JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  This is a work of nonfiction. Certain names have been changed.

  Copyright © 2018 by Allie Rowbottom

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph by Jamie Chung; Jell-O mold by Maggie Ruggiero

  Back cover photographs © Wellcome Collection

  Author photograph by Willy Busfield

  Cover © 2018 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: July 2018

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  ISBN 978-0-316-51063-9

  E3-20180605-DA-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Book I 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Book II 15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Book III 28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  Author’s Note

  Much of this book is memoir. To write it, I relied on my own present recollections of experiences over time. Elsewhere, I relied on my mother’s memory, as recounted to me through the years and as conveyed in her writings. All memories are subjective and affected by time, and I suspect that my mother would be the first to point that out, as well as to offer additions and amendments to the story I’ve told here. I am confident, though, that I have been true to her own sense of herself and to her story as I came to know them.

  Like many memoirists, I have chosen to change some names and characteristics, compressed or omitted some events, and re-created dialogue.

  For Mary

  Prologue

  She leaned forward, mouth opened for the wobbling pink Jell-O I steered toward her. “Here comes the Jell-O train,” I sing-songed, as if she were a child and I her mother, piloting a spoon into my baby’s mouth. She kept her lips closed over a laugh, focused on swallowing, and said nothing.

  Across the room the TV flashed images of a Main Street somewhere in America, a dilapidated factory. Faded red brick, a smokestack, and a plaque: The Jell-O Company, 1900–1964. My mother gestured, mouth still full, pointing at the screen, suddenly frantic.

  “Today we’re revisiting LeRoy, New York,” the newscaster said. “Birthplace of Jell-O, where, in late 2011 and early 2012, a group of girls suffered mysterious Tourette’s-like symptoms with no known cause.”

  The camera cut to old footage of the girls, seated around a table, twitching, holding their own hands to stop themselves from flailing. Their eyes were rimmed in black liner. Their hair was neatly swept into headbands. Their lips were glossy and pink. Their mothers sat beside them, tensed against the camera’s gaze, as if reined in to compensate for their daughters’ unbounded bodies.

  We had followed the story closely, my mother and I. The mystery of Katie Krautwurst, a senior at LeRoy High School, who, in October 2011, awoke from a nap with her chin frozen. It jutted from her face at an unnatural angle. Her face was in spasm, her whole body twitching. Weeks later, her best friend, Thera, took a nap and woke up similarly altered. She, too, was ticking, throwing her arms, jerking her head, stuttering.

  The girls were both popular, both cheerleaders. Both had neatly conformed to the ideal of girlhood in their community, where the football team reigns supreme and Jell-O salads are still served on holidays and at local church potlucks. And the other girls, the girls who followed, also falling asleep, also awakening changed: those girls were cheerleaders, too. But after a while the numbers grew and the symptoms spread. Quiet girls like Lydia Parker were afflicted, too. One girl wasn’t a girl at all but a thirty-six-year-old woman, a nurse.

  About this “mystery illness” the media said many things. They said This is how it all started and then offered theories of train wrecks and toxic spills, black mold in the classrooms, witchcraft in the woods. They said There is no end in sight and talked about the diagnosis—conversion disorder, mass psychogenic illness—but always with a disbelieving tone, their faces floating on the television screen, disembodied heads in small side-by-side boxes. On other shows, the girls sat on sofas beside their mothers, answering questions and twitching more violently the more they spoke. “I know my daughter,” Thera’s mother said. “She’s a normal happy girl. There must be something physically wrong with her.” The mothers insisted, and the girls all agreed. A refrain emerged: they wanted the world to know they weren’t crazy.

  “Before this,” Thera stuttered, arms flailing as she started to speak, “I was fine.” As she convulsed, the other girls began to as well, their movements picking up until the couch was rocked by the violence of their bodies.

  We weren’t afraid of them, though the nation was. In the years approaching my mother’s death, she and I were fixated on these girls. We talked about every unfolding aspect of their story. Hours on the phone about their lives, about our lives, about how our histories were entwined, about how we were implicated. How this “mystery illness” was a part of a system of symbolism, one older than us, older than Jell-O, consumerism, and America itself. One older even than witchcraft. One as old as men and women and words. This illness and its attendant metaphors, my mother told me, were what she’d been trying to write about all these years. This, she said, was why she’d started her memoir in the first place.

  She pronounced memoir with a soft r—memwah—and talked about hers constantly. In fact, the book, almost as old as I was, sometimes seemed to me like my mother’s second child, and I resented her flourished memwah for all the years she spent writing it, all the years she spent away from me. But until I got older, I never thought of her book the way she did: as a spell she wrote to stop her family curse and save herself.

  Her writing would reclaim her life story, she believed, and the story of her mother before her. Her writing would become a counter-curse.

  * * *

  We come from Jell-O. It is our birthright, bought by my mother’s great-great-uncle by marriage for $450 in 1899 and sold twenty-six years later for $67 million. Jell-O money paid my mother’s health insurance. It many times bought my ticket to her beds
ide in the cancer ward at Mount Sinai, where in the winter of 2015 we watched the girls of LeRoy, searching for glimpses of ourselves.

  Even so, my mother rarely ate the stuff. She saw Jell-O as an effigy of a curse she longed to escape. An apron, a kitchen, and long hours spent molding the perfect dessert had always seemed a cage to her, and she dreamed of freedom. Art and travel, music and self-expression, a life sung loudly and lived without fear.

  But, sick as she was that winter, Jell-O was all she could keep down. “Who would have thought,” she whispered one night as I was feeding her. I pretended not to hear. It hurt too much, to acknowledge every incremental loss she bore on the road to losing her life. I learned to be choosy with my empathy. She smacked her lips in mock satisfaction then, and listed the food she’d eat if she could. Cold slices of pineapple, fried-egg sandwiches, a burger so rare it dripped bloody juices. “You’ll get there,” I said, coaxing her to take one more bite.

  Afterward, she slept, her little mouth open, sighs arriving like characters in her dreams, expressions of comfort, maybe, maybe of pain. Her red curls, touched with gray where the dye had worn off, haloed her face. Her hands were open at her sides, waiting for my palm, which molded perfectly to the soft shell of hers. I sat, our fingers interlaced, looking out the window, keeping watch, waiting for her eyes to open. Waiting to hear her voice.

  From her room at Mount Sinai, we could see the vented smoke from the Carver Houses’ rooftops, colliding with the winter air, making a cloud we hovered above. We could see cabs on Madison Avenue, fluorescent against the gray ground, and dirty bodega awnings, leafless trees like bodies, thin and aching in the cold. I walked the barren city every afternoon, arriving at her bedside with all varieties of liquids and broths, black-cherry Jell-O because she had mumbled through half sleep that it sounded better than the strawberry she received for lunch each day. Peppermint candies for her to suck, never swallow. Wonton soup I carried in a paper sack tucked under my coat and close to my body, to keep the heat in.

  That was in January. By March, she’d be back in the hospital, unable to keep her food down, and Jell-O would remain the only thing she could stomach. By June, she would stop treatments and return home to a rented bed in the sunroom, to the hospice care that helped her to a front-row seat at my wedding in the garden, where I married the man I love into the Jell-O legacy. Two months after that, on the first day of September, she would leave me, passing away with the sunrise, unable to the end to talk about death, its cruelty, her fear. Unable to fathom how it was that Jell-O was the last meal she ever ate.

  Somehow, though, I was unsurprised by the coincidence of my mother’s last meal. I was used to black magic’s mean jokes by then. My mother had been sick for decades, always in pain, always bargaining for her health, casting spells to keep herself alive long enough to see me into womanhood, to pass some sort of gauntlet. Once, when cancer had returned and another surgery was imminent, she traveled to Egypt, stood on the bow of a boat, and mimed scooping tumors from her body and throwing them overboard, offerings to the brown Nile water. “It’s taken care of,” she’d assured me, her voice solemn with the spell she had spoken to the river as she exorcised the cancer from her liver and gut. And she was right. When she returned, CT scans found no sign of the tumors they’d revealed the month before.

  At first, the spell stuck. The tumors stayed vanished; she lived. But in time, every spell weakens. This I know. And even though time’s dilution of my mother’s witchcraft gave way to the cancer that killed her, I am still counting on her magic. Because the spell my mother cast that day slowed the curse she believed had made her sick in the first place, the curse she believed had befallen the girls of LeRoy, the curse she worried was coming for me, too.

  The curse. When my mother was a child, it was used to explain all manner of familial misfortune. Death, alcoholism, wealth and the existential boredom it brought with it. It was, she was told, confined to men and therefore nothing for her to worry about. All she had to do was stay cute, stay pretty, stay silent. Later she understood these admonitions were the curse. The curse wasn’t confined to men; it came from them, from a social structure predicated on their power. The curse was the silence impressed upon her, her mother before her, and countless women before them. The curse was the sickness that silence becomes when swallowed, lumps of unspoken words ticking like bombs.

  Our task was to reclaim and speak, to take up space with our bodies and our voices. This is how we save ourselves, my mother constantly reminded me, through words and through witchcraft, that deep, intuitive power alive in every woman, connecting us across space and time. If you remember nothing else, remember this, she said. And so, I write. I return to my mother’s body, her voice, through the hundreds of pages she left for me, the story I consult now like a spell book, searching its pages for incantations I might hold up against the silence she left behind.

  Book I

  1

  They named my mother Mary. She was born in 1945, the last year of the Second World War. Her father, Bob, was a naval pilot with soft eyes and high cheekbones that cast shadows like smudges across the side of his face. Her mother, Midge, had been a journalist in Honolulu before Bob swept her off her feet. Midge hadn’t been sure about children. But they were what one did after marriage, she reasoned. At least she had Bob, and the glamour and travel his profession ensured. She thought about this often, as she dressed in the morning, as she fell asleep at night. What would her life have been like if she’d defied the norm, stayed childless and free? Would she be writing now? She pictured herself at a desk surrounded by books, a cup of coffee steaming, a typewriter recording her words, and her byline, Mary Jane Fussell, claiming them. But each morning she woke to the children’s cries, drowning out what could have been.

  She rose from an empty bed and stayed housebound, adventure just outside her window, too risky for a woman alone. My grandparents lived in Lima, Peru, when my mother was born. There, Bob flew commercial jets for Panagra. He was always working. But he was lucky. While other pilots were drafted to fly dangerous jungle routes, waiting for shots to ring out, Bob kept the perks of his prewar profession: the shiny green-and-gold winged globe pin, the white hat, the black leather shoes he shined himself before each flight. He told jokes over the intercom, he smiled wide and white as passengers disembarked, he shook their hands, held their babies. Flight was still remarkable then, and a handsome pilot was a celebrity to most people.

  Mary was born on the first day of spring. The March heat settled like a wet blanket over Midge while she held her dark-haired daughter in a bare-walled hospital room, listening to the whir of the fan, watching the light change outside, pulling night down over the city. Bob had left yellow roses on the bedside table, a glass of water, a book. They pulsed there, reminders of her incapacity.

  For Midge, pregnancy had been uncomfortable. She’d known, from the birth of her first child three years before, what to expect, but her mother had written that it would be easier the second time. It wasn’t. She hated her fat ankles, her unwieldy body, which she wanted to exit as she would a poorly lit room.

  With both children, the labor pains had arrived like relief, like the promise of a life she might reclaim, and Midge had eagerly fetched her prepacked bag of toiletries and clothes and climbed into the car Bob wheeled slowly to the hospital. When they arrived, she walked through the doors Bob held open for her, climbed onto a gurney, and politely deferred to the team of white-suited doctors who stood at her bedside, telling her what was happening. “You’re going to have a baby, Mrs. Fussell,” they said in thick accents, as if she didn’t know. “Are you ready for your medicine?” She nodded. Then the nurse arrived, administered, and twilight fell over Midge, who in the space between day and night saw her daughter enter the world as a shadow.

  Midge had hoped her second child would balance out the needs of Thomas, her first. They’d have each other, she reasoned, and could lean more on each other and less on her. The thought of this, the promise of t
his freedom, carried her through the physical discomfort of pregnancy. After Mary’s birth, Midge watched for the relief she’d been promised by baby books, her mother. She sat by her window, waiting for lightness to fall back into her life. She waited for the light, she waited for her husband, anticipating his return each evening like the ringing of a bell, the filling of a glass. They ate out, sometimes, at the country club, with friends from Panagra. This was the best part of Midge’s life in Lima, the night.

  A year passed. Mornings stayed endless, colorless, full of boring minutiae—groceries to be ordered, a baby to burp and feed, a mess to clean up, a toddler to comfort when he cried. Each day the city moved on outside Midge’s windows, and she listened for it hungrily: honking horns, whistles and shouts; the sound of vendors ringing bells, of cart wheels over dirt or cobblestone. Each day they called out Mango!, held up wet, yellow blossoms Midge longed to taste. But she never felt free enough to do so. Even when the children napped, their niñera keeping watch by the window in their bedroom, fanning herself with a stiff pleat of paper glued to a stick, Midge never pursued the things she needed, the things that made her whole. Never did she feed paper into the typewriter she’d once used to write stories for the local paper, for anything other than letters home. Never did she push out her chair and take her housecoat off, hang it on a hook, pick up her purse, and walk out the door. Never did she try that cadmium fruit, bite to its seedy heart.

  * * *

  Midge had been married once before, to a man—a boy, really—who drank too much and made crass, critical remarks. It was a quick, impulsive union, a desperate attempt to depart from LeRoy, where she could barely stand to be, the scandal of her father’s affairs—the latest with the choir leader of the Methodist Congregation, a mousy woman he ran off with to Florida—rippling out from his absence. But her first husband turned out to be from the same mold as her father. Only a week after the wedding, he stayed out late after work and returned smelling of another woman, indignant when Midge asked him where he’d been.