Here we are,” Ron said when we broke out of the woods on the path he’d been leading us through to our cabin. In the clearing in front of us, I could see a small building. Was it a shed? The outhouse?
“That’s home,” Ron said.
“That?” I said out loud. “That’s a house?” It was even smaller than Ron and Betsy’s. It looked—honestly—exactly like the shed our neighbors the Ostrakazis use to store their lawnmower. And the giant snowblower that Mr. Ostrakazi never offers to loan us for our driveway, even when he sees me up to my waist shoveling. My mom thinks shoveling is good for you.
“And there’s the barn,” Ron continued, pointing again. Get this: the barn was actually bigger than the house.
To the left of the house was a garden surrounded by a post and rail fence, and beyond that a field that looked like a meadow. “We’ve already plowed and planted corn,” Ron explained.
“It doesn’t look like corn,” my dad said.
“That’s because all you can see right now are weeds. You’ve got your work cut out for you, I guess.”
“Ah,” said my dad.
“There’s a nice kitchen garden too,” Ron went on. “As we are committed to 1890 farming practices, we don’t use any chemical pesticides. We’re actually classified as an organic farm. That lets us sell our stuff for more on the market.
“Hey ya, Daisy. Hey ya, Pumpkin,” Ron called to a pair of chickens that were pecking at the ground near the house. And then, when we still didn’t say anything he asked, “What do you think?”
None of us, not even my mom, moved. I was trying to take in the whole expanse of it—the bigness of the woods, the bigness of the mountains that you could see beyond the field, the smallness of the house, how cool the air was now that the sun had started to set.
Then we went inside.
“Sweet home Alabama,” I muttered. The cabin was dark and creepy, and smelled kind of funky—like old bacon mixed with mildew and mold.
All the time I’d been fighting with my mom back home, at least we’d been doing it, well, at home. With carpeting, wall-board instead of rough planks, and with lights on in all the rooms. Even Ron and Betsy’s tiny house felt like a palace compared to the cabin we’d just walked into. Their place had a real upstairs. All we had here was a loft with a ladder.
It was so much worse than what I’d been imagining that the horror canceled out my ability to feel anger. I even forgot for a second how badly I needed to pee—and trust me, I had to pee pretty badly by now. “This,” I said out loud, not caring if I was being rude to Ron, “is it?”
Ron set a lantern on the table and showed my dad how to light it. It had kerosene in it, so you held a match to a wick and turned a little key to make it burn brighter or dimmer. It wasn’t a lot of light even on the brightest setting.
My dad looked at Gavin and me. “You can never do this,” he said. “It’s not safe for kids.”
“We can never turn on the lights?” Gavin asked. I think he meant it to be a sarcastic question, but his voice cracked. He sounded as freaked out as I felt.
I noticed bugs swarming around the lamp. A lot of bugs. A mosquito whined in my ear and I swatted at it. “Is there a hole in a screen or something?” I said.
“Screens?” Ron said. “Frontier cabins in 1890 didn’t have screens. Mosquitoes were a part of life. If they’re really bad, you can run a smoky fire or close the windows.”
“There’s no screens?” my dad said. He started to scratch at his neck.
My mom put the basket down on the table and went to the counter that ran along the back wall. There were a couple of barrels underneath it and a few shelves above that held dishes. There was a pump mounted to one end of the counter with a basin underneath the spout—not even a real sink. “This is the kitchen,” she said, like she was speaking more to herself than to us. “Amazing. It’s so simple. Think about our convection oven, our lettuce washer, our stand mixer—even the toaster—and then look at this,” she said. “We have more counter space on the grill!”
“You’ve got wood for the stove in the lean-to next to the house,” Ron announced. “You can try for a fire tonight, or just wait until the morning, though it does get cold. I’ll send Nora over tomorrow to make sure you are getting along okay, and next week we’ll set you up with a milk cow.” He was almost out the door before he remembered something. It was strange, he had looked so creepy in the airport and driving the van, but out here, he blended in, just like one more enormous and silent tree. I kind of wished he would stay. “You might want to clear a little bit of the forest growth from around the house,” he said to my dad. “It will help with the bear problem this place always seems to have.” He spoke casually, like he was talking about a rainstorm coming or a beautiful sunset.
“Bear problem?” my dad echoed.
Now, remember how I said my dad is really laid-back and lets my mom make all the rules? Well, here’s something else to know about my dad. He is totally brave and a totally great guy, but he is really scared of animals. He crosses the street if he sees a dachshund coming. He makes my aunt send her cat to the kennel when we visit, claiming allergies everyone knows he doesn’t have. We had a raccoon in the neighborhood for a while last year, and if you so much as put a paper plate on the ground during a cookout, my dad would be after you about how it would lead to exploding raccoon populations and everyone we know dying of rabies. I once saw him cower when a deer crossed the trail when we were on a hike. He has never taken us to a zoo.
So, bears.
“What do you mean, problem?” my dad asked. “They come into the yard?”
“Sometimes,” said Ron. “One time we had a big teenager cub try to get into the house. I think most of them aren’t so dumb though.”
“One tried to get into the house,” my dad repeated quietly. He wasn’t asking a question. Merely stating what Ron had said as if he were translating from a foreign language. As in, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Crazy, I must have heard you wrong…
“Just the one time,” Ron said, and then, as if it wasn’t really worth explaining further, he changed the subject. “If one of you kids can toss some scraps to the chickens and lock them up in the coop before you go in for the night, I’m sure they’d be much obliged.”
“Is that wise?” my dad said. “To let the chickens run around loose during the day with a bear on the prowl?”
Ron smiled—was he laughing at my dad? “It’s full summer. The bears aren’t hungry now,” he said. “There’s plenty for them to eat out in the woods.”
And then he was gone, and it was just my dad, Gavin, and me, sitting in hard-backed chairs around a rough wooden table with a (smoking) lamp on it. As soon as my mom finished running her hands along the surface of everything, saying, “See how useful every piece of furniture has to be to merit being built at all? Ron made everything by hand!” She joined us at the table. It was freezing in the cabin.
“So!” Mom said. And it was clear we were all supposed to be as excited about this as she was.
“So,” my dad answered. “I thought this was going to be a resort?”
“A resort would teach us nothing,” my mom said firmly.
My dad looked up at the ceiling, where you could see a lot of spiderwebs. And also, after your eyes adjusted to the dark, spiders.
“I feel like our family’s closer already,” I said. It didn’t even come out funny, and no one laughed.
Meanwhile, Gavin started to look around. My mom began to unpack Betsy’s food. My dad covered one of my hands with his.
“I think I found the TV!” Gavin shouted, and when I turned my head with a jerk, he was like, “Just kidding.”
I didn’t move from the table as my mom found a knife and sliced up the bread. There was butter shaped in a ball and wrapped in a cloth, and she spread some on each slice. The milk in the jug was still kind of warm and way thicker than I am used to. After a few sips I didn’t want any more. But the bread and butter were amazing. The butter tasted richer than normal, and also, in a strange way, cleaner. It melted onto the soft, still-warm bread. We each got a piece of ham too.
“That’s it?” my dad said when he’d finished his serving. He had his face buried in the bucket. “No leftover apple pie? I only had one piece at the picnic.”
I didn’t mention that I’d given half the bread to the cute guy. “Well, tomorrow, we’ll make more food,” my mom said. She was already paging through a cookbook she’d found next to an enormous Bible, the only pieces of reading material in the place. “Look at this!” Mom said. She flipped to the front of the book, and pushed it into the glow of the lamp. “This was published in 1882.”
“Whatever,” I said, standing up. I couldn’t take it anymore. Not just the cabin, but the by-now-pretty-overwhelming need to pee. My grandma once said that when you hold it too long, your eyes turn yellow. If that was true, my eyes must look like two lemons popping out of their sockets.
The sky was still lighter than the dark mass of trees when I crossed through the yard, but inside the outhouse, it was pitch-black. I couldn’t see if there was a bench or just a hole in the ground like my mom said they had when she studied abroad in France.
The darkness did nothing to interfere with my olfactory perception, however. I was almost rocked backward by the smell. Immediately I slammed the door shut and took deep breaths of uncontaminated air. Even the worst Porta Potties do not compare.
But when I say I had to pee, I’m not being casual. I’d been holding it now for four hours and it wasn’t lost on me that Betsy had said I would only have one change of clothes. I took another deep breath and opened the outhouse door.
I groped forward, reaching for where I expected the bench to be. It was there, but it was also… wet. Wet? Wet!! Why? Because it was covered in black mold scum? It was too dark to say what I was touching. But there was one thing I could say for sure. I was not going to sit down on any slimy, wet, smelly wooden toilet seat I couldn’t see. I planted one thick-soled boot up on the bench and felt around with my toe for the opening. Once I had located it, I hauled the rest of my body into a standing position over the spot where I took the hole to be.
That’s when I came to terms with the fact that I had absolutely no idea what to do with my clothes. Feeling around the layers for all the buttons and bows and clasps Betsy had so expertly fastened earlier, it occurred to me that I was trapped. I might as well be in a straitjacket. I started to panic. My body was sending clear signals that clothing or no, I had to go now, so I hiked up my skirts, and while keeping them pinned to my sides, I managed to pull apart the bloomers at the—okay, I admit it, pretty darn convenient—slit down the middle and let go.
You know how good the first bite of a peanut butter and chocolate sundae tastes on the way home from a hot and sticky early September soccer game? Or the sight of presents under the tree on Christmas morning? That was nothing compared to the joy I felt just then. Even with pee splashing on my stockings, and also, I suspected, my shoe.
I felt so good that for a one crazy second I even thought, “Hey, I can get used to it here.”
The yard certainly did smell good after I left the outhouse. The stars were coming out bright and clear in the sky. I stumbled past the chickens on my way back into the house and in a spirit of magnanimity muttered, “Shouldn’t you be fed?” before realizing we had eaten every single crumb of food except flour and lard.
My period of positive thinking came to an abrupt end when, back inside, Gavin called down from the sleeping loft, “How come there’s only two beds?” and my mom said, “Kids, family life was a lot less private back then. You two will need to share.”
In those Little House books, Laura slept with her big sister—you got the feeling all the kids in a family would get just one bed to share. But here? No way. No one could possibly expect me to sleep with Gavin. He’s a boy. He’s ten. At home, he isn’t allowed in my room. He isn’t even allowed in the space outside my bedroom door.
There was simply no way I was going to accept this.
My mom said, “Betsy explained the sleeping arrangements. On the frontier, there wouldn’t have been the resources to build you each your own bed. You’d have slept in the same one until Gavin was older.”
I crossed my arms. “I’m not sleeping in a bed with Gavin.”
“But that’s what’s going to make this whole thing so great,” Mom went on. “Don’t you see? That you’re going to learn so much here? You’re going to learn about how little you really need to be happy?”
“But I’m not going to be happy,” I said. “I’m going to hate this. I refuse. I refuse to sleep with Gavin.”