That is where, I suppose, my cousin got a copy of and read Little Women, and passed it along to me. Until then, the only books I had access to were the ones in the Childhood of Famous Americans series that my second-grade teacher, Miss Virginia Nolan, kept in the back of the classroom. I was working my way through all of those orange-covered books. John Philip Sousa, Marching Boy. Betsy Ross, Girl of Old Philadelphia. Eli Whitney, Boy Mechanic. Little Women was something else. Fat, with small type and many chapters, it was a real book, the kind I glimpsed when my mother pulled me past the tiny Books department at Ann & Hope, the local discount store. The kind I imagined filled shelves in libraries.
From the first line—“ ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug”—I was hooked. With each detail—the introduction of the four March sisters, the utterance of that beloved nickname “Marmie” for their mother, the absent father away at war, the plays written and performed by the March sisters, the neighbor boy Laurie—I fell deeper and deeper into the story. All these years later I recognize how magical this experience truly was. I wanted to live inside a book, and this was the first time I really did.
“I’m going to call you Marmie,” I told my mother, surely clutching Little Women because I did not put that book down.
“What? No. No, you’re not,” my no-nonsense mother said.
A day later: “May I carry a baked potato to keep my hands warm? And put it inside a muff?” I asked.
“No! Put on your mittens!” Then with a sigh: “Why are you so weird?”
She had dreamed of a beauty-queen daughter, a cheerleader, a popular girl. Instead she got me, a pageant dropout after just two trophies, too clumsy to be a cheerleader or playground star, quoting “Drama in Real Life” and wondering aloud about photosynthesis.
Little Women's pages brought me into a different world from my Italian immigrant one, which was large and loving, dramatic and loud. Our house was always full of relatives, many of whom spoke very little English. We were taught to respect our elders, which meant to kiss them hello and goodbye. Even though this often earned me a few dollars from grateful relatives who pinched my cheek or stroked my blond banana curls, cooing, Bella!, I didn’t like the way they smelled (I realize now that they smelled of food cooking, chopped onions and garlic, dirt and sun). I didn’t like that we kids were required to give up our seats to them and crowd together on the sofa or floor, silent.
My great-grandmother, Nonna, was a strong, imposing woman, a strega who cured sciatica, migraines, and broken hearts through prayers and magic. People lined up on our block for her services, offering embroidered linens, homemade wine, and the best eggplants and squash from their gardens in lieu of money. Still, Nonna was afraid of two things: flush toilets because she believed they could flush you away, and furnaces because she thought at night they released toxic fumes. Luckily, we did have a toilet, though Nonna kept an outhouse in the backyard, a huge source of embarrassment for me. However she refused to get a furnace. Instead we had a coal stove in the kitchen until 1966. The coal man came every week, and Mama Rose and Nonna shoveled the coal into the coal bin in the dirt basement and started the fire in the kitchen stove early on cold winter mornings.
They also grew much of the food we ate. The community garden stretched far behind our house, and from it came the tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and string beans; the cherries and pears and apples and figs; the zucchini and mint and basil and carrots. They raised chickens and rabbits too, and before I left for school I was sent into the backyard to kiss them goodbye, gagging at their blood-spattered aprons and the feathers and fur that lay on the ground at their feet.
Little Women took me away from all of this and transported me to the March household in Massachusetts during the Civil War. It was all I could think about at school: What will Jo do when Amy burns her manuscript? Will Laurie join the sisters’ club, the Pickwick Club? What will happen next? As soon as I got home, Mama Rose would hand me a plate of bread covered in spaghetti sauce or a handful of figs, and I’d sit eating and reading until it was time to set the table for dinner. Some afternoons I would look up, surprised by the shift of light in the room. Surprised that I was actually still in the kitchen rocking chair at home in my little town, that my brother was at the table with his slide ruler and math book, that dinner was ready.
Then I reached chapter 36: “Beth’s Secret.” Beth is the most lovable, kindest March sister. Jo is confident and ambitious, Meg maternal and ordinary, Amy pretty and spoiled. But Beth! So sweet! So frail after an earlier illness. All fall she appeared to be melancholy, and now in chapter 36 she confesses to Jo that was because she knew she would die soon. Although Jo tries to convince her otherwise, Beth insists it’s true. To my seven-year-old self, the idea that a beloved character might die was almost too much to bear. But the idea that we somehow know when we are going to die was downright terrifying. Had my mother’s sister Ann—my namesake—known that when she went into the hospital to get her wisdom teeth pulled, she was going to die? Then why had she gone? Why didn’t she cancel the operation and stay home? Had her brother, my uncle Brownie, known he’d have a fatal heart attack at a dance on Valentine’s night? But why wouldn’t he go straight to the hospital instead?
For several chapters, Beth goes virtually unmentioned, which lulled me into a false sense of security. See? She wasn’t going to die! Would Amy and Laurie dance together in Nice if Louisa May Alcott intended to kill off Beth? Would Meg and John work so hard on their marriage if doom was around the corner? Would Jo throw herself into writing for the Weekly Volcano if her favorite sister were about to die? Would a writer dedicate so many chapters to illustrating the pros and cons of marriage—Meg and John’s, yes, but also Jo’s decision to say no to Laurie’s proposal—if a main character was dying? I decided no. Beth would surely live.
As an adult, and a writer, I suspect that Beth had to die. Her role in the second half of the novel did not seem tenable. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser posits that Beth’s quiet, old-fashioned character who clings to outdated values symbolizes the changing role of women and therefore had to die. Still, when I began chapter 40: “The Valley of the Shadow” at the breakfast table one morning and read about the family setting up a special room for Beth with her piano and Amy’s drawings in it, an overwhelming dread filled me.
I tucked the book into my pile of textbooks and walked to school, that dread growing with each step. At school, I hung my red wool jacket with the toggle buttons on a hook in the hallway and took my seat in the back of the room, Little Women open in my lap. Meg was bringing the twins to visit Beth, almost like a farewell. I swallowed hard, afraid I might start to cry. I kept reading.
Our mornings began when Miss Nolan entered the classroom and all forty of us jumped to our feet.
“Good morning, class,” Miss Nolan would say.
“Good morning, Miss Nolan,” we’d reply.