Little Women and Me

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  As I watched Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, noticing the changes of the past three years, I couldn’t help but think of Charlotte and Anne. Had they all forgotten about me? And if three more years had passed here, would three years have passed there too? If so, Charlotte would be in college now and Anne would practically be out of high school. What were their lives like now? What were they like? Had either one ended up with Jackson?

  Jackson.

  It’d been so long since I thought about him. Funny. He’d seemed so important to me once. I wondered now why he ever had.

  But I didn’t get to think any more about that just then because Papa was pronouncing Meg and John husband and wife—Meg was Mrs. John Brooke now!—and the party was about to begin.

  I’d thought it promising earlier in the day, when I’d seen Papa pass through the room with a bottle of wine under each arm. After all, I was eighteen now. Wasn’t that legal to drink in some places? At least back in the 1800s? But where was the wine now? All I could see was tea, water, and lemonade.

  Laurie also noticed the absence of alcoholic beverages, because he commented on it to Meg. Apparently both his grandfather and Aunt March had contributed bottles to the occasion. That’s when Meg informed Laurie that Papa was donating most of it to some soldiers’ aid society, keeping just a little of it for Beth. Papa only believed in wine for medicinal purposes. Hey, I had medicinal purposes here! I was almost sure of it.

  “You know, Laurie,” Meg said, “you would do well yourself to give up alcohol.”

  Laurie looked reluctant.

  “In fact,” Meg said, “I would consider it a great present to me if you did so.”

  I knew Laurie liked to go to the saloons. He always said it was so that he’d have people to play billiards with, but anyone with any sense had to figure he drank there too. And I had some sense.

  No, he didn’t look like he wanted to give that up. But Meg was the bride, after all, and this was her wedding day.

  “I’m sure I’ll eventually be grateful to you for this, Mrs. Brooke,” he said at last. “Very well. I promise to never drink again.”

  Wow, I hoped Meg didn’t ask me to give up anything today!

  Hey, wait a second though. This whole thing that had just happened with Meg and Laurie about drinking: Was this the beginning of what would eventually turn into 12-step programs everywhere?

  Whatever.

  All I knew, as we saw Meg and John off on the short walk to their new life together at Dovecote, was that it had been a lovely day. Perhaps some people, like Sallie and Ned Moffat, needed to have a big wedding to feel their marriage was worthwhile. But Meg and John had proved that it wasn’t the money that made marriage worth it and the ceremony celebrating it wonderful. It was the love.

  Oh, heck. I was beginning to sound like Marmee!

  Someone get me out of here!

  But as I lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, I knew that no one was going to get me out of there. After all, if it was going to happen, wouldn’t it have happened already? I’d been there four years. I’d probably be here forever now.

  And that three-year gap between Meg and John announcing their engagement and me basically “coming to”—it was the only phrase I could think of to describe it—the day before their wedding. What did it all mean? Could I only experience things that were part of the original story? And if that was the case …

  An uneasy thought came to me, something I’d wondered before. When the events of the original Little Women ended, what would happen to me? What would my fate be when I ran out of story?

  Twenty-Six

  It was the beginning of the end.

  “What are you doing with that thing?” I shouted at Amy.

  “You mean this red-hot poker?” Amy said mildly, waving it in my direction.

  “Point that somewhere else, please,” I said. “And yes,” I added, once she’d moved it away. “That red-hot poker—what are you doing with it?”

  “Why, it’s for my art, of course.” Amy’s tone was still unruffled. It occurred to me that over the years Amy had become quite the people person, knowing what to say in order to defuse a situation or to get what she wanted out of others. “I’ve taken up poker-sketching,” she continued. “Basically, you take a red-hot poker and use it to sketch things with on hard surfaces, like wood.”

  It didn’t surprise me that this art form hadn’t survived into the twenty-first century—at least, not that I could remember. The way Amy waved that thing around, sometimes leaving it on surfaces so that some of us feared the house would burn down around our heads—who knew art could be so dangerous?

  Now that Aunt March was paying for Amy to take art lessons, Amy had gone from simple pen-and-ink drawings to the poker-sketching. From there, she proceeded on to oils, her paintings shockingly unrealistic; charcoal portraits of family members—was there a reason why only my portrait was so unattractive?; clay and plaster—trying to make a cast of her own foot, she got that foot stuck in a bucket, causing Jo to accidentally cut that foot with a knife when she extricated it, that cut reviving the old tensions between Jo and Amy that had been dormant ever since the manuscript-burning incident.

  But all of this—all of Amy’s … art—was a dangerous thing.

  The first time I’d read Little Women, I remember being charmed by Amy’s growing interest as an artist. I hadn’t seen it as the beginning of the end, not the way I saw it now. Amy’s art—it would eventually take her away on a trip, where her newfound sophistication would become impressive, where she would—

  Why should Amy end up with the boy?

  I had to stop it. I saw that now. I wasn’t sure how or when, but when the opportunity arose, I’d stop Amy from taking that trip.

  And then I’d take her place.

  After the disaster with the clay and plaster foot, Amy turned her artistic attention to nature sketching. Well, at least there are no red-hot pokers involved with that, I thought.

  But as her special course neared its end, she announced that it might be nice to have some of the girls from her class over for a luncheon, after which she’d take them on a tour of the area so that they might see all the spots that inspired her art, which the girls admired.

  Marmee thought this a fine idea.

  Until she found out that Amy wanted to invite fourteen girls.

  “That does sound like a bit much,” Marmee said.

  Amy hurried to point out that it was not really “a bit much,” because she would use her own money to pay for everything, plus she was certain we would all want to help out with the preparations.

  “If I can’t have it as I like it, I don’t care to have it at all,” Amy announced.

  Something about the way she said that struck me. I could almost never identify it when my sisters said something word for word in the way they had in the original book—it’s not, after all, as though Little Women is packed with quotable quotes like “To be or not to be”—but I would have bet my last bonnet that this sentence was uttered exactly as written. It was kind of eerie for some reason, almost as though Amy were repeating a rehearsed line. But I shrugged that off because Jo was busy objecting to having the party at all.

  “I just can’t see the point of it,” Jo said. “You’ll work like a dog getting ready for your little luncheon”—I could see Amy wince at that qualifying little—“or you’ll get the rest of us to work like dogs for you. Then the girls will come or they won’t, but whatever the case, they’re all wealthy. None of them will be impressed by what you put out and I highly doubt that any of them care about you anyway. So why not save us the bother by not having it at all?”

  That’s when Amy pointed out, in a surprisingly diplomatic fashion, that she and Jo had vastly different values. She didn’t come out and say that Jo’s values were all wrong, but despite Amy’s diplomacy, I thought Jo might blow a gasket when Amy detailed what she saw as Jo’s values. They involved doing as Jo liked, and not caring what anyone else thought about what she did o
r said or wore.

  But Jo didn’t blow a gasket. Instead, she laughed good-naturedly at Amy’s comparison between the two of them and even grudgingly agreed to help out as best she could.

  And I had to grudgingly admit that I was on the side of Jo’s values. Once upon a time, back in my twenty-first-century life, everything that Amy said would have made sense to me: the need to maintain the kind of image that would impress people; the need to be thought cool. But now I saw that Jo’s way was the right way.

  Jo may have been annoying, Jo may not have cared about dressing fashionably or about what anyone else thought.

  But at least Jo was real.

  The day of the grand luncheon dawned …

  … and then the day passed.

  Amy thought she was being smart in telling the girls the event would take place on Monday or Tuesday, hedging her bets in case we got a summer storm on Monday. So when Monday turned out to be just slightly drizzly—turning to sunshine by midafternoon—no one showed at the appointed hour. This put Amy into a lobster-finding tizzy, since some of the food she’d had us prepare for Monday was already beginning to spoil, so she went on her own into town in search of live shellfish.

  But all of Amy’s preparations were wasted, because on Tuesday, a very sunny Tuesday, only one of her invited guests arrived: one Miss Eliot.

  Unfortunately the one Miss Eliot couldn’t possibly eat all the food Amy had gotten Hannah and Meg and everyone else to put together.

  By dinner—our fourth meal in two days of Amy Food—Papa declared enough to be enough.

  That was when Amy suggested sending the leftovers to the Hummels, adding that, “Germans like messes.”

  I still blamed the Hummels for Beth getting scarlet fever, even though I knew in my heart it wasn’t really their fault—Beth was so good, they couldn’t have stopped her coming to help. But even I would never say anything so obviously rude like “Germans like messes.”

  Where did Amy come up with this stuff?

  No, really: Where did Amy come up with this stuff?

  “I look forward to the day I take my place among ‘our best society,’ “ she said that night as we all sat in the parlor. She actually said that phrase, “our best society,” as though she didn’t even see the irony in the air quotes her tone implied.

  She was sketching when she said this, the rest of us occupied with various things.

  “What exactly does ‘our best society’ mean to you?” I asked, fully aware that when I put the air quotes in my tone, I intended the irony.

  “People with money,” she said, “people of position, people who understand fashion.”

  And just where had this Amy March come from? I noticed for the first time how different she looked from the rest of us: how much time she put into her appearance and how she did always manage to look fashionable, while we mostly made do with what we had. Honestly, if she weren’t living with us in our humble home—what with the way she looked and dressed and spoke now that she’d mostly learned not to mangle the English language—it would be easy to picture her living a Real Housewives of Victorian New England kind of life.

  I laughed then and, speaking my thoughts aloud, said, “Sometimes, it’s almost like you don’t come from this family at all!”

  “That’s because—” Amy started to say, but then stopped herself as she put her pencil aside to stare at me. “What are you trying to say, Emily?”

  “Only that you’re so different from the rest of us.” I shrugged, not knowing what was bothering her. “With your interest in ‘our best society,’ something no one else here is interested in, certainly not Jo”—at this Jo snorted—“you almost seem like you were dropped here from another family. The way you’re interested in money, as though you have some sense of what it’s like to have money—”

  “But of course I do.” Amy cut me off. “As you well know, Papa had plenty of money, but he lost it at one point. We used to live a much grander lifestyle than we do now.” Blushing, she turned to look at Papa. “Sorry, Papa.”

  “That’s quite all right, Amy,” he said.

  But wait a second here. I distinctly remembered one time Meg making a big deal about being the only one of us to be old enough to remember the days when the family had been well off and Jo saying she could remember it too, the implication being that the rest of us—including Amy, who was a full three years younger than Jo—weren’t old enough to have such memories.

  So where did Amy’s come from?

  When I tried to ask her about it, with what seemed to me to be an innocent enough question, Amy got red in the face and replied with a huff:

  “Well, I have heard all the stories, haven’t I? I mean, of course that’s the only way I could know about it—really, Emily, sometimes I think Jo is right about you!”

  Twenty-Seven

  One thing Jo should have had right about me was that I was competitive with her where writing was concerned, but she wasn’t even aware of that because: 1) I hadn’t worked on my book in a long time, and 2) except for that long-ago thing with the Pickwick Portfolio/Twist Times, she’d never known about it in the first place.

  But that was all about to change …

  Miss Crocker invited Jo to escort her to a lecture on the Pyramids that was being given as a People’s Course.

  I couldn’t even remember who Miss Crocker was when Jo told us about it, but then, straining memory, I remembered she was the family friend who’d come to dine with us that time Marmee tricked us all into being bored with our leisure, the same day that Jo put salt on the strawberries and Beth’s canary, Pip, had died.

  Funny thing about living in Marchville. You could meet someone who was supposed to be a close family friend and then not have them show up again for another four years.

  Anyway, Miss Crocker had invited Jo to escort her, Jo had said yes, and Jo was very happy about it.

  “It shall be good to do something different for a change,” Jo said.

  That did sound appealing.

  “Can I come too?” I asked.

  “No,” Jo said, “you weren’t invited.”

  I thought about fighting her on it. It was a free lecture, after all, open to the public—I was the public! But—eh—I just wasn’t up for all the dramarama.

  So I let her go.

  I’d planned on ignoring Jo when she got back. After all, if I wasn’t welcome, what did I care about the Pyramids anyway? Besides which, the Pyramids were just big sandy triangles in the desert; it’s not like there was anything new to say about them.

  But when Jo came in, she was bouncing around like a pinball, she was so excited. “Must’ve been some lecture,” I said. “Did someone discover a fourth Pyramid or something?”

  “Oh, who cares about that?” Jo said. Then she pulled something from a pocket of her skirt. It was a crumpled article that she’d torn from a newspaper. Smoothing the creases, she handed it to me. “Read this!”

  I read.

  The newspaper was sponsoring a contest. The winner would receive a grand prize of one hundred dollars—a small fortune around here. The only thing the winner had to do was write the most sensational story of all those submitted.

  “A boy at the lecture gave me the newspaper to read while we were waiting for it to start,” Jo went on enthusiastically. “And I had the chance to read one of the stories they regularly print before I even knew about the contest. The story was positively dreadful! I know I could do better than that. But the boy said the author was extremely popular.”

  “Who was the author?” I asked. If the author was extremely popular, maybe I’d heard of him or her in my previous life. I strained to recall popular authors from the late 1800s, but the only one I could think of at the moment was: “Louisa May Alcott?” I guessed.

  “Who?” Jo’s puzzled expression quickly turned to typical annoyance as she shook her head at me. “No, it was Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury.”

  “Of course,” I said, as though I’d known all along. It was crazy t
he strange names people came up with around here. Mrs. Northbury’s first name was as bad as Blank Hospital when Papa was sick down in Washington. But then I realized that Evelina Massachusetts, the pseudonym I’d chosen to be published under in The Eagle that one time, was right up there.

  “You can’t possibly have ever heard of Mrs. Northbury,” Jo began to object, “when I have never even heard of her before tonight!” She shook her head again. “But never mind that now. I am going to enter this contest and I am going to win it.”

  “Oh?” I asked innocently. “And have you decided yet what your winning sensational story is going to be about?”

  “Yes.” Jo’s eyes shone. “It will be about romance and despair, there will be an earthquake, and”—here she paused dramatically as though waiting for an invisible drummer to add a roll—“it will all take place in … Lisbon.”

  “My, that does sound sensational,” I said.

  But inside I was thinking:

  Bring. It. On.

  Jo completed her sensational story about romance, despair, an earthquake, and Lisbon, and sent it off with a prayer. Meanwhile I brushed off “A Woman from the Future”—the story I’d originally written for The Eagle—adding to the original story about a teenager who time travels from the twenty-first century to the 1800s. Then I sent mine off too, and I even used my real name this time, but without the prayer.

  I figured I didn’t need it because I had the most sensational story going.

  We waited six long weeks to hear the results of the contest. Jo waited loudly, because everyone knew she’d entered—even the milkman had to listen to her go on about it!—while I waited in silence, because no one knew I had.

  At last, after we’d both given up on winning—Jo loudly, I silently—an envelope arrived.

  “Emily won the writing contest?” Amy all but shrieked.