That’ll Be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents Please
Harper’s Magazine, March, 2010
It’s not unusual for the line to the Birthplace to stretch all the way to the miniature pony farm. Launching a business around here used to mean selling methamphetamine or Amway, but with interest in the Birthplace taking off like it has, all a person has to do to get a bank loan is mention the name of our town. The Nelsons started in with the miniature ponies just this past April, and I hear that the Murch family is thinking about building a water slide, the kind that uses rubber mats. It only stands to reason that once someone goes to all the trouble to get here, they’re going to want more than one thing to do, the next closest attraction being the two-story outhouse over in Belle Plaine.
Not to brag, but I was the first to grasp the potential of the situation, the first to see all those visitors and think concessions. I started out with bottled drinks that I brought over from the Sam’s Club and sold out of my car, but pretty soon I felt my old ambition kicking in, coming back like a long-lost friend. When I started to get creative, it was only natural my thoughts turned to ice cream. The technology has changed a lot since I was a girl—I got the idea from those popsicles that look like cartoon characters—and it turns out you can get almost anything custom-made these days. Once the season kicks in, I get a shipment every month, trucked over from Wisconsin. They use blue gumballs for the eyes and then the rest of the face is done in different ice cream flavors—strawberry for the lips, vanilla for the skin, lemon for the hair. The wrapper claims every stick is autographed and it’s true that her signature is on each one but they’re printed by machine of course, so they’re not true collector’s items. I ‘m still not used to seeing the very same people who have been waiting hours in line after traveling hundreds of miles to see the Birthplace of Little Darling, America’s Princess of Peace, biting into her face.
The scene outside the Birthplace used to be a lot more competitive. I won’t name names, but for a while there were people working the line selling hair ribbons they claimed had once decorated Little Darling’s head, or knee socks that they swore she had once worn, but the mayor has since cracked down on that sort of thing. Last year there was a big stink when someone on Ebay tried to pass off a chicken vertebra as one of her little bones, but I had a hard time getting too upset over it since anyone who cares at all for Little Darling knows that her death wasn’t the sort to leave bones behind. Early on, an interested party could buy legitimate relics up at the house, and for prices that would make you want to cry nowadays, but those got snatched up pretty quick. I myself have a pair of Little Darling’s white Mary Janes, certified genuine, that I’m holding onto for my son Clyde’s college fund. Truth be told, I pinched them from her bedroom during all the craziness following her demise, which I suppose I should feel guilty about but I don’t. A lot of us went through that house and took something. Considering the inconvenience and intrusion caused by the newspaper and television people, as well as everyone who’s coming around nowadays, I think we all deserve our own little piece. The mayor declared an amnesty. He said that folks who returned what they took would avoid prosecution and receive a $50 grocery certificate redeemable for anything but cigarettes or liquor, but I don’t think anyone took him up on it except for Wayne Kilborn, who thought he could use his amnesty to buy beer and took exception to the fact that by liquor the mayor had meant alcohol in general.
Concession work isn’t exactly consciousness-expanding, but it sure beats waitressing. The mark-up on the bottled drinks and ice cream novelties blows any kind of tip situation out of the water, plus I’m my own boss and can wear whatever I want. My son Clyde is embarrassed by the extra effort I put into it, the song and dance stuff, but folks standing in line are grateful for any sort of entertainment and providing it is fun for me and good for sales. It didn’t start out as a planned thing. One day I was walking the line with my cart and a woman asked was I the Jordan Dairy Girl. I got this warm feeling inside my chest, like someone had lit a sparkler behind my ribs. Around town, of course, the Dairy Girl situation is old news but the woman must have been from a little bit further out. Channel 12 goes north up to Hutchinson and south all the way to Kussuth County. That TV spot ran for a long time, basically until I was a high school sophomore and gunning to model bikinis across the hoods of Dodge Daytonas. In those last couple years, the Jordan Dairy Girl aired during all the late night commercial breaks, which made for a decent drinking game standing around someone’s trashed living room after you’d run out of things to say but weren’t quite ready to choose between going home or going upstairs. When Mr. Jordan sold the business and retired to Arizona, those TV ads retired along with him, and that was the end of that. So I told the woman, That was me but it was a long time ago. And her face just opened up. I knew it, she said, I recognized those big round eyes of yours! Would you sing the song? she asked. By this point other people in the line were looking in my direction, and not in a bored way but in that way people have when they think someone might be important or famous. Feeling all those eyes on me was like being touched by a man at the end of a dry spell. In all the times since, that hasn’t changed. Jordan Ice Cream It’s a Treat, I sing, Bring It Home For Your Kids To Eat. Jor-dan Fresh, Jor-dan Good! Take It From Me, and then I wink just like I did back then along with the little curtsey and everybody claps. I can’t begin to say how good that feels.
People aren’t expecting the Birthplace of Little Darling to be a perfectly ordinary white ranch house with a patch of front yard in a regular neighborhood of folks who keep their lawns trimmed and their garbage lids on, but that’s exactly what it is. The inside is no different. The dining room’s got the table she ate at, her bedroom’s got the bed she slept on. There’s an open bureau drawer with little nighties in it, but I’m pretty sure those are fake. I know there’s no way the half-written letter to the President sitting on her desk is bona fide, but I can see why they’d put it there. Someone who goes to all the trouble to visit doesn’t want to be told that anything that could fit inside a pocket or a handbag walked out of that place a long time before they got there. At night, once it’s too dark to see the signs and the house’s porch light is on like all the other porch lights along that street, it’s still possible to see it as a normal house and think back on the eight years she lived among us without anyone suspecting her of being anything but a star-struck little girl with too much imagination and not enough to keep her entertained.
People act surprised when I say that. I suppose it’s hard for most folks to imagine Little Darling ever not being famous, but everyone’s got to start out somewhere and no one around here had a crystal ball. To be honest, I think we all found her kind of annoying at first—the way she would march down Main Street in her pink dresses, stopping people and asking them what they intended to do. I know I didn’t much care for it. Do about what? I’d ask, and she’d answer, All the fighting in the world, and then I’d ask her if she was selling candy or anything, and that’s when she’d launch into The Greatest Love of All, or I Believe I Can Fly. She couldn’t have been more than six at the time. Of course when I was that age, I was doing song and dance numbers in front of the post office while my mother was inside buying stamps, so I should have understood her better than anyone. I guess I might have if I had been at some other place in my life, but I was working breakfast and lunch at the Happy Chef and the last thing I felt like doing was dealing with a little girl prettier than I’d been at that age, singing at me while I was trying to cash my pay check. At that time there were names going around: Little White Whitney Houston Wanna-be, That Crazy Girl, Little Miss Incredibly Annoying. I may have come up with a few of them myself.
Part of it was that Clyde wasn’t much older than her and even though I’d been raising him alone that whole time, I still wasn’t used to it. Back then Clyde was a cute little kid and I‘d been prepared to offer him all the opportunities I’d had to fight for—auditions, dance lessons, head shots—but Clyde didn’t exhibit any natural inclination. If there was one thing I didn’t want, it was to be one of those parents who pushed show biz on a child who didn’t already have show biz in him. So in the very beginning, it was hard for me to witness that girl’s natural aptitude and not imagine what I would be doing for her if she was mine. I pictured national television ads, her face on a cereal box, a starring role in a family sitcom. It’s a testament to the scale of her talent that even then I was underestimating her.
Little Darling’s father was a clerk down at the bank and her mother worked part-time for an orthodontist. Paul and Jilly Kranz, whose daughter back then was still called Claire. They told her time and time again to stop going down to Main Street to torment folks who were just going about their business. If Paul or Jilly happened to see you in the grocery store or at the prescription counter they’d go so far as to apologize to you about it. They even took Claire to see a doctor. It was supposed to be a secret, but Marcia Collins is Dr. D’Oraggio’s receptionist and she can’t keep a thing to herself. According to Marcia, Dr. D’Oraggio spent a good, long time with Claire in his office and decided that while she was certainly an excitable and sensitive child, there was no reason to do anything more than keep an eye on her. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Dr. D’Oraggio had put Little Darling on any of those things doctors are feeding kids for ADD or HDTV, or whatever other bogus label they’re trying to slap on natural high-spiritedness. For better or for worse, I think it would have changed her destiny.
My own near-miss happened when I was eleven. I had decided that teaching myself to walk a tightrope was a good idea. I fell two stories from a tent cord I’d rigged between a tree and the chimney of the house and was lucky enough just to break my leg and get some sense knocked into me. I concentrated on singing and dancing after that, but I do wonder what might have happened if I’d been more gravely injured and my performing career had ended there, with the Jordan Dairy years behind me but before any of that stuff with Valleyfair Amusement Park or Windom Chrysler. For one thing, I would have probably paid a lot more attention in school. I expect I would have been exposed to a better class of person, or at least some folks who were halfway decent.
There are those in town who, when they see me, will compare me with her. Our Own Original Little Darling, they’ll say, and I know they’re trying to be nice but it’s just as phony as calling a middle-aged woman Miss. What that girl did was so much bigger than anything I ever dreamed of, that putting us together in the same breath is like serving foie gras on Wonder Bread. Looking back, what she did seems so obvious I feel stupid not having thought of it for myself, but that was the genius of Claire Kranz. I suspect that the way she described it really was the way it happened: one day in the grocery store parking lot she saw a couple fighting in front of their child, and when she told them that their disharmony was hurting their baby, they stopped. This town has never been a hotbed of romantic tranquility. At certain times of the month—around payday for example—domestic disturbance is basically a spectator sport. It’s perfectly believable to me that a girl too young to mind her own business and too pretty to be ignored might have had that kind of small influence and seen a bigger picture.
The thing that distinguished Little Darling from 99.9% of the people who end up in the public eye—myself included—was that she never lay at the center of her plans. Youth, talent, and beauty aside, I don’t believe it ever was Claire’s intention to become famous. For example, not even her parents knew about the letters she’d been writing. Apparently she’d sent letters to Peru and all sorts of other countries before the Handawi school bombing, but none of those other places had possessed the good sense to write her back. I take issue with anyone who says that the Handawi Prime Minister’s response was based on political considerations. What matters is that when those pictures of burnt-up children appeared on the news, Claire took it to heart and the Handawi Prime Minister heeded her call. There’s no copy of the letter she wrote, but the Birthplace does have a facsimile of his reply, offering to pay airfare for the whole family and everything else. Anyone who reads it would have to see that her parents had no choice but to let her go. It certainly wasn’t their intention to embarrass our government, as some of those TV people have claimed. Back then not one of us around here knew anything about the ongoing debate in Washington over Handawi statehood, or Handawi’s role in the World Terrorist Equation. All we saw were those terrible pictures. When an innocent child offers her generosity and that generosity is accepted, it’s the sort of thing a parent needs to encourage, now more than ever.
The video in the Birthplace living room starts with the TV clip of Claire visiting the burned children, followed by the press conference where she gets called Little Darling for the first time and then looks straight into the camera and asks for people everywhere to find peace in their hearts. From there it goes to her first appearance on The Tonight Show, where after singing “Children of the World” wearing the green velvet dress, she climbs onto Mr. Leno’s lap. I’ve seen that clip I don’t know how many times and I still couldn’t tell you when the studio audience goes crazier: after she finishes the song or when she doesn’t sit in the chair beside Mr. Leno’s desk like everyone else who had ever come on that show. I have reason to believe that the shoes I’ve got are the ones she wore that night: if you look closely at the footage, you’ll see a darkish blur on the right instep that matches a black scuff mark on the corresponding Mary Jane in my possession. After that, it goes straight to her visit to the White House, where she holds the President’s hand and says that her mission in life is to be a friend to all children. By then, of course, the whole world knew her name.
It would have been easy for her to put on airs. I know that once I became the Jordan Dairy Girl, there were certain kids I wouldn’t give the time of day to and I tried to make my parents feel bad for the sort of house we lived in. I was sure it was only a matter of time before the world fell at my feet, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to start acting like it already had. But to talk to Little Darling, you’d never have known that she’d met world leaders and movie stars and that man from U2. You’d have been struck by her beauty and her presence, but she used those things to make you feel better about yourself instead of inferior. Little Darling made me see my own shortcomings. I stopped feeling quite so bitter when I realized that I’d never had a real shot at the bigger opportunities. I pretty much went as far as I could have expected to go.
My favorite place to visit is her bedroom. The rumor that she covered her walls with Jesus pictures just isn’t true. And I won’t even dignify the alien theory with an opinion. One time the sheriff’s office had to come to the Birthplace after hours to remove a man who was lying on her bed in a velvet green dress he’d had specially made who said he was waiting to receive a transmission. I’ve stopped being shocked by the nonsense that people get up to. Anyone who wants to can check the hospital records and see she was a regular girl born to regular parents. Her bedroom looks just like any other little girl’s bedroom, with posters of horses, and a shelf for her stuffed animals, and a picture of one of those boy bands that I can’t remember the name of because I’ve only got Clyde, and he’s not interested in such things. It’s easy to stand in that bedroom and imagine it belonging to your own daughter or to a younger version of yourself. The one difference is the world map next to her bed, where she kept track of all the countries she visited. There are little white pushpins on every continent except for Antarctica, which doesn’t contain any children so far as I know. Most people don’t stay to watch the video in this room through to the end, which is too bad because if you ask me it lies at the core of what Little Darling stood for. The fact that it shows the same thing over and over again is exactly the point. Whether she’s in Chechenia or the West Bank or Ulan Bator, the people around her look the same way I imagine that first young couple looked when she spoke to them outside the Cub Foods. No matter how hot or dirty her surroundings— whether she’s in Darfur ladling out gruel to refugee children or holding the little hook hand of an Afghani mine victim—it’s almost impossible to see her and not want to agree to anything that she’d ask you to do.
I tried to get Clyde to take the tour with me once, bribed him with the offer of a free popsicle and a resident pass that would take us straight to the front of the line, but whenever he’s not using his skateboard to scrape his anatomy over any available concrete surface, he’s plugged-in to his computer games. He’s at that age where he’s angry about everything and blames me for most of it. This includes but is not limited to the town we live in, his only getting to spend a few weeks each summer with his Dad, and my getting knocked up too young to have provided him a more deluxe childhood. I’ve pointed out that my lousy timing was crucial to his drawing breath in the first place, but he disregards that the same as everything else that comes from my mouth. He’s called me names that would have gotten him slapped upside the head by almost any other self-respecting person. Aside from family dinners, which I still insist on, we pretty much try to avoid each other—though I’ve seen him showing off my old scrapbooks to his friends when he thinks I’m not looking, so I know he’s proud of me, even if he’s not at an age where he can let me know it. I tell myself that one day he’ll be civilized again. In the meantime I’m doing the best I can, which these days means that I can supply Clyde and myself with a little more than the basics. I’ve even put something away for Clyde’s college education, assuming we both survive his being fourteen.
An entire room could have easily been devoted to the events surrounding the death, but the Birthplace is intended as a celebration of Little Darling’s life and not its tragic interruption. In the far corner of the living room, there’s a photo of her helicopter when they finally found it, all black and burnt up, along with a framed copy of the front page headline and a local picture painted by Jerome Wilson that has drummed him up a fair amount of portraiture business, but that’s pretty much it. The town erected a gravestone for her and her parents down at the cemetery, but not many people visit it since they know nothing’s buried there. On their way out, folks will often ask me questions about her demise, andI’m happy to answer. While I respect the Birthplace’s celebration decision, it’s only natural that people would want more, plus I’m a licensed seller of official commemorative items. Any Birthplace visitor already knows the basics: they’ve read the O Magazine memorial issue and they’ve seen the television specials. When they come to me, they’re looking for something more personal, and I do my best to supply it.
Some want to know if I think our government had anything to do with it. This town has its fair share of conspiracy theories regarding the Little Darling tragedy, and while I certainly sympathize, I don’t count myself as a subscriber. Even though there were a few countries Little Darling visited that our government might have preferred her not to, I wouldn’t be able to call myself American if I thought our country could be that cold-blooded. That said, I think it’s shameful the lack of official response when she was killed. The government statement compared Little Darling’s death to a foreign journalist getting caught in the line of fire, but that’s like saying Abraham Lincoln just happened to get in the way of John Wilkes Booth. There’s not a person living who could mistake Little Darling’s personal emblem: no enemy combatant on this earth carries a flag of a heart beneath a rainbow. Lots of war-torn nations had no trouble treating her with the respect she deserved. Everyone in Pakistan behaved themselves beautifully while she was there, and I’ve never seen a lovelier picture than the one of Little Darling holding hands with soldiers from both Koreas. Anyone who claims that her visits should have been timed to avoid fresh hostilities is missing Little Darling’s whole point. The world’s children were tired of waiting. A beautiful little girl offered herself up to the world, and the world shot her down like she was just anybody. In a way, I envy my son Clyde his pessimism. He’s never going to be in a position to be disappointed.
It can get pretty emotional around the Birthplace exit. There aren’t a lot of dry eyes walking back to the shuttle bus stop, and I’m talking men as well as women. I suppose spending as much time as I have around the place has made me philosophical but if you ask me, how she went wasn’t such a bad way to go. It’s a pretty safe bet her life wasn’t going to get much better than it already had. For instance, I’m not a bad-looking woman, but I basically peaked in 1985 with Windom Chrysler. Eventually Little Darling was going to hit her awkward phase, and the world’s countries were going to get tired of inviting her to visit their children, and she was going find herself back here with no chartered flights, no television appearances, and not a whole lot of options. This isn’t something I tell people, but I think that was a big part of why she kept going. Anyone could see she was getting tired, that she was agreeing to visits that were more dangerous. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she’d looked into her own crystal ball and decided that she might as well take what she was doing to its natural end. For those first few years when I was the Jordan Dairy Girl, there wasn’t a soul in greater metropolitan Mankato who didn’t know my face. I signed autographs, I did ribbon-cuttings, and I got free ice cream wherever I went. If I’d had the chance to go out in a blaze of fire, a hot orange bloom to cancel out all of life’s future regrets, I think I might have done it.
It’s a pretty decent likeness, considering that it’s ice cream. Hold it up to her photo and you’ll see that they got the spacing of her eyes right, as well as the curve of her smile. Dollar for dollar, it is definitely the most economical option. The popsicle itself is awfully satisfying, and once that’s done you’ve still got something to take home and remember her by.