JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  Two years before, in Europe, they’d passed a mourning party. Women in black shawls, rending their hair, hysterical in their grief. Midge had taken Mary’s hand and shuffled them along, eyes averted. But Mary had secretly turned to steal one more look. The women convulsed as they screamed and sobbed, exorcising the demon of their sadness. What freedom, Mary thought now, to feel so much, to love so deeply. Everything here was felt in secret, so she wasn’t sure if she felt anything at all. How would it be different if she were allowed to be hysterical about her mother’s death? What were the circumstances that would warrant such behavior? She knew those European women were expected to bear certain hardships without complaint. She knew that even as they wailed and howled, they were performing, artificially at times. The performance itself was a requirement of their sex. But wasn’t there still truth to it? In Europe, death was everywhere acknowledged, a question posed by each little candle lit at each cathedral, by the artwork and sculpture, the crucifixes, catacombs, and cemeteries. Not like here, Mary thought, not like in LeRoy, where the realness of her loss was tucked away, silenced by superficial assurances that her mother was in a better place, consolations like the sugary toppings and layers of mayonnaise on the Jell-O molds guests carried with them when they entered the house, offerings of perfect sweetness to Midge’s memory. Mary was fourteen now, nearly a woman. It was her job to accept these offerings, to smile and nod and assure the world she would manage her emotion, contain it inside her, a spell in a bottle, and shelve it away.

  Drinking helped. Everything about Midge’s funeral was punctuated by the glug of upended bottles. By nine a.m., Bob was chugging rye from a bottle stashed in the pantry; by ten, John had arrived and joined him. When the family left the house and headed to the funeral, the men reeked of it, caustic and tart.

  “Religion is for nutjobs,” Bob liked to say, but he cowed in the end to propriety. A generic service, fine. Mary sat next to him on the hard wooden pew, focusing on the only stained-glass window, a phoenix on a bed of fiery ashes, its wings half-spread, its talons uncurling. The bird was supposed to be hopeful, a symbol of rebirth. But Mary felt cheated by its false promise. She didn’t cry. But she must have worn an angry look because after the service she was pulled into the pantry just the same.

  “Here,” said Cousin John, craning his elbow around her shoulders, his forearm pressing into the back of her neck, “drink this.”

  She took a short swig from the bottle. The bourbon burned going down. “Not yet,” she said when John started to screw the cap back on. She took a glass from the shelf and held it out to him.

  They stayed there, in the pantry, for another glass, then another, hiding out, watching the caterers carry trays in and out of the dining room, the swinging door between kitchen and crowd clapping closed, and open again.

  Mary awoke in the late afternoon to the sound of the last guests still milling about downstairs, pots and pans clattering in the kitchen. Her cousin Joan was sitting in the armchair by the window, smoking a cigarette, which glowed with each drag she took. An angel’s heart, Mary thought as Joan stubbed it out. “You’re awake,” she said. “Welcome back.”

  Joan had always been distant, quiet at dinner parties and during holidays—if she showed up at all. But now she spoke to Mary with a soft familiarity, as if sickness and loss made her relatable. “If you need to throw up, you should,” she said, lifting the metal wastebin from its station beneath Mary’s bedside table and placing it at her feet. “It’ll make you feel better.” Joan smiled.

  Mary smiled back shyly, not sure if she could accept Joan’s help, not sure what she had to offer in return. It seemed Joan wanted nothing. She camped out at the house on East Main Street for days, doting on Mary in particular, waiting for her to return from school each afternoon, wrapping her arms around her in the night as she fell into heavy, dreamless sleep. “You should get out of here,” Joan said one morning, seated by the window in her nightgown, dragging on her cigarette. “Go to Europe for school, why don’t you? Find work you like, depend on yourself. Don’t stay in LeRoy. And don’t,” she added, stubbing her smoke into an ashtray, “drink so much. Trust me,” she said. “It never turns out well.”

  After Midge’s death, time sped up, a blur of days and nights beginning and ending. Joan left abruptly one afternoon while Mary was at school. The next morning another cousin, Betty, cleaned out Midge’s closets, scooping nylon stockings into bags, sweeping bottles of nail polish into shoe boxes. She left only Midge’s bathrobe, her jewelry, and her ivory-handled hairbrush with irises carved into its hilt. Bob seemed to like it better this way, absent any reminders of his wife. He began making the cocktail-party circuit, taking Mary along as a date. She, in turn, asked to invite John.

  The parties were always the same. Someone’s living room, someone’s bar cart, no one speaking Midge’s name, Bob drinking bourbon after bourbon, leaning on Mary as she helped him back to the car—John suddenly nowhere to be found—then driving him home. It was as if her mother had been erased. It was as if Mary were entirely alone. Well, she thought, if this is how it has to be now, I might as well embrace it. She imagined boarding school, a new life as a new girl, as she squinted at the road, seesawing the wheel to stay straight.

  Even though John was prone to disappearing, he made the parties bearable. When his attention was turned on her, Mary felt the world melt away. When he was distracted, roped into a conversation, or dancing with one of his many admirers, there was always a drink to be had. They went hand in hand, Mary’s handsome cousin and the gin and tonics she had begun to crave around four each afternoon. She held her glass in one hand as John twirled her, sometimes even pressing his nose into her neck when he thought nobody was watching.

  “He’s making a fool of you,” Tom said. But Mary only shrugged.

  “I’ll be gone in September anyway,” she said. She couldn’t wait to pack her things and leave.

  9

  Thanksgiving that year, the first without Midge, was served at John and Jessie’s house in Rochester. John sat next to Mary for the whole cocktail hour, elbows on his knees, a squat glass of bourbon cradled in his hands, asking her about boarding school. “Your mother would be proud,” he said when she struggled to answer, his hand on her forearm, his eyes not wavering from hers.

  It had been a six-hour train ride from Kent Place School back to LeRoy, and Mary’s body buzzed with pent-up energy. Even at school she felt this way, trapped. Her room was small, puritanical in its whiteness. She was one of forty boarding students and one of only seven freshmen; most of the students commuted from home. This might have created a close community, she’d thought, but for most of her first semester at Kent Place, she’d found herself alone, mechanically following rules and routines she wasn’t subject to at home. Set mealtimes and bedtimes, curfews, a strict visitation policy that prevented boarders from leaving campus.

  So Mary had to search for something to tell John about Kent Place. There was little she could tell him that wasn’t deeply private, somehow indecent to reveal. She’d taken Midge’s ivory hairbrush from home, and it was her most important possession besides her books. After lights-out, wrapped in her quilt, she secreted novels and contraband cartons of crackers into the bathroom. She padded the bathtub and made a nest there. She preferred books to sleep. In books, she forgot about herself, her mother, whom she encountered in dreams, transformed into a vampire, a witch, hungry for her own daughter’s blood. In class, she argued with her teachers, disputing their claims about places in Europe she’d already been, novels she’d already read. She simmered in her own rising rage and was called impertinent and rude. In etiquette class, she was told to slow down and, for heaven’s sake, to keep her mouth closed. Her only escape was literature. She favored the classics, burning through all of Dickens and the Brontës in her first year. She loved the weight of the books in her lap, the thin pages painting her stories of poverty and romance and the Gothic occult, its crosses to bear and crises of faith.

 
So what could she tell Cousin John? The truth was that Mary wanted to be wanted, irresistible, a heroine. She wanted to be seen. And now, sitting in front of him, his attention burning into her, she thought of how often, on those lonely nights in the boarding school bathtub, she’d fantasized about him.

  No one at Kent Place knew about her mother. If they did, it was an afterthought, something they expected her to process and be done with. There is an expiration date on sadness, she’d learned. There is an expectation that one must move on, get over it, accentuate the positive. The passion and pain and periods of mourning in the novels she read were a fiction; they weren’t allowed in her world. Except with John. With him she felt justified in her grief, how it made her want to rend her garments, to rage. He seemed to understand this impulse.

  “Mary.” Jessie’s voice punctured her thoughts. John’s hand flew from Mary’s arm, recoiling instinctively. “Would you gather up the drink orders?”

  “Of course,” Mary said, seething on the inside. She rose, smoothing her skirt and walking around the room asking, “May I get you a drink?” the way Midge taught her, then retreating to the pantry to fill the orders. In the glass doors of the liquor cabinet, she looked at her own sallow face. It was a sad face, she thought. It was the face of someone alone in the world. But the next moment, John’s reflection joined hers in the glass pane. And then his hands were on her shoulders, turning her around to face him. And then his lips were on her lips, erasing every other feeling. And then there was only the brush of skin, the ache of it.

  Back at Kent Place, she reclined, resplendent on her bed, surrounded by her dorm sisters, regaling them with stories of her dashing cousin John. They put their hands over their mouths when she detailed how he’d kissed her, hard and wet and wanting.

  Suddenly she was popular. Suddenly the other girls on the floor wanted her counsel and friendship. In the months that followed, they started calling her Mother Mary for the way she held court on her bed, inviting them to her inner sanctum to hear tales of her exploits with John, to confess their troubles and receive her advice. She nurtured them, giving—and receiving—the attention she craved herself. It was only natural that sometimes she scandalized them. But so what? She hoped she did. She meant to be motherly and bad. Honest with the girls the way Midge never was with her. She chain-smoked and said hell and damn, later adding shit and fuck with abandon. She signed the logbook, saying she’d be staying with a day student who lived just down the street, but really she was on the train to New York, sandwiched in between two other bad girls, whispering dirty jokes, cracking into laughter that made the other passengers, the men in suits and the women in their pillbox hats, turn around and stare. In the city, the girls walked Fifth Avenue, holding their purses with white-gloved hands. They mimed the postures of the mannequins in the windows at Bendel’s and Saks. It was 1961, the era of circle skirts and wide shawl collars, silk turbans and furs, items the girls coveted as talismans of the womanhood they were entering into. Sometimes, inside the gilded gold doors, they had their makeup done, sitting like dolls for the powder-faced women who plucked and puffed and primped them to perfection. Sometimes Mary bought rouge or lipstick, sometimes a sweater, something functional and warm for the cold New Jersey winter. Sometimes, though, she slipped a folded scarf into her handbag, sometimes an extra set of gloves.

  The girls called themselves the Klepto Club. For the most part, they perpetrated their crimes in Summit, celebrating their hauls at the local soda fountain after a successful steal. But then word got out that someone had snitched, that the headmistress was hot on their trail, and Mary knelt over the toilet, unraveling her one big take, a navy-blue cashmere sweater, the soft strands of which she flushed away.

  After that she changed her ways. The only thing worse than staying at Kent Place was getting kicked out. Especially now that a new girl had arrived on her floor. Judy was from Alaska. Small and blond, but tough, she wore her outsider identity unmistakably, like a scratchy tag sticking from the collar of her dress. Mary couldn’t stop staring at her. When Judy looked back, it was with an expression of anger and then recognition.

  Late at night the two girls sat cross-legged on Mary’s bedroom floor, wrapped in their quilts, a flashlight in the circle’s center, while Judy pried the lid off a can of smoked Portlock salmon, sent all the way from a place called Squeaky Anderson’s in Cordova, Alaska. She was full of stories: family fishing dates and grizzly bear attacks. The only thing she rarely spoke of was her mother, dead of cancer, just like Midge. Mary never pushed it—what was there to say? She knew what it felt like inside the mind of a motherless girl. Long stretches of icy numbness inside and then rage, fear, and a dull longing for something she knew she could never have.

  Sometimes on weekends or vacations, the girls went to LeRoy or visited Judy’s grandmother, a wealthy old woman with a house in Summit. Sometimes they drew apart and Mary took the train home alone, returning each time to a town unchanged by her absence, her mother’s absence. There were the same red and yellow leaves, the same neat piles of them on the lawn outside each house; the same kids hanging out at the soda fountain on Main Street, ringing the jingle bells hung on the door each time they entered or left. The same pillows on her bed, the same dolls on the shelf. It made sense, then, that she half expected to find Midge at her writing desk, licking envelopes, signing her name in that delicate draw of ink so unique to her.

  There were some small changes, of course. The absence of a photograph that made Bob weep, the presence of empty Scotch bottles stacked beside the trash bin. Without Mary in the house, Bob and Tom had let Elfrida go. “No!” Mary cried when Tom told her nonchalantly the afternoon he picked her up for a long weekend home. “How could you?” she demanded, her voice growing higher, thinner, threatening to shout. “Why didn’t you think to ask me?” Tom shrugged and said nothing. He was getting taller now, although not by much. In the wide-openness of his face, Mary thought she’d seen a lessening of something, the sibling rivalry they’d carried on for years, maybe. But now he seemed unfeeling again. She stared at him, wishing her eyes could bore holes into his face, to get at the feeling beneath the wooden mask he’d assumed.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess she was sick.” He kept his eyes on the road. “I actually think she might have died.”

  Mary lost her breath as her anger turned to shock, her whole body dropping suddenly downward, as if swept through a trapdoor, out of the car, out of LeRoy, into a blackness where she floated, fluid and afraid.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’m remembering now, she died.”

  For a long moment Mary was silent, her face blank and seized up, as if possessed. But she shook herself back to the car and her brother’s impassive expression, which filled her with a feral urge to strike him. Instead she struck herself, pounding her fists hard into her thighs and repeating, “Why the hell didn’t someone let me know?” as she sobbed, releasing everything she’d tucked tightly into the box behind her solar plexus, the same place she hid all the feelings she’d learned were unutterable.

  “Jesus Christ, Mary,” Tom said, glancing over at her as if she were deranged. “We didn’t want to bother you.”

  She was crying in loud, violent gasps, but by the time they arrived home, she was calm again, everything siphoned back into the box where it was hidden, safe. Mourning was a luxury she couldn’t afford. To dwell on her loss, her anger, her fear of death, would only drive her mad, she told herself as she climbed from the car, grabbed her suitcase from the trunk. But she couldn’t help but think of the Jell-O curse Cousin John had warned her of. It was the men who were vulnerable, he’d said. But Mary was beginning to suspect it was the other way around.

  She spent the afternoon in her room until Tom’s voice called through the door. “Stop sulking,” he said. “John’s here.”

  “Shit shit shit,” she muttered as she dug through her suitcase, looking for her best dress, the dark-blue one with the tight waist, the tapered skirt. When she found it,
she pulled the hem to loosen the wrinkles. “Oh well,” she said to no one as she stepped into it, contorting her arms to work the zipper. She’d seen John once since the kiss, and he hadn’t repeated it. But she wished he would with a longing that felt like sorrow and joy compressed into a single, smarting bruise, pulsing to be pressed. In the bathroom she patted her hair with water and Royal Crown hair cream, the only thing that even began to keep her dry curls looking combed out and straight. She dug a pill bottle from her ditty bag and shook two Dexedrines into her palm.

  The Dex had come from the mother of a day student, who had given them to Mary, along with a random array of other diet pills. “I can easily get more,” the mother had said, handing her several bottles and winking. “A girl’s got to keep her figure—better to be looked over than overlooked.” The mother, it seemed, felt that Mary’s best investment was to sculpt the outlines of her body. Mary had potential, so she shouldn’t waste it: diets and trim figures were regimens to be maintained no matter what.

  With the pills, Mary had shed pounds like they were a second skin, a buffer between her body and the world. She hungered for nothing and wanted for nothing. Her breath was shallow, her heartbeat quick. Her hands shook. She stayed up late reading, avoiding sleep and nightmares of her mother. In class she tapped her pencil manically on her desk. Suddenly other girls envied her body, which had shrunk around the waist and face, giving her the hourglass figure of a movie star in only a month’s time. You’re so tiny, the girls pouted, putting their hands on her waist, then doing the same to themselves, comparing. Men stared more than ever now. They called to her from cars when she walked into Summit on the weekends. Hey, baby, hey, sweetie, hey, sexy. But now that she was home in LeRoy, no one seemed to notice. Not Tom and certainly not Bob, who had looked at her when she came in from the car with the same glazed-over eyes he turned on everything since Midge’s death.