JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  That evening, after she swallowed the pills in her room, she slipped into short navy pumps and walked downstairs and into the parlor. Cousin John saw her and stood immediately. “My God, Mona,” he said, running his eyes down her. In his expression Mary recognized something about her body, something strong about it, when molded to fit a man’s desires.

  John came back the next morning to take her to the shooting range. He waited in the car, watching her as she shut the front door behind her and walked toward him, wearing tight, tapered trousers and a fitted button-down blouse that showed off her waist. She slid into the passenger side of his Mercedes, and he leaned over, his lips next to her ear. “You look beautiful,” he whispered. She smiled. The power she felt, the control she suddenly had over her body, over John, pushed through her, elation. On the way, as the car snaked over dips and rises in the road, John reached over and put his hand on her thigh. She said nothing, just collected the thrill of his touch, his desire, which felt like something dropping inside her, an excited thread from the base of her sternum to her lowest point, that place Midge had called her modesty.

  At the range, he stood behind her, his arms wrapped around her arms, even though she was already an excellent shot. He pretended to teach. “Hold it more like this,” he said. When she called pull and the clay pigeon released, the gun kicked back into both of them, the crack of the shot reverberating in their ears.

  Afterward they had lunch at the country club, and then John drove the car to a quiet strip of road and pulled over. The car fell silent but for the occasional whir of a passing automobile. After some time he spoke.

  “Let me see you,” he said, not saying her name, not calling her Mona.

  “What do you mean?” She turned in her seat to face him.

  He reached over, unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse. When he finally kissed her, it felt violent. But he wanted her; it was because he wanted her so badly. He told her so. “Just you wait, Mona,” he said, squeezing her leg and clawing the flesh. She felt something like heat inside her, radiating from the V of her legs where his hand was inching, closer, closer. The place the boys had entered when she was only eleven, their intrusion an erasure of the girl she’d thought she was. Good, obedient. An inoffensive girl, always offering. A Jell-O girl, the Rockwell vision. What a lie. Striving for that had gotten her nowhere. It had certainly gotten Midge nowhere. Even so, Mary had tried, briefly. The funeral, the reassurances she’d offered. The real feelings they replaced had broken from the box and gathered now, excessive, beneath her skin. She wanted to release them. She wanted violence, sex. The two felt inextricable. Embodiment. In the shadow of her mother’s death, she wanted to live, to remake herself in the image of the European women she’d drawn in her journals, their unrestrained breasts unapologetic, their thick thighs swinging from the slits of their skirts, their faces every variation of strange beauty, sneering and smiling at the men who jeered and catcalled. These women smelled of pungent body odor, not the sweet talcum and perfume her mother had used to hide herself in a cloud of artificial scent. They snapped the necks of birds and boiled the bones with sausage and spice, stirring the pot like witches. They ate with abandon. They mourned. This was who she wanted to be, this was who she could be with John. If only he would have her. “Not here, not here,” he kept repeating, fending her off. But his hand still gripped her leg, moving now of its own accord to straddle him. He was breathless when he gently steered her from his lap, kissing her forehead, then breathing in her ear, whispering, “Soon, soon,” as if soothing the child inside her.

  10

  For every American woman with household responsibilities, awareness of a meal’s order, its organization, was considered essential by domestic scientists. To this end, recipe booklets had long been a staple of Jell-O’s marketing campaigns. But in 1961, when my mother was sixteen, the small-booklet form was replaced with a ninety-five-page cookbook containing more than 250 recipes. Joys of Jell-O and its numerous sequels are still in use, available on eBay for five bucks, in fact: a steal, given that in the early 1960s, the cookbook sold for twenty-five cents plus proof of purchase of six Jell-O cartons, a sum equivalent today to around seven dollars.

  Pricey, but worth it. Among the revolutionary recipes contained in its pages are five different variations on Jell-O Bavarian cream, the saucily titled Jell-O Hawaiian Eyeful, a mix of celery, pineapple gelatin, and fruit, and a Jell-O glaze for ham, sweet potatoes, and roast duck. Each recipe in Joys of Jell-O is summarized by a brief sentence beneath its name, explaining the occasion for which this particular Jell-O mold is best suited. The ladyfinger dessert, for example, is for special occasions and should be molded into the shape of a flag, heart, bell or other symbol in accordance with the closest holiday. The more modest cardinal-pear mold is simply an easy way to glamorize inexpensive canned pear halves. The Waldorf mold is a lovely luncheon entrée when served with cold cuts and hot muffins. The rhubarb salad, however, should be presented as a tangy crisp contrast to a more robust meat course. Ditto the minted pineapple, and cucumber cream.

  Although most Joys of Jell-O recipes are carefully cordoned into their own category—dessert or salad—the slim and edgy “Two Way” chapter presents recipes that defy someone to say that you’re not ready for anything. These molds may be (daringly!) served as either desserts or salads, so long as their category is made absolutely clear. It is the critical responsibility of the lady of the house to alert guests to the role a specific mold plays in the order of the meal. Desserts should consistently be garnished with prepared sweet toppings or whipped cream; salads must be unmolded on crisp greens and topped with dressing and mayonnaise.

  At the end of the day, housewives were responsible for strengthening and maintaining the nuclear American family. It therefore made perfect sense that gathering everyone for set mealtimes three times per day ensured not only that they would eat, grow strong, and flourish—but also that they would absorb the strong American values the country’s future depended on. It was important that Father sit at the head of the table, dispensing wisdom; it was imperative that Mother serve healthy, well-balanced meals. Mental and physical nutrition must be tended to. And Jell-O was here to help, to nourish and cajole, to serve as the centerpiece of social order.

  Never in my mother’s childhood had breakfast or lunch been particularly privileged. Bob was usually gone when the rest of the house awoke and Midge and the children ate Cream of Wheat in the kitchen, sometimes eggs and bacon on Sundays or on the first day of school. Come dinnertime, Midge and Bob tried to sit down at the table with their children. And sometimes they succeeded, Midge positioned at one end of the polished dining table, Bob at the other, while Elfrida swept in and out of the swinging door to the kitchen bearing lamb or pot roast, hot buttered rolls and potatoes. Sometimes, though, dinnertime came and went, and Elfrida, tired of listening to the hungry children whine, sat them down in the kitchen and served them chicken and Minute Rice and stewed buttery greens, all of them waiting for Midge and Bob to return from cocktails at Edith’s mansion or listening to the laughter of the adult party going on in the parlor.

  Now, without Midge, the group of cousins and friends that used to gather nightly in the East Main Street parlor had vanished. Bob was often out, mooching off someone’s bar cart and ignoring mealtimes altogether. His absence frightened Mary. His grief, which he wore on his winnowed body, engulfed her own. She had wanted to be nurtured through the loss of her mother. She had wanted to act out her sadness, to try on identities—bad girl, Mother Mary, Mona—and find the one that would suit her best in this new, motherless world. But she’d quickly realized that she would have to put all that aside if she wanted to keep her father from falling apart. She would have to give to him all the nurturing she wanted for herself. The only way she could think to do so was to feed him. So on the weekends Mary came home from school, and every night during summer vacation, she tried to establish a seven o’clock dinnertime. In the kitchen, she’d flip timidly through E
lfrida’s old cookbooks. But she was unsure of what she could possibly master on her own. Without a woman to pass down recipes and techniques, Mary had little idea of what to make or how, and she tried too much too soon. Her Salisbury steak came out dry, oversauced, and rimmed in vegetables boiled gray; her roast chicken was too pink on the inside. But she kept trying. She had to. Her father was wasting away, and somehow she knew it was her duty to save him. It was what a woman did. If she could just assume the proper role, Mary thought, if she could nurture him like a woman, a wife, or maybe a mother, perhaps he would right himself, become the father whose wisdom could order the world. She longed for the day she could cease to be a centerpiece, the hub to which the spokes of her family attached. But this was her function now, a function Midge had escaped only in death. This was every woman’s function: to be the piece that held the family, the culture, the country, together.

  11

  By 1963, Mary was a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College. She’d graduated from Kent Place in the spring, posing with Judy in matching white dresses and gloves, identical bouquets cradled in the crooks of their arms. Now she wore paint-splattered blue jeans and went braless under loose tops. She took the train into the city and spent afternoons at the Guggenheim, the Modern, the Met. She stood in front of Pollock’s massive canvases and Nevelson’s boxlike sculptures and imagined herself an artist. She pictured herself working in the city, teaching at Barnard, walking down Broadway, her portfolio in hand. While her father’s self-negligence still constrained her at home, at least she was free of the rules that had ordered her life at boarding school. No more set meal- and bedtimes, no more classes on comportment. She saw it all for what it was, conformity, designed to keep people in their place. In the city, in college, she felt freshly awakened, the way she had in Europe as a child. Art pulsed from New York, dangerous and alive. West of Fourteenth Street, Andy Warhol threw his parties. Dylan played in Greenwich Village. Patti Smith moved into the Chelsea Hotel. And Cousin John called twice a week.

  Mary received his calls on her twin-sized dorm bed, where she would lounge, the telephone cord curled around her finger. Finally, John told her, now that he had her on her own—finally he could truly take her. “I want to make you mine, Mona,” he whispered into his end of the line. “When can I see you?”

  Mary giggled. “You tell me,” she said, girlish and gamey, her voice babyish and soft. With him she was different from the self-assured woman she became when she wrote and spoke about art. Even art-making itself had begun to feel possible, and the idea of a life built around art and travel and adventure thrilled her, though she never mentioned this to John.

  There was a freedom for her in the artist’s way, a new way of managing the memories she’d tried so hard to shut off: her mother’s body as it died, draining of life slowly, like a wilting plant, her desperate plea, Hide me, and Mary’s cowardice, the slivers of siren and light glinting off the snow as she hid behind the shed. For years she’d worked to block these images, which came like flashes and infected her dreams. But in art, she could tap them, make something of them. Her professors praised the pieces she produced, painted and sculpted translations of her nightmares, which had only gotten worse with each year that Midge stayed dead. Her drinking, too, had worsened, and Mary woke most mornings unable to remember the night before. This, she told herself, was what she needed to create. She made a private mold for herself: isolated and addictive, the orphan-artist, tortured by visions of death. At night, barefooted and drunk on cocktails of bourbon and Dex, she strapped the welder’s helmet to her head and drew the mask down over her face like a shell. In her hands fire and steel shaped predators—spiders and bony witch fingers, born of an endless loop between her unconscious world and her art.

  “Meet me for dinner,” John commanded. It was early November, a hint of winter on the air. He was coming into the city and staying at the Plaza. “I want you to see the Oak Room,” he said, and Mary agreed coolly, but then hung up the phone and ran down the hall of her dorm, calling out to the other girls: “Who wants to go shopping!” She borrowed a green suede jacket and bought a new black sheath dress at Saks, a pair of velvet pumps that pinched her feet and made her teeter but looked, the salesman said, as if they were stitched to your foot, their arches fine, like those in the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

  At the Plaza, in the dark-walled room, John ordered champagne that came nestled into a gold ice bucket. Light catapulted from the room’s gilded accents into the bucket, piercing the bottle, and back out again. There was caviar and steak and a crème brûlée, the surface of which Mary daintily broke, chipping through the crusty top with the edge of her spoon, aware of John’s gaze and how he watched her every move. “I like the way you do that,” he’d say when she took a bite, as if everything about her were on display, presented like dinner for his consumption.

  Afterward, after John signed the check and drank the last of his bourbon, he steered her toward the elevator, his hand on the small of her back. Mary felt herself moved into the gold box, a marionette in its theater. There they stood side by side, nearly touching, and she could see her own misty body next to John’s, reflected in the plated doors. When the doors opened, offering a threshold, Mary walked forward, teetering in her too-high heels.

  In the bedroom John poured two bourbons. He loosened his tie, watched her fold her coat and slowly lay it over a chair. “Let’s hurry, Mona,” he said, throwing his tie on the bed, reaching for his glass. Mary wasn’t sure what he meant by this. What specifically does he mean for me to do? She struggled to reach her zipper, moving slowly, stalling. She stepped from her dress carefully. “Now the rest,” John said, still watching. Her face flushed. She shimmied out of her slip and stood before him in her underwear. She hadn’t expected this. What she had expected, she didn’t know. But not this. He sat down to remove his shoes and socks.

  “On the bed,” he demanded.

  He left the lamp on. He had her sit on top of him, minus her brassiere, whose tight wires and bands she yearned for as soon as John removed them, exposing her to the light. He placed his hands on her hips and pushed into her in one swift motion, a shattering pain above which she hovered, observing herself from the ceiling while her cousin rocked her hips back and forth, agitating her body like an undeveloped photograph. From above, Mary saw the embarrassment of her breasts, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of John’s hands. She saw his face fold into a frown that deepened as the rhythm quickened, giving way to relief as his fingers squeezed tightly, leaving behind the indents of his nails, little crescents in her skin.

  He slept after that. And Mary watched shadows, suspended on the ceiling, where she too had drifted, silent and disembodied. She felt full of food, sick with it, stuffed like a ballotine with everything she couldn’t say. Once she’d thought she could confess to John and be understood; now she knew she had been wrong. She shouldn’t have come here. She wanted to leave, but willing herself to rise felt impossible. Her whole body tingled, and she wondered if she could even move it. When John awoke and hastily dressed, pulling on his pants and saying It’s about time we get you home, she pried herself off the bed, hiding her nakedness with a sheet, wavering on trembling legs when she stood. She moved about in a daze, gathering her clothes. When she found her slip, she stepped back into it, then did the same with her dress. But when she tried to catch the zipper, she realized she couldn’t. Her right hand was frozen, clutched into a replica of her own sculpture, her fingers transformed into the claw of a crone, a witch. It stayed that way even after she asked John for help, suddenly mortified by having to do so; even after he packed her into a cab and handed the driver a ten-dollar bill; even after she returned to her dorm and retreated to the shower and scrubbed.

  That night she did everything she could to cleanse herself, running the water so hot, it singed her skin, leaning over the toilet, trying to empty herself. When that didn’t work, she sat on it instead. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t unburden herself of the suffocating fullne
ss she’d embodied since sleeping with John, since courting the curse, the meaning of which felt even foggier now. Once John had told her that the curse was out to get him, and he was the one in danger. But since he’d been inside her, Mary herself had literally frozen, her body like land torn up by excavation, then left barren and untended. Maybe, she thought now, the curse wasn’t after John—maybe the curse was John, or something about him, carried by him, light as the scent of his Guerlain cologne.

  When the other girls on the floor noticed her illness, her hand, they imagined food poisoning, the flu. “Let’s get you to the nurse,” they said, cooing in soft tones as they swaddled Mary in blankets and walked her to the campus clinic. But once there, Mary couldn’t say what the matter was. She couldn’t say anything at all.

  The nurse prescribed aspirin and talk therapy, and Mary took both, finding herself a week later seated opposite Dr. Harris, a broad, brown-suited man with lines etched into his forehead like stacked horizons. He said very little during the hour, and so did she.

  “Your silence suggests a manipulative character,” he said, and after several sessions, Mary believed him. Whereas at first her voice had stuck in her throat like a sob each time she tried to speak, now she simply found she had nothing to say. Although her hand had thawed, her voice had frozen over. She was leaden.