Little Women and Me

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 or 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!”