Little Women and Me

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  I threw off the sheets and blankets, not minding a bit about the cold in spite of my thin white granny nightgown and hairy legs—I’d peeked the night before as I’d climbed into bed.

  I heard a woman humming and followed the sound to an old-fashioned-looking kitchen. It reminded me of a class trip we’d taken to Sturbridge Village, what with all the antiques, like a barrel with a wooden paddle thingy sticking up through the middle—a butter churn, maybe? Standing at a table was a woman I didn’t recognize. Well, that wasn’t a huge shock. I hadn’t known any of these people until just recently!

  Ignoring the woman, even when she shouted “Emily!” after me, I raced for the back door. Once there, I threw it open and stepped out into …

  Fresh snow! I instantly felt the coldness on my bare skin as my feet sank into it. I looked around me and saw real winter just like on an old New England postcard.

  But never mind that now … I was free!

  I experienced a head-rush of excitement at having left the March household behind me. Somehow, I would find my way home! But when I turned around, the house was still there—a house without a satellite dish or a paved driveway. And looking at the landscape around me? It was all equally unfamiliar. I saw a horse and carriage traveling by on the dirt road. The horse and carriage might have fit into any country road back home, but the driver with his odd clothes wouldn’t. Was he wearing knee pants with stockings? Had I escaped or hadn’t I?

  Barely thinking about what I was doing, I leaped back over the doorstep, then outside again, then back and forth. Maybe I had to build up speed to trigger the trip back to the future.

  Mixed feelings filled me as I leaped back and forth. What was I going to do? How was I ever going to get out of here? But then the other part of me felt something different, something the opposite of panic. I felt a sense of calm as I realized that no amount of jumping out the back door was going to work. I was stuck, with no choice but to just deal with things until some other solution came along.

  I’d always been known to be, well, a little excitable about things. In fact, Charlotte used to call me “emo” until Anne pointed out that nobody said “emo” anymore. So how could overreacting me be so accepting of this situation now? Maybe because I knew there weren’t going to be any handbooks lying around on How to Get Out of a Strange Time Period When You’ve Accidentally Slipped into One. But it was something else too. I was experiencing something completely original. Had anyone ever had anything like this happen to them before?

  “Hannah, what is Emily doing?” I heard what I now recognized as Jo’s irritable voice and I realized who the woman in the kitchen was: Hannah, who was more of a friend than a live-in servant, even though that’s what she technically was to the March family.

  I couldn’t exactly tell Jo that I’d been searching for the seam that separated her fictional world from my real one.

  Even I wasn’t crazy enough to try that!

  “I was just … enjoying the snow,” I said instead with an awkward laugh to Jo as I leaped back inside again. I’d work out my escape later. That seam, the way in and back—it had to be here somewhere …

  “Silly goose.” Jo gazed down at my red feet. “You’ll catch your death of cold.” Then she shook her horse’s mane of hair as she grabbed my hand. “But never mind that now. Marmee has left presents for all of us under our pillows.”

  I followed obediently as she tugged me along, feeling grateful that thanks to her I hadn’t had to embarrass myself even more by asking who Hannah was.

  Marmee had indeed left presents for us. Oh, yay, whoopee.

  There were copies of Pilgrim’s Progress for each of us: crimson for Jo, green for Meg, gray for Beth, blue for Amy. As for mine? It was brown.

  Brown? It was the Incident of the Shawls all over again!

  “I’m so sorry,” Marmee explained, “but it was the only color left.”

  As for the inscription?

  Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are.

  I felt a rush of frustration. Was this some kind of joke?

  Hurriedly, I sneaked glances at the inscriptions in my … sisters’ books. But theirs were all inspirational, biblical even. Whereas mine was …

  Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are.

  They were taunting me! I was on the point of saying something, but then I glanced over at Marmee and saw the sweet look on her face.

  “It’s … lovely,” I finally lied through my teeth. Then, thinking it would be smarter to talk like the rest of them in order to avoid detection, I added, “I shall rely on these wise words and, um, let them guide me like a beacon through life, always.”

  Marmee beamed.

  “Well,” Amy said, with an uncharacteristic snort in my general direction, “don’t overdo it.”

  Jo was going on and on about the army shoes she’d given Marmee for a Christmas present.

  And what had I bought Marmee, to go along with Jo’s army shoes, Meg’s gloves, Beth’s handkerchiefs, and Amy’s—as it turned out—big bottle of cologne? Well, even though I couldn’t remember going shopping with them, even though I’d somehow leaped from that first night in front of the fireplace to this Christmas morning, somehow bypassing the mall crawl altogether, I’d managed to buy Marmee a dollar’s worth of paper so she could write to Papa. It was nice to know I was thoughtful if hardly original.

  The way Jo blathered on about how she wished she were a boy so she could fight with the men, side by side with our chaplain papa—honestly, I’d only been here a short time, but already I was sick of it.

  Someone needed to set her straight about war! After all, I’d watched the news and gone to history class! However necessary the American Civil War might have been, there was nothing nice about young guys getting killed.

  “Iraq!” I burst out with it. “Afghanistan!” I went on hastily when they all stared at me. “And by the way,” I mumbled, hoping to distract them from my outburst, “I’m hungry. When’s breakfast around here?”

  I stared back, returning their stunned looks with what I hoped looked like firmness. Of course, they didn’t have a clue about Iraq and Afghanistan! For a moment, fear grabbed me, fear of being discovered as the … March impostor that I was. If they discovered that, they might throw me out on the streets. And then not only would I be stuck in the wrong time period, I’d be a homeless person stuck in the wrong time period. But then again, they already seemed to have accepted me as one of them. So I’d be the eccentric March, I thought with near-manic glee—I’d found my place!

  “Never mind whatever it is you’re going on about, Emily,” Jo said. “Didn’t you just hear Marmee say that there’s a poor German woman living nearby with a newborn baby and six children all freezing in one bed because they have no fire and nothing to eat and that we should give them our Christmas breakfast?”

  Um, no, I thought. Somehow, I’d missed that. On top of everything else, was I now suffering from story amnesia? It was like there were things that happened that the others seemed to know but I didn’t. And there were also things I didn’t remember from my many times reading the book.

  “We will have bread and milk for our own breakfast,” Meg said, tying a totally ugly bonnet on her head.

  “Yes, Marmee says we will make it up at dinner, so what does it matter if we starve a little now?” Amy’s words were brave considering she was, well, Amy, but I got the impression that if her sisters hadn’t been pressuring her, she’d have loved to do the wrong thing.

  And so would I. What were these people, nuts? They planned to go from a breakfast of bread and milk straight to dinner with nothing in between. I couldn’t live that way. It was worse than eating lettuce every day to impress a guy!

  “I’m not going.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

  “Aren’t you feeling well?” Meg asked, placing a hand on my forehead.

  “Would you stop doing that all the time?” I said, annoyed, as I swatted her hand away. “I just don’t see any point in g
iving away a perfectly good breakfast.”

  The others gaped at me.

  “What?” I said, feeling self-conscious and indignant at the same time. So what if the others thought me selfish—I was hungry! “Honestly, what difference does it make?” I went on. “So we make the big gesture of giving them our breakfast now, but what next? Do we give them our dinner too? Our breakfast again in the morning? Of course not! We can’t do that, or eventually we starve. So, please tell me, what is the point in doing something that will only help these poor people for a few hours but, in the long run, the larger problem will still be there?”

  Beth stepped forward and stood in front of me. For a strange moment, I thought she might say something harsh, the sort of thing I expected from Jo. But when she did speak, her words were gentle, her expression sad.

  “It is Christmas morning,” Beth said, taking my hand in hers. “I admit, it is hard to give away our feast, and I shall be hungry all day. But think of how much harder it is to go daily without, as the Hummels do.”

  The Hummels—that must be the name of the German family.

  “Yes,” Beth went on, “tomorrow the Hummels will have to go back to starving to death, but should we not give them this one happy moment, on Christmas morning of all days? I, for one, should be happy to go hungry all day. Indeed, I wish we could do this for them every day.”

  Oh God, I groaned inwardly at her sincerity. How had I landed myself here? And who did Beth think she was—Oprah?

  Still, the combination of sincerity and serenity in her expression got to me. Somehow, I could stand to have the others think I was selfish, but not Beth.

  “Oh, whatever,” I conceded sourly. “Let’s go give our breakfast away.”

  The Hummels turned out to be exactly as described: a poor mother with a newborn and six children freezing in one bed with no fire and nothing to eat.

  Now they had fire, at least for the morning, because Jo had hauled some of our own firewood over. And they had food, at least for the morning, because we’d brought our Christmas breakfast.

  In spite of the grumbles in my stomach, as I looked around at those six little faces, happily eating the fresh muffins and pudding I wished I were eating, I was glad I’d been a part of this, this giving. But then I saw Beth seated in front of the fireplace, the Hummel woman’s baby cradled in her lap, and I felt a chill go up my spine. I didn’t know where it came from, but I knew there was something I should be remembering right now and yet couldn’t.

  “Hey, Beth,” I tried to urge her. “Give the baby back to its mother and come over here.”

  But she was so caught up in that baby, it was as though she never heard me.

  The bread we had for our breakfast was the warmest, most awesome-smelling bread I’d ever eaten—even better than Panera! “Are you going to sniff that bread or eat it?” Jo said at one point. Well, I guess I did have my nose pressed a little too closely. As for the strangely yellowish milk, it didn’t necessarily look bad, just different. “Aren’t you going to pour the cream off the top and then shake yours?” Jo said at another point as I raised the glass toward my lips. Oh. Right. I poured. I shook. Then I raised the glass again hoping to drink a bit before any more nasty comments were flung my way, but as the glass got nearer, I wrinkled my nose as it struck me: yuck! Unpasteurized. Still, in spite of the wonderful newness of the one and the strange newness of the other, bread and milk for breakfast wasn’t exactly exciting. But as I went through the rest of the day, feeling hunger grow in my stomach, I felt good about that hunger, virtuous even. We had done a good thing and, as the others pointed out, it was just for one day. Tomorrow we’d be back on regular rations.

  As it got dark, Meg announced that it was time for the Christmas play I’d seen the others rehearsing. I watched carefully to see if I was supposed to do anything, but it didn’t seem like it. As far as I could tell, I was just supposed to be an observer.

  A part of me was relieved—how could I have performed in a play when I hadn’t learned the script?—but a part of me felt PO’d. Why didn’t I, the middle March, have a part in the play? Did I have stage fright? Was I a bad actress?

  Meg and Jo put on their costumes on a cot bed they referred to as “the dress circle,” while Beth and Amy helped. Then, as the audience—in other words, Marmee and Hannah and me—took their seats, a blue-and-yellow chintz curtain was raised.

  The play, which was mostly confusing, was also mostly Jo. She played all the male parts, wearing leather boots and an old sword and a slashed doublet that she obviously loved. Meg played the female—no big stretch.

  I was relieved when it was over, because I hadn’t been able to figure out what was going on in the play. Besides, it was finally time to eat again.

  Pink and white ice cream, cake and fruit, French bonbons, and a bouquet of flowers for each of us. Whoa! It was way better munchies than I’d been expecting. Marmee said that Mr. Laurence—the grandfather of the Laurence boy, whom Meg swore we didn’t know—sent it. Marmee said he had sent it because he heard about us giving our own breakfast away.

  Ah, the rewards of virtue! I thought happily, reaching for another bonbon and dropping it on top of a spoonful of pink ice cream before popping it all into my mouth. The pink ice cream was so good.

  I had a sudden inspiration.

  “Hey, do we still have any of that thick milk from this morning?” I asked.

  “Of course, why?” Marmee said.

  “Can I have a glass?” I asked.

  Hannah brought me one—I had to admit, the servant thing was easy to get used to—and I scooped up the rest of the ice cream, dumped it into the glass of milk, and swirled the two things together. I was going to ask for a straw but stopped myself. Did the 1860s even have plastic yet? Shrugging, I sipped from the glass. Oh, yum.

  “What are you doing, Emily?” Jo demanded.

  “Hmm?” I said, wiping with the back of my hand at the milk mustache I could feel on my upper lip.

  “That thing,” Jo said, pointing at my glass.

  “Oh,” I said. “Here. Try it.”

  Jo took a cautious sip and then a smile broke across her face. Before I knew it, she passed the glass to Meg, who had the same reaction, and so on through the sisters and finally to Marmee. Then they all asked Hannah for glasses of milk, adding their own pink ice cream and swirling.

  Hey! It struck me. Had I just invented milk shakes?

  “Well, I’ve spoken to him before,” Jo said importantly. “The Laurence boy, I mean.”

  Then, as the others listened closely, she told us how she talked to him once over the fence about cricket, whatever that was, until Meg came along and spoiled the fun. Jo added that he seemed shy and in need of a good time. Ha! I could tell Jo thought she was just the person to provide it.

  With the exception of the spectral figure of Papa in his letters and perhaps a few of the Hummel children, it had just been women, women, women since I’d arrived. But now things were changing. A boy was being introduced into the story!

  There’s always trouble when a boy enters the picture—hello! Jackson, anybody?—and I did try to warn the others.

  But, just like with Beth and the Hummel baby, no one would listen to me.

  Beth and the baby …

  Suddenly it hit me. In the original Little Women, Beth and that baby was really the beginning of the end for Beth, even though the reader had no clue at the time. And then it further hit me: Mr. Ochocinco’s assignment, back in my real world. We were supposed to pick one thing we’d change about a favorite book to make it perfect. I’d been going back and forth about changing what happens to Beth or fixing things between Jo and Amy and the boy next door to make the book more romantically satisfying. But now … now that I knew Beth, the choice was obvious. I’d save Beth’s life. To heck with who wound up with the boy.

  So maybe that was my purpose in being here? The thing that would get me home again?

  I’d been sent into the story to keep Beth from dying!

/>   Three

  But before I could save Beth’s life, I needed to find my way in this strange new world for as long as I was in it. So, after placing my hand on Beth’s forehead and not feeling anything that felt like a fever, and after promising myself to always keep a close eye on her so I could prevent her original fate from happening, I got back to the business of doing just that: finding my way.

  And what a random way it was! If someone had asked me before I got here if Little Women was a normal novel, with a regular plot like any other, I’d have said yes. But now that I was living it, I saw for the first time how episodic it was. Talk about people being random!

  Every girl who has grown up in the last hundred years or so wanting to be a writer, including me, has Jo March to blame. An overstatement? Maybe. But still.

  Meg reported finding Jo in the garret, her favorite escape, wrapped in a comforter on the three-legged sofa by the sunny window with her pet rat named Scrabble not far away. Meg reported that Jo had been eating apples and crying over a book. That’s when it hit home: my memories of Jo March from that other book. How obsessed with books and her own writing she had been. How whenever I read about her in that garret, I’d wanted to be her. How, whenever she’d been writing something in the book, I wanted to be a writer like her. How, in spite of the various charms of the other three sisters, it was Jo who really rocked.

  But now that I’d started getting to know her, she was proving to be a regular P.I.T.A.

  “Of course you’re not invited to the party, silly goose!” Jo laughed in my face now.

  My fingers itched to slap her as I repeatedly clenched and unclenched my fists at my sides. I swore, if she called me “silly goose” just one more time …

  “You are only fourteen!” she said, laughing some more.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “And you’re so much older at—what is it again? Fifteen?”