Little Women and Me

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Jo!” the three other sisters shouted at her.

  “What?” Jo said, all innocent confusion.

  While all I could think was:

  Boys, boys, boys.

  Earlier, I’d been excited that there was finally at least the idea of a boy in the story. But maybe that wouldn’t be such a good thing. Sure, they were all “scandalized” by Jo’s behavior now. But before long, they’d mostly all be fighting and falling all over each other to get to this Laurie character. That’s what happens when a cute guy comes into the picture, even if he does have some features in common with Scrabble the rat.

  “Let’s make a pact,” I said impulsively.

  The others stared at me, puzzled.

  “It just seems to me,” I said, “that we all get along well. But now that this … Laurie boy has been introduced into the picture, we’ll probably all start acting ridiculous, fighting with one another and competing for his attentions. I don’t want that to happen to us.”

  It was true, I didn’t. The one thing this world had going for it was that here my sisters all mostly got along together, not like back home with Charlotte and Anne. I didn’t want to see that all messed up.

  “I’d never do that,” Beth said, obviously horrified by the idea of girls competing for a boy, while Amy instantly looked guilty.

  “He’s too young for my tastes,” Meg said. “I think I favor a more mature man.”

  “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard from you yet, Emily,” Jo said. “The very idea … that we’d fight over a boy!”

  “If you think it’s so ridiculous,” I countered, “then it should be easy for you to agree to a pact, not to let Laurie come between us.”

  “Fine,” Jo said grudgingly. Then she added, “But I’ll bet you buttons to bows, if one of us should break that pact, that person will be you.”

  Buttons to bows? What a bizarre thing to say! Still …

  “Fine,” I said.

  Four

  How I missed Facebook!

  If only there were a computer around here somewhere and I could log on to say, Emily March opened a book to do an English assignment and got sucked into a whole different time period—WHOOSH! My friends would comment with “LOL!” and “OMG!” and a few dozen people would simply hit the “like” button, and I’d feel like my day was off to a regular start.

  But no.

  The holidays were over and it was time to get back to normal life, which for me meant first having to figure out just what my normal life around here was supposed to be.

  But first I had to deal with …

  My period!

  I’d never had to suffer through it in 1862!

  I lay in my bed, sheets pulled up to my chin. What was I supposed to do? I was pretty sure there weren’t any tampons in this house!

  “Get up, lazybones!” Jo cried, somehow making her words sound both cheery and admonishing all at once as she tried to rip the sheets off of me.

  I clung tighter to them.

  She pulled harder.

  “It is time to get back to our regular lives,” she said with another tug of the sheets. “Life can’t be all plays and dances all the time.”

  Excuse me? I felt like pointing out. I never got to be in the play. I never got to dance at the Gardiners’ New Year’s Eve party—that was you!

  “I’m not feeling well today,” I said instead, clinging even tighter to the sheets. “I think maybe I’ll just stay home today.”

  “Come on, Emily, you know the rules. Unless one is literally dying, no one gets to take a day off from their duties around here.”

  “ ‘Unless one of us is dying’?” I echoed. “Well, that’s a little overdramatic, don’t you think? Why do you always have to be so—”

  “Do you have a fever?” she cut me off, placing both hands on my forehead.

  “What are you doing?” I cried, swatting her hands away. “You’re worse than Meg!”

  “HA!” she laughed. “I saw you do that swatting thing to Meg and I just knew you’d do it to me too.” Then she reached for the sheets again, which, now that I’d removed my hands in order to swat at her, she was able to rip from my body.

  “You give those back!” I lunged at her.

  “No!” She laughed again, darting out of my reach. But then her expression changed, becoming a sober combination of wistful and sweet. “Oh, Emily. Your first bleeding!”

  My first…? I wanted to point out that I’d been getting my period for over two years now, thank you very much, but then I realized how lucky I was. At least now I wasn’t going to have to explain why I didn’t know how to take care of my own period in 1862.

  “Here,” Jo said, taking me by the hand, “let me show you what to do.”

  A few moments later, it occurred to me that what was going on between us was kind of nice: Jo and I were having a real bonding moment!

  “Yes, you are a woman now,” Jo said, “and now I must tell you all about the making of babies and such.”

  Darn! Just when things were going so well. Sometimes she was worse than Meg.

  “I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I started to say, but she just blathered on.

  I listened in horror as she gave some long and yet vague explanation that had dogs and horses and, I’m fairly certain, chickens in it.

  Was this really the 1862 view of sex?

  “Here.” Jo handed me my nightgown. “Here.” Jo stripped the sheets from my bed, shoved them into my arms.

  “What?” she asked, when I only gaped at her, stunned. “Well, you can’t very well expect Beth to do your laundry, can you? Honestly, Emily!”

  So much for our bonding moment.

  I swore, if I ever made it back to my real life, if I ever heard anyone yak about the “good old days” again, I’d punch them. On the surface, things may have been sweeter and simpler in 1862, but doing laundry by hand sucked.

  The holidays over and my first period attended to, now it really was time to get back to normal life around here.

  Amy was doing math or something on a slate while Beth lay on the sofa, the cat and three kittens around her.

  “Hurry along, Amy,” Meg said briskly. “Mustn’t be late for your first day back at school.”

  “Are you sure it’s just a headache?” Jo said, placing a hand on Beth’s forehead. “You do feel a little warm.”

  While the sisters did many things together as a group and some activities were split into the two youngest and two oldest, with me roving between the two duos, Meg was Amy’s confidante, while Jo was Beth’s.

  So where did the middle March fit into all this? Seemed to me, I was odd man out here. Or at least odd girl out.

  “Come on, muffs are getting cold,” Hannah called to us from the kitchen as Meg and Jo and Amy hurried into their outdoor clothes: cape-like cloaks, a bonnet for Meg, a wide-brimmed hat for Jo, and no hat for Amy, who simply took a few strands of hair from each side of her face and tied them neatly in the back with a blue ribbon.

  What Hannah had called “muffs” turned out to be turnovers fresh from the oven. There were four of them, and since Beth was still on the sofa, I assumed I was supposed to go out with the others and that one of these turnovers was for me.

  Suddenly I realized how hungry I was. Bringing the turnover to my mouth, I was about to take a bite when Jo shrieked, “What are you doing, Emily?”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “Eating?”

  “You can’t eat your muff now!” she said to me with scorn.

  “I can’t?”

  “If you do,” Amy said, “how will you keep your hands warm on the long walk?” She laughed. “Sometimes, it’s as though you don’t know anything about how we do things around here.”

  Oh no! Was Amy on to me?

  “Oh, right,” I said with a nervous laugh, “the long walk. What was I thinking?”

  Then I hurried into my own cape-like cloak and followed the others out the door, muff in hand.

  I wa
s happy the muff was so warm as we walked—stupid cold New England winters!

  But where were we going? I wondered as we looked back at the house one last time to see Marmee at the window—nodding and smiling and waving at us, reminding me of a creaky mechanical toy or the queen of England—before we turned the corner.

  “Oh, I do wish we could live lives of leisure as other girls do,” Meg said with a put-upon sigh.

  “And we don’t because…?” I asked the leading question.

  “Why, because we don’t have enough money, you know that,” Meg said. Another sigh. “Of course, we once had money.”

  “And we lost that …?”

  “Why, Papa lost the money trying to help an unfortunate friend, which is why we older girls have to work.”

  Was I included in that “older” too? Did I work in some sort of factory? Was I a salesgirl in a shop? I’d bet anything if I was a salesgirl, I was a really rude one.

  “You know all this, Emily.” Meg sounded exasperated, but then her tone softened as she looked self-pitying again, a faraway look in her eyes. “Or maybe you don’t remember what it was like when we had money. I suppose that I am the only one who remembers what things used to be like because I am the oldest and therefore I am the only one who ever—”

  Jo yawned with such deliberate loudness, she snapped Meg right out of her self-pity party.

  “I know you like to go on and on about being older than the rest of us,” Jo said to Meg, “but you are only one year older than me and I remember a few things too.”

  I felt the frigid cold around me intensify as the muff turned cooler in my hands. Suddenly I wanted to be back at the cozy house with Beth. I may have had to do my own laundry, but at least there were fireplaces.

  “So, um,” I said, “just where exactly are we going?”

  The other three stopped in the snow and turned to look at me as though I’d just landed from another planet, which, essentially, I had.

  “I’m going to the King house,” Meg said. “You know—where I’m nursery governess to their four spoiled children?”

  “It’s Aunt March’s house for me,” Jo said with a wrinkle of the nose.

  “Josy-phine!” Meg said in a loud old-lady voice, and I remembered that this was how Aunt March spoke to Jo.

  “At least I get to read in her large library whenever she’s napping,” Jo said, “although that’s hardly compensation for when she’s awake.”

  “And I am off to school,” Amy said with a heavy sigh. “Oh, I do wish Beth weren’t so bashful, for then at least she could accompany me. What a wonderful life Beth has! All Beth has to do all day is play with her imaginary friends—those wretched six dolls she dresses every day, tending to them when they are sick—and take care of stray animals and practice on her piano with the yellow keys. Oh, and all the housework that Hannah doesn’t do—that’s Beth’s job too.”

  I’d seen one of Beth’s dolls: a castoff of Jo’s, the thing was limbless and had no head.

  “And what am I supposed to be doing?” I asked.

  Meg narrowed her eyes at me as though wondering why I would be asking about what I should already know.

  “Why, you are our jack-of-all-trades.”

  “Your what?” She had to be joking. This sounded like it might be as bad as Marmee’s Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are inscription in my brown copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.

  “You do a bit of everything,” Meg said. “On Mondays you go and help me at the Kings’.”

  “On Tuesdays,” Jo said, “you help me with Aunt March.”

  “On Wednesdays,” Meg said, “you stay home and help Beth and Hannah around the house.”

  “And I suppose on Thursdays I go to school with Amy?” I said, finally catching on and not liking what I was hearing at all. What kind of family role was “jack-of-all-trades”? I knew what that meant. It meant I was a master of none. Worse, it meant I fit in nowhere. Just like at my real home.

  “No,” Amy said, looking at me like I’d gone insane. “You don’t go to school with me. What sort of sense would that make, to go for just one day? And you being two years older?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea. Seriously, very little of this made any sense to me.

  “On Thursdays,” Amy said, sounding an awful lot like Jo at this point, “you walk me all the way to school, you meet me there afterward, and you help me with my homework and any problems that might arise, which is basically what Meg does on the other four days of the week.”

  So … at fourteen years old, I never had to go to school again? At least not here? Cool!

  “And on Fridays?” I wondered aloud. “What do I do on Fridays?”

  Now it was their turn to look puzzled.

  “Huh,” Meg said at last. “I don’t think any of us know.”

  “What do you do on Fridays?” Amy asked.

  “Never mind that now!” Jo said, using one hand to hold her hat to her head as a strong gust of wind threatened to blow it away. “Don’t you two realize what Emily’s been doing?” she said to Meg and Amy.

  “What have I been doing?” I asked, wanting to hear this as well.

  “Emily,” Jo accused, “you’ve been asking all these silly questions because it is Monday and you do not want to go to the Kings’ with Meg.”

  “Oh, right.” I laughed nervously. “I guess you caught me, didn’t you?”

  “Come along, Emily,” Meg said as the four of us reached a fork in the road and she pulled me toward the left.

  “I do wish you hadn’t dropped me into the cold hod when I was a baby,” I heard Amy mutter at Jo as they veered off to the right. “It is all your fault my nose looks like this …”

  Anyone who tells you that it’s easier not to have to go to school never had to babysit the King children, I thought, rubbing my feet by the fire that night. I’d somehow managed to get through my first day as a functioning, working member of the March family, subsisting on just that one turnover the entire day. I was sore. I was tired. And those King children—they were monsters!

  While sewing after dinner that night, each sister recapped her day. Meg complained about ours and told the others about the oldest King boy being sent away for doing something “dreadful”—neither of us had been able to worm out of the other monster King children what that dreadful something was, but I had my suspicions, even if Meg didn’t. Jo complained about her day with Aunt March. (“Josy-phine!”) Amy complained about the teacher humiliating some chick at school. Beth didn’t complain about anything, instead telling us of seeing Mr. Laurence give a fish to some beggar woman at the market who’d been about to be turned away by the shopkeeper.

  That’s when Marmee told all of us a fable about four—no, make that five girls who always complained, always saying “If only we could do this or have that,” until an old woman cast a spell over them so that in the future, whenever they became discontented, they would think over their blessings and be grateful … or they’d lose whatever good things they had.

  I was sure there must be a moral in there somewhere, but for the life of me, I could not care less.

  I was too busy trying to sew—when would I learn how to sew as well as the others? I wondered, pricking myself with the needle; not that I cared about sewing, but I was sick of having marks all over my hands—and my feet were still sore, my temper fried from dealing with the wretched King children.

  And tomorrow I’d have to go with Jo to Aunt March’s.

  Five

  I settled in to my first week as the jack-of-all-trades.

  On Tuesday I went to Aunt March’s with Jo. For once, Jo hadn’t exaggerated. Aunt March was as obnoxious as Jo said she was. And while whenever she bellowed “Josy-phine!” I laughed, it was substantially less amusing when she started bellowing “Emi-ly!” As my own mom used to say: “It’s always funny until it happens to you.” Still, Aunt March did nap often, and when she did, I followed Jo to the most amazing private library, where Jo showed me the one thing w
e really had in common: books. All those books made me itch to get back to writing.

  Wednesday turned out to be the best day of the week, being at home with Beth. Yes, doing the housework was hard. There were no vacuum cleaners, no dishwashers or dryers, no laundry machines, no Dustbusters—everything had to be done by hand. My beautiful hands—honestly, I grumbled to myself, someone should have invented rubber gloves by now. And if doing the housework was hard, watching Beth play with her six dolls could be a little odd too. That limbless castoff she’d gotten from Jo, the one with no head—it was creepy! But that was Beth: she was capable of loving anything and everything, even the most loveless creatures, even me. And that was why it was the best day of the week, even if it was the hardest work and there were those creepy dolls: because a person couldn’t be around Beth and not feel a little more peaceful, a person couldn’t be around Beth and not feel inspired to be just a little better than the person they normally were.

  You’d think that Thursdays with Amy would be the easiest of my jack-of-all-trades days since all I had to really do was walk her to school and then I was free until I had to pick her up later, and help her with her homework if necessary. But you’d be wrong. Thursday wound up being a loose-ends day for me, with me spending a good deal of it staring over the low hedge at the Laurence estate—a McMansion compared to the little brown March house—and wondering what went on inside there.

  As for Friday … the others had grilled me on what I did on my free Fridays, but I still wasn’t saying, in large part because I hadn’t figured it out yet!

  But then Saturday finally came and everyone was home again with lots to do.

  At least, there should have been lots to do, except there wasn’t, because it turned out to be a blustery and snowy Saturday, leaving the others happy to do totally exciting activities, like reading and sewing.