Little Women and Me

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  You’d almost think that this rowing thing was yet another of Marmee’s little experiments …

  So many things in life have a way of widening the gap between ideals and reality.

  My hands were getting sunburned already—I hadn’t thought to wear gloves—plus there were so many flies out on the water! Not only was there no sunscreen in this world, but there wasn’t any bug spray either.

  And was there a good reason, I thought as I watched my reddening hands pulling backward on the oars in a great heave, that I was the only one doing any rowing?

  Oh, that’s right. I’d offered.

  In my mind, I did a snotty imitation of my own voice: “ I can do all the rowing!” I’d said, figuring Jo couldn’t turn me away if I made myself invaluable to the expedition. “But I’ve never known you to row a boat in your life!” she’d said, sounding just as snotty, only for different reasons.

  This rowing was hard work! There was no time to do anything else.

  Like flirting with Laurie, which was exactly what Jo was doing right now.

  “That post office you installed between our houses,” she said from underneath her wide-brimmed straw hat, which, I must say, looked cooler in every way than Hannah’s bonnet. “That post office is really such a marvelous thing!”

  Okay, so maybe it wouldn’t seem like flirting to most people, but coming from Jo it was.

  “I never knew a boy could be so inventive,” Jo said.

  Honestly. She was practically throwing herself at him! Why not just jump in his lap and lick his face like a puppy? I thought grumpily.

  Oh, that’s right. I’d already done that. Well, not the lap and licking parts.

  And what was Laurie doing while I rowed us around the lake where Amy had nearly drowned and Jo now flirted? You’d think, being a boy, he’d want to do his share of the labor. But no. I was on one end of the boat, rowing, while he lazed indolently—PSAT word! Woo-hoo!—on the seat at the other end, with Jo on the middle seat, her back to me.

  Maybe he was so lazy because he was used to having servants do things for him? Well, I thought, at least he isn’t insolent.

  “Why?” Laurie said to Jo, a long blade of marsh grass dangling from the corner of his mouth. “You don’t think boys can be as inventive as girls?”

  “I don’t think boys can do anything as good as girls.” Jo laughed, still in the Jo mode of flirting. I swore, I liked her better when she walked around with her hands shoved in her skirt pockets like she was a boy, saying “Christopher Columbus!”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Laurie said, not argumentative at all, but as though he were simply making a statement of fact. “Everyone knows that boys are superior to girls, in every way imaginable.”

  Jo had her long chestnut hair tucked up under her straw hat and I saw her naked neck redden instantly.

  And it wasn’t with sunburn.

  “You take that back, Theodore Laurence!” she threatened, half rising from her seat.

  I was surprised by her reaction. Was she really that upset about what he’d said? Or was she so bored after yesterday that she was mad at the world and picking a fight?

  Whatever the reason, I decided I liked the mad Jo better than the flirting Jo.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Laurie said with a lazy smile, tilting his head back to catch the sun. He closed his eyes, happy. “I am bigger than you, stronger, I have greater speed, and I am smarter on every measure that matters.”

  Yeah. I could have told you he thought that. Guys always do. That’s why they had to be humored, for example …

  “I like that about you,” I called across the boat to Laurie, having to crane my neck around Jo. “Bigger-than-girls is a good feature in a boy.”

  Laurie opened one eye and, I swear, winked it at me.

  But Jo, apparently, didn’t know anything about guys or how to talk to them.

  “Emily may be silly enough to agree with what you say,” Jo began.

  Hey! I resented that.

  “But not me,” Jo said hotly. “I know that I am superior to boys.” She paused. “At least most boys,” she added, showing that she had some sense if she was reluctant to insult Laurie completely. What guy would really want to be with a girl who kept saying “I am better than you, I am better than you, I am sooooo much better than you.”

  That’s the guy’s job.

  “So you take back what you said,” Jo instructed Laurie.

  “And if I don’t?” he challenged, looking for once as though he might be getting a little angry. Maybe the heat was beginning to get to him too.

  “If you don’t,” Jo countered, “I’ll throttle you … and then I’ll never speak to you again!”

  I couldn’t have that, I thought as Jo rose from her seat, prepared to deliver on her threat. Oh, I didn’t care if she never spoke to Laurie again. That would be fine with me—welcome, even! Although she was such a chatterbox, I figured she’d never be able to stick to it.

  It was the throttling part I couldn’t allow. Laurie was bigger than Jo, but she was still pretty big for a girl. Plus she had anger and scrappiness on her side. I was sure she could take him.

  No, I couldn’t allow that: my poor, sweet Laurie, throttled black and blue by my crazed sister.

  That’s when I saw my opportunity.

  Not far from where I’d been rowing, a rock jutted out of the water. I swung the boat around, rowing toward it as fast as I could, keeping my eye on my goal all the time.

  When we struck the rock with a surprising degree of force, we only teetered on it for a moment before all—Jo, Laurie, and Emily—were dunked in the water.

  There! I thought. That would cool Jo off! It was certainly cooling me off, I thought, rolling onto my back for a moment and just floating.

  “You did that on purpose!” Jo sputtered at me angrily, little drops of water spraying from her mouth.

  I ignored her, turned on my stomach, and dog-paddled over to where Laurie was sopping wet, laughing.

  “Did I mention,” I said, treading as water dripped from my lashes, “how much I like it that you’re bigger than I am?”

  Four days later, the whole household was still bored, Marmee had decided she and Hannah would take the day off since the rest of us had already had most of the week off, Jo and Laurie had had their fight and were not speaking as far as I could tell, and my hands were only beginning to lose the lobster-red color they’d acquired that day on the lake.

  Rotten rowboats.

  And rotten Hannah for accepting Marmee’s offer of a day off.

  Wasn’t anybody going to do any work around here anymore?

  With Hannah off, there was no fire in the kitchen, no breakfast in the dining room. No breakfast?!

  With that bracing thought in mind, I offered to help Meg, who’d wanted to surprise Marmee with breakfast in bed.

  But even preparing a simple meal like breakfast proved a challenge in the 1800s. Meg had obviously never done so before, and while I had, there were no Pop-Tarts nor was there a microwave to be found.

  Suffice it to say we burned everything, which Marmee didn’t seem to mind at all.

  Then Jo informed us she’d make our dinner. Apparently, while we were busy upstairs delivering the burned breakfast to Marmee, Jo was busy putting a letter in the post office for Laurie. She’d invited him to dinner, I guessed to make up for the argument she’d instigated.

  I didn’t offer to help Jo like I had with Meg.

  But that was okay, Jo said, she had everything under control.

  “I may not know how to make a salad,” Jo said, wrapping an apron around her waist, “but I’ve a book here that will tell me.”

  “You don’t need a book to make salad,” I said. “Just rip up some lettuce and toss it in a bowl!”

  “How would you know?” Jo looked down her nose at me. “And anyway, I’m fairly certain there’s a lot more to it than that!”

  “Not much.” I grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table. “But suit
yourself.”

  As I exited the room, I heard Jo muttering something about lobsters and strawberries.

  It was going to be a fun dinner.

  And it would have been a fun dinner, if Pip hadn’t died.

  “Poor Pip is dead!” I heard Beth scream, her voice trailing off into a heartbreaking sob.

  With no clue what she was talking about, I raced through the house after the sound of her.

  When I found her, she was using the hem of her skirt to wipe at her eyes as sobs shook her shoulders. In the room with her was a birdcage, inside of which lay a dead canary.

  Huh. I hadn’t even noticed we had a canary!

  “There, there,” I soothed.

  Awkwardly, I fitted my arms around Beth. I’d never been very good at the whole hugging thing, but I was sad to see her so upset, even if it was only over a bird.

  Then, before I knew it, the others were in the room with us. When Beth tried to blame herself for Pip’s death, because perhaps she had forgotten to feed him during her week of leisure, the others pooh-poohed this. One of my brain-surgeon sisters even offered to put Pip in the oven in the hopes of reviving him.

  “We can have a funeral right after my dinner party,” Jo offered, a bit self-absorbedly I thought—after all, we’d had a death here!—but it seemed to calm Beth.

  Sooooo …

  Jo went to market, Marmee went out to dinner, a gossipy spinster named Miss Crocker—who was apparently a friend of the family even though I’d never met her before—showed up expecting to eat with us, Laurie came, Jo rang the dinner bell an hour late, and the food she made was gross.

  Salt instead of sugar with strawberries?

  I think not.

  And then we had the funeral.

  As we stood in the backyard, Laurie—being the only man and therefore the strongest, as he would no doubt want people to know—used a small spade and dug a hole in the earth where Beth could lay Pip before the cats got to him. In fact, she’d been carrying his dead body in her pocket all day to avoid the problem of the cats, in spite of my warnings that it might not be the healthiest thing to do. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell her that any self-respecting health inspector would shut this place down in a minute for all the violations—Beth had gone from cradling a dead canary to the table without a hand-washing in sight!

  But none of that mattered now as poor Pip was finally laid to rest.

  It was as Beth bravely tossed the first clod of earth over his body that the first involuntary sob broke from me. I don’t know why. Maybe it was just that the idea of death itself—even if in this case it was only a canary—reminded me that there were more serious things in the world than the silly things I mostly thought about? Maybe it was just the reminder that anyone could die at any time?

  What was going on back home, in my real life? Suddenly I missed my own world so much, and not the things, for once, but the people. I even missed Charlotte. And then a thought occurred to me, a scary thought: if I was so oblivious to things going on around me here that I’d failed to notice a canary in the house until that canary up and died, how in the world was I ever going to save Beth?

  I began to cry harder.

  “Huh.” Jo eyed me strangely as she offered me a handkerchief that looked none too clean. “I didn’t even know you liked Pip. As far as I could tell, you never even noticed he was there.”

  It was a big job, doing the cleanup after dinner. Beth was still too upset over Pip to help, Meg felt she’d done enough that day in making breakfast, and Jo thought she’d done enough in making dinner, and so I had to do all the work, since Laurie had offered to take Amy for a drive in his carriage.

  Hel-lo! I thought as I scraped dishes. What was up with that?

  Then Marmee came home, Amy came back, we were all together again, Marmee asked how our day was, we confessed that it had been fast and awful.

  And then Marmee gave a speech about the need for a balance between work and play, concluding with:

  “Work is wholesome.”

  That Marmee! I thought. What a sly boots!

  Twelve

  Beth had been appointed our postmistress, meaning it was her job to unlock the little door in the box Laurie installed and then distribute our mail. She’d been appointed because she was the one who spent the most time at home. Also, because we felt sorry for her, having so little in her life that most people would find exciting and feeling that such an important job would mean a lot to her. Also, because some of us were hoping to wean her away from that wretched Joanna doll.

  Okay, that last was me.

  On that day in July, when Beth entered the house with the mail, her arms were filled to overflowing. My, we were a popular group!

  “Here’s the nosegay for Marmee that Laurie always sends,” Beth announced as she began distributing the mail.

  HA! What a kiss-up Laurie could be at times.

  “Here’s one letter and one glove for Meg.” Beth handed the items over.

  The letter was from Mr. Brooke, Laurie’s tutor, translating a song from German that Meg had requested. As for that single glove, it was a puzzle, since Meg claimed to have left two at the Laurence house.

  HA! I thought about the single glove. I didn’t really know what the single glove meant, but it was odd and did seem as though it could be HA!-worthy.

  “Two letters for Jo, a book, plus a funny old hat from Laurie so she won’t burn her face.” Beth looked relieved to be rid of so much of the mail burden in one shot.

  HA! But then I realized there was nothing to HA! about. Instead, I was resentful: Jo always got the most mail, plus I needed that hat more than she did. I was the one with the fair skin that always burned.

  One of Jo’s letters was from Marmee, congratulating Jo on the good progress she’d been making in controlling her temper.

  HA! Her efforts to control her temper—Marmee hadn’t been there that day in the rowboat when Jo had tried to throttle Laurie.

  Jo’s other letter was from the boy she’d tried to throttle. Laurie wrote that he had some English boys and girls visiting the next day—friends he’d made abroad—and he wanted the March girls to join them all at Longmeadow, where a tent would be pitched, a fire lit, lunch eaten, and croquet played. He also said that Mr. Brooke would be going along to keep the boys in line, while Kate Vaughn, the oldest of the English girls, would be in charge of the rest of us.

  Jo insisted Marmee must let us go, claiming that she, Jo, could be such a help to Laurie with the rowing—HA! She hadn’t rowed a single row that day on the lake—and Marmee agreed.

  “Amy’s got chocolate drops here,” Beth said, continuing with the mail distribution, “and a picture she wanted to copy, while I’ve got an invitation from Mr. Laurence to come play the piano for him tonight before the lights are lit.” Beth gave a happy little sigh, although I couldn’t see what was so happy-making about the idea of playing piano in the dark.

  HA! Who wanted to eat chocolate drops?

  HA! Who cared about playing some stupid piano anyway?

  The others continued cheerfully studying the items that had come to them through the post office, while I stood there.

  “Ahem,” I said.

  The others finally looked at me.

  “Isn’t there anything else?” I said. “From the post office, I mean.”

  Spreading her arms wide, Beth revealed their emptiness. “What else could there be?” she said with a puzzled frown.

  “Ohhhh, never mind,” I grumbled.

  But I wasn’t grumbling when I got up in the morning. Instead, I was actually excited about the day ahead.

  Something new and different to do—coolio!

  Then I saw what my sisters had been up to overnight.

  OMG.

  Meg had put curling papers all over her head, like the heat and humidity wouldn’t drag any curls straight down. Jo was slathered in cold cream—she looked ridiculous, like a not-too-scary movie monster. Amy had a clothespin on her nose—nineteenth-century
cosmetic surgery!

  Well, I thought, I may not have had any mail the day before, but at least I didn’t have any of their peculiar grooming habits.

  As for Beth, she never cared what she looked like. But she did have her own fetish. She’d spent the night cuddling the headless and limbless Joanna.

  “I wanted to atone in advance for our day’s separation,” she told me as the others pranced and preened.

  Oh brother. Apparently, she was still feeling guilty about Pip’s death and was worried that the day’s separation would result in a similar fate for her doll as that which had befallen her bird.

  I was tempted to explain to her that it wasn’t the same thing at all. But there was no point in telling that to Beth, I realized as I watched her croon over the doll. It would only hurt her.

  “You’re a good girl, Bethie,” I said. “Joanna’s lucky to have you and I’m sure she’ll still be … alive and well when we return.”

  Beth and I may not have had anything in common in terms of our feelings about dolls, but we did share one thing. Neither of us liked to fuss over our appearance, so we were ready long before the others.

  As we stood outside waiting, I wondered: If Beth and I shared an indifference to fashion, what qualities did I share with my other sisters?

  Meg was prim, to the point of being boring. I was nothing like that. Would a prim girl be the March family skank? Amy was vain to the point of absurdity. Nope. Nothing like that either. Look at the shabby clothes I’d been willing to wear to impress Laurie with my lack of vanity. As for Jo: HA! We had even less in common than I had with any of the others.