of my mom’s silver jewelry. I kept it all in the bag for weeks—constantly untangling the necklaces that kept getting wound around the other pieces, checking to make sure the earrings were matched up, wondering where I could possibly keep these things that clearly belonged someplace else.

  For the next few months after my mom died, I kept telling people, “We knew it would only be a matter of time before she went,” which was my way of saying that I was okay: I’d known it was inevitable. In a way, I thought, it was already a long time ago.

  A year went by. I had gone back to trying to write the novel. Chris had a new job. The apartment had become home, filled with our things, our books on the shelves—so many books, really, that we could forget which ones we had. Even though we’d had them for years, and always in plain sight in order to tell us who we were, or at least who we’d been.

  And so I noticed the yellow spine of Little House in the Big Woods again and took it out from the bookcase.

  I started reading in the late winter, on weeknights before bed. It was perfect comfort reading: the big print and generous leading of the book’s pages were the readerly equivalent of the deluxe pillowtop mattress we’d just bought. But as I read, I found myself wanting to stay awake.

  “How’s it going in the Little House?” Chris would ask when he’d come to bed. “Is it like you remembered?”

  “Exactly,” I told him. Meaning that right away I found everything where I’d left it in the log cabin in Wisconsin—the pumpkins stored away in the attic, the nails in the hollow smoke-log where the deer meat hung. Laura’s long-gone life had woken up in my head, all her thoughts playing back faithfully. “It’s all coming back,” I said.

  “So does that mean it’s good?” Chris asked. He got that there was a difference. Obviously, this is why I live with him and allow him to see me in enormous plaid pajama pants.

  Yes, I told him. It was so good. But that was all I could express. I mean, I could have gone on and on about all the wonderful stuff—the bears, the fiddle, the roasted pig’s tail!—but it was more than that. I got to the end of the book, the part where Laura lies awake in bed listening to the world around her and thinks to herself, “This is now.”

  She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

  I experienced the same thing I’d felt the first time I read those lines: suddenly, all the nows—mine, Laura’s, the world’s—aligned with each other and made a clear, bright conduit, and then my mind sped up and down it, and then I came back to myself. Now I remembered.

  A month or so later Chris came home with a box that he held behind his back, though it didn’t take more than a glimpse for me to recognize what it was. It was a complete set of the books—nine paperback volumes with matching blue spines lined up in a cardboard sleeve, a Reader’s Digest Book Club set with the ’70s-era design. They were in near-mint condition. He’d found them at a record store in Lincoln Square, a place that had an eclectic selection of used books—pulp sci-fi novels and comic strip collections, kitschy old cookbooks and nostalgic children’s books.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted the whole set,” Chris said. “But they were too cheap not to buy.”

  I started with Little House on the Prairie, reading it, like the one before it, in bed.

  “So are the Ingalls family horrible racists?” Chris asked me, because I’d been telling him about the history of the books.

  “Ma is, a little,” I admitted. “She’s racist the way some people’s grandmas are racist.” Which makes it all pretty awkward, of course, especially when you love your grandmother. At least the book itself acknowledged the uneasiness: Ma really was sort of a jerk, the way she sang wistful songs about vanished mythical “Indian maids” but then couldn’t stand to be in the same room as a real Indian. And Pa, for all his sympathies, had to stop himself from calling the Osage “screeching devils.” As a child, I’d known Little House on the Prairie to be about an uneasy coexistence with Indians who were alternately fascinating and terrifying. Now as an adult I could see that the fascination and terror were embellished with “glittering” Indian eyes and other dismaying details, a whole pile of cultural baggage. As I read on, I found myself willing to take the bad with the good. Though when the bad was Pa in blackface during a minstrel show in Little Town on the Prairie, that was a little much.

  “Oh, no,” I said, showing Chris the illustration. “Pa’s, uh, a ‘darky.’ ”

  “You’re worried that these books are going to turn you into a racist grandma, aren’t you?” Chris joked.

  “Go to sleep,” I told him, which is what Pa says to Laura in Little House on the Prairie when she asks him difficult questions about the Indians.

  There were things I would always take issue with, of course—awkward moments in an otherwise happy reunion. Everything had come back so vividly that I learned to stop worrying and love the books as much as I had when I’d first read them. After Little House on the Prairie, I moved on to On the Banks of Plum Creek, then took a quick detour away from the books about Laura to read about Almanzo Wilder’s childhood in Farmer Boy. Then it was back to the Ingalls family in By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter and, finally, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years.

  I took to carrying the books around. For the next four months I always had a Little House book in my purse. I could never remember whether or not my cell phone was charged or if I had any quarters for the parking meter, but if I needed to suddenly immerse myself i
n a passage about making button-strings, I was set.

  It wasn’t just that I was getting old feelings back from revisiting the books, or that they transported me to some sunny and comforting kind of place. At first the books were just an escape, but after a month or two of reading, Laura World had started to spill into other areas of my waking life as I began looking up Laura and the history behind the Little House books on Google and Wikipedia. At some point it wasn’t enough to revisit the familiar memory landscape I’d known; now I had to know what the twisted haysticks the Ingalls family burned during The Long Winter looked like. I knew what year the Long Winter actually happened (1880–81), and that for years afterward it was known to locals as “the Hard Winter” and “the Snow Winter.” Now I knew exactly where On the Banks of Plum Creek took place (near Walnut Grove, Minnesota) and that it took about eight hours and thirtyseven minutes to drive there from my apartment.

  The accumulation of knowledge began to radiate outward into the rest of my personal universe. Either that or it was a black hole sucking everything else in. I found out that Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, helped found the Libertarian Party, and that there was some big lawsuit about book royalties nine years ago, and that the series is really big with homeschoolers, and that you can buy a special Christmas ornament depicting Jack, the brindled bulldog, and that there was a TV movie about Laura starring that actress who’d played the crazy girl on Season Two of Dawson’s Creek.

  I mean one minute I’d be looking up the years the Ingalls family spent living near Independence, Kansas, and then the next I was on TV.com poring over a page listing all twenty-six episodes of the 1975 Japanese anime series Laura, a Girl of the Prairie (also known as Laura the Prairie Girl). Who knew that such a thing existed? The episodes had titles like “A Cute Calf Has Arrived!” and “Dreams and Hope! Departing for the Prairies” and “Wheat, Grow Tall!” The series never aired in the United States and to my eternal frustration I have never seen a full episode, save a few clips on YouTube, one of them in Italian. I still search to this day. Dreams and hope!