Little Women and Me

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Before we’d been able to see them, we’d heard their voices chattering, which was when Laurie had put a finger to my lips, cautioning me to keep silent. I was tempted to bite that finger, or kiss it, but then it occurred to me that it might be fun to sneak up on them and scare them—almost as much fun as scaring maids by implying one of the dogs was going mad.

  Laurie and I had crept up behind a tree and were silently watching, Laurie enchanted, me less so, until I revealed our presence with a sneeze.

  What? I shot him a defensive look. Was it my fault I suffered from seasonal allergies no matter what century I found myself in?

  “Who goes there?” Jo said in a voice full of challenge.

  What sort of person says “Who goes there?”

  “It’s just us,” Laurie said with a nervous laugh, leading me out from behind the tree.

  I didn’t know why his laugh should be nervous, but then I noticed that, in order to lead me into view, he’d grabbed my hand. I liked that. And I really liked it when I saw that Jo had noticed too.

  “Oh,” Jo said, going red in the face. “Well, you can’t be here.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true,” Beth said sorrowfully. “Only those who are working are allowed to be here.”

  “There’s a rule against being idle here,” Amy said.

  “That’s why we call it the Busy Bee Society,” Meg said primly.

  The Busy what? Seriously. Where did they come up with these things?

  I looked around at the evidence of what they’d been doing before we interrupted. Meg had been sewing, Jo knitting while reading—multitasking showoff!—Amy sketching ferns, and Beth sorting pinecones.

  My, they did look busy.

  “Well, we didn’t know to bring any work with us,” I said, tugging on Laurie’s hand, “so since there’s a rule against being idle, I guess we’ll just be on our—”

  “If I find some work to do,” Laurie addressed the others, yanking his hand from mine, “may I stay?”

  “What sort of work?” Jo narrowed her eyes.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Laurie said, casting his eyes about. “Oh! I know! I could help Beth sort these pinecones.” Before anyone could say anything else, he dropped down to the ground beside Beth and began sorting like mad.

  “And what sort of work do you plan on doing, Emily?” Jo hit my name so hard, she might as well have shot a gun through it.

  I looked around and thought how ridiculous all the imagination games they played were. Seriously? These were supposed to be teenagers? What would I be doing back home right now? Back at my real home?

  Playing Wii. Texting friends. Going to the mall to buy clothes.

  “You’re right, Jo, as always.” I sighed. “There’s no work for me to do, no place for me here, so I guess I’ll just—”

  “There are plenty of pinecones here!” Beth piped up desperately, the minute I started to turn away. “Really, Emily, there are so many pinecones here, even with Laurie to help, I could never get them all sorted, not if I lived forever!”

  Reluctantly, and feeling Jo’s glare, I sat down beside Laurie and Beth.

  I had no idea what guidelines were being used to sort the pinecones, but pinecones I would sort!

  Beth wasn’t usually much of a talker, but it turns out there were certain hot-button subjects that could get her mouth motoring.

  “When we are up here,” she said, sorting away happily, “we pretend that we are on the Delectable Mountain from Pilgrim’s Progress and that from here we can see the country where we hope to live sometime.”

  As the others selected places, mostly in Europe, except for Beth, who wanted to stay home, I wondered where that country would be for me. What would I want my life to be like if I felt as though I had any choice?

  Gack! It was so easy to fall into the … March Sisters Trap. Spend enough time with them, and before long a person found herself sucked into their imagination games.

  “Of course,” Meg interrupted my thoughts with one of her Marmee-like pronouncements, “there’s a lovelier country than any we can see, and we shall all get there eventually if only we are good enough.”

  The others all nodded solemnly, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Good enough? I wondered. Good enough for what?

  “I wonder if I’ll ever get in,” Jo said.

  Oh. Right. They were talking about heaven—that’s what this was all about.

  Then Beth said she wished she could go right now, Laurie said he hoped Beth would put in a good word for him if he showed up late, and I felt a cold shiver in spite of the heat.

  Beth was going to die.

  If I didn’t find a way to stop it, Beth—who longed for heaven and who only ever wanted to remain at home—would die.

  But when?

  And, most important of all, what could I possibly do to prevent it?

  “What about you, Emily?” Jo’s voice invaded my thoughts.

  What about me, what? Then I realized that while I’d been deep in thought, my hands had gone idle. Shoot. Jo was probably admonishing me for not being a busy enough bee, I thought as I forced my hands to sort pinecones at a rapid pace.

  “What about me, what?” I said aloud, my hands flying so fast, I could have gotten a job on the assembly line at a candy company. “See? I’m working. Busy bee, busy bee, that’s what I am, no idle hands here.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that.” It was amazing. Even without looking at Jo, I could tell she rolled her eyes when she said that.

  “What then?” I said.

  “We were all making up our castles in the air.” Another dramatic eye roll, even if still I wasn’t looking at her. “You know, our personal definitions of heaven on earth?”

  Heaven on earth—there was no such thing, I’d have liked to tell her. I wasn’t even so sure there was a heaven in heaven.

  “The others all said theirs already,” Jo went on, “so it’s your turn.”

  “Well, what did the others say?” I wanted to know, figuring there’d be no point in me saying “all the gold in the world” if everyone else had picked “peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind.”

  “Honestly, Emily.” Jo again.

  Honestly. What sort of annoying person said “honestly” all the time?

  “Don’t you ever pay attention to the world around you?” she demanded, exasperated.

  “Frankly …” I paused to peer closely at a pine cone before deciding, sort it into this pile or that pile. “… no.”

  “Fine.” Jo sighed heavily. “To remind you what’s been said, I’ll go first … again. I want, of course, to be a rich and famous writer.”

  Oh. Of course. HA! She wouldn’t get very far with that dream if she kept writing idiotic stories like that play when I first got here.

  “I want to be rich and live in a nice house,” Meg said.

  “I want to be rich,” Amy said, “and I want to make my fortune in clay and I have lots of other wishes, but mostly I just want to live in Rome, even though I don’t know where that is.”

  “I want to be a musician,” Laurie said.

  I noticed he didn’t say he wanted to be rich, but then, he already was.

  “What about you, Bethie?” I asked.

  “I just want everyone else to be happy and I want to stay home with Marmee and Daddy and my piano.”

  “Are you finally ready to say what you want most, Emily,” Jo said, “now that we’ve all repeated our castles in the air?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said honestly. Perhaps that had been one of my problems in my real life: that I’d never really known what I wanted, only going after things because those things seemed like the cool things to have. Had I ever even really liked Jackson? Or had I just wanted him because he wanted Charlotte?

  “Well, you have to pick something.” Jo was thoroughly disgusted. “Everyone else has.”

  “Fine.” I straightened my spine. “For my castle in the air, I wish for peace on earth a
nd goodwill to all mankind.”

  Jo’s jaw dropped so low, she was going to need help getting it off the ground.

  As I looked at the faces of the others, I saw real admiration there.

  “That’s quite a thing,” Laurie spoke at last. “You have the opportunity to spin a castle in the air, to wish for anything for yourself that you would like, and yet you use that wish for something to benefit the rest of the world.”

  “I hope I am as wise as you when I am your age,” Beth said, grabbing on to my hand impulsively.

  “I could never be as generous as you are,” Amy said, taking my other hand. “I keep forgetting how you saved my life that day on the ice.”

  I blushed at their words, but really, I hadn’t done anything so great. How hard was it to be generous when you didn’t know what you wanted for yourself in the first place? One of these days, I was really going to have to figure out what was worth going after or fighting for.

  “Sometimes, Emily,” Meg said, “you reveal depths in you none of us have ever seen before.”

  The only one not tossing adulation in my direction was Jo, who let us all know what she thought by snorting.

  “Why don’t we meet in ten years’ time,” Jo suggested, “and compare where we are with our wishes?”

  The others all thought that was such a capital idea—their word, not mine—and left me no choice but to agree.

  What could I say? That in ten years, poor Beth would probably be dead, unless I found a way to stop it? Or that if I did manage to stop it I’d be back living where I belonged, in the twenty-first century?

  Besides, because I’d studied history in school, I already knew one castle in the air that wouldn’t come true:

  There would be no peace on earth.

  There would no be goodwill toward mankind.

  The American Civil War would end, but eventually, other wars would come to replace it. Some things couldn’t be stopped or changed.

  The others tried to convince Laurie that he should be a musician if that was what he wanted most. What was there to stop him? Of all of us—as a male, as a rich male—the world should be his oyster.

  That’s when Laurie explained that his grandfather wanted him to be an India merchant, as he was, but that he hated the idea and hoped that going to college for four years would appease him. Why, if the old man had anyone else in the world other than him, Laurie would leave tomorrow for Europe to pursue his music.

  Meg continued on with her advice, accidentally making it clear that she knew an awful lot about Mr. Brooke, and telling Laurie that we only teased him because we regarded him as our brother.

  Huh.

  Did Jo regard him as a brother?

  How did he regard each of us individually?

  And what did I really think of him?

  Fourteen

  I’d become a stalker.

  Just like that, October had arrived and with it, a strong chill in the air. The other thing that had arrived was a new industriousness in Jo. She spent more and more time alone in the garret, writing. When Meg asked her if she got lonely up there—didn’t she miss “our society”?—Jo replied that her pet rat, Scrabble, provided excellent company and that his eldest son was quite amusing too, although she failed to name him.

  I wanted to know what she was working on, but when I asked, she wouldn’t say. As for my own story, I was still working on it in stolen moments.

  I did try sneaking into the garret one night after the others were all asleep, my intent being to ransack the old tin receptacle where I knew Jo kept her pages, but she’d booby-trapped the thing. By candlelight I saw that she’d taken so many of her long chestnut hairs, draping them across the crease in the drawer in an intricate pattern, I knew that if I tried to move them, I’d never get them back again the way she had them.

  And then she’d know someone had broken in. And she’d probably guess it was me.

  One chilly day, I secretly observed her doing a suspicious thing: putting on her silly hat and coat and then, when she thought no one was looking, taking a package wrapped in red ribbon and lowering herself out the back window! Naturally, I had to follow her.

  I tailed my suspect to what the others called an omnibus, a public vehicle drawn by horses. Hoping to avoid being seen, I hopped on the back at the last minute, situating myself behind an old man. When we got into town and everyone else got off, I again waited until the last minute before hopping off and following her at a safe distance.

  At last she arrived at a small office building. Hiding behind a fat oak tree, I peeked around the corner, observed her as she circled around to the front entrance no less than three times.

  Why was she so nervous?

  I squinted up at the signs as she finally entered.

  The dentist? Was that why she was so nervous? Did she have a cavity? I could see why she’d be nervous. I had no idea how they filled cavities in the 1800s, but I had a feeling it involved more pain than it did where I came from.

  Poor Jo. I may not have always liked her very much, but the idea of dental work without Novocain was scary to think about.

  But wait a second. A bad tooth didn’t explain that mysterious package she was carrying.

  I squinted up at the signs again, and that’s when I saw it.

  The Eagle.

  Huh. That was our local newspaper. Most people liked to wrap their fish in it.

  But why would she …?

  Why, that little … !

  She’d brought her stupid stories here to beat me to the publication punch.

  Well, we’d see about that! I huffed as I raced down the hill.

  For a long time, I’d felt in competition with Jo as a writer. First, there was the fact that we did both love to write, which sometimes could be enough in itself. Then there was the fact that she thought she was all that. Not to mention that competition over the Pickwick Portfolio/Twist Times. And now she was going to try to sell a story to a newspaper before me?

  I hurried faster. I had to get home as quickly as possible.

  I had a short story to finish.

  Who does she think she is? That was the furious thought that filled my mind, alternating with every sentence I wrote in my story. That and, I’ll show her!

  That’s what I was doing, writing furiously and furiously writing, when the object of my fury found me in the garret two hours later.

  “Emily, can I have a word with you?” Jo asked, with a rare shy tone.

  Before answering, I quickly covered my pages with my arms.

  “I’m not trying to steal a look at your silly writing!” she snapped, returning to her typical exasperated mode of addressing me.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, blushing as I loosened my arms.

  Then I thought: Hey! What did I have to be sorry for? After all, she’d been so paranoid of her own writing being seen, she’d placed that basket weave of hair over it. Well, two could play at paranoia!

  I returned my arms to their protective posture over my work.

  She rolled her eyes at me. But when I asked, “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” a sad look came over her face.

  “I need to talk with someone,” she said, “and there is no one else with whom I can discuss this particular thing.”

  That was weird. Jo and Meg always confided their secrets in each other. Or else they spoke to Marmee. Nobody ever came to me.

  In a way, I felt flattered. Even if it was Jo doing the asking.

  “How can I help?” I offered magnanimously, feeling just a little bit like the head of a Mafia family.

  “I was just in town—”

  “And what were you doing there?”

  “Does it matter? I was in town and, when I finished my business, I ran into Teddy …”

  It took me a minute to remember that Teddy was what she called Laurie.

  “What was he doing there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know! I thought I saw him coming out of a billiards saloon, he claimed he was taking fe
ncing lessons, but I’m still not sure. The point is, we got to talking and—”

  “Talking about what?”

  “I’m trying to tell you! So we decided to trade secrets—”

  “What sort of secrets?”

  “I’m trying to tell you! And Teddy’s secret was … Teddy’s secret was … Teddy’s—”

  “Yes?” I was on the edge of my seat here.

  Her next sentence came out in a breathless rush. “Teddy’s secret was that he knows where Meg’s other glove is.”

  “Is that all?” I collapsed back into my chair. “And what glove?”

  “The missing glove.” Horse that she was, Jo rolled her eyes at me and then snorted. “Remember the time Beth was delivering the mail and we all got a lot of things—well, except for you—and Meg got a few things as well, one of which was a single glove from the set of two she said she accidentally left over at the Laurences’? That glove.”

  “Sounds vaguely familiar,” I said. “But what of it?”

  “Teddy told me that Mr. Brooke has kept it as a treasured memento of our sister. He carries it in his pocket at all times. Apparently, Mr. Brooke … likes our Meg.”

  “Oh!” I had to admit, that did strike me as a bit icky, the notion of someone carrying around someone else’s sweaty glove at all times. But then, that was the Victorians for you. You never knew what crazy things they’d do when under the spell of love. So probably, there was nothing too terribly psychotic about Mr. Brooke’s behavior. He’d carry her glove, she’d probably press his dead flowers in some book, and eventually they’d call it love.

  “So he likes her.” I shrugged. “I fail to see the harm that—”

  “Fail to see the harm?”

  “Well, there’s no need to get—”

  “Fail to see the harm? But this is the most awful thing ever! She’s too young for love!”

  “Well, she is seventeen now. How old was Marmee when she married your—I mean our father?”

  “Then I’m too young to have her be in love,” Jo said, ignoring my question. “Oh, why do things have to change? Why do we have to grow up?” She paused. “There is one hope.”