Pioneer Girl (17 page)

If she waits long enough she will see a man in the window. He speaks to someone. His wife. Into view come two children, girls, who reach for their mother.

The portrait of a family is complete, and in kind, the garden flourishes with mid-summer blooms. No one here needs to be a wanderer or scavenger.

The afternoon is ending.

The girls tumble into the yard, the ribbons on their dresses are like flags.

In the window, the man and the woman watch their children. What do they see?

The old woman, being old, goes without notice. The fact of her age must be admitted, if nowhere else but beneath her own hands. Years and years and finally this: silence, survival, sunlight, all conspiring, and a little gray house in the West.

A
s Gregory drove us back to San Francisco in his mother's electric-blue Subaru, I called Amy. She was relieved to hear from me at first—she had left a bunch of voice mails and texts on my phone—but when I told her where I was, she said, “You're with
him
?” so loudly I knew Gregory had heard her. We agreed to talk when I got back to her apartment, and I could picture her, wineglass in hand, legs drawn up on the turquoise midcentury sofa I had so admired in her living room. A grown-up life.

Gregory and I didn't speak much. Back at his mother's house we'd taken pictures of each inscription in
Free Land
, and I'd said that it was proof that Rose had wanted to know what happened to Albert.

“It's still third-person,” he reminded me. “It's still oblique. There's no way to know if this was about her or someone else.”

“Rose knew better than to use the first-person,” I argued. “She wanted to make sure that no one would know absolutely.” I wanted to see it as a kind of promise, a family secret coded and hidden, but still written—in order to be found.

Gregory hadn't asked to keep the book or the letter from his great-grandmother and I didn't offer. I kept changing my mind, thinking I should. But I couldn't let go of those pages yet, just as I couldn't let go of the possibility that maybe Rose had gone to that house in Corte Madera before her trip to Vietnam in 1965. What if the sight of my mother, a girl peeking out from the kitchen at the lucky Café 88, had reminded Rose of Gregory's mother—a girl who might have been her own grandchild? What if this was the reason she had spent so much time talking with Ong Hai?

It was past eight by the time Gregory and I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. The streets dizzied me with their profusion of signs and painted grid lines sloping up and down those vertiginous hills.

When we stopped in front of Amy's building, it suddenly felt like we were at the end of the date, not knowing what to do next. A kiss, a call-you-later, a have-a-nice-life?

I was glad when Gregory reached for my hand. “If you end up writing something about all this, will you let me know?”

“If I ever do, of course. Thank you,” I said. “Have I said that yet? You've been incredibly generous.”

“I should be thanking you too.”

“Do you believe all of this? You believe Rose is your great-grandmother?”

“I may never know what to think. But one way or another, whether it
was
Rose or Rose imagining someone else standing outside that house—my family history has become more interesting. I wish my mother could know all this.” He let go of my hand, his voice turning light. “I guess I'll need to read those
Little House on the Prairie
books, just in case.”

“And Rose's books.”

“Maybe I'll even go check out those archives in Iowa.”

“If you do, tell me.” Though as I said it, I realized I didn't exactly know where I was going to be in the future. Would I even be in Chicago or the Midwest?

I opened the car door and Gregory held out his hand again. “Good luck.” The gesture and words seemed kind of silly after everything we'd done, but I took his hand again anyway. I wanted to ask if he was thinking what I was—how much and how little connected us, after all. Perhaps that was why we had felt compelled to touch each other, looking for a way to acknowledge how strangely our stories had intersected.

How else did any family tree happen, if not for the mistakes and coincidences that brought people together? Just as it happened to be that Laura Ingalls's parents concluded their homesteading search in De Smet, South Dakota, where the nearest major city was Minneapolis, some 260 miles away, so it happened to be that Almanzo Wilder, working his way west, had ended up in that same remote town. Their daughter, Rose Wilder, that solitary figure—or so she seemed to me now, with ribbon-trimmed hats and long skirts—might have shaped my family's trajectory in America. So might have Gregory's mother, bounding out of that little gray house while an old woman stood hidden, watching. Rose, or whoever she was, becoming a contradictory apparition, a remainder, a reminder.

Amy was waiting just as I had pictured her. She turned off the TV as I came in, and set her drink on the glass coffee table. I could tell that she was struggling between being upset and being understanding.

“I'm sorry,” I said right away.

“I don't get it.”

I kept apologizing, trying to explain that, after arguing with Sam at the coffee shop and then at the house in Pacific Heights the day before, I'd gone on an impulse to the library to see Gregory. I hadn't expected even to say anything to him, and then I hadn't expected him to call me. “We were just carried along,” I said. “Caught up in the momentum.” Not that I admitted just how much.

Amy sighed. “You have no idea what my job is like. It's so the opposite of exciting. So the opposite of mysterious. There's no discovery, Lee. I was looking forward to this.”

“I know. I feel awful.” And I did. It was a breach in the very foundation of our friendship. And because of that, I couldn't bring myself to tell her all that had happened between Gregory and me. It seemed shameful, too uncomfortable to joke about, though Amy might have joked,
Little Whore on the Prairie
.
Gives new meaning to the phrase westward ho
.

So I described, instead, how Gregory and I had turned every page of
Free Land
looking for Rose's scribbles, how he had looked out the living room window as if he could pierce the early evening light and see Rose looking back at him through the arbor that had once framed the walk to the front door.

“It gives me the chills, and I wasn't even there,” Amy said. She still firmly believed that Rose was Albert Stellenson's mother. “Think of her standing outside that house, waiting to get a glimpse of the child she'd given up and who'd grown up into someone she couldn't recognize. What if Rose hadn't left that pin in Saigon? What if your mother hadn't brought it to the U.S.?”

I looked at her. “Are you forgiving me, then?”

She thought this over for a second. Taking another sip from her glass, she said, “There's nothing to forgive, Lee. This is your story.”

But I didn't know if that could be true. What was mine to tell? How would I tell it, if I ever did? Were all stories up for grabs?

“We've hardly even talked about what you're going to do this fall,” Amy said, widening the conversation. I was grateful for that. “You can't keep staying with your mom.”

“I know.”

“Move here,” she said again. “Just stay in that second bedroom. It would be so much fun. You could probably pick up some adjunct teaching, right? Or do something else entirely. Who says you have to stay in academia?”

“Stop being such a good friend,” I said. “Besides, what if this is all I know?”

Amy understood that. Sometimes she wondered what she'd missed, she said, stepping off the academic medical track, and sometimes she thought it the best decision she'd made. She knew as well as I did that if I quit now I might not ever get a way back in.

“I do like how faraway this place feels,” I said. “You know—
California
, italicized. The dream and all that. I can see why people feel like they can start over here.”

“That's right. Time to join the gold rush, girl.”

We got up from the sofa and headed to the kitchen. As ever, it provided for us. Leftovers, cheeses, pastries, a found bottle of blanc de blancs. As with all of the meaningful relationships spun throughout the
Little House
books, food drew us back together, gave us a way to keep talking.
West Coast living
, Amy insisted again. Like Rose; like my brother.
This is the place to be
.

But first, I had to go home.

W
alking through O'Hare, I kept my tote bag close to my side. I glanced at my phone—no messages from anyone. For a moment, in the midst of airport suspension, I could almost pretend that I was just an anonymous traveler, nearly outside my own self, unknown, with no obligations at all. The feeling lasted about ten seconds. The stoic
Welcome to Chicago
sign, with the mayor's name underneath it, stirred up in me a mix of homesickness, pride, bone-tiredness—that letdown of an adventure ended.

For once, I didn't mind how long it took to get from the terminal to the tram to the economy lot where I'd parked. I lengthened the drive back to Franklin, taking alternate turns through neighborhoods of split-level houses. The strange language of the rapid traffic reports on WBEZ—
Lake Cook to the junction, 35; 30 Ike Thorndale—
made me feel a part of the city yet also apart from it, in my own little capsule, unworried about the time it would take to get from one intersection to another.

It was evening, past dinnertime, when I arrived at the house on Durango. I knew I'd be walking in to two televisions playing in different rooms. No way to slip past my mother. Even as I pulled up to the curb I could sense she was looking at me. She liked to keep a close watch on all the cars on our street, liked to know who was coming and going. She was suspicious of new vehicles that appeared overnight, suspicious of neighbors who had visitors.

I hadn't spoken with my mother since the night—had it been less than two weeks ago?—when she had talked about buying a house for Sam. In college, I'd had friends whose mothers called them every day, sometimes more, and sent them e-mails and texts. Their conversations were sweetly casual.
Are you going out tonight? I had sushi for dinner, how about you?
My mother was not that kind of mother and I was not that kind of daughter. Whenever she called, she had a specific purpose in mind.
What day are you driving back here for Christmas? Exactly what time?
She would call repeatedly until I gave her a set answer, and then she would call to remind me. Our conversations were so brief that my roommates sometimes thought I was talking to a telemarketer. It was my mother's tone of voice that managed to unnerve me, keep me in line. That constant undercurrent of disapproval, as though she were always catching me in the middle of getting in trouble.

All the while, of course, she had her own secret life.

After seeing Sam in San Francisco, scenarios had sprung up in my mind: my mother and Hieu carrying on an affair; my mother and Hieu in love. My mother deciding between two men, two loves. Then, my father's death making the decision for her: she would have neither. But maybe she couldn't let go of Hieu, yoked as they were by guilt and blame.

I didn't see my mother as extortionist—tough as she could be, I didn't want to see her that way. I could see Hieu, though, giving her money in the way he'd given packs of gum and Hot Wheels to me and Sam. Unrefusable. They had the pride of old-school Vietnamese, and if this secret arrangement had been going on for twenty years, then it might continue forever.

Unless Sam and I had changed that.

When I stepped into the living room my mother was, as expected, knitting and watching television. She didn't lift her eyes to me. I had the old urge to flee to my room but decided to get things over with: I sat down.

At the next commercial break my mother said, “I guess you think you go wherever you like, here and there.”

“I had to do some research.”

“Research,” she said mockingly. “Only in special libraries. You spend so much time on things that are long ago. Then you call it work.”

“Actually it is work,” I began tensing up. “But I don't want to talk about that.”

“You think you can do anything you want?” she said again. “Go here and there, change the menu and change the sign? But guess what—I'm the one who has the say.” She was going to stand her ground again, make sure I knew my place.

Ong Hai, no doubt hearing this exchange, came into the living room.

“You're back,” he said. “Where'd you end up going?”

He'd known, of course, that I'd lied to him about staying with a school friend in Iowa. “San Francisco.”

“No joking? What's going on there?”

“First there was some research,” I said. We were talking over the volume of the sitcom my mother was watching, or pretending to. “And I saw Sam.”

My mother's knitting needles slowed and she examined my face for a moment, maybe wondering if I was telling the truth.

“He's definitely living there,” I continued.

She let out a puff of annoyance. “No, he's not.”

“Then why did I see the house he's staying in?”

Gently Ong Hai retrieved the remote control and turned down the volume.

“He's working for some rich friend of his.”

“What kind of work?” Ong Hai asked.

“Something to do with medical sales,” I hedged. Just as Sam had known I would.

My mother didn't say anything. Ong Hai's forehead was wrinkled with worry.

“It's true,” I said, more to her than to him. I thought about telling her that I'd even held out the false promise of money and he hadn't fallen for it. “He's living in a house, a beautiful house, up on a hill. He has no plans to come back.”

It was time to tell my mother and grandfather about the gold pin. They had a right to know, even if it was all or partly based on conjecture.

“What I was researching—” I started to say, but at the sound of
research
my mother cut me off, even stopping her knitting to hold up one hand.

“It's enough,” she said.

“You might want to know what this is about.”

“Be quiet.”

Ong Hai spoke over her. “Tell me about it, Lee.”

From my book bag I pulled out the wad of paper towel that held Rose's pin. One of the pieces floated to the floor.

“You'll clean that up,” she said.

“Here,” I said, and handed the pin to my mother.

From her look of surprise I guessed that she had already discovered the theft of the rest of her jewelry.

“It was Sam,” I said quickly, in case she was going to start accusing me. “Except he left this behind in my room.”

Then I brought out the old photograph I'd swiped from Rose's archives. I gave that to Ong Hai.

He regarded it, squinting at the man that nearly fifty years and thousands of miles had obscured. He said, “Who is this?”

“Don't you know?” The tension rose in my blood—how much I wanted him to know.

“Is that Saigon?”

My mother held out her hand to take it. “Too blurry,” she said.

“Is it you?” I finally asked Ong Hai.

“No,” my mother said, just as Ong Hai said, “It is!” He was leaning over my mother's shoulder to study the image again. “Maybe. Maybe it is! Where did you get this?”

“That woman in Saigon, all those years ago in 1965. I think her name was Rose Wilder Lane.”

Even my mother seemed interested in this. I tried to explain the web search, the “August in Vietnam” article Rose had published in
Woman's Day
, the papers at the Hoover Library. I had never held my mother's attention this long, not with any matter of literature or research, and I found myself talking too fast, stumbling over my words.

“This picture was there and they let you borrow it?” Ong Hai asked.

Instead of answering directly I asked, “Do you remember Rose taking a picture of you?”

“No,” Ong Hai admitted. “But she had a camera. I know that.”

“There's more,” I said. From my room I retrieved my old girlhood copy of
These Happy Golden Years
. Ong Hai muted the television and I read aloud the passage that described Almanzo giving the pin to Laura as a Christmas gift—the same passage I'd read to him and my mother and brother in the car nearly twenty years earlier.

But even as I focused on the page, I could feel the moment slipping from my grasp. My mother looked down at the pin in her lap but didn't react. My grandfather listened, sitting on the arm of the sofa, but didn't exclaim or jump up as I had somehow expected he would this time around.

“Don't you see?” I said. “It all adds up. Rose in Vietnam. The photo. And this book describes the pin. Laura Ingalls Wilder was Rose's mother.”

“How can it be?” Ong Hai asked. “Isn't that book just a story?”

“It's a TV show,” my mother said.

“The books are based on their real lives and Rose helped write them.”

My mother regarded the pin again, safe in her hand. She ran one index finger over the little house that had been engraved into the gold. “I remember she was wearing the pin one day. She was so big and white and the pin looked funny on her. I never forget that—how strange she is, showing up in the middle of Saigon.”

“She did like to talk. Asked me so many questions about Vietnam,” Ong Hai said.

“Because she was writing an article about it,” I said.

He took the pin from my mother, held it out for his farsighted eyes. “What does it mean, Lee?”

“It means we know who she is now. We know the history of that pin.”

“Maybe,” my mother said. She picked up her knitting again. She seemed to be making a cable-knit baby sweater, perhaps for a friend's grandchild.

The
Little House
books were American classics, I told them. I wanted to explain that they represented an idealized, old-fashioned landscape of pioneering, making do, and scraping by, no matter how forced the veneer of family life and good cheer. I wanted to tell them that my own concept of American history had been unknowingly shaped just by reading those books, and that they had rooted in me a paradox of pride and resentment—a desire to be included in the American story and a knowledge of the limits of such inclusion. Like the Chinese workers who helped build the transcontinental railroad and yet were left out of pictures and edged out of history.

“All these years,” I said, “haven't you wondered who she really was?”

“Didn't think she was anything else,” my mother answered.

Ong Hai said, “I don't know if I ever thought about it that way. I didn't know there was a big story. It is very interesting,” he added.

“This is huge. This is major. Nobody knows this stuff.” My voice was rising.

“So she was the daughter of a famous American lady,” Ong Hai said, but it was like he was trying to make me feel better.

Frustrated, I said, “I guess I just thought you guys might want to know this part of your history.”

“What are you talking about?” my mother said. She drew forth a length of yarn from its cylindrical knot. “We already knew everything that matters. You should leave that lady alone.”

In my mind, Rose and Laura were still arguing with each other, building the
Little House
. They needed each other, called to each other, and drove each other mad. In my mind, Rose was choosing between two lives. But here in Franklin, in the living room with my mother and grandfather, the three of us dumb-mouthed in front of the television, the past had never been mine to challenge.

My mother spoke again. “Did you tell Sam about buying a house here?”

It felt like it took all my energy to reply, “He doesn't care about any of that.”

“You didn't tell him,” she accused me. “You're supposed to tell him the right way.”

I stood up. “I'll send him a long e-mail. Is that what you want to hear? Right now, I'm going to go to sleep.”

Ong Hai got up too and headed down the hallway with me. At my door he handed back the photo that Rose Wilder had snapped in Saigon.

“I think it could be me,” he said, still sounding like he was trying to cheer me up.

“But is that what Café 88 looked like, the street?”

“Sure, it did look like that,” he agreed, though it was probably true that it could have been one of hundreds of streets in the city.

“I want to figure this out.”

“I know you do.” He patted my shoulder and said, “Until then, it's good to have you back here.”

—

S
ometime in the night I woke up. A sound—a garage door grating open. I peeked through the blinds and saw the husband of the couple who lived across the street. The guy was dragging out a lawn chair from around their Buick. He set it at the fender and sat down, clasping his hands together, sticking his feet out like it was just another leisurely afternoon. I couldn't read his expression.

I couldn't go back to sleep knowing he was sitting out there. I kept checking on him. I'd hardly ever talked to him and his wife but I knew that Ong Hai occasionally brought them some Vietnamese food and they in return had given him some potted plants. When their grandchildren visited in the summer, they brought out an inflatable pool and a Slip 'N Slide.

It was past one in the morning. I'd fallen asleep with everything from the past weeks—Rocky Ridge, Gregory Stellenson—vaporizing into mere circumstance. I hadn't mentioned those names to my mother and grandfather and I knew then that I probably never would.

Now, alone again, stilled again, I went back to my books and notes. I opened my computer. I thought about e-mailing Gregory but wasn't sure what to say. Would he have to remain my secret? Would we just be social media friends, peeking at each other's photos? Rose would have been a master of the online persona, wielding it as it was meant to be, a way to shape and project a voice. I wondered if Gregory was going to tell anyone what had happened to him.
This girl walked into the library and told me I was related to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

No matter what Amy said, I knew that the story I'd tracked down was only slightly, peripherally, mine. It was Gregory's, possibly; it was Rose's, possibly. Me, I was a bystander. A finder. Was this to be the rest of my future, trailing other people's lives, whether they were real or fiction, then turning them inside out, looking for critical nodes to explore and exploit? Was I always going to be the go-between, the one translating one text to another, one person to another, conveying interpretation?