JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  The children stared at him, confused. His description of the curse was abstract and unclear. But in years to come, it would haunt my mother, who came to fear the curse because she was a woman, not despite it. The curse, she told me, was the very attitude Cousin John—like most men—took toward women, an attitude reflected by the messages about women and their worth that her family sold with each box of Jell-O. The curse was the myth that the love and approval of a man like John was something to be earned, something that would bring us women all the happiness we could ever dream of. This myth was, my mother believed, particularly strong in LeRoy, the culture of which was so small-minded and nostalgic and terrified of change that it pressured women into prescribed roles, stifling their voices and making them sick.

  As a child, though, Mary was told she was exempt. She was safe, protected by the men in her world. “Don’t worry, Mona,” Cousin John said, “I’ll keep you safe.” But what happened when he was gone? She thought of her uncle Frank, who, two years earlier, facing financial hardship brought on by two divorces and ill-advised spending, had plummeted off the roof of the Sheraton. His death had been a confirmation of exactly what John was speaking of, the long-held idea among the Woodwards that the curse killed all the men in their family. It wasn’t just the idea of losing John that lodged itself icily into my mother’s young heart; it was her terror that, though she was a girl, the curse would get her, too. That she’d be the first to break the mold.

  Cousin John scared Mary, but she loved him, loved the thin wave of excitement that shot up her spine each time he called her Mona. “And what about you, Mona,” he’d say whenever she showed up at his side, the top of her head level with his waist. He’d reach down and run his hands through her curls as if he were petting some favored object. “You’re marriage material, Mona,” he’d say. “If I weren’t already taken, I’d scoop you up this instant.” He’d wink at her, and she’d smile shyly, gazing up his long torso to his face—handsome, she thought, like a movie star’s—and the perfect sweep of his dark-blond hair, which caught the light and shone.

  Around Cousin John, Mary imagined herself desired, a femme fatale like the women she saw in the movies. She imagined herself in furs and dresses that hugged her body scandalously tight. And she would have a ring, Mary decided. Not a ruby, like her mother, but a yellow diamond, a canary rimmed in white. She would wear it proudly, showing it off all over the world, which she would travel like an actress, an artist, someone free from the confines of a small town like LeRoy.

  * * *

  In 1955, Aunt Edith died and Mary turned ten. She began to fake sick, staying home from elementary school to hole up in bed with a cardboard box full of paper dolls. Her little kneecaps stood up to make silky white mountaintops for her dolls to traverse. When they fell, they lost limbs, amputations Mary doled out methodically with a pair of scissors from her art kit. This, she told herself, was their punishment. This was what they deserved for trying to escape the white-linen world she’d built for them. She was obsessed with justice and retribution, concepts that had boggled her mind since the 1950 arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, betrayers of America. Mary knew only a few details of the case—clips of information from the nightly news, snippets of conversation she overheard at cocktail hour. But she couldn’t forget Ethel’s unfocused gaze in the booking photos, published in the Batavian, or the reports that surfaced, following Ethel’s 1953 execution, that after three shocks her heart still beat and smoke rose from the dry nest of her hair. It all seemed so horrific, so possible. A nightmare that could happen to anyone. The Rosenbergs had used a cut-up Jell-O box to commit their unforgivable crime. Mary had seen it, Imitation Raspberry held up to the courtroom by the U.S. attorney. What if he suspected her family, too? Just last month, her fourth-grade teacher had called her a Communist and sent her to the principal’s office for repeating what Bob had said the night before: “This McCarthy guy’s a hack.”

  After that, news of her alleged Communism had spread like wildfire throughout the school and persisted, even as a year passed and she graduated to the fifth grade. Tom was embarrassed by her. Mary herself felt haunted by a shame so deep it was animate, shaped like the specter of the Rosenbergs, like the gray-and-black figure of Joseph McCarthy, who had appeared on the television each night for years, his eyeglasses in one hand, his body hunched around a microphone.

  The world shifted often in those days, characterized by falsities and false binaries. The bombers were coming but never came. Elfrida was considered less than, dumb and different, but was the kindest person in Mary’s world, the only one who seemed to care. Tom was her brother, bound by blood but so cold that she sometimes imagined his contempt seeping through the walls of the house, snaking around drywall, wood, and stone. But the greatest pain came not from Tom but from two of his friends, who, in the weeks after her trouble at school, began to open Mary’s bedroom door after she’d gone to bed.

  She’d taken to sleeping in her dress-up clothes, falling into dream as Cleopatra one night, a gypsy queen the next. But when the boys arrived, they stripped away her layers, her imagined womanhood, touching and examining her with expressions of quiet concentration. When they left she was ashamed, unable to speak, to shout the way she wanted to. She’d learned what talking could do.

  One night she awoke to the squeak of her bedroom door. She kept her eyes closed, pretended to sleep, even as she felt a body enter the room, felt herself go rigid with expectation and dread. The boy climbed up on the side of her twin bed and slowly, trying not to wake her, reached his hands under the covers. She felt his fingers draw the hem of her nightgown carefully up her thighs. She kept her eyes squeezed shut. A floorboard squeaked in the hall, a pipe ticked in the ceiling above. The boy stopped moving. Mary opened her eyes, looked up at the shadow leaning over her.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, almost comfortingly. “Be really quiet.” She nodded. She had done this before. She knew to say nothing, to wait for him to finish, to ignore his fingers and the other soft and clammy parts of himself he placed in her hands, as if she would know what to do, as if her touch could unlock some purpose that seemed as much a mystery to him, Mary thought, as it felt to her.

  The boy was seated beside her, touching her beneath the blanket, when Mary heard the footsteps. The boy didn’t seem to notice. Not until the door swung open did he freeze. Mary curled into a tight ball, hiding her face in her hands, opening her fingers just enough to see Elfrida standing in the doorway, blocking the hallway light almost entirely, its glow making shapes out of the dips and curves of her silhouette. The boy slowly turned to look at her. “Get the hell out of here!” she screamed. “Get out!”

  Elfrida told Midge what she’d seen, not quite sure what to expect. Midge loved Tom and Mary. But there was a reservation to her, a deep sense of decorum. She blushed easily at the bodily functions other mothers were inured to. And she avoided conflict, even with her own children. Elfrida probably wasn’t surprised when, after that night, they never spoke of Mary and the boy again.

  “Thank you, Elfrida” was all Midge said. “I’ll handle it from here.”

  She climbed the stairs to bed, aware that her daughter’s pain was now another burden for them both to carry. She tucked it up inside herself, resolving never to mention it again, not even to Bob. His temper ran hot, especially after so many bourbons, and she could imagine him confronting the boy, wrenching him from sleep, throwing him out the door. She could imagine having to explain the embarrassing details of Bob’s anger to the boy’s parents. But something had to be done.

  Perhaps, Midge reasoned, leaving LeRoy would solve Mary’s problems. But boarding school seemed too painful a separation for her sensitive daughter, who was still so young. And wouldn’t the whole family benefit from time away?

  “The children should see the world,” she said to Bob one morning, floating the idea of a year abroad. He agreed instantly, eager himself to leave LeRoy. What was all their wealth for, he boomed, if not for an adventu
re like this?

  The plan developed quickly—a year in Europe as a family, a Volkswagen bus, a tutor—but the preparations were endless, maddening, and sometimes Midge wondered if they were worth it. But then she reminded herself of the weightlessness of travel, the world outside LeRoy; and the boys, little Mary prone in the dark.

  She called friends and friends of friends, universities and boarding schools, looking for someone single but trustworthy to travel with them. Her search led to Mr. Ward Smith, soft voiced and cosmopolitan, who’d taught for years in Istanbul but lived now in New York. She hired him at once. She phoned Volkswagen and bought a bus they could pick up in Marseilles; she booked hotels in different cities and passage on an ocean liner. In October of 1957, she handed the keys to 141 East Main Street to the tweed-clad young couple who would be renting it, and the family left LeRoy.

  * * *

  Was the sea for Mary a balm? Stinging at first, but good, like salt poured in a wound to sterilize it, make it clean? Twelve years old now, she still dreamed of the boys and their black-magic shadows looming at her bedside. But as days passed on the ocean, her nightmares lessened. She rose each morning to walk the deck with her father, hinging her arm neatly into the crook of his elbow. They hung over the ship’s railing, pointing out slivers of sunlight on the water or looking for the horizon, which disappeared into the ocean each morning, the two surfaces reflecting each other.

  6

  During the Second World War, when sugar was war-efforted into ration, Jell-O advertisements assured anxious cooks that the challenge was simply further incentive to make the Jell-O that was available even prettier. Pour it into the most elaborate molds! Bedizen it with the tastiest fruit and fixings! To help, General Foods produced promotions like Bright Spots for Wartime Meals, a 1944 Jell-O cookbook designed to advise those struggling under rationing. Bright Spots featured a new brand ambassador—another approximation of femininity based on a cartoonish outline of a woman’s character. Plump and perky faced, housewife Victorianna is seen throughout the book pondering what to make. On one page she leans into her refrigerator, searching for solutions, clever tricks to disguise her lacking pantry. On the next she whips up miracles, presents them to a table full of guests. Her corpulent body presides over every meal, promising the bounty her country can’t provide. But she never thinks about all that. She just lifts the dashed-off lines of her eyebrows, curls her shaded lips into a U. The dots of her eyes hang like pencil pokes, promising simplicity and stability, the sureness of order and routine. Follow these simple steps, she chirps, and everything will be just fine!

  And what sweet victory when Victorianna was right! The steps worked, the war ended. America entered into a more prosperous economic state, and Victorianna’s role shifted, changing with Jell-O’s, which in turn became utterly dependent on the country’s burgeoning domestic-science movement.

  Fronted by women and born of the Industrial Revolution, the assembly line, and the space race, the domestic-science movement maintained that science and technology, when applied to housework and meal preparation, could simplify housekeeping, nourish families, and eradicate germs and sickness entirely. Previous generations of housekeepers (i.e., previous generations of women), as well as antiquated European practices such as sweeping and handwashing, were to blame for unkempt, disorderly homes and the familial illnesses, addictions, and poverty they begot. In fact, all societal ills could be traced to the failings of women, and it was the job of modern wives and mothers to atone for the past, to streamline outdated housekeeping methodologies, to make a science of domestic labor.

  Of primary importance was the control of food, which in its natural state was unclean and disorderly. And so it must be encapsulated, hidden in neat vessels, decorated to appear palatable. Jell-O, of course, was an imperative tool. But mayonnaise, for example, became another ingredient scientific cooks saw as indispensable. It was not uncommon to see chicken or tuna disguised by mayo, congealed with Jell-O, then shaped into the specter of the animal from which it originated. Consumers wanted the shadow of a thing, cleaner somehow in its transparency, but not the thing itself.

  The more food could be processed and contained, domestic scientists reasoned, the easier it was to safely administer. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Makes the medicine appealing, familiar, even, the further alienated it is from its original source: nature.

  Even before industrialization pushed American housewives into the kitchen, salad preparation was considered the purview of the lady of the house, not a hired cook or maid. Plucking and carving could be left to the help. But only a lady could rein in and refine the fruits of the earth. Salads were enmeshed with nature, which was in turn enmeshed with femininity (a correlation often detrimental to women throughout the ages), and the addition of a salad course not only rounded out a meal but also feminized it. Light and decorative, clean and delicate—these were the attributes a salad, and a lady, should possess. The production of a salad too beautiful to eat was the epitome of success for modern domestic scientists and contributed to the widely circulated notion that women’s appetites were as dainty as the salads and desserts they labored over. Anemic girls and women, green with chlorosis—a pallor considered beautiful—were the norm in the late 1800s, and although future generations of women consumed more meat, a bloodthirsty young lady was, and perhaps still is, considered unnatural.

  Jell-O’s light and dainty demeanor fit well with the dietary restrictions of girls and women in the 1800s and 1900s. Advertisements heralded its low caloric composition (calories also being a modern scientific revelation), and recipe books came equipped with charts outlining the correct serving sizes for Jell-O desserts, salads, pies, and so forth. In the wake of the Second World War, advertisements continued to market Jell-O as uniquely American but also uniquely healthy.

  Gone were the days when the full-figured Victorianna was needed to comfort anxious Americans, who, confronted by their dark and empty pantries, feared scarcity and hunger. Now, America had more bounty than it knew what to do with, and the country turned to women’s bodies to reflect the necessary restraint. So it wasn’t long before Jell-O’s low-cal reputation was bolstered by a new, sugar-free variety, D-Zerta. Made with saccharin, D-Zerta clocked in at ten calories per serving, one-eighth the amount in regular Jell-O. “It takes a lot of willpower to keep counting calories,” bemoans a thin blonde in a TV ad spot. She sits in the foreground of a child’s birthday party, watching glumly as a similarly slender brunette frosts a chocolate cake. “Yeah, I know,” her companion commiserates. “But give up dessert? Not me! Not when I’ve got D-Zerta!” D-Zerta, she informs her friend, handing her a dessert cup full of trembling pink, is sugar-free and low-cal. “I can treat myself to D-Zerta whenever I want,” she says, the kids milling frantically in the background, “and not feel guilty.”

  7

  In Europe, Bob and Midge took the children everywhere with them. Gone were the evenings out alone. Everyone went to the nightclub. Everyone drank the red wine and danced shoulder to shoulder on the packed floor until two in the morning. In Paris and Pisa and Rome, the family took separate paths through cathedrals and ruins, intersecting with each other from time to time. Mr. Smith circulated, whispering his lessons to the children, remarking on buttresses and stained glass to Midge and Bob. He often found Mary alone, sitting in a quiet spot and drawing her view in the small leather notebook Midge had given her. She journaled in images, chronicled her memories in the details of people’s faces, the patterns in the tiles; she imitated the sculptures and facades she saw, imagining someday she might make art herself, not knowing she already was. She sent letters home to her best friend, Marcia, the margins filled with sketches of dancing women with full skirts and cleavage, their dresses always colored in bright shades of orange or red or green. These women, unlike any Mary had seen before, took root in her mind. They seemed so confident in their bodies, their voices, which boomed in greeting or insult to the other women they passed, the leering
men. They were peasants, but to Mary they seemed like priestesses, imbued with a power to speak that traced straight back to divinity.

  At night Mary sat on the window ledge of her hotel room, watching the winter rain fall outside, formulating a future for herself in the image of the women she admired. She would be thirteen soon. Her body was changing, and she was hyperaware of its newness. Men stared. “Che bella!” they called from across the street, blowing her kisses even as she walked arm in arm with her mother. She didn’t know what to do when this happened. She thought of the women and sensed she’d soon need their magic, a deep, feminine witchcraft. At night she sat up while Tom slept and looked at herself, her own soft reflection in the lamplit windowpane, like something newly pieced together, something that had been shattered, then saved.

  One room over, alone in her bathroom, Midge ran her hands down her neck and along the soft slope of her breasts, tracing new lines, new skin loosened by a weight loss she couldn’t explain.

  * * *

  The nightmare began in Rome. Midge stayed in bed, pleading exhaustion and a headache. “A trip to the doctor’s wouldn’t hurt,” Bob said, and it was decided; the next morning, she went. “I’m feeling much better,” she said when she returned. They were at dinner, everyone drinking red wine. “Mary, darling,” Midge said, changing the subject, catching her daughter as she reached for the carafe, “how about a little shopping tomorrow?”

  They ventured out the next morning. “A dress, certainly,” Midge said, “but undergarments, too.” She steered her daughter into a small lingerie shop. “It’s time for a brassiere,” she practically whispered, flushing a little red as she touched Mary’s arm. She stood by and watched as a wrinkled Roman woman measured Mary’s waist and bust, the latter of which grew, it seemed to Midge, daily. She wasn’t surprised when Mary fit into a C-cup brassiere. How could she have waited so long for this?