Pioneer Girl (10 page)

D
riving south on U.S. 54 in Missouri, I tried to envision what could have seemed so magical about the place to Laura and Almanzo back in 1894. The handbills had promised bountiful apple and cherry orchards, and Laura wrote in her travel diaries that their journey, by covered wagon, had taken them through immense expanses of wheat and corn fields. I tried to picture rows of apple trees, groves of peaches, lush leaves everywhere. And a well-worn path where horses and carriages passed each other, coming and going from the Ozarks, once known as the Land of the Great Red Apple. Laura was twenty-seven then, Almanzo thirty-seven, and Rose eight years old. They were rebounding from a disastrous stint in the Florida Everglades. Drawn by advertisements touting the farming possibilities in Missouri, they'd set out once again, weary, hopeful, determined to make a permanent home.

It was taking a lot of imagination—a kind of movie light, with matching sound track—to transform the highway and median strip and dismal expanses of rural neglect into something golden and beckoning.

“Are we in the Ozarks now? Aren't they supposed to be hilly?” Alex asked.

Neither of us could tell where they started or what they were supposed to look like. The terrain looked as flat as ever, though according to the map we were very close to Ozark country.

I slowed to turn onto a county road and Alex pointed at the Tastee-Freez sitting at the corner. He started singing “Jack and Diane.”
Two American kids doing the best they can.

“That's probably where we're having dinner,” I said.

We had hardly seen a gas station in the past thirty miles, but we had passed plenty of anti-abortion signs and stern religious placards.
Hell Is Real
.
Jesus Is Real
.
Jesus Saves
.
Be Saved Today
.
Will You Be Left Behind?

Then, not far from the turnoff to Mansfield, I saw it in the distance: the unmistakable red and yellow of a “Chinese” restaurant. A windowless cinder-block frame, bulging-eyed Chinese dragons painted on either side of the door.
Golden China Inn
read the sign, and a plastic banner:
Buffet 11 AM–9 PM Everyday
. I remembered reading somewhere that the birthplace of American deep-fried cashew chicken was Springfield, Missouri, an hour west of Mansfield.

A little shiver went through me, as it usually did when I saw these kinds of restaurants. It felt like a secret, some sort of private knowledge or shame. In grad school, no one I knew would have dreamed of eating at such a place; everyone wanted
authentic
food, street food, real food, none of this boneless almond chicken bullshit. It still felt embarrassing to admit that, for me, these kinds of buffets
had
been an authentic American experience.

Whenever I did tell people that my family used to manage buffets—with a great show of irony, of course—they were always intrigued. Everyone asked the same questions: did we eat the food ourselves (sometimes, but mostly as leftovers); did the busboys scrape half-eaten plates back into the chafing dishes (it maybe happened in some places, but not that I'd seen); did the workers make fun of the customers (yes, if they were obnoxious or rude). Sometimes that was all the levity my mother seemed to get—complaining about the cook, going over the tedium of each day, recounting stories about customers, especially the ones who were messy, dirty, overweight, or loud. She had grown immune to the piles of fried chicken parts, the cornstarchy sauces that ranged in color from fuchsia-pink “sweet and sour” to dark brown “Chinese gravy.” Ong Hai, who worked alongside her after Sam started fourth grade and I started third, which was when we were judged old enough to look after ourselves, took his usual stance of observance and amusement. You wouldn't even know he was paying attention to everything, but later in the evening he would chuckle about the man who'd been caught filling up a Tupperware with General Tso's.

Once, in college, I made a list of all the places we'd lived before Franklin and how I knew them.

Rockford, Illinois:
Sam's birth.

La Porte, Indiana:
My birth.

Battle Creek, Michigan:
Air smelled like sweet puffed-rice cereal.

La Porte, Indiana
:
Golden Dragon. Dad dies.

Naperville, Illinois:
Great Wall. Brief stay. Endless divided highways and car dealerships.

Joliet, Illinois:
Asia Garden (or was it Jade Palace?). First apartment too close to the prison; second apartment too close to the casino.

Waukesha, Wisconsin:
Jade Palace (or was it Asia Garden?). Annie, Asian best friend in fourth grade, who introduced me to
Laverne & Shirley
; we decided when we got older we'd go to Milwaukee to see where they worked.

Valparaiso, Indiana:
Grand Asian Buffet. More strip malls than anywhere else. Frozen custard shops.

The last buffet my mother and Ong Hai ran was the New City China in Franklin. This was after my mother agreed to stay in the area so that Sam and I could go to the same high school through graduation. The New City China was no different, really, than all the other buffets. Same foods, same steaming chafing dishes, same dark carpeting, same mottled plastic cups the color of amber. But somehow the place made my mother and Ong Hai different. Maybe that was where they finally reached the saturation point, for he grew quieter and she grew even moodier. The customers were no worse than any others in any other town, but somehow this particular restaurant, squatting on the edge of a strip mall of tanning salons, with its vinyl sign that flapped in the wind, seemed to take all the energy out of us. And maybe it coincided with my becoming even more aware, or more self-conscious, of that inexorable deep-fry smell. Even when I didn't go anywhere near the restaurant, I could smell it in our apartment. For years after, and still, I couldn't stand the odor of fried food. When the owners of the New City China shut the place down, my mother and Ong Hai managed a Viet-Thai-Chinese restaurant. A couple years later, the Lotus Leaf Café came along.

In my anxiety dreams I often find myself back in one of those buffets, unable to find entrance or exit. I wake up with the sound of the interstate in my head—cars muffling past, the rush of them, in darkness, going right past us, the drivers missing us entirely with blinks of the eye.

That's what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be: the person in the car. The driver driving past. I had come all this way so as not to think about my family, the Lotus Leaf, the way they paired and weighted me with obligation.

And yet Mansfield, Missouri, reminded me of how the past will not be banished. So many small, dying, basically dead towns in the Midwest looked like this. Where once-graceful, ornate courthouses and libraries—back when libraries meant something important, something civic—had been, if not torn down or boarded up, converted dozens of times over into shops and offices and apartments and barely surviving historical societies. There might even be the remains of an ambitious opera house. The nicest building in town was likely to be a funeral home.

Main Street had been built broad, to accommodate horses, buggies, and hitching posts. And surely local efforts tried to preserve the “historic downtown” area. Surely there were sad little parades on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. In Mansfield a few local “shoppes” offered “olde-fashioned ice cream” and “sewing notions,” but it looked like most of the money was flowing in and out of the paycheck advance and pawn shops.

It was all claustrophobically familiar, but because I didn't know how to explain this to Alex, didn't know if our relationship—whatever it was—could sustain that kind of talk, I kept it to myself. Alex had grown up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where his point of reference was D.C. and the bustle of power it represented; he'd gone to Urbana-Champaign because his father had. He had no expectation of staying in the middle of the country forever. For the time being, Iowa City, with its multitude of coffee shops, vegetarian restaurants, and boutiques, with its writerly quotes embedded into the sidewalks, was a novelty. The Midwest itself was quaint and charming—two words that, to me, had come to signify a deception that went both ways: while the outsider might deign to peek in, the midwesterner knew the darker isolation that waited behind Victorian facades and re-created soda fountains. As we drove through Mansfield, Alex was startled, then fascinated, by signs that read
Communities Against Meth
and stores with names like Farm King and Smokes for Less. He had never really lived, and never would, in this kind of waning small town.

There wasn't much more to Mansfield except the markers directing us to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum. We followed them to another rural road, at last glimpsing the farmhouse ahead at the bend of a curve. A gravel parking lot had been set up across the street and I pulled into it. There must have been at least thirty other cars already there.

“Stuff of dreams,” Alex said as he stretched, getting out of the car. It seemed to be the phrase he'd chosen for the trip. Crossing the Mississippi in St. Louis: “Stuff of dreams.” Seeing billboards for Branson slots and comedy acts, a life-sized replica of half of the
Titanic
, $9.99 all-you-can-eat steak dinners: “Stuff of dreams.”

We could hear singing as we walked toward Rocky Ridge. The house was all white clapboard, with a wide front porch and dark shutters, sheltered by a canopy of trees. It was what Alex termed “respectable,” meaning large enough to command some authority but not so overly large as to appear to be trying to impress. Though it sat close to the curve of the street, perhaps a victim of years of widening roads, it still felt remote, set apart from any discernible neighborhood. This was what Laura and Almanzo had finally deemed home. Where Rose had come of age. Where she had returned again and again, loving and hating her mother, writing her books, writing her mother's books.

The singing turned out to be an a cappella group—a dozen kids, ranging from about ten to eighteen, holding sheet music and standing in a circle in the backyard of Rocky Ridge. A few mothers stood off to the side, watching, and Alex asked one of them what was going on.

“Rehearsals,” she explained. She smiled at Alex's confusion and I regretted that her hair was done in a typical suburban mom-bob. “For Wilder Days. It's not till September, but we have to start early because of camps.” For the festival, the kids would be dressed in the long flowered dresses, bonnets, and hat-and-suspenders that signaled pioneer garb. For now, they were in halter tops and cargo shorts, practicing a musical about Laura and Almanzo.

You drove a team of horses that caught my eye; it's there I'll be sitting by and by.

By and by you'll be taking my hand; by and by we'll settle our own land.

Oh, Manly, Manly, what a wonderful life we're living.

Oh, Laura, Laura, what a wonderful life we've been given.

“It's probably the big event of the year,” the woman said. “There's lots of music and games, there's apple-bobbing and all kinds of fun things from the books. People come from all over. They dress up and have picnics and there's a trivia contest and a Laura look-alike contest. Where are you two from?”

“Iowa,” I answered.

“Oh, I love Iowa,” she said.

I could see Alex about to engage in an earnest conversation with her, so I grabbed his arm. “Let's go.”

I pointed ahead to the museum, a flat-topped building that looked like a public rest area, sitting right next to the farmhouse. The cost of admission included access to the house as well as the second home, Rock House, which Rose had built on the property in 1928. Alex and I paid for our tickets. The strains of the singing rehearsal started up again as we stepped into the world of Laura memorabilia.

Ron had mentioned that the place lacked funds, and it showed. While most of the trinkets and photos were shelved behind glass, some were simply exposed to the summer humidity. If there was air-conditioning, it was either broken or running on the lowest possible setting, supplemented by a giant whirring fan stationed near the open doorway. The place was what it was: a low-budget, overly specific museum, musty, cramped, and vaguely organized, the labels and signs handmade and hand-typed, with a scent of mold, mildew, and sleepy Sundays in the air. Yet it was thrilling too to see bits of the
Little House
stories coming to actual life. Here was Pa Ingalls's famous fiddle. Here was Almanzo's last buggy. Here was a display of Laura's hair combs, lamp mats, knitting needles, serving spoons. Here was Laura's writing desk, stocked with her favored pencils and tablets. Mannequins were dressed in some of her outfits and hats. The lace fichu that Ida Brown had given Laura on her wedding day lay folded on a shelf. The glass platter, etched with the words
Give us this day our daily bread
, one of the few things Laura had been able to save from the fire, sat on a dining table.

Laura's jewelry was also scattered throughout the glass cases. Her engagement ring, a pearl-and-garnet set, was granted prominent display. As told in
These Happy Golden Years
, noted the label. No sign of Laura's gold pin, however. Its absence gave me a moment of validation when I considered that its likeness—my mother's pin—was tucked in a pocket of my handbag.

One corner of the museum was devoted to Rose. Though some of her books and newspaper articles were laid out, mostly her role seemed to be that of daughter of a proud mother. See Rose all dressed up, ready to board a train out West. See Laura and Rose and Almanzo all living together with their horses at Rocky Ridge, 1930. See Rose and Laura posing in front of a World's Fair exhibit, San Francisco, 1915.

San Francisco
. The name of the city brought Sam back into my mind, and with him my mother, my grandfather, our dwindled family. I shook my head, refusing to allow them entrance.