Little Women and Me (10 page)

That night over supper, Jo and I told the tale of our joint adventure that day.

“Did he like my blancmange?” Meg wanted to know.

“I believe, er, he wanted to save it all to enjoy himself later,” I said, not wanting to hurt her feelings by telling her he hadn’t touched the gross-looking thing.

“I hope he doesn’t think the geranium flowers and leaves are edible,” Amy said, “for I believe they might be poisonous.”

“I am sure,” Jo said huffily, “that he is intelligent enough not to eat the flowers.”

“That piano sounds heavenly,” Beth said, chin in hand. “But it is perplexing: Why does his grandfather not want him to play it?”

That’s when Marmee had some insider information to share with us.

“Mr. Laurence doesn’t like the boy to play the piano,” she said, “because his daughter-in-law, the boy’s mother, was an Italian musician whom he blames for taking his son away from him. He worries that the boy will also want to be a musician and that he will lose him as a result too.”

“Italians are always nice,” Meg said.

“Perhaps,” Marmee said, considering. “The boy was born in Italy, and I fancy he is not very strong. Still, I agree with Mr. Laurence. You girls would do that boy a world of good, and I
have the feeling he would do the same for you. You have my permission to spend more time with him.”

“I have Fridays off!” I piped up.

Jo narrowed her eyes at me. I could almost see the wheels turning in that brain of hers:
Remember the pact, Emily
. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care anymore about trying to avoid conflict with my new sisters by
not
competing over some guy. I’d once thought I wanted to switch things in
Little Women
so that Laurie would wind up with Jo rather than Amy. But now that
I
was here, why shouldn’t he wind up with me?

Laurie was good-looking, he was nice, and he was impressed with my ability to come up with new words. I couldn’t remember the last time any guy had been impressed by me. Plus, he was the coolest guy in town. Okay, so maybe he was the
only
guy I knew in town, but still …

Meeting Laurie for the first time that day—talk about getting lost in a good book!

I no longer wanted to leave it.

Six

I’d already decided that my purpose here was to keep Beth from dying, but so far, I’d had no opportunity to take much action. After all, other than feeling her forehead after our one visit to the Hummel family, watching her the entire week afterward to see if she got sick, what was there for me to do? Simply wait until the story carried me to a point where I
could
change something, anything, to keep the worst from happening.

Until that time came, all I could do was go about my days.

I’d announced to the others that I could visit Laurie on my Fridays off, but it would be a week before I could go back over.

Sunday. You’d think a family like the Marches would be regular churchgoers, but Sunday came and went with no mention of church at all.
Could we possibly be Jewish?
I wondered as the day
wore on.
Muslim?
But no. Of course it was neither of those things. What then?

Then it struck me. The only things that had happened since I’d been here were those things that had actually happened in the original book: visiting the Hummel family; Jo and Meg going off to the party at the Gardiners’; Jo making fast friends with Laurie. The only changes to those scenes? My presence. The story itself didn’t change on its own. But perhaps I could change it. I wondered what would happen if I suddenly suggested, “Hey, aren’t we going to church today?” Would the others quickly lay aside their reading and sewing and sketching, hastily throwing on cloaks and bonnets? Maybe Jo, looking slightly puzzled by the turn of events, would hurl a “We were all just waiting for you to say something, lazybones” in my general direction?

Sunday passed quietly until Marmee reminded us that Mr. Laurence had said Laurie might—what was the word? Oh, right—
benefit
from our society.

That’s when the great pilgrimage began.

Meg took a walk through the gardens, enjoying the winter flowers.

Jo took up position in the grand library, grabbing every book I showed any interest in so that there was little fun for me and tons of frustration.

Amy studied the artwork on the walls, making sketches.

I, the jack-of-all-trades, apparently had no hobbies to call my own, not like the others did, and so I was left at loose ends. It would’ve been a good chance to flirt with Laurie, but somehow that would’ve felt weird with so many other sisters in the house. Jo would probably call me on it if I tried anyway, accusing me of breaking the pact. So I had to be satisfied with smiling at him as
we came and went, and introducing
dude
to him as a form of address.

Only Beth stayed away, in spite of Jo’s description of the piano. She was too shy of the old man, too shy of life.

Monday, it was off to the wretched Kings again with Meg.

Tuesday, it was off to wretched Aunt March’s with Jo.

It was Wednesday when things began to change.

On Tuesday night, alerted by Jo to Beth’s specific fears about his heavy eyebrows and fears of him in general, Mr. Laurence paid us a visit. As Beth listened, clinging fearfully to her limbless and headless doll—whose name I’d since learned was peculiarly Joanna—he told Marmee that he could really use someone to play the piano and help keep it in tune since Laurie so rarely played.
And whose fault was
that
?
I wondered. Mr. Laurence assured Marmee that anyone who was kind enough to keep the piano in tune need not worry about being bothered by the rest of the household. In fact, that person could simply come and go as she pleased.

What an awesome invitation. For the first time in my life, I wished
I
played the piano. Too bad the only musical talents I’d ever possessed had been the sort to elicit “You suck” pronouncements from my real sisters.

But it was a perfect opportunity for Beth. And for once, it seemed she wanted something enough to let go of her fears. Slipping her tiny hand into the old man’s large one, she offered up her services as pianist.

It was quite a thing to see, the way this gruff and stiff old man melted into a puddle around Beth.

But then it was Wednesday and there was Beth steeling her courage to walk across to the Laurence estate. I went with her and we entered quietly by the side door, and discovered the simple sheet music that I was sure the old man had deliberately left out for her.

Beth took a seat at the piano, touched the keys in awe, breathed a happy sigh.

“You needn’t stay any longer, Emily,” she said. “It was so kind of you to accompany me this far, but I can manage from here.”

“Are you sure?”

She was. And then it occurred to me: she
wanted
to be alone, wanted her first time at this piano to be exactly as Mr. Laurence had promised her it would be—without fear of bothering anyone and no one bothering her.

I went out the music room door, thinking I might find Laurie. Perhaps we could have a little chat, maybe get to finally know each other better without nosy Jo around.

But as I moved to close the door, and Beth began to play, I saw Mr. Laurence open his study door to listen, and then I looked up the winding staircase, and saw Laurie standing guard there, warning the servants away. How
sweet
was that? It was
so
sweet.

Still, I realized then that this wasn’t the place for me, or at least not at that moment. It was Beth’s moment, Beth’s day.

It was time for me to find something else to do with myself, outside of intruding on other people’s stories.

What I should do
, I thought,
lame as it might be, is go home and do Beth’s share of the housework as well as my own. That would be the nice, sisterly thing to do.
But I didn’t want to do that.

I decided to walk into town.

So far, I’d only been to the Hummels’, the Kings’, the Laurences’, and Aunt March’s, and it was high time I saw something else. The other sisters had all bought Christmas presents for Marmee
somewhere
, so there must be at least one store around here, some sort of town center perhaps.

But, I wondered, arriving at the street, which way was town?

Hmm … the traffic on the street, such as it was, the few carriages in sight, all seemed to be heading … that way.

Figuring that must be where the action was, and hoping there really was action and that it wasn’t too far away—it was seriously cold out!—I followed in the carriage tracks.

Soon there were more carriages in the street, more people walking in the same direction. At last we all turned a corner and there was …

A strip mall. Well, not a strip mall like back home—there was no Starbucks, no CVS—but there was an obvious string of businesses: a tearoom, a barbershop, a store selling items for women, a general store, the last being the place where my sisters probably did their holiday shopping. Since I wasn’t a man in need of a haircut and since I had no cash to spend, I decided to check out the general store.

There were food items, housewares, there were men’s army boots similar to the ones Jo had bought for Marmee. I picked up one of the boots, studied it from all angles. I’d always thought the boots we wore here were ugly, but you never knew when something was going to become fashionable again in a retro way. Maybe when I got back to the real world, I could win
Project Runway
with these?

At the sound of voices, I looked up to see a group of older men standing around the counter talking.

“The war has accelerated since the New Year,” one said.

“Since before that,” said another, “since back in July when Major General McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac.”

“How long,” asked a third, “before Lincoln orders an attack on Virginia?”

Attack on Virginia?

That’s when it hit me, really hit me: it was 1862 and I was living in a country that was in the midst of a war. Before now, I suppose I had been aware of the war on some peripheral level—the absence of Papa, Jo’s incessant talk of wishing she could be where the fighting was—but it had never hit me like this. While we were all safe here up north, leading relatively comfortable lives, terrible things were going on down south. So what if this was a fictitious world. The American Civil War was real. The dying was real.

I felt a sudden sense of urgency, spoke without thinking.

“Can’t the Red Cross do anything?” I asked. “People are dying!”

The men looked at me like I was an alien, which, I guess, I was. Maybe the Red Cross hadn’t been invented yet?

“
Do?
” the first man who had spoken scoffed.

“You’re a girl,” said the second, stating the obvious before snorting.

“You can sew socks,” said the third with a sneer. “That’s all
you
can do.”

Socks???
I was outraged.

The very idea—that I could do nothing, simply because I was a
girl
, that it was all above my pretty little head! Didn’t these idiots know that girls could do anything guys could? No, of course they didn’t. In my time, my
real
time, women were soldiers, fighting right
alongside men. But here? I was pretty sure girls weren’t even allowed to vote yet!