Pioneer Girl (12 page)

Everything was directing me to California. All the signs were there, I would say to Alex. Stop using that word, he would say, and I would answer that I couldn't help it. The pioneers had looked for signs, hadn't they—checking the sky, the weather, listening for the call of a certain bird—whatever it took to keep justifying the journey. If Sam was in San Francisco, then I could find him too, talk to him for real, far from the tensions of our mother's house.

Over dinner, I asked Alex if I could stay with him a couple more days, until my flight. I couldn't see myself driving back to Franklin, aproning myself to the Lotus Leaf again, then having to lie about where I was going next. Being away from that, even for just a few days, felt like new freedom.

“You know I'd never turn you away,” Alex said. “I don't know about this whole San Francisco Rose Wilder thing you're doing. But it's your business, right? So stay as long as you want.” He made the decision so simple, and I wondered if he would have let me stay on and on, for weeks, months, the whole year.

He said it again later, in bed, after sex, which we had skipped the night before in St. Louis. We knew each other well enough as friends, but this pattern was starting to veer toward something too risky to define, with neither of us sure, or at least I wasn't sure, who was doing the steering. Suddenly I felt a little shy about meeting his gaze, as if afraid to break a tacit, though unclear, agreement.

“You know you don't really have to go,” he murmured again into my shoulder.

“I already bought the ticket.”

“You could call or e-mail the guy instead.”

“It's not the same. You know that. Besides, I haven't seen Amy in two years. I mean, I might move there. And Sam is there.”

“Yeah, and what if he won't see you?”

The words delivered an unexpected sting, but all I said was, “You have to get back to your writing anyway. I don't want to distract you too much.”

“Don't you have a book to write too? What are you going to do if your diss turns into nothing?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Well, I worry about you.”

“Why?”

“You know I do.”

It was too close to intimate, far more than lying there in bed together.

“I'm not a hundred percent sure what I mean by that,” Alex added quickly.

“Okay.” It was a dumb response, but I had no other to give. I knew then that I could have just stayed there and kept staying—it would have been an easy inertia. But there was a bigger restlessness. I was looking at the time, looking for the door.

“I'll come see you after I get back.”

“You will,” he said. It sounded vaguely like insistence rather than a question.

L
aura Ingalls was fifteen when her grown-up life began: she became a schoolteacher, even though sixteen was the legal age to be one, and she started dating Almanzo Wilder. Not that they really
dated
. Such a word implied neutrality, even equality. In the 1880s a girl didn't date. She was courted. She was the recipient, waiting for a man to tip his hat, offer a buggy ride, walk her home from church. By fifteen, Laura and her friends—Minnie Johnson and Mary Power and Ida Brown—had to think about their future husbands and houses.

Toward the end of
These Happy Golden Years
the girls gather at a recess—they still attend De Smet's one-room school—to admire Laura's and Ida's new engagement rings. When Laura says she wants to teach another round of primary school before getting married, Ida declares,
Not I
—indeed, that's why she got a ring. All the girls laugh. Later, Almanzo tells Laura that her last stint teaching
will
be her last, and that soon she'll be frying his breakfast pancakes instead. Laura had never really wanted to become a teacher; she had done it because her mother had, and because it was one of the only ways a respectable woman could earn money. Her mother had stopped as soon as she got married, and even before Laura taught her first class she longed for the same deliverance.

A generation later, in Mansfield, Missouri, the options for girls weren't much different. But Rose Wilder had never been like her classmates, and most of her classmates had never liked her. She made it clear that her ambitions were well beyond their town. When she left she traveled across the country and then the globe, wanting to see the places she'd read about in books, and to discard the rural mores that had felt so suffocating. Independence, money, and fame: these would lift her out of the depressive plunges that often threatened to sink her.

Growing up, Sam and I had always agreed that we couldn't wait to get out of “here,” by which we meant whatever little city or suburb we happened to be in at the time. We would flee to Chicago or perhaps even farther. We wouldn't be tethered to buffet bins and pop dispensers. Like Rose, we thought ourselves suited to bigger lives. Yet I saw how things ended up: Rose, despondent over her perceived failures as a writer, her inability to make or save enough money. Sam was in a limbo of his own making and I had moved back to Franklin, with little to call my own.

Just how little became even clearer to me when I stepped inside Amy's two-bedroom, very grown-up-looking condo in San Francisco, in an acronym neighborhood, SoMa, which kept resounding in my mind like a shout.

Amy and I had been friends since freshman year in college, when we lived two dorm doors away from each other and commiserated over our roommates—mine with a habit of bringing guys back to the room and locking me out; hers who kept borrowing clothes without asking. Amy had grown up in a North Shore suburb of Chicago and, like me, had dreamed of a more romantic life on one of the coasts. But now I was still in graduate student mode while Amy owned a substantial place of her own, with furniture that definitely did not come from IKEA. Whenever I admired people's houses I got fixated on the details, the cost of lamp shades and drawer pulls and crown molding. How much consideration had been given to the placement of picture frames, of candlesticks on a fireplace mantel? How much could a person, if unhampered by time and money constraints, devote to such refinement, to the pleasure of pure decoration?

The walls in Amy's condo were the creamy yellow of lemon chiffon cake, trimmed in white, and set off by drapes and throw pillows done in floral swirls of pink, tangerine, and teal. On her living room coffee table a mammoth glass vase was jammed with peonies. A matching vase sat in the kitchen, which gleamed expectantly in steel and white marble.

Gorgeous, I said, kept saying. Beautiful. What I really meant was,
Unimaginable
.

“Well,” Amy said. “What else have I got to do?”

Whenever she talked about her work, which wasn't often because, as she put it, it was less a career than a job, she said she pimped for Big Pharma. I knew she sometimes felt like she'd sold out, going this route after med school—but she'd already paid off all her loans and didn't have to worry about parceling out her paychecks to make them last; she didn't have to think about money at all. I wondered if I'd ever know what that was like.

Setting out two wineglasses on the countertop—a pain in the ass, she said, pointing to stains from olive oil and tomato sauce—she wanted to talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Amy, with her lake-blue eyes and ale-brown hair, could have competed in a Laura look-alike contest. She had no doubts about the connection between Rose Wilder and Gregory Stellenson. “Who doesn't love a good literary mystery?” she said. And she needed the distraction. She'd broken up with a guy a few weeks earlier, or maybe it was that he had broken up with her; she still wasn't quite sure about it. They'd been dating for four months and he simply stopped contact. No calls, texts, e-mails. At some point, Amy said, it felt too pathetic to keep waiting for a return call. “Did stuff like that happen in the pioneer days?” she said. Sure, I said. Except the guy would just hitch up his horses and ride out of town, never to be seen again.

Amy had always been a planner—probably the only time she had surprised anyone was when she didn't go into residency—and she'd prepared for my visit by doing her own background reading on Rose. She'd reread all of the
Little House
books, which she practically knew by heart anyway, all those images of salt pork nestled in baked beans, shanties covered in tar paper, and polonaise dresses poufed out with hoop skirts, and had reconciled herself to the news that the books had been essentially cowritten.

“It was a bit of a balloon being punctured,” Amy said, bringing a bottle of wine from the refrigerator. She opened it with some contraption I'd seen at a professor's house—one clean pull. “But then I decided, so what? If both women were happy with the arrangement, what difference does it make?”

I said I felt bad for Rose. “All she wanted was to be famous and rich but her name fell into obscurity.”

“Rose was the wind beneath Laura's wings.”

I felt bad about laughing. How Rose would have hated that idea!

Amy wanted to see the gold pin, so I brought out my tote bag, where I'd kept the pin wrapped up in a paper towel.

“This has to be real, right?” Amy touched the faint etching of the house. “Remember when Almanzo gives her this, how he says,
Can't you thank a fellow better than that?
and they kiss? That's got to be the only sexy moment in all of the books. Then soon enough they're married with a baby.”

“And remember,” I said, “In
The First Four Years
, after Rose is born, they visit the Boasts, and the Boasts ask if they can have her?”

“Oh, yeah. Mr. Boast is like, if you give us the baby then you can go into the stable and take my best horse, because you can have another baby and we can't ever have one at all. They want to trade the baby for a horse!”

“It's especially sad since, from the other books, we know the Boasts as this sweet and perfect couple.”

“How could they ever have faced each other again after that?” Amy took a drink from her glass, regarded it. “Ma wouldn't approve of this drinking. Do you know what became of the Boasts in real life?”

I shook my head. I said that I did know that the Olesons moved to Oregon, where Nellie married and had children. Jaunty Mr. Edwards had gone out to Oregon too, though he hadn't been heard from after that. Laura's friends from school, Mary, Minnie, and Ida, all married and moved West as well. Cap Garland had been killed in his early twenties, in a threshing accident.

“See, everyone goes West,” Amy said. “You should too.”

“But I always think, once they reach Oregon or California, what next? Did they want to keep going somewhere else?”

“Not at all. This is it. The land of gold and honey and citrus, like the oranges in the Christmas stockings.”

Amy brought out parcels of cheese from some expensive shop—or perhaps there was no other kind there—and pastries from Tartine that were so perfect they made me want to cry. She offered me a city map, spreading it on the counter so I could see the distance between her neighborhood and the Mission District, where Google said that Gregory Stellenson lived. Google had also told us that he worked at the San Francisco Public Library, in the History Center (
History Center!
we both exclaimed), though he wasn't listed on the website.

The library was about a fifteen-minute walk from Amy's place. All we had to do, she said, was show up. She was taking the next day off for just this purpose. “We'll be like Almanzo and Cap Garland, going after the winter wheat that will save the town.”

“Except we're going to say what?
Hey, Gregory Stellenson, did you know that you might be the only living descendent of Laura Ingalls Wilder?
He'll think we're crazy.”

“I know. I've thought about this.” Amy handed me a flatbread cracker and pointed to the melty-looking robiola. “That's why we have to be careful in our approach. Get to know him through chitchat first. You'll need to bring all of your academic credentials to bear, plus the evidence. We will have to sound stunningly lucid, is all.”

Amy had always had this ability to inspire confidence in people. She was a talker, a natural saleswoman. She could make Gregory Stellenson believe whatever we were going to say, and that made me feel safe, somehow. Corroborated. It was easy, sitting there with Amy, to agree to her plan.

That night I looked all around her guest bedroom before going to sleep. Like the rest of her place, it seemed to be ready for visitors at any moment. The windows were topped with linen Roman shades. The hardwood floors were glossy, reminding me of the gleam of chestnut-haired models in hair dye commercials which always seemed to me extremely convincing. How did Amy manage to get her duvet and pillow shams looking so hotel-room-placed? Where had she learned these life skills?

I thought of Sam and the way he'd said
California
with a kind of reverence. It had embarrassed me. Had he looked at me the way I looked at Amy? Had he thought I had my shit together while he was just floundering and wandering around? What did he have to fall back on, to turn toward, to keep him going? What, I wondered, kept so many people going, every day, beyond devotion to habit? Was Sam even now in the same city I was? Was he in the same neighborhood, on the same street? From Amy's guest room I could glimpse the traffic below and the lights that were still on in the office buildings across the way. So many rows of lights, but few people. Every time I was in Chicago, or any city, I wanted to know how everyone managed to coordinate themselves in tandem, exiting buildings, entering trains, each person taking up so much space, having so many needs and desires. All scurrying toward shelter and food and safety and sleep.

It was impossible to regard San Francisco without thinking about its long history of immigration, the way it still symbolized a place of reinvention, transformation. No wonder Rose had been drawn here. No wonder my brother had. Countless immigrants had rebuilt their identities and families in this town, in spite of and sometimes because of earthquakes and fire. I had spent my entire life so far in the Midwest. I had never mentioned to my family that the postdocs I'd applied for had been at universities all over the country. I might have gone anywhere; I had hoped to land somewhere. The scarier part was thinking I wouldn't, that I would remain in the same life I'd grown up with.

But not Sam. Was he really here? Would I now, forever on, link the city to him? Not even Ong Hai knew the whereabouts of either of us. I had called home before driving to O'Hare, lied again, said I was going to spend a few more days with college friends, catching up on research at the University of Iowa. Ong Hai said he understood and didn't mention the Lotus Leaf at all, perhaps trying to spare me the guilt I already felt.

I found my phone and sent Sam a text:
I'm in San Francisco.

—

I
n the morning Amy and I walked to the library, hoping we might be there when Gregory arrived for work. A dozen people were already hanging out in front, waiting for it to open. Though the building was a modern beauty, with squared stones and tall, imperious windows, I felt a twinge of disappointment that the old library Rose had visited—all those arches and pillars echoing the World's Fair pavilion—was now a museum.

“The problem with this library is that it should have steps,” I said to Amy. “Lots of broad, long steps for people to sit on.”

She laughed. “What difference does it make?”

“Cultural atmosphere. You know, the vaunting of place through architecture.”

“What was your dissertation called? ‘Edith Wharton and the Reabsorption of Place'?”

“‘Reifying the Aesthetics of Place.' Not much better, I know. Possibly worse.”

“You could have called me for title advice. I can make contraindications sound positively symphonic.”

It was fifty degrees in June and I pulled Amy's borrowed jacket tighter around me. I was glad for the easy silence she and I could fall into as I took in the bustle of people getting to work, especially the Asian women, some in sneakers and flats, some in heels, all loaded down with bags. One had a purse that seemed to be made of a hundred squares of canvas stitched together in fraying, flapping tiers. I couldn't take my eyes off them, wondering how that woman came to be in this very place, how she had selected that particular hideous purse. I'd been in San Francisco only once before, visiting when Amy was at Stanford, and had then too been unreasonably surprised by the number of Asian people populating the streets. Though I already knew that would be so, it was still startling to see them moving around in a way that seemed oblivious, like they never had to worry about being stared at.