Jo & Laurie Read online

  “Weddings and balls and gardens and carriages, Jo.” Amy was quick to rattle off Meg’s particular specialties. “She’s written whole pages of them, in almost every issue of the Pickwick Portfolio—you know she has.”

  The Pickwick Club had been their favorite childhood game of all, writing news articles and bits of ephemera for their homegrown newspaper in the style of the characters in Dickens’s novel The Pickwick Papers. They all had roles: Meg as Mr. Pickwick; Jo, Mr. Snodgrass; Amy, Mr. Winkle; and even Laurie as Mr. Weller. Beth had been Tracy Tupman. The old Pickwick nicknames still occasionally reappeared, a lovely reminder of when all four sisters had been together. But that was long ago, now.

  Even so, every time any of them read a passage from Dickens—or “old Charley,” as Jo had a habit of calling him, as if he were a bosom friend rather than a writer she’d long idolized—it brought all those pleasant memories flooding right back.

  “Not whole pages, Amy.” Meg blushed.

  “Yes, pages, Mr. Pickwick,” Jo said, a bit shamefaced, because it was a truth among sisters—especially these sisters—that what could be said of one could be said at least partly of the others; Jo had dragged her sisters along into her writing attic garret, as often as not. “Old Winkle has a point.”

  “Only because you insisted, Mr. Snodgrass,” said Meg.

  “Very well.” Jo pulled herself to her feet. “It’s a story problem. Quite a lot of them, actually.”

  Meg nodded. “About?”

  “My sisters and their prospects. The March girls—I mean, the fictional variety.”

  “Prospects?” Amy sat up. “Go on.”

  Jo looked at Meg. “Am I really to do this with you? Here and now? In Vegetable Valley?”

  “Why ever not? Was I not your champion editor, Mr. Snodgrass?” Meg smiled. “Of all Pickwick’s most esteemed editorial board?”

  Jo’s face took on a suddenly grave expression. “Ah, most certainly, Mr. Pickwick! Most certainly, indeed.”

  “Then, proceed, dear Snodgrass. If I may call you that.” Meg lay back on her elbows, despite the garden mud, which was unlike her.

  “Very well, Pickwick. If we are not to stand on formalities.” Jo pointed to a nearby cabbage. “Let’s say that hideous deformed leaf-head is your future husband, John Brooke.”

  “Not again.” Meg twisted to have a better look at her leafy green ball of a suitor. “Please don’t, Jo. It’s so awkward. I’ve hardly spoken to him, and now half of Concord believes him to be my intended!”

  “Plus, he’s a cabbage!” Amy laughed.

  Meg rolled her eyes. “Must he be?”

  “Absolutely.” Jo plucked a long twig free from one of the saplings lining the muddy garden path. “Yes,” she repeated firmly.

  “What prospects!” Amy shook her head.

  “But that cabbage doesn’t look like Brooke.” Meg frowned.

  “Not a bit,” Jo said, feeling a bit cheerier now. “But he is . . . rather serious, like your John.”

  Meg looked distressed. “Jo, you know he is not my John and has never been! I can’t even look the man in the eye since your book was published.”

  Jo shrugged and ripped loose a fat, many-stalked rhubarb plant, tossing it into the dirt next to the cabbage. “And that’s you, Meg. You’ve put on a few pounds since the wedding. I suspect . . . well, yes, you’re with child.”

  “No!” Amy howled.

  “Already?” Meg pursed her lips. “Are you certain?”

  “As the grave.” Jo looked somber.

  “Ah, very well. A baby’s a blessing, as Mama says,” Meg said.

  “Babies. Twins, in fact.” Now Jo was almost enjoying herself.

  “Twins? Oh, Jo, that won’t be easy.” Meg grimaced. “What a thing to do to your sister.”

  “Horrid business.” Jo nodded.

  “Do they at least have names?” Meg asked. “My babies?”

  Jo picked up and swung a stick, beheading a daisy from the clipping garden on the other side of the path. “Daisy. That’s one.”

  “Daisy?! Why Daisy?” Amy began drawing daisies along the page.

  “I don’t know. I suppose because I could reach the daisies.”

  “Why not Rose?” Meg asked.

  “The roses are on the other side of the house. Do you really want to make me walk past the woodpile? It’s practically a mansion for spiders!” Jo swung the stick again, clipping off the tops of the basil bush.

  Meg tossed her rag back in the bucket. “Fair enough. Daisy, then. What about the other twin?”

  Amy scoffed. “The boy? Who cares?”

  “John Brooke the second. After his father,” Meg said, blushing as she bent back over her weeds. “We could call him Demi!”

  Jo pointed her stick at her elder sister. “Please don’t fall in love with your beloved imaginary baby’s fictional father, Meg. You’ll only regret it.”

  Amy looked interested. “Why not? What’s wrong with him?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. Perhaps he’s a terrible drunk. A terrible, stinking drunk!” Jo laughed.

  Meg was horrified. “Jo! No!”

  “Is he, Jo?” Now Amy was intrigued.

  “Of course not!” Meg looked appalled.

  “He is if I say he is.” Jo threw the twig as hard as she could, sending it flying into the trees. “See? This is why I didn’t want to have to write all this girlish nonsense!”

  Meg scrambled to her feet. “Those are my twins you’re talking about! That’s not nonsense, Jo!”

  “They’re a daisy and a . . .” Jo grabbed a stone from the path. “Rock.”

  Meg grabbed the rock from Jo’s hand. “You’re a horrid thing! I don’t want a rock for a son! That’s my Baby Brooke!”

  Jo shook her head. “You’re missing the point, Meg. Your family is happy. Daisy and Baby Brooke are the apples of your matronly bosom . . .”

  “Eye,” Meg corrected.

  “That, too. You live over there . . . in that shoe. Which is a cottage. A dovecote. You love it. You do all sorts of—I don’t know—sweeping and laundry and mending things there.”

  Amy watched as her big sisters negotiated Meg’s future family in the middle of the garden bed.

  “I see. Not a bad life. But what about you? Don’t you need a suitor?” said Meg.

  Jo laughed. “Me?”

  “Yes, you.” Meg folded her arms. “Since you have been so bold as to have married me off to a man who doesn’t even know my name, you need a suitor as well.”

  “She has a point,” Amy said. “Turnabout is fair play and all that.”

  Meg considered their middle sister. “Perhaps a professor.”

  “To ensure that I die of boredom?” Jo rolled her eyes. “Fine. Professor Bore.”

  Amy folded up her sketch-pad. “Bore isn’t a name. Bayer? Baer?”

  “Bhaer. There you go. He’s from Europe. Positively Continental. You’ll love him,” said Meg, pointing to a head of German lettuce. “Wait, not a professor, a prince!”

  “A prince? Whatever would I do with a prince?” Jo made a face.

  “What about me?” Amy demanded. “Can I at least go on a Grand Tour? I’ll meet the prince, and Jo can have the professor!”

  Jo looked at the vegetables. “Hmmm, it might work. Your husband, Prince Arthur?”

  Amy folded her arms. “No, I loathe the name Arthur. I’ve an idea! Laurie’s as rich as prince! What if we met over there? While I’m painting the Colosseum!”

  “But what about Arthur?” asked Meg.

  “Arthur . . . fell in a well . . . and broke his neck.”

  “How sad for him,” Jo said. “And for you.”

  “It was. I wept piteously and tremendously into my best lace handkerchief until Laurie came to console me in a horse and buggy with chocolates.
” Amy stuck out her chin. “I want Laurie.”

  “You can’t have Laurie,” Meg said. “It doesn’t work in the narrative. You and Laurie don’t even like each other all that much. Actually, I take it back about the German professor. Obviously, Jo has to marry herself off to Laurie.”

  “Obviously?!” Jo sat up, spluttering indignantly. “I do not!”

  “Jo does not!” Amy crowed, equally so.

  “In point of fact, Jo does.” Meg yanked a worm-ransacked, half-green tomato from the vine. “It’s written in the stars, just as Jo wrote about Roderigo of the North. In Act the Third, our scandalous Laurence Lovers elope, and it breaks Mama’s heart.”

  Jo was aghast. “Foul plagiarist! You can’t just steal Roderigo’s Act the Third!”

  Amy tossed her head. “I still think my ending is better.”

  Meg threw the rather sad-looking vegetable to a still red-faced Jo. “There you go. That’s a Jo March of a tomato if ever I’ve seen one.”

  Jo looked like she wanted to hurl the lopsided green orb at her sister’s linen-capped head.

  Amy giggled, in spite of her commitment to a good sulk. “You mean Jo Laurence, now that they’ve eloped.”

  “Christopher Columbus! Enough!” Jo roared. “No wonder they call you the weaker sex!”

  Amy and Meg burst out laughing.

  Jo’s pink-spotted cheeks were now bright red. “Fine. Take Laurie. I don’t want him. But you have to live here. I can’t write back and forth across a whole ocean and between two countries. I’ll be describing cities until the cows come home.”

  “What about Beth? What happens to Beth? In the book, I mean,” asked Amy. “Since she’s meant to be still alive in your book.”

  A momentary silence rose up between them. The elder March sisters looked at each other askance. How could they imagine a future without their sister? What would their lives have been like if she had lived?

  “Beth becomes a famous pianist, of course,” said Jo, staunchly.

  She tried not to think of Beth’s final days, of the way Laurie had played all her favorite melodies on her little piano, over and over and over—

  “A pianist? Of course,” said Amy, approvingly. “Which means she’ll be touring the world over, just like me. I’m a vray artiste, Jo. I’m not meant for Concord.”

  “If you stay, I’ll let you babysit the twins,” Meg said, attempting to sound cheerful, even though her face had gone decidedly pale. “Daisy and what’s-his-name. If you’re responsible. Twins are an enormous responsibility. You’d need to be patient, and kind.”

  Amy looked stricken.

  Meg faltered. “I mean, I’ll have to ask Brooke, but seeing as I’m the mother of his children . . .”

  Jo looked at Meg like she was speaking gibberish. “We’re talking about a rock and a daisy. I think Amy will be fine.”

  “I’m sure,” Meg said, brightly. “And I’ll show her what to do.”

  “Also? You probably die in childbirth, on account of the twins. I haven’t decided. But if that’s the case, Brooke will be eternally grateful for Amy—seeing as she’ll most likely be the only mother your poor children ever know. Perhaps they’ll even marry each other after you die.”

  “What?!” Meg and Amy both shouted.

  “You’re killing me off?!” Meg looked horrified.

  “You’re dooming me to twins?” Amy looked terrified. “Can’t I be the one to die?”

  “Fine! No one gets married in the sequel!” Jo huffed. “I shall write a Manifesto of Femality! One to rival Margaret Fuller’s own! Where women give themselves to service and to fulfillment of their art!”

  “Sounds terribly didactic,” said Meg. “And a bit dull.”

  Amy pouted. “No princes? No castles? No Laurie?”

  “None! As the author, after all, these decisions are best left entirely up to me.”

  “Like the limes?” Amy hissed.

  “And the borrowed dress?” Meg scoffed. “Or our dowager aunt?”

  “Exactly,” Jo said, rising to her feet. “Now off to the garret I go, to destroy your horrible lives.” She was feeling a bit better.

  A good scrap with her sisters was, at times, an even better distraction than rubbing tomato leaves.

  And as she savored the teacup-sized triumph of the writerly life, she wondered again how anyone could content themselves with any other sort of horrible life at all.

  5

  HOT AND COLD

  Perhaps one day you’ll be happy that the famed authoress Josephine March wrote you into her stories,” Laurie said, tugging on one of Amy’s curls, already damp with the unseasonably thick heat of the late-spring afternoon. It felt practically like summer.

  Amy had regaled Laurie with tales of their Vegetable Valley futures the entire way to the church picnic. Once they’d arrived, Meg had done her best to find a shady spot for their blanket, beneath the spreading oak trees—but even in the shade, this particular Saturday was unbearably hot. And even by Concord standards, any event hosted by the First Unitarian Congregation was certain to be a notoriously dull affair.

  “Stop!” Amy said, pulling her blond curls away. “I won’t. Besides, it’s no fun at all. Her versions of us aren’t proper versions. We’re all scrambled together and boiled down again . . . like syrup.”

  Laurie sat up, surveying the picnic spread Meg had laid out from Mrs. March’s hamper. “It doesn’t sound too bad, especially not when compared to my fictional future, which apparently includes moving back to Italy to become a musician and living the lonely life of a wandering wastrel. You don’t hear me complaining about it.” Jo had shared Laurie’s fate with him that morning.

  “Orphan wastrel,” Jo corrected. “And there may be a hump involved; it isn’t settled yet.”

  “Well, keep me informed, just so I know what size vests to buy. These sorts of topics aren’t addressed in Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society.”

  “Naturally,” Jo said soberly, only the merest twinkle in her eye acknowledging the game she shared, in perpetuity, with her bosom friend. “Speaking of complaints—how long must we stay here?”

  “Longer than this,” Meg said, surveying the crowded grass between their blanket and the church.

  “Fine.” Jo took a butter knife from the basket and turned to Laurie, who sat immediately next to her, as he always did. “Please plunge this butter knife through my heart, Laurie. I beseech you, dear boy.”

  “I will not,” Laurie said. “Stab it yourself.” He kept his head bowed beneath the straw hat he’d stolen off Jo’s own head, but his cheeks were still flushed a bright red. “Are you going to eat that lettuce? Trade you?”

  Jo tossed another piece of chicken down to his plate, which tipped unevenly on the blanket in front of him, spilling fried-chicken bones and butter-sandwich crusts. “But it would be a merciful death,” she said, reaching for the strawberry in Laurie’s hand.

  He pulled it away before she could take it. “What fun would that be? I live to punish you, my murderous pet.”

  “Oh, I know.” She reached over him to grab it in a most unladylike manner. “And you do it so well.”

  They laughed together. That was how dull the afternoon was.

  “Blazes!” Jo sighed.

  “Damnable blazes,” Laurie agreed.

  “Shush!” Meg hissed at them from her perch across the blanket, where she’d been doing her best to ignore the tomfoolery. “Stop it! You two cannot be yourselves at a church picnic! There are decent folk here.”

  “Any decent folk in particular, Meg?” Laurie teased.

  “Theodore Laurence,” Meg huffed. “Behave yourself!”

  Jo reached for the untouched chicken drumstick on Meg’s plate and stole it, taking a bite before she handed it over to Laurie. “Feed the beast and he’ll be quiet.”

  “Please,” he a
nswered, attacking the drumstick himself. “Well played.”

  “At least we won’t starve to death,” she consoled him.

  “No,” he said, his mouth full. “We’re more likely to die from the boredom first. Because this isn’t one of your stories. It’s Concord.” A bit of chicken fell to the blanket, and Meg made a face.

  “True.” Jo nodded, eyeing the crowd. “I’d give them all the Black Death. Buboes for the lot of them! That would spice up an afternoon.”

  “Only that?” Laurie grinned.

  Jo considered the crowd. “Give me a minute. Galloping consumption . . . and a raft of marauding pirates . . .”

  “You deserve each other, you monkeys. You’re unfit for company, especially a church social. At your age, you both should know better,” Meg grumbled.

  “He’s a year older. He’s worse,” Jo said, pointing at Laurie, who nodded agreeably.

  “Loads worse.”

  Even Amy, who had both shoes off now, looked at their older sister, annoyed. “We’re just trying to survive, Meg. You can’t expect les savages to have manners.”

  “Put your shoes on, you little heathen.” Meg was increasingly out of sorts, sitting stiffy in gloves and long sleeves and another one of her plain bonnets.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take your gloves off? You’re going to faint,” Jo said. “Then we’ll have to carry you home, which is difficult to do . . . properly.”

  Laurie eyed Meg. “I bet I could do it. Throw her over one shoulder?”

  Jo looked Meg over as well. “I suppose I could take the legs?”

  “Wouldn’t we just use a wheelbarrow?” Amy asked, shoving the last of the lettuce into her mouth. “I saw one over in the church shed.”

  Meg snapped, “No, thank you. No wheelbarrow will be required, and my gloves are not about to leave my fingers, as long as we are in mixed company—with gentlemen—at a church social.” Her bonnet bobbed with indignation.

  “Gentlemen? Here?” Laurie laughed.

  “She doesn’t mean you, you toad,” Jo said, poking him in the ribs.

  “Well, if this fine social occasion is meant for gentlemen, then can we be excused?” Laurie asked. “Since Meg wouldn’t let us swim in the creek in our knickers on the way here, I want to jump in the swimming-hole on the way home.”