Little Women and Me

Thirteen


It was a warm September afternoon, the summer holiday was drawing to a close, and the other four had just tramped off to do that thing they’d been doing every day now and that I wanted no part of: self-improvement.

Marmee liked for us to be out-of-doors as much as possible. So each day the others would put on what I considered to be ridiculous costumes: floppy hats and brown linen pouches slung over one shoulder, long walking staffs in one hand, various items in the other. Then they’d traipse up the hill between the house and the river, ultimate destination unspecified, and do whatever it was they did. They said they brought their work with them and played at being pilgrims, but for all I knew they could have been casting spells over the town and playing at being witches. As I say, I wanted no part of these self-improvements.

But there was something boring, not to mention a little lonely, in being left behind, so once they were safely out of view I went to visit Laurie.

“I’m bored, dude,” he said when he came to the door.

“There’s a bit of that going around, dude,” I said. “Maybe we need to do something out of the ordinary?”

“I already tried that,” he said. “I frustrated Brooke by deliberately making mistakes in all my studies, then I scared the maids by implying that one of the dogs was going mad.”

“That last sounds like it has possibilities,” I said.

“It did, but how long can terrified maids be fun?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It sounds like the kind of thing you could make a whole day out of.”

“No.” He looked depressed. “It was only fun for about five minutes. Then all the screaming just became boring.”

“Yeah, I could see where that might happen. Maybe we could—”

“What are your sisters up to?” he cut me off.

“Nothing interesting.” I snorted. “I can tell you that much!”

“Yes, but what are they doing today?” he persisted.

“Oh,” I answered vaguely, “I think they were headed up the hill to do some … thing…”

His eyes brightened immediately. “I’ll bet they are going boating. But they’ll need the key, of course, which of course they won’t have, so I suppose I should get it and then bring it to—”

“No, I don’t think anyone said anything about boating,” I said, feeling exasperated as I had to race after him to get the key and then hurried to keep up as he traipsed up the hill. “I’m sure I would have noticed if they’d said they were going boating, so I don’t think anyone—”

“Oh,” he said, looking dejected, when we’d at last climbed the hill, reached the river, and found the boat bobbing on the water, unused. “I guess not.”

Honestly. Why couldn’t he be content to just spend some time alone with me?

“We’re here now,” I suggested, “and you have the key right there. Maybe we could go boating? It’ll rock.”

“Rock?” he echoed. “Is that another new word when used in that fashion?”

I shrugged.

Suddenly he looked appalled. “Boating? Just the two of us?”

“Hey, I wasn’t planning on trying to k—”

He cut me off before I could even say the whole word, never mind finish my sentence. “No.” He blushed. “I wasn’t worried about that.”

“Anyway, I thought we agreed I was suffering from a fever that day,” I said, still certain he was worried about that.

“No, really,” he said. “It’s just that …”

“It’s just that what?” I demanded, hands on hips.

“Do you know you look just like Jo when you stand there like that? Well, except for the hair and the height and just about everything else being all wrong.”

All wrong? I was all wrong?

“But other than that?” he went on. “You look just like her.” He shook his head abruptly, as though trying to rid his mind of an image. “No, all I meant was, you’re not exactly the best person to go boating with, are you? I mean, you do have a tendency to overturn the boat.”

“Oh, thanks a lot. I make just one little mistake, just one time and—”

“But if they’re not here,” Laurie spoke as if I wasn’t even there anymore, “where could they be?”



We found them in a pine grove.

If they didn’t annoy me so much, I’d think they looked cool there in their floppy hats, their skirts spread all around them on the ground so it was like an ocean of colorful fabric connecting each girl to all the others. They looked like, oh, I don’t know, something out of a painting of the 1800s or something.

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 and 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?