Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town

by Leslie Tall Manning

“Even by the pool?”

  Wendell nodded. “Up in a tree, about ten feet—”

  “The bear.”

  “What?”

  “Was that a fake bear? The one by the stream that night?”

  “No. That was definitely an unscripted bear. Gave me nightmares for a week. The producers ate it up.”

  “You saved us. You saved me.”

  “Yes.”

  I turned toward Prudence in the dark, her broad skirt like the silhouette of a giant bell. “Could you leave us be?”

  Prudence went back to the wagon and stood next to Willow, stroking her mane.

  And then, like a swarm of bees, the questions flew out of me: “Is Wendell Murphy your real name? Where do you go to school? Where do you live? California? New York? Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “I’m not allowed to share those things with you.”

  “But you’re allowed to break my heart, is that it?”

  A shooting star flew directly over our heads. I stared at the flying star through my tears as the tail grew from bright yellow to a fuzzy outline of what was no longer there.

  Wendell took my hands in his. Chicken bumps covered my arms beneath my long sleeves. “Did you make any memories out here?” he asked. “Ones that don’t include me?”

  I thought of Nanny leaving me a jar of flowery shampoo and a handmade hoop skirt; of eating butter churned by Yours Truly; of the way my dad stood proudly among his freshly planted seeds, and later, his sprouting crops; of my little sister who had bravely witnessed the death of a pig she’d named and loved, and who was proud to display the long pink scar that would forever be a reminder of Sweet Sugar Gap.

  “Yes,” I whispered, surprised to hear my own answer.

  After a moment, he said, “Let’s get back to the fire, Brooke. Let’s give everyone the happy ending they’re expecting.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we go back to the real world.”

  “What if this is the real world?”

  “You know that isn’t possible.”

  We held hands as we walked to the wagon. He helped me onto the seat. Prudence climbed into the back. He took the reins, and we made our way back down the road. Rusty met us halfway, his breaths coming out in small spurts. He climbed into the back next to Prudence.

  “What did I miss?” he asked.

  “Not a thing,” Wendell answered.

  At the fire, they waited for us. All these families, these professional actors who were getting paid to be our neighbors. Had they only been kind because it was in their contracts? Or did they feel the same way I did, that I was now a part of this land, this backcountry, with its ancient oaks, sparkling streams, and rolling hills? And how would I ever know for sure, unless I asked them?

  But, of course, I could not ask. My dad ran to us when we got back, but he didn’t scold. He merely offered a smile of relief when he saw that Wendell and I were holding hands. And there was Rebecca Lynn, feeding bits of leftovers to Sully. How could I explain to my little sister she had sliced open her leg and killed a pet pig just to make a bunch of producers in their Ralph Lauren suits happy?

  Wendell and I sat beside one another on a log near the fire. Mrs. Murphy gave me a motherly smile as the firelight reflected against the silver locket around my neck. Dad handed me my guitar, Wendell’s dad handed him another, and for the next hour we sang songs of the backcountry, of battles and homecomings, damsels and soldiers, hunters and farmers, death and love.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  What’s funny is, way back in May, I had started counting down the minutes leading up to the last day. Somewhere, between then and now, the countdown had turned the tables on me. Modern Land had snuck up from behind like a professional pickpocket, about to rob me of all I had gained during the last four months. I didn’t want this story to end, no matter how confused I was, or how much my heart had been tricked. I hadn’t missed my tiled shower or noticed the acrid chicken poop smell since that first week. I had adapted to a different way of life. I loved the smell of baking bread and plain black coffee for breakfast, and the taste of berries plucked right from the bush, the purple juice staining my fingertips like natural tattoos.

  We had said our goodbyes at the bonfire that final night. I hugged everyone, including Prudence, who whispered, “This was the coolest project I’ve ever been a part of. If you ever come out to Santa Monica…”

  But I would never see Prudence—Sarah—again. She said goodbye every time a movie or TV show ended. She was a professional.

  They all were.

  In front of the entire town, I let Wendell kiss me with the cameras nearly pressed against our cheeks. His taste was minty fresh like all his other kisses, and I realized he tasted like Colgate toothpaste. Funny thing is, deep down inside, I always knew that’s what it was. Even so, it was a sweet kiss; a Hollywood kiss; the kind romantic comedies are written for. I kissed him back. Not for ratings, but as my parting gift to Wendell.

  Josiah poured a bucket of water over the flames as each “family” went to their wagons and rode off into the night for the last time. It was the last community feast, the last bonfire, the last hoorah.

  I didn’t cry when Wendell disappeared over the rise and into the dark. I had come to realize a broken heart isn’t the hardest thing to deal with when you work to survive on a daily basis. It is hard, but not the hardest.

  Now, as I stood in the stuffy attic for the last time, waiting for our ride back to Modern Land, Dad made clanking noises as he readied the morning coffee, and Sully barked as Rebecca Lynn went out the back door to feed the chickens and offer them a farewell pat on the head. I tied my bonnet in an extra pretty bow and flattened out my apron, which covered my dress, which covered my corset and slip. I fluffed up the pillows, even though no one would be sleeping on them that night. I pulled the cheesecloth curtain back from the tiny window and let the sun shine through. The mini-mirror reflected the light, and I picked it up from the wooden beam, then put it back. Maybe someone else on some future venture would need it. I would leave my iPod in the attic as well, in case some fossil hunter a thousand years from now searched for a past that included me. I climbed down the ladder, and in the still of the early morning, shared a final breakfast of coffee and scrambled eggs. My family ate in silence, each of us trapped by or lost in our own thoughts.

  While Rebecca Lynn washed the dishes, I used the outhouse for the last time, washed my hands in the bucket for the last time, and headed out to the barn for the last time.

  The tears wouldn’t stop coming. My heart was aching—but it had little to do with Wendell.

  Gretchen licked the salt from my face with her big fat tongue as she gave me her milk. I brushed Willow and told her I loved her. I said goodbye to the remaining chickens, but they only clucked like they hoped I had treats in my pocket. I walked the milk out to the springhouse and poured it into two crocks, knowing it wasn’t necessary. When I came out again, Dad was standing in the middle of the field. His field. He stood with his back to me, his hands on his hips like he was thinking of what crop to plant in the spring. Then his head bowed, and I knew he was crying, not because his harvest had been taken from him, but because he was proud to have produced something so extraordinary with his own two hands.

  Leaving him alone, I made my way back to the front of the cabin. Rusty waited near the gate, panning the quiet road. I stood on the porch, the one that leaned way too far to the right, with the crooked steps and splintered railing. Fog swirled above each and every divot between our gate and the first hill beyond.

  I was afraid to come out here in the beginning, and now I was afraid to go back. My mom was everywhere I looked. She was in the gold leaves as they rustled in the wind, some of them already drifting to the ground, waiting for a winter snow to bury them. She was in the night sky filled with enough stars to light up a country. She was in the cracks and crevices of the cabin, the rocks in the creek, and the roses still growing on the fence.

  I st
ood on the porch until the unearthly hum of Modern Land broke through the morning silence, and I shut my eyes as the vehicle approached so I wouldn’t have to admit too quickly that our life in the backcountry was over.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The hallways were a zoo. Libby and I walked to lunch together, trying not to bump into other students as we made our way upstream. I kept meaning to bring earplugs and sunglasses to school. The slamming lockers and quivering fluorescent lights were overwhelming. I felt like I’d been living on the dark side of the moon.

  Libby was working to deprogram me, like I’d been held hostage by a cult for the last four months. “You’ve been back a week and you’ve barely said a word. What exactly happened to you out there in Laura Ingalls Land?”

  I wanted to say, “Why can’t you wait for the season premier like everyone else?” Instead I said, “Just need some time to acclimate.”

  “I still can’t get over how great you look,” she added.

  My body had found muscle definition in places I didn’t know was possible. I had put on a short skirt with a pair of tall boots, and my thighs looked amazing in the full-length mirror. My deltoids belonged to a tennis player or a hairdresser. I washed my face with water and washcloth only, and my pores were clean and happy. Even though I loved the ritual of shaving, and tampons were once again my best friends, I had tossed out my eyeliner. Wild Raccoon was no longer my style. Instead of buying synthetic blush, I bought red roses from the florist. Not only did my cheeks stay pink all day, but I smelled good, too. And the tiny hole in my eyebrow had mostly closed, so I fastened Mom’s hoop earring to the chain holding my locket.

  “Your hair,” Libby breathed.

  I couldn’t tell if she was complimenting me or not. My hair had grown three inches while wound up in those donuts. Instead of dyeing it two-tone, I kept it chestnut brown. It was healthy and thick and fell in waves past my shoulders. Dad kept telling me how much I looked like Mom.

  “We need to get you a social calendar,” Libby said as we entered the hectic cafeteria.

  It’s difficult to explain, even to myself, how I was more bored here than out in Sweet Sugar Gap. Gorgeous sweaters were on sale at Belk which meant that Homecoming was just around the corner. My seventeenth birthday was in a few weeks. Soon after, there’d be gobs of Halloween parties. There was Thanksgiving break, including Black Friday, followed by Christmas shopping and wrapping. There would be hayrides in Beulaville, holiday concerts at the local schools, and parties to crash at ECU. But none of that seemed to matter much. I didn’t miss alcohol, had decided that pot was a total waste of time and money, and promised myself the only kissing I planned to do was with boys I actually knew—and liked. I used to think about non-stop partying during the holidays, but now all I could think about was decorating my home and Christmas tree out of things found in nature. And as far as I was concerned, I’d already had Thanksgiving.

  A final photograph was taken on the last day of the venture. Dad stuck the first photo and the final one, side by side, up on the fridge. Each time I glanced at them, it was as if I was peeking into the past of some other family, one I had descended from, not one I was a part of. In the first picture, my face looked angry. In the second, a sense of peace had settled into my forehead and around my mouth. My eyes were clear and awake, my skin plain and beautiful, my shoulders relaxed.

  We received an evaluation, as promised. Of course, it didn’t really matter, since we were already winners from the moment we signed the contract. Out in Charlotte, Novak read the letter to us with the cameras rolling. The show’s historians informed us that if our family had really lived in the backcountry in 1861, we could have survived, so long as the wood chopping continued. They said we were “…tenacious, hardworking, and gifted as creative problem solvers. A family like the Deckers is what this country was built upon. Hats off for proving that determination is the thread in the fabric of survival.” Rebecca Lynn brought the letter to school for extra credit.

  In the cafeteria, Libby and I slid our lunch trays along the track. The woman behind the glass served me a flat piece of meat on a bun and greasy fries on the side. I grabbed a pint of milk. Milk which tasted nothing like the kind from a smiling cow.

  I handed the student cashier a five dollar bill. She handed back two dollars in change. “Three bucks?” I asked. “For this?”

  The girl looked at me like I was an idiot.

  I wanted to say, “Did you know a pound of beef was ten cents back in the 1860s?” But I held my tongue.

  “Don’t mind her,” Libby told the cashier. “She lived in the Outback for four months.”

  “Backcountry,” I corrected, shaking my head.

  People came and went as we ate our lunches, some stopping by our table to ask well-meaning questions, others gawking like I’d just crawled out of a Petrie dish. Dad had advised me to “Give it some time.” Of course he was right, but the feeling of living with one foot in the present and the other foot in the past made me woozy.

  Since it was raining after lunch, Libby and I hung out in the gym instead of in the quad. The room was loud, over a hundred voices bouncing off the walls. Basketballs slammed against the backboards, and tennis shoes slapped against the hard floor like they belonged to a herd of cattle. I found a spot on a bleacher in the corner, opened my notebook, and skimmed over my geometry notes.

  “What are you doing?” Libby asked.

  I wanted to explain that when you miss the first four weeks of school, you sort of get a craving to open text books and smell highlighters. But I didn’t think Libby would ever believe I was aiming for straight A’s.

  “Just reviewing a few things.”

  “I’m going to say hey to Bobby Taylor,” Libby said. “I want to check out his new tat.” She jumped off the bleacher and flitted across the room, her heavy backpack slapping against her spine.

  I sat staring at equations, playing catch-up. As I tried to wrap my brain around postulates and theorems involving parallel lines and convex polygons, my cell phone chimed.

  Dad.

  Ever since returning home, he called me every day to tell me how the job hunting was going. So far, he was “Close, but no cigar.” The money from the show had saved our house, but with our health benefits ending just after Thanksgiving, and Dad’s severance package dwindling fast, he was sounding desperate again.

  One hand grasped my locket while the other hit the button on my cell. “Hey, Dad. What’s the word on the street?”

  He said, like Family Feud’s game show host, “Word on the street IS…”

  I put a finger in one ear to hear him better. “Tell me.”

  “I got it, Brooke. I got the job.”

  “Oh, God, Dad, that’s awesome! When do you start?”

  “Right after Christmas. That will give me time to prepare…I’ll be in management. What do you think? Think I can handle management?”

  “Absotively.”

  “There’s more. My new job isn’t in New Bern.”

  “Where is it?”

  “And it’s a three-year contract.”

  The word contract made my stomach flip. I took in a deep breath and let it out again. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  “The company is in Germany.”

  “As in…Europe?”

  I could almost see him jumping up and down in his Docksides in the kitchen. I could see him rubbing the beard he’d decided to keep—trimmed, of course—after the venture had ended.

  “How could we possibly move to Germany, Dad?”

  “You can go to a private school there, if you like. And college, if that’s what you want. All this opportunity does is give you more choices.”

  “Oh.” I licked my lips. I had forgotten what it was like to have choices.

  “I’ll understand if you’re not up to it.”

  Bits and pieces of history classes came back to me: WWI, WWII, Hitler, the rise of democracy and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We had the famous German Bosch plant right in New B
ern. We even owned one of their dishwashers. Our glasses came out spotless. I had always wanted to go to a real Oktoberfest, so that had to count for something. And I liked pretzels.

  But I didn’t speak German. I only spoke a little Spanish so I could chat with the waiters at El Cerro Grande: “Este burrito es delicioso!” Of course, it had only taken a summer to learn the language of the 1860’s backcountry.

  Across the gymnasium, Bobby Taylor stood with the back of his shirt lifted. Libby and a group of girls cooed over his tattoo.

  Dad said, “Your grandparents offered to stay with you until—”

  “No.”

  “No, you’re not up to it?”

  “No. I’m not telling you that I’m not up to it.” A nervous giggle popped out of me. “I’m telling you I am up to it. Totally. I mean, why the hell not, right?”

  I could almost see his grin; could almost hear his skin move with excitement.

  “Wow,” he said. “You have no idea how much this means to me.” He handed me a super long pause, and I thought he’d hung up. And then: “I have some other news, Brooke, but I’m not sure how you’re going to handle it.”

  For four months I had swept an old shack, conducted my business in an outhouse, flipped mattresses, used sanitary napkins held in place with a belt, and wrote nineteenth-century music. I had learned how to feel comfortable in a corset, turn a plain dress into a gown, make my own butter and cheese, and like myself even when my legs belonged to a chimp. And soon I’d be moving across the Atlantic. I figured I could handle anything by now.

  “Tell me.”

  “Wendell called. He left a message on the answering machine. Including a number. Do you want me to erase it?”

  “Wendell?”

  I had only watched TV a handful of times since returning to Modern Land—the high-speed images sort of freaked me out. I didn’t even plan to watch the premier of Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town, much to the dismay of my classmates who thought it was effing crazy but totally awesome to be on television. Everything was already ingrained in me without the reminder of an edited version of my life that past summer.