The Wilder Life (12 page)

“I have the whole set,” she said quietly. “Here's your key.”

We had dinner at Ralph's Bar/Mary's Kitchen, which appeared to be one of the few places that was open during the evenings in winter. Luckily it was also one of the restaurants
The Little House Guidebook
recommended. It was a small place that displayed team logos for the Packers, the Badgers, and the Vikings; we sat in a booth and had very good hamburgers in red plastic baskets. There was a nice crowd for a Thursday evening—more than half the seats at the bar were full.

“Everyone seems nice,” I pointed out to Chris. We could see that many of the people in the room knew each other. Mostly they looked settled—families with teenage kids, older couples. They were all perfectly normal-looking, but I found myself watching them as intently as I could without being conspicuous.

“What are you looking for?” Chris asked.

“Nothing, I guess.” But I couldn't shake the feeling that I
was
watching for something in particular, looking and listening. Hoping to overhear something.

“Oh my God,” I said. “I just realized something really weird.”

“What's that?”

“Somehow I keep expecting everyone here to be talking to each other about Laura Ingalls Wilder.” It was true. I'd been sitting there feeling like something was missing and that was what it was.

Chris started laughing. “What, you mean talking like they
know
her? Like, what would they say?”

“I guess I hadn't imagined that far.” Though now that I thought about it, I supposed that they would say things like
Have you been by the log cabin lately?
and
Boy, things sure have changed since the Ingallses lived here!
I knew it was completely ridiculous. I'd been trying to cast everyone here in this bar as extras in this secret world of mine.

“I suppose it's just as well that this isn't a room full of people talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder,” I admitted to Chris. “Because that would be a little creepy, right?”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

That night, back at the motel, I was getting ice from the ice machine near the lobby when the manager's little boy in footed pajamas appeared in the dark hallway. He seemed to have come out of nowhere and didn't look lost in the slightest.

He growled at me, like a little bear. “
Rowr!
” he said, and then he giggled and ran away.

“Just think,” I whispered to Chris later, just before we went to sleep. “We're in the Big Woods.”

We were out of the motel early the next morning. We'd need most of the day to drive to Green Bay to see our friends. It took us only a few minutes to see the historical marker in Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Park and the closed museum and visitor's center, where I got out of the car and peered in the windows at the gift shop and felt a brief, inexplicable longing for a Little House collector's spoon.

“We should look at the lake again,” Chris said when we got back in the car. We'd driven along the marina the day before when we first came in, but we hadn't really stopped to look. Now we made our way down the hill again, past the shuttered summer cottages and the rows of little brick storefronts.

Near the bottom of the hill was a tiny garden-shed-sized log cabin with a tiny porch and a sign that said
COMING SOON! SINGLE FAMILY YEAR-ROUND LOG HOMES
. (“Wow, what a concept,” said Chris.) Then we crossed the railroad tracks and parked along a rocky beach. Except for a couple guys who were icefishing near the marina, the shore was deserted. The rocks looked boring and brown and dumped off a truck; so much for collecting Lake Pepin pebbles, I thought. But then we looked out at the lake.

“I can't believe it's still frozen,” Chris said. I couldn't believe it, either; we'd crossed the river twice on our way in and the ice had broken there. It was March, after all.

It was a gray morning, nearly misty. The temperature was in the forties, almost warm enough to leave our coats in the car, certainly mild enough to not feel the weather at all. Which is why it was so strange to see that the expanse of Lake Pepin that opened out in front of us was still frozen solid. A rough lip of ice was pressed up against the rocks on the shore, and behind it the entire lake stretched motionless for at least a mile. The great bluffs on the Minnesota side were faint in the distance, rising above the soft white line of the frozen lake. There was no wind, and despite the vastness of the lake, everything felt muffled and still.

“Pa drove the covered wagon across here.” I said. It wasn't until I spoke that I realized that the fact astonished me.

“In which book?” Chris asked.

“
Little House on the Prairie.
Right at the very beginning. And in real life, too.” I couldn't stop looking out across the ice. “I think this is the same time of year they went across.”

“Really?”

I tried to remember. The book had said they set out “in the very last of the winter.” “I think so. Then the night after they went across the ice started breaking.”

This didn't look like it would break, though. I went a little closer to where a ridge of ice met the rocks and considered stepping out over it. The only thing that kept me from doing it was knowing that I'd want to take another step, and another. As solid as the lake looked, there was also something sort of miragelike about it, with the overlay of gray weather between us and the opposite shore. I felt, very distinctly, that if we went across we would follow them. I mean “them” as in
them
, and it seemed to me, too, that the same other side they'd reached in their covered wagon would be there instead of Lake City, the present, whatever. It seemed perfectly matter-of-fact that it would be this way; that just as the winter turns water into roads, it makes the world revert like this.

“I hadn't expected it to be like this,” I told Chris. Meaning I hadn't thought I would find something like an opening into Laura World, that I would come this close.

I DON'T HAVE A SISTER, but for a time, while growing up, I had Laura Ingalls.

I'm the only daughter in my family, the younger of two. My brother, Steve, is four years older than I am, and for much of my childhood his life seemed infinitely more advanced than mine. While I didn't grow up alone, sometimes being a girl felt lonely.

Books often helped. Plenty of them offered surrogate sisterhood through their characters, but none filled the need the way the Little House books did. I enjoyed
Little Women
, but the March sisters were a self-contained bunch, the four of them so chummy together that I could only be an onlooker at their attic plays and Christmas mornings. Anne Shirley in
Anne of Green Gables
was a little more solitary, but she seemed awfully needy. While I had a perfectly decent set of parents, girlhood felt like an unknown territory. I loved that Laura World was full of wide open spaces that expressed the sort of not-alone lonesomeness that I often felt. One frontier seemed to stand for another.

Of course, this is just a personal metaphor, and maybe a hopelessly quaint one at that. So it seemed to me when I walked into American Girl Place in Chicago with my friend Kara on a late winter afternoon. Located on North Michigan Avenue, an upscale shopping district that attracts throngs of tourists, American Girl Place is the flagship store for the American Girl brand, which began as a small line of historical-themed dolls and has become a veritable empire of dolls, toys, books, clothing, and accessories, all for girls from toddler to tween ages. It's a massive place, as big as a department store, with its own doll hospital, doll beauty salon, and restaurant.

American Girl Place didn't exist when I was young, but I can see why an eight-year-old girl would love it, where everything from the pink-accented décor to the slogans on the wall (
FOLLOW YOUR INNER STAR
, read one motto) emphasizes how special it is to be a girl, how powerful. At American Girl Place, girlhood is
not
a lonely prairie. If anything, it's a city, or even an industry. The sense you get when you visit the store and ride the packed escalator is that American Girl girls have places to go, things to buy, important girly work to do.

“Why are we here again?” Kara asked. We'd been out on Michigan Avenue when I'd talked her into going into the store. “Do they have a Laura Ingalls Wilder doll?” she asked. By now most of my friends knew about my recent preoccupation.

“No,” I said. “I just really like looking at the stuff sometimes,” I confessed.

It's true: while I've never owned an American Girl doll, my fascination with the company dates back to my college days, when one of their catalogs inexplicably showed up at my apartment in Iowa City. While my “thing” for tiny doll accessories has never run as deep as my Little House obsession, I was starting to suspect they were related somehow.

It would be another month before my next attempted foray into Laura World, a trip to both the
Little House on the Prairie
site in Kansas and Laura's adulthood home in Mansfield, Missouri, and I was itching to see something in the meantime. So when I'd noticed the American Girl sign gleaming forth from Water Tower Place, I thought, why not? Maybe American Girl was the methadone to my Little House heroin, good for a fix. And maybe it would help me figure out why I'd gotten hooked in the first place.

American Girl is now owned by Mattel, Inc., but it was created by a teacher named Pleasant Rowland, who founded the brand's original company, Pleasant Company (clearly her entrepreneurial destiny demanded she call it this), and started the doll and book line in 1986. Reportedly she came up with the concept following a trip to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; eventually she'd create a doll character, Felicity, whose stories were set there. The very first American Girl to launch, though, was Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant girl who comes to live on the Minnesota prairie in the mid-1800s with a trunk full of calico dresses and sunbonnets. It might be just a coincidence that when American Girl set out to build its empire, it started in Laura's very own neighborhood. Or it could have been a shrewd move based on market research. (“The gingham sunbonnets scored high with the focus group, Ms. Rowland.”) All I know is that if I'd been about seven years younger, I might have encountered the American Girl products firsthand.