get through my first day as a functioning, working member of the March family, subsisting on just that one turnover the entire day. I was sore. I was tired. And those King children—they were monsters!
While sewing after dinner that night, each sister recapped her day. Meg complained about ours and told the others about the oldest King boy being sent away for doing something “dreadful”—neither of us had been able to worm out of the other monster King children what that dreadful something was, but I had my suspicions, even if Meg didn’t. Jo complained about her day with Aunt March. (“Josy-phine!”) Amy complained about the teacher humiliating some chick at school. Beth didn’t complain about anything, instead telling us of seeing Mr. Laurence give a fish to some beggar woman at the market who’d been about to be turned away by the shopkeeper.
That’s when Marmee told all of us a fable about four—no, make that five girls who always complained, always saying “If only we could do this or have that,” until an old woman cast a spell over them so that in the future, whenever they became discontented, they would think over their blessings and be grateful … or they’d lose whatever good things they had.
I was sure there must be a moral in there somewhere, but for the life of me, I could not care less.
I was too busy trying to sew—when would I learn how to sew as well as the others? I wondered, pricking myself with the needle; not that I cared about sewing, but I was sick of having marks all over my hands—and my feet were still sore, my temper fried from dealing with the wretched King children.
And tomorrow I’d have to go with Jo to Aunt March’s.
Five
I settled in to my first week as the jack-of-all-trades.
On Tuesday I went to Aunt March’s with Jo. For once, Jo hadn’t exaggerated. Aunt March was as obnoxious as Jo said she was. And while whenever she bellowed “Josy-phine!” I laughed, it was substantially less amusing when she started bellowing “Emi-ly!” As my own mom used to say: “It’s always funny until it happens to you.” Still, Aunt March did nap often, and when she did, I followed Jo to the most amazing private library, where Jo showed me the one thing we really had in common: books. All those books made me itch to get back to writing.
Wednesday turned out to be the best day of the week, being at home with Beth. Yes, doing the housework was hard. There were no vacuum cleaners, no dishwashers or dryers, no laundry machines, no Dustbusters—everything had to be done by hand. My beautiful hands—honestly, I grumbled to myself, someone should have invented rubber gloves by now. And if doing the housework was hard, watching Beth play with her six dolls could be a little odd too. That limbless castoff she’d gotten from Jo, the one with no head—it was creepy! But that was Beth: she was capable of loving anything and everything, even the most loveless creatures, even me. And that was why it was the best day of the week, even if it was the hardest work and there were those creepy dolls: because a person couldn’t be around Beth and not feel a little more peaceful, a person couldn’t be around Beth and not feel inspired to be just a little better than the person they normally were.
You’d think that Thursdays with Amy would be the easiest of my jack-of-all-trades days since all I had to really do was walk her to school and then I was free until I had to pick her up later, and help her with her homework if necessary. But you’d be wrong. Thursday wound up being a loose-ends day for me, with me spending a good deal of it staring over the low hedge at the Laurence estate—a McMansion compared to the little brown March house—and wondering what went on inside there.
As for Friday … the others had grilled me on what I did on my free Fridays, but I still wasn’t saying, in large part because I hadn’t figured it out yet!
But then Saturday finally came and everyone was home again with lots to do.
At least, there should have been lots to do, except there wasn’t, because it turned out to be a blustery and snowy Saturday, leaving the others happy to do totally exciting activities, like reading and sewing.
All except for Jo, of course.
Meg was lying on