Pioneer Girl (4 page)

M
y mother had planned to have, one day, a Golden Dragon she could call her own, but Sam changed her mind. Sometime when he and I were in high school, American eaters had started looking for authenticity. They wanted true ethnic food, whatever that was, and they'd go to a hole in the wall to get it, in fact preferred that, in order to feel like it was the real deal. Whenever Sam said that buffets were gross, full of fake food, my mother would tell him to be quiet, that he was being disrespectful. She didn't let on that she was listening when he said that Ong Hai's cooking was better than any we could find at a restaurant. But that's what had led her to the Lotus Leaf.

The day after my discovery of Rose Wilder Lane, my mother discovered the deal I'd struck with the bakery that supplied the café's pastries. I'd been so preoccupied with Rose and the gold pin, wondering what and whether to tell Ong Hai, that I wasn't prepared when my mother came boiling out of the kitchen.
Stupid
, she spat out
. Who do you think you are?
Then she switched to Vietnamese, and though I had no great grasp of the language, I knew the basics.
Think you know everything
. She pointed a sharp finger at my nose. The silky-poly button-down she wore was trembling.
Stupid. You know nothing.

A customer was standing there, waiting for to-go summer rolls for his lunch, but my mother ignored him. I grabbed a paper bag while my mother amped up her voice, repeating herself. Ong Hai appeared with the packet of summer rolls and handed them to me, steering my mother back to the kitchen.

“Whoaaa,” the guy said. “That lady's tough. She your mother?”

I hated these kinds of chatty customers, especially when there was no one else in line.

“Enjoy the summer rolls,” I said.

“Hey, how come your English is so good and hers isn't?”

Some things, buffet or not, didn't really change. And I still didn't have a good comeback.

“Who knows?”

After the guy left, Ong Hai came back out. He looked sorry for me. “Maybe you should go take a break again.”

I started to say I couldn't believe she was really that mad, but of course it was my mother—she really was that mad. Sam, the chalkboard, now this. The previous night, watching TV, had been the lull in the storm. “What am I supposed to do, stay out of her sight until Sam comes back?”

“Let's just keep more trouble away from us.”

“I'm just going to go home, then. Which I'm sure will make her even madder.” I sounded like a petulant teenager, which was what I felt like too.

“I'll talk to her, Lee.”

When I got back to the house on Durango Road, I filled a plate with grapes and set them near the photograph of my father. Growing up, I'd often taken care of the altar just to hear my grandfather tell me I was a good daughter.
Your ba would be so happy about a PhD
, Ong Hai would say whenever I called from Madison. Sometimes I thought this hypothetical affirmation was what had kept me in grad school. According to Ong Hai, my father had prized education so much that, whenever he could, he'd helped his friends pay for their classes. That was the kind of guy he was.

As I dusted the oak console of the altar, I told myself to be more like my father. Think forward, look up. That's what Ong Hai would have said too. I resolved to collect my computer and spend the day anywhere else—maybe sit in a museum or library until it closed, get some work done, try for some sort of progress toward making good on my degree.

But Rose had another plan for me. On my laptop, where my e-mail inbox showed no new messages, the website for the Rose Wilder Lane papers was still up on the screen. Index of letters and writings; chronology of her life. It was all housed in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. I mapped it. A twenty-minute drive from Iowa City, which was a three-hour drive from Chicago. I thought of Sam fleeing to California on the wings of his theft. For him, a breaking free. For me, a different way westward—for that's what Iowa once was, the west, not the middle—was coming into view.

The lie formed itself easily: I would tell Ong Hai that I was going to Iowa to help an old college friend move apartments.

But first, I called Alex.

—

I
n college we had gone on a few road trips with friends—to Graceland, Dollywood, even Disney World. Being undergrads in the humanities, we had an overdeveloped sense of irony and camp. We used the word
meta
too often. And we purposely avoided organized social life—the fraternities and sororities, the clubs and associations pinned to ethnicity, race, and religion that were constantly posting “call-outs” and advertising bowling nights, dance nights, movie nights. Alex and I made sure to hang out at bars and coffee shops and living room sofas with other English and arts majors. We had met during our second semester at the UI, and, whether by sheer proximity or boredom, we'd slept together a few times, late after a party or study session, when there was nothing more interesting to do.

I hadn't seen him since before his move to Iowa City a year earlier, when he'd been boyishly pleased to have gotten into the MFA program there. When I called to propose an impromptu visit, that nervousness was gone. He talked about his cohort, his workshops. He used the phrase
my collection
to refer to the short stories that would become his thesis and, he hoped, his first book. The MFA was only two years, so he was dedicating the summer to holing up in his studio apartment and writing every day, living on savings, a summer stipend, and his parents' good graces.

And when, hours later, he opened the door to his apartment, the guy with the hair that never looked washed had a new look of cleanliness. His clothes seemed ironed. He looked like the kind of guy who could put together a killer PowerPoint. It didn't seem very writerlike, I thought, and said so.

“
You
don't look like someone with a PhD,” Alex returned. But he spoke lightly, watching me leave my overnight bag on the floor next to his bed. The sheen of early evening, early summer, lent his face and the room around us a kind of expectancy. I knew, as no doubt he did, that we'd be sleeping together that night.

He saw me noticing his built-in shelves, well filled with books; the mod-floral rug and the striped curtains; hardwood floors that reminded me of the apartment I'd had in Madison—old, softened, scratched, in need of a refinish but still cozy-making. I wondered which girlfriend had decorated the place.

“So who are you with right now, Edith Wharton or Laura Ingalls Wilder?” Alex asked, bringing out two mugs for tea.

Over the phone I'd explained my plans to look through the Rose Wilder Lane papers. I hadn't yet said anything about the pin and the connection I thought it had to my mother, to my family.

“Both, I guess.”

“My sister was obsessed with those
Little House on the Prairie
books when she was little. She always wanted to call our parents Ma and Pa.”

“Apparently her daughter wrote those books, or at least cowrote. Some critics even call them ghostwritten. Did you ever read them?”

He shook his head. “Too girly.”

“You'd be surprised. There's a lot of hunting and building stuff. Plus slaughtering pigs and digging wells and all that.”

“I remember my sister wanted to churn butter and bake biscuits.”

“There's that too. Also headcheese.” I described how Laura's ma would take the head of a pig and boil it until all the little bits fell off, then mix them together with spices and pot-liquor and wait until it all congealed, the gelatin seeping out from the skull. Then it could be cooled into a loaf and sliced. “I bet some place around here still serves it.”

“Way out in the country, maybe. Too many vegans and hippies in this town.” Alex brought me a cup of tea and looked at his watch. I thought he was going to ask me to clear out for a while so he could write, but instead he said, “Want to go to this party later? I forgot about it until a couple hours ago. It's at Jonah and Silvie's.”

“Jonah and Silvie are here?”

“She got her MFA in poetry last year. Jonah's at the law school now.”

They had been the first of our friends from undergrad to marry, not long after graduation, and their wedding had seemed a little silly, a little young.
We
were young. Kids dressing up in formal clothes from T.J.Maxx, one step beyond prom, insisting on being adults, while parents and elders looked on with amusement.

It wasn't like I had anything better to do, so a while later we headed out. Alex's neighborhood was lined with Bradford pear trees that I remembered from Urbana-Champaign—white bunches of bloom giving off an odor of ash and old fish. I could never understand why they were so popular. Like the battered sofas that reigned on front porches, the smell brought back the sleepy, pleasant feeling of being alone in a college town in the summer.

“Did I tell you it's a baby shower?” Alex said as we walked.

“Oh, Jesus.”

“There'll be alcohol, though. And obviously guys are invited. It's just a party.”

“Wait a second, Jonah and Silvie are having a baby?”

“Didn't you see their news on Facebook?”

“I try to avoid Facebook.”

“Well, they're popping it out at the end of August.”

“But I don't have a gift. And where's yours?”

“I'll get them something later.”

“You can't show up to a baby shower without a gift. That's the whole point of a shower: to shower people with gifts.”

“I always wondered why they called it that.”

“Did you know that an anagram of
shower
is
whores
?”

We laughed.

“Another thing,” Alex said. “They're going to announce the gender. I think they officially called it a gender-reveal-slash-celebrate-baby party.”

“It's not accurate to say gender. They should say sex.”

“A sex-reveal party? Anyway, apparently they asked the doctor to write down the gender—or sex—on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope, and they gave that to the baker. When they cut into the cake at the party it'll be either pink or blue.”

“Next thing you know, people are going to turn the whole delivery into a party. An all-nighter with kegs, and shots for every contraction. You know, in the olden days pink signified masculinity and blue signified femininity. Somewhere along the line that got reversed. What if the baker forgot or mixed up the pink and blue? Or just decided to play a trick on them?”

Alex caught my hand and held it for a moment. “Why don't we just let them cut the cake and be happy about it?”

I didn't know anyone at the party except Alex, Jonah, and Silvie. Her belly kind of freaked me out, the conspicuousness of it. She kept running her hands lovingly over its expanse. We were pretty much all the same age at the party but it felt like everyone else had, if not the rest of their lives figured out, then at least the next few years. And of course everyone else had brought bags and boxes of gifts, covered with bright paper and ribbons and images of teddy bears.

Alex, a natural partygoer, made the rounds while I helped myself to the deviled eggs, mini-cheesecakes, and spiked pomegranate punch. I noticed him talking to a couple of girls who were leaning toward him with that unmistakable interest of intent. I wondered if they were previous dates or dates about to happen.

At last Jonah and Silvie approached the cake—tall, piped with flourishes and rosettes—that sat in the middle of the dining table. As everyone gathered around, it was like their wedding day all over again. I well recalled that moment, Jonah's hand covering hers as she held an engraved silver knife. Here was the old-timey notion of marriage and the promise of a baby carriage done in real life. I'd read enough literary criticism to have earned a healthy suspicion of this, and yet I found I couldn't so easily dismiss their joy. I slipped to the back to pour myself more of the punch.

“I'm so nervous,” Silvie said. Earlier, I'd heard people gossiping that she really wanted a girl.

“I hope it's not green,” Jonah said.

People whipped out their phones to take pictures as Jonah and Silvie sliced into the cake. Those nearest them started exclaiming and everyone else craned to see: the innards saturated a deep Cookie Monster blue. Shouts rose up and in spite of myself I joined in too. Alex took a picture and showed it to Silvie. Tears came to her eyes and she said, “Oh, my god, I'm having a baby boy.”

Jonah hugged her close and I couldn't help it: I felt something for them.

When Alex brought me a piece of cake he said, “Pretty good sex reveal, don't you think?”

I took a small bite—too sweet, as expected, the buttercream leaving a film on my tongue. “That's a lot of toxic-looking blue dye. Must be some boy they're having.”

We decided to sneak out before the gift opening. We talked about going to a bar but ended up just walking around the empty campus. I remembered why my friends and I had spent so much time in college rotating among each other, as if seeking out ways to develop wounds. We needed some small dramas to forget the bigger ones, and to make us feel like we could be the protagonists of our own minor story lines. Being with Alex helped numb the guilt and worry about Sam and my mother and Ong Hai and the café; my unwritten future could recede with each further minute we spent together. As much as we talked, I didn't mention much about the Lotus Leaf or my brother; I didn't tell him about Hieu. It was easier to present Alex with an edited version of myself.

I'd been ready to poke fun at the MFA world Alex had immersed himself in, but he seemed so truly glad to be there that I didn't have the heart. Besides, I didn't want the talk to turn to my own prospects. How I would have to force myself to revise my diss and turn it into articles; how I would have to try to get those articles published and do presentations at conferences. I would try to make the whole thing a book, or
monograph
, as people in academe irritatingly called it; I would hit the job market again and try, try, try to land any kind of tenure-track assistant professorship or visiting assistant professorship, no matter if it involved a heavy teaching load in some rural county in Oklahoma a hundred miles away from the nearest Target. The saga of my family, round two.