Little Women and Me (15 page)

Wretched King children!

Wretched stupid everything!

I had to finally admit it: my chief problem in life, the one I needed to work on in a
Pilgrim’s Progress
sort of way, was jealousy. Sometimes it seemed as though I was jealous of everybody and everything: jealous of Meg’s opportunity in going to the Moffats’, jealous of Amy’s pretty blondness, jealous of Jo’s writing—specifically the fact that she’d done more of it than I had—plus her friendship with Laurie, even jealous of the tender way everyone treated Beth.

“Doesn’t it bother you,” I said to Jo a few days after Meg’s departure, “Meg getting to go to the Moffats’ while you and I have to stay here? After all, we
are
almost as old as she is.”

“Bother me?” Jo looked startled. “Of course I’m not bothered. I hate parties and getting dressed up. Why should I mind someone else getting something, especially when I don’t even want that something for myself?”

Apparently, I was the only March sister to be plagued by jealousy.

In fact, the others seemed just as happy to rely on their imaginations as they would have been to go to the house party in the first place. Just like when Meg and Jo had gone to the New Year’s party at the Gardiners’, leaving me behind with Beth and Amy, the other three now spent their evenings discussing what they were sure Meg must be doing
right that second
.

“I’ve heard,” Amy said, “that one of the older Moffat girls, Belle, is engaged. I’ll bet Meg finds that extremely interesting and romantic. I know I would.”

“I hope Meg isn’t feeling too badly,” Beth said with a worried frown, “that her dresses are somewhat shabby compared to those of the other girls.”

“Well, she won’t feel bad for long,” Jo said. “Laurie told me he was sending her a box with roses, heath, and ferns in it for the small party tonight.”

“Doesn’t anyone else find it strange,” I said, “how much attention Laurie spends on each of us?”

The others stared at me as though I’d said the oddest thing in the world. Apparently I was the only one who found Laurie’s behavior strange.

“You’re not going to bring up the pact again, are you?” Jo said witheringly. Then she shook her head as though shaking
off my peculiar words. “I’ll bet it’ll be like Amy said before—the other girls will be green with envy over Laurie’s flowers. But if I know our Meg, she’ll play a trick on them. She’ll pretend they’re from the old man, Mr. Laurence.”

I wasn’t sure what was so funny about a sixteen-year-old girl pretending a man old enough to be her grandfather was sending her flowers, but the others apparently found it a hoot, because they started laughing.

“The ball is going to be a week from Thursday,” Amy said with a wistful sigh.

Now
that
I understood. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on that wall.

Every now and then, a person gets what she asks for. In this case, I got to be a fly on the wall at the ball, although not in the way I’d imagined.

The Moffat girls were so impressed with the flowers Laurie sent Meg, Belle Moffat sent Laurie an invitation to the ball. Laurie’s initial inclination was to decline politely—he said he didn’t like dressy parties any more than Jo did—but Jo convinced him. Jo, who never seemed to care at all what she herself looked like, wanted him to report back on how Meg looked.

And Laurie consented, just like that.

It would be nice
, I thought, thinking of Jackson,
to get guys to do what you wanted them to do.

The day after the ball was a Friday, which worked out well for me, Friday being the day I had free from my jack-of-all-trades work. While Jo grumbled off to Aunt March’s, and Amy and Beth stayed behind in the house to work on their lessons and do
housework, I practically skipped across the newly green lawn to the Laurence estate and knocked loudly on the door.

I hadn’t been over by myself since that …
last time
, and at first Laurie looked vaguely shocked to see me standing there. I wondered if he was scared I’d try to kiss him again.

My concern grew when he tried to shut the door in my face.

“I’m not going to try to kiss you again!”
Or at least not today
, I mentally added as I pushed back forcefully against the door.

Laurie stopped trying to shut the door so abruptly, that with no resistance anymore, I immediately fell at his feet. As he reached out a polite hand to help me up, I saw he was blushing.

“Of course I wasn’t worried about that,” he said. “I know you will never do such a thing again.”

A lot you know
, I thought.

“It’s only,” he went on, “that I promised Meg I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about last night.”

If
that
wasn’t catnip …

“You have to tell me now!” I said.

“Oh no, I mustn’t!” he said.

“But you can’t say something like that and not expect me to ask any questions.”

“But a promise is a promise. And Meg made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone at home.”

I had an inspiration. Grabbing on to his arm, I tugged him outside.

“What are you doing?” he shouted.

But I didn’t answer. I just kept tugging.

“There,” I said, satisfied with myself now that I’d tugged him so far across the lawn, we stood exactly in the center between our two houses.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Laurie said, “although I just did—follow you, that is, but that was only because you tugged me so hard.”

“There’s your home,” I said with a nod in one direction, “and there’s mine.” I nodded in the other direction. “Since neither of us is technically
at home
right now, then there’s no reason why you can’t tell me what Meg didn’t want you to tell anybody.”

“Well, while I suppose that might be literally true—”

“Besides which, I’m not
anybody
. I’m just Emily. I won’t say a word, and it’s not like anyone listens to me anyway.”

“Yes, well—”

“
Spill
, Laurie.”

“
Spill?
Is that another new word you invented?”

I simply waited, hands on my hips.

“Very well.” He sighed, then: “It was awful, I tell you!”

“What was?”

“Meg! They had her dressed up like a, like a …
doll
. There were high-heeled silk boots to match the blue silk gown Belle insisted she wear. The dress was so tight she could hardly breathe, the train so long she could barely walk. They put makeup all over her, crimped her hair … and the neckline on the dress!” He blushed again. “It was so low, they put tea-rose buds in her …
bosom
… and her shoulders were bare!”

That didn’t sound much like prim Meg.

“And as for the young gentlemen!” Laurie said.

“Yes? What about them?”

“They were begging introductions and lining up to dance with her when I showed up!”

After the practically guy-free months I’d spent in the March household, that sounded awesome.

“And the worst was that after I told her I didn’t care for the
way she looked, that I didn’t care for fuss and feathers, and after she made me promise not to tell any of you, saying she’d tell you all herself, after all of
that,
later on I saw her drinking champagne with Ned Moffat and his friend Fisher. And even after I made it clear I disapproved, she kept drinking!”

“There, there.” I made vague patting gestures with my hand on his arm, meanwhile thinking of how much I’d learned in the past few minutes:

One, Laurie could talk a blue streak when he wanted to, and he was a little priggish about certain things.

Two, when let off her leash, Meg was something of a tarty lush—so
that’s
what the March girls were really like when readers weren’t looking!

Three, Laurie really didn’t like fuss and feathers, not at all. I figured this knowledge would serve me well in my romantic war against Jo for Laurie’s heart. And I still did want to win his heart. In a weird way, it was insanely cute how worked up he was getting on Meg’s behalf. Back home, if a girl’s neckline was so low you could see her …
bosom
, the only thing any guy might say would be “Lower! Lower!”

“Oh!” Laurie added, newly outraged. “I almost forgot: the Moffats nicknamed Meg ‘Daisy,’ of all things. Can you believe it? Daisy!”

Four, Laurie had something against nicknames, unless it was his own.

Oh, and five, I had the power to get Laurie to spill secrets.

Meg returned the next day, Saturday. She looked ragged and I thought she might be suffering from a hangover. Champagne’ll do that to a girl. Or so I’d heard.

Meg said she was happy to be home, even if home was unspectacular.

Marmee let that “unspectacular” pass.

But once Beth and Amy went to bed, Marmee was all ears, which was good, since Meg was suddenly all mouth.

“It was awful!” Meg echoed Laurie’s words to me from the day before. Then she confessed about the dress. “But that wasn’t the worst part. Oh no. The worst part was that at one point I heard Mrs. Moffat telling her girls how smart you are, Marmee, how you had such plans for us girls, chief among which was that we should all be kind to Laurie because he is rich, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if he married one of us!”

Well, when she put it like that, it didn’t sound like
such
a very awful idea. I mean, someone had to marry him.

“I would like to confront Annie Moffat!” Jo sprang from her chair.

Geez. What a hothead.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Marmee said.

“Marmee’s right,” Meg said, going on to add something about how she’d forget the bad, only remembering the good—
HA!
I thought.
As if that ever worked for anybody!
—and that she wouldn’t be dissatisfied with her life any longer.

HA!
again. I’d heard that kind of talk before. I’d
talked
that kind of talk before. I’d never been able to follow through, though.

“Of course, I must admit,” Meg said, “I did like being praised and admired.”

And cue the violins for a Marmee Speech …

It turned out that Marmee wanted Meg to be modest as well as pretty but that further, she did indeed have plans for us:

“… to be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and
sweetest thing which can happen to a woman”—
No wonder
, I thought,
girls get so guy-gaga they’ll do almost anything to get one; it’s because of stupid books like
Little Women
!
—“but if it doesn’t work out that way …”

Hey, what if I turned out to be the lesbian March girl? I bet that would screw up their story!

Never mind that, though.

Would it ever work out for me in the way that Marmee described?

Ten

Okay, maybe after getting upset about Marmee saying “… to be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman”—barf—it was hypocritical of me to change the way I dressed to suit a boy. If that’s the case, sue me. Anyway, there was a world of difference between Marmee’s version, in which the guy was the center of the universe, and mine, in which the guy was just a fun and interesting part of it.

Since learning that the wealthy boy next door didn’t like “fuss and feathers,” I’d started dressing down in order to attract Laurie’s attention. So far, that didn’t seem to be working, but it looked as though my new shabby dress might benefit me in another way. Now that it was fully spring, with longer afternoons for work and play, I’d discovered that the March girls all loved gardening. Every year, they were each given a plot of their own in the yard.

So one Saturday, having seen the others put on their shabby
attire too, I grabbed a little spade and followed them out to a square section on our small property that someone had staked out with wooden posts and twine.

“Oh, look!” Meg exclaimed. “My little orange tree is doing nicely! Now, about some roses …”

“I haven’t decided what to plant this year,” Jo said, rubbing her chin. “Maybe sunflowers? A whole plantation of them?”