Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “We’re asking an awful lot of a thirteen-year-old here,” she said. “I think we’ll still get the bulk of the experience even if we make this one exception.”

  Betsy raised her eyebrows. “All right,” she said, “though my personal opinion is that clean water and proper nutrition—”

  My mom cut her off. “Let’s drop it,” she said. She turned toward the stairs, her back straight and tall in her black dress that looked so much like mine. I was reminded for a horrific moment of the matching mother-daughter dresses she tried to force me to wear on Christmas when I was ten and already way too old for it.

  I couldn’t help but wonder now: if I’d just sucked it up about the mother–daughter dress back then, would my mom have gotten this kind of thing out of her system, and let me spend the summer hanging out at the rec-center pool where I belonged?

  The thought was enough to make me want to cry all over again.

  3

  When it was my dad and Gavin’s turn to change, Betsy smiled at me some more and said, “If you step outside, you’ll find some kids running around. They’re probably getting ready for the picnic. Introduce yourself!”

  “Um… okay,” I said, although I had no intention of introducing myself to anyone while I was dressed up like Strawberry Shortcake. “Can you tell me where I can find a bathroom?” I asked.

  Betsy flung open the front door and pointed.

  Now, I’d known what the bathroom was going to be. I’d read the word “outhouse” in the brochure. And yet I hadn’t completely believed it. I’d thought, okay, there will be a secret, real bathroom—maybe just a small one—inside the house. Like the kind they have in old gas stations where they tell you they don’t have a bathroom but if you look nice and helpless they’ll let you in. Employees Only. For Emergencies. For me.

  But no. Betsy was pointing toward the woods, where I could see a shape I recognized from TV shows and Road Runner cartoons—a tall shack with a narrow door and a crescent moon carved out under the roofline. “It’s not as bad as it looks. You’ll get used to it,” Betsy said.

  I didn’t see how I could get used to that. Or any of this. Have I mentioned that I could barely breathe in what I was wearing? Betsy had explained that, for health and liability reasons, wearing corsets was optional, and both my mom and I had said no, but even without one, the dress felt like a straitjacket. Especially now that I had to pee.

  Stepping out of the door, I ran.

  But not toward the outhouse. I didn’t have to pee that badly. I headed to the barn and then went around the back of it and into the edge of the woods. I was conscious of people in the yard, but I ignored them, and once I was alone, I stopped. I pulled the box of Clearasil from my pocket, unstuck the lid where I’d glued it shut the night before, pulled out the actual Clearasil tube, and dug through some cotton balls to find my new phone.

  Here’s the thing: after my mom and dad had gone to bed the night before, I’d snuck down to the kitchen and taken the phone from where my mom had left it on the counter. I’d only wanted to look at it, but when I saw that the box was sealed with nothing but a clear sticker I could easily peel away with my fingernail, I got the phone out, thinking, “No one will ever know.”

  I swear I just wanted to turn it on and check it out. But after I charged the battery and changed the wallpaper and set it up with my name, returning it to the box for the summer seemed like such a waste. I tried to convince myself I shouldn’t sneak it in my suitcase. The battery wouldn’t last for very long, I argued. I wouldn’t have privacy, and it’s not like I’d be able to get calls. I mean—I’d waited for a cell phone my whole life. I could wait two and a half more months. If I got caught with it at Camp Frontier, I’d probably never see it again. Bringing it made no sense.

  But obviously, I hadn’t listened to myself. And now—here it was! And I was glad. Just the feel of the cool plastic helped me to remember that there was a world out there where people dressed in normal, comfortable clothes, and could pee in sanitary, indoor bathrooms. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I turned the phone on. I watched the picture of a sunset morph into a sailboat. I checked the service signal, and almost couldn’t believe my luck. There were three bars. I thought about making a call, but I didn’t want anyone to hear. Who knew how close we were to the other people? I had to be very careful. So I texted Ashley and Kristin—the only numbers I’d programmed into the phone the night before.

  Week 1 – Sunday

  2:27 pm

  Help! I’m dressed up like an American Girl Doll minus the fashion sense. My sleeves are so tight I can’t lift my arms above my head. Is this the new me?

  I pressed send.

  Watching the envelope icon spin as the text went zipping out into the world, I felt like someone who has just tossed a message in a bottle into the ocean.

  4

  As Betsy placed the last basket onto a table that had been set up behind a row of benches, a girl with red hair approached with a napkin-covered tin bucket that she placed next to it. The redhead appeared to be a card-carrying member of what I was already thinking of as the Doll Club: half of the kids milling around seemed to be nine-year-old girls carrying little dolls. “They’re muffins,” the girl whispered to Betsy. “My mom made them.”

  “Bryn!” Betsy exclaimed. “Your mom didn’t have to bring anything today.” She looked over the girl’s head and waved at a woman who was standing next to a man with hair so red, I knew the couple had to be the girl’s mom and dad. “I can’t believe she even figured out how to use the stove.”

  The girl’s—Bryn’s—pale skin was covered in freckles. “We’ve been cooking on the woodstove in the yurt my dad built on my grandparents’ farm. Erik, Anja, and I helped.” The girl pointed into the crowd at the only other kids whose hair looked just like hers. One was a little girl, maybe seven or so, and the other was a boy who was walking back and forth on a bench like it was a balance beam. He looked older. “They’d done this before?” I thought. And then: “What the heck is a yurt?”

  Soon, Ron started talking in that voice teachers use when it’s time to start a class. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Let’s all sit down and we’ll get started. Sit with your kinfolk. One family per bench.” He looked over at Betsy and she nodded and smiled back at him.

  “Now that you’re all here and relatively well settled in,” he said, “I’m going to explain our setup.” I guess he was forgetting that we hadn’t seen our cabin yet. Not that I wanted to, except that I was kind of holding out hope—unfounded, I know—that it might have a bathroom. There were so many buttons and layers to what I was wearing, I didn’t really know where to begin, but at least it would be private.

  “Some people say that they don’t think the camp should have a competitive spirit,” Ron said. “That it’s pitting people against each other in a way that doesn’t reflect well on the spirit of community life.

  “So let me explain. Giving the camp a bit of a competitive edge re-creates the sense of urgency frontier people experienced on a day-to-day basis. For them, there were no modern-day conveniences to turn to. There was only the long cold winter that was fast approaching and the matter of survival. If a family didn’t have enough seasoned wood to make it through the winter, they might freeze to death.”

  We were sitting right behind the family with the red-haired kids—Anja, Bryn, and Erik, the ones with the yurt, whatever that is. Across from us was a family I’d seen earlier, a woman whose short, no-nonsense haircut had been transformed into an 1890s style with the addition of a hair bow that looked like the kind they put on dogs after they visit the groomer. The dad was chewing on a stalk of hay and I elbowed Gavin and whispered, “Really? He’s that much of a farmer already?” Their little girl was cradling her doll in both arms like she was holding a sleeping baby. I noticed its hair, which was made from strips of rags, was braided just like the girl’s.

  The boy was older. My age? It was hard to tell. He was still wearing his felt hat, though most
of the men had taken theirs off. I wondered if the boy liked hats. Then I noticed that he’d pulled the hat all the way down to his nose and angled it to the side in a way that made him look like he should be in some black-and-white detective movie, wearing a trench coat and standing in the fog. Or maybe he didn’t like hats after all. Maybe he thought this was a big joke too. Now, that would be cool.

  In front of the straw-chewing, bow-wearing, hat-boy family was a group I immediately labeled the Happy Blond People. The parents could have been twins—they were both freckled and had blond hair cut short in a way no hair bow could possibly make look like an 1890s style. Their kids were happy, blond, and sporty too, except one girl whose long hair must have been dyed, it was so solidly jet black. She had her face in her hands but when she moved them, it hit me. Some of it had rubbed off, but you could still tell that she was wearing a lot of black and white makeup. A goth girl, out here?

  When she caught me looking at her, I turned quickly back to Ron. “If they did not put aside enough food,” he was saying, “people on the frontier might starve. What Betsy and I found so valuable in our experiments living on the land was the starkness of this contrast, the idea that you couldn’t just open up a new line of credit on your house to pay for the things you needed. You truly had to rely on yourself.

  “We want you to have this experience as well. So we’ll meet up every Sunday as people would have done on the frontier if they were lucky enough to have established a church, and we’ll share our progress and our frustrations. I’ll make an assessment of how you’re doing, which doesn’t really matter in any way, but year after year, people tend to take pretty seriously.”

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered to my dad. “We get grades?”

  “Shh, Gen,” he said, but the look on his face was the same one he gets when he’s been stumped by a clue in the Sunday crossword.

  “It’s a simple system,” Ron explained. “Each week I’ll visit your farm and see what you’re up to. I’ll assign you a grade for the week based on overall preparation and the efficiency of your execution of what you set out to do. I use a scale of one to ten, and at the end of the summer, we add it all up to get your score. It gives you a goal, and it keeps us honest while we’re out here. This is real. You won’t get anything out of this experience if you don’t feel that way. It’s not a vacation.”

  My dad leaned over to whisper, “I thought this was a vacation.”

  “I gave you the brochure to read,” my mom hissed.

  “It sure is priced like a vacation,” he grumbled.

  “A few final words,” Ron said, “about the actual work on your farm. Each of you has been assigned a cash crop that you will be raising on the bulk of your acreage. In addition, you’ll be tending an extensive kitchen garden. This late in the season, all of the major planting has been done, and in the case of the gardens, we’ve even been bringing some things in. We do this before our families arrive. My daughter, Nora”—he pointed to a girl I’d seen helping him move benches earlier—”has been a great help with the work in the fields. Betsy has been magnificent in tending the gardens, and we’ve used some hired workers as we always do off-season. You’ll be responsible for taking it over now, though. Thinning, weeding, watering to whatever extent that’s feasible, and before the end of camp, we’ll start pulling in the harvest, though most of that will happen after you have left.

  “Each family will also take on a significant farm improvement project. We have some at the ready for you, or you can feel free to suggest one that speaks to your talents or desires. Just keep in mind that I’m talking about barn raising and road building—not fixing a door or screening a window.”

  “This sounds like sharecropping,” my dad whispered to my mom, loud enough so the man with the red hair turned around to stare. My dad rubbed his hands over his forehead, scratching at his hair and then under his collar. “We do the work and live in unimproved cabins on the farmer’s land. He keeps the harvest?”

  My mom turned up the corners of her mouth in an if-you-insist-on-looking-at-it-that-way-you-deserve-to-be-miserable look. Just as she started to speak, the dad from the red-haired family leaned back toward us again. “Shh,” he said, like someone was talking on their cell phone in a movie theater. My mom’s face turned bright red. My dad rolled his eyes. I tried to draw my knees up to my chest, which is something I do when I’m embarrassed, but it’s a lot harder when five yards of skirt, a petticoat, and bloomers are involved. Let’s just say I almost fell flat on my face in front of the bench.

  Gavin caught me, and as he was pulling me back to an upright position, he said, “Let the fun begin.”

  5

  I’m guessing Ron used to be a mortician, but he couldn’t keep a job for more than a year because the corpses he worked on never looked happy. I heard Betsy thought up the idea of this camp to save their family from financial ruin.”

  It was the goth girl. She was next to me in the food line, but her hair was hanging around her face in sheets, so I couldn’t say for sure if she was talking to me. But when I laughed, she looked up and kind of quasi-smiled, though her eyes held that same, mournful I’m-trying-to-stay-goth-even-though-I’m-in-this-ridiculous-costume expression I’d noticed before.

  “Okay,” she said. “I made that up. But doesn’t it sound right?”

  “People are already baking muffins,” I said, gesturing with my chin to the pail the red-haired girl had delivered, but keeping my voice low, as if we were spies.

  “I’ll tell you something,” she said. “The first time I find myself alone, I’m feeding this petticoat to a bear.”

  I giggled. “How about the wool stockings?”

  “Already toasted,” she said. “My mom was practicing lighting a fire in the stove and when they weren’t looking, I shoved them in. Smelled kind of funny. Almost put the fire out. If they make me wear the other pair I’ll bury them somewhere far away.”

  She stabbed a piece of ham with an enormous fork as she spoke, for emphasis, but it made a loud scratching noise against the plate and I was a little bit like, whoa. I mean, I didn’t want to be here, but this girl was taking camp rebellion to a new level.

  “Did you puke before?” she asked me.

  I just stared at her.

  “I saw you run out of the house and disappear behind the barn,” she prompted. “I thought maybe you were puking. ‘Cause of the monkey suit and all.” She pointed to her own dress, which looked just like mine except her sleeves were not puffy at the shoulder, and the bib was covered in ruffles. According to Betsy’s system of making different dresses based on your age, I guessed this meant she was younger than me.

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “But I could have been.”

  “Maybe Ron was in a motorcycle accident so bad, he had to have half his body parts replaced and is basically an android now. Maybe Betsy was his physical therapist when they fell in love—he’s her greatest success story.”

  “I’m Gen,” I said.

  “My name’s Kate,” she said back. “But my friends call me Ka. Rhymes with Saw, as in that movie, which by the way totally rocked.” I didn’t tell her I was too scared to see it. “You’re not into this whole frontier idea thing, are you?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Good, because there’s this kid with red hair who is totally into it and I can’t really let him get too near me.” She was talking about the boy from the muffin family, the one who’d been walking on the bench like it was a balance beam. Now he was whittling, carving something Gavin later told me were homemade fishhooks.

  “I love the twenty-first century,” I reassured her.

  “It’s not even that for me,” she said. “My mom?” She gestured with her plate to her happy, wholesome blond parents, who looked so sporty I was surprised they weren’t carrying kayaks on their backs. “That’s a guy she married just two days ago. This is his idea of a honeymoon. Those kids…” She gestured to the boy who’d been throwing the rock, and two Doll Club girls i
n matching dresses. “They’re my new stepsiblings.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Everyone is making all these Brady Bunch jokes, but seriously, it’s awful.”

  “Have you known your dad—I mean stepdad—very long?” I asked.

  “Like, six months,” Ka said. “They’re both gym teachers. They met at a gym-teacher convention. My mom and I live in San Francisco and they’re from some conformist suburban dystopia near LA, but they have a big house, so we’re leaving to move in with them.”

  Just then, her stepdad leaned down, kissed her mom on the lips, and then nuzzled her ear. I wasn’t sure what dystopia meant exactly, but imagining moving in with a bunch of strangers while your mom macked it up with their dad—I think I got the drift.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, looking on in disgust. “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of the move, but I am.” She took a bite from a slice of bread on her plate. “Maybe when I unearth the truth about the experiments Ron was conducting for the government at Area 51, and about how Betsy is an alien from the planet of smiling extraterrestrials, my mom will see the light and we can bail.”

  I looked back over at my own parents. Speaking of smiling extraterrestrials. My mom was talking to the woman with the bow in her hair. You could hear their squeals and exclamations even from where Ka and I were standing. They were both trying way too hard. Gavin was walking on the benches in imitation of the red-haired boy. My dad was staring out into the woods like someone who’s been hit by a blast from a stun gun. “I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes I wouldn’t mind swapping my family for a bunch of strangers.”