JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  * * *

  Summer 1964. Mary stayed in New York for therapy, she said, but really it was for distance from John. He had stopped calling, and she was humiliated, revealed as a slut and, worse than that, a disposable one. And yet she missed him. His disappearance had peeled something, the scab over her mother wound, perhaps. It glowed now, undressed and septic. Maybe that’s why, as time passed, Mary allowed the details of that night at the Plaza to soften in her memory. She obsessed over everything she’d said or done but brushed off John’s brusqueness, the hot light of the room and the careless way he’d sent her off. She allowed herself to forget that afterward she’d suspected that he was the cursed one. She forgot, and so she wondered if his silence had something to do with her, how he’d plumbed her and found the rotten truth of who she was: the girl who’d run from her dying mother, who’d hidden behind the toolshed when Midge had whispered Hide me, the kind of girl who couldn’t cry at her funeral.

  She sublet a place on the Upper West Side from her old tutor, Mr. Smith. It was a dark, railroad-style one-bedroom stocked with books and little else. Tiny lamps lit her way around the place at night, but barely.

  Evenings she walked down Broadway, heading to dates with friends of her friends’ older brothers, boys she slept with and ran away from in the night. They rarely called afterward, although she wanted them to, searching as she was for someone to contradict the certainty of her badness.

  More and more, Midge appeared in Mary’s dreams as misplaced, tucked into the linen closet and forgotten, jumping forward in attack when Mary discovered her; or buried alive, her white fingers reaching up through the soil. Before bed every night, Mary swallowed double doses of aspirin to sleep deeper, to erase all thought and history.

  Mornings she woke, then hid under the covers, her bed a raft she rode over oceans of unstructured time. Sometimes she stayed there all day, frozen. Sometimes she rose, forced to her feet by a restlessness she could exhaust only by walking. Up and down Manhattan in the short nightgown she wore as a dress—cream colored, with a Peter Pan collar and a pattern of red roses. She had straightened her hair on a whim that spring, waiting under the hairdryer at Lord & Taylor for hours while the chemicals set in and burned out the curls. Afterward she’d felt new, cleansed, her silky hair like poured thought, simple and pure. But the feeling had soon worn off, though she chased it, spending money on drinks and meals, meeting men. Maybe in them, she thought, she might find a way around John. Maybe they wouldn’t see in her what he had: something spoiled and easily controlled.

  So she fucked the men, the boys, fucked them all. She fucked them in hotel rooms and in their clean apartments on the Upper East Side. She walked home to Mr. Smith’s in the morning light, holding the hem of her baby-doll dress like an indecisive Kewpie, the sounds of the city waking up around her, all air brake and release, all garden hose watering the bodega blooms she passed as she walked up Broadway. Each time she returned to the apartment: the stale smell of old books and unemptied trash, as if she were returning to her own inner world. She accepted the decay but bathed and brushed her teeth compulsively. She heated the iron to flatten her hair. She examined her face in the mirror, sallow where once it had been flushed.

  It began as a pimple, blossoming from the edge of her lower lip. Accompanied by a small lump beneath her chin, it grew. She charted its progress in the bathroom mirror, leaving, calling it nothing, then returning again to look, to feel, to imagine the cancer growing steadily, to imagine it expanding.

  It had been days since she’d left the apartment. How could she? Look at this thing. The last time she went out, to visit a group of Sarah Lawrence girls living at the Barbizon Hotel, they’d patted zit cream and concealer on it, only a shadow then. You poor thing, they’d cooed, and she’d wanted to curl up and stay there, sublet be damned. These girls had done it right, with a series of connected rooms for the summer and internships in midtown. In the evenings they lay poolside, novels resting unread on their laps as they chatted. They ordered room service and ate spread-eagled on their fancy beds, complaining about their skin tones and tummy fat one minute, then slyly proposing late-night sundaes from the diner around the corner the next. But she’d made her bed, and now she must lie in it, she figured. So she returned home to Mr. Smith’s apartment and heated up a can of Dinty Moore stew on the single-burner stove, lounging on the ratty sofa while she ate, a book propped open in front of her. It was silent in the apartment, and when she turned the pages, their thin flutter resounded.

  The next day the pimple began to throb. When she examined it in the mirror, she felt the lump hardening. Immediately she thought of Midge: the mussel shell of malignancy in her left breast, the way it grew roots and spread throughout her body.

  In the emergency room, an intern ran his cold and slender fingers over the thin skin of her throat. He shook his head and left, returning an hour later with his supervising physician. “Impetigo,” the doctor said, exasperated, as if both Mary and the intern were overreacting. “That lump you feel is just a swollen gland.” That was it. They gave her some salve and sent her home.

  After that she stayed inside, mortified, watching the sore develop like some horrific creeping thing. It filled with purple blood and pus, engorging daily. She ate her stew, read her books. The city steamed and sang outside her windows.

  It was late at night when the sore finally erupted, bursting like an artery, leaving behind a fleshy crater. Mary felt blood and pus trickling down the side of her face. A horror show. “I need you to come and get me,” she pleaded to her father on the phone. “I need to leave this place. I need to leave this place now.” She clutched the clunky black receiver like an anchor, hoping the weight of it might tether her. “What’s wrong?” Bob asked her through the bewildered congestion of sleep. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know,” she repeated.

  12

  In the early 1960s, Jell-O’s age-old selling point as a national beacon of stability, a staple of nuclear-family dinner tables and affordable “fancy” dishes, flickered and surged dramatically. This wasn’t success: this was the gasp of a flame preparing to die out. The country was in flux, teetering on the latter half of a century that had inflicted trauma on the collective psyche. And now, America was in the middle of another war, facing stirrings of civil disobedience. Change was filtering into the country’s unconscious, hinting of the upheaval soon to roil up, a fever from beneath our national skin. Advertisements responded as best they could. Best to hunker down for now, they urged, their messages achingly upbeat, like forced smiles: best to lean on routine and familiar family structures. Best to serve a delightful and wholesome Jell-O mold tonight. In new mixed-fruit, blackberry, and orange-banana flavors!

  More than ever, family was a focal point. The family unit was to be stressed, preserved. So even as Jell-O advertisements kept a toe in the water of the diet conscious, they also revolved around the nightly dinner table, reflecting the indulgent side of America’s cultural ethos. There are people who like to eat, one television spot began, speaking over a montage of different American dinner tables where a clan of Maine lobstermen shells the fruits of their labor, an Italian matriarch serves pasta, and a third family celebrates the oldest son’s return from military service by heaping his plate with food. There’s Always Room for Jell-O! the ad proclaims, even for those stuffed full of America’s bounty.

  America’s tenuous bounty. By 1964 the beacon had gone out for LeRoy. In a move that would change the town forever, General Foods closed the original Jell-O factory and relocated manufacturing from New York to Delaware. Families who’d worked for Jell-O for generations were suddenly faced with an impossible choice: leave the only home they’d ever known, or lose their only job. Many LeRoy natives, so betrayed by Jell-O’s departure, vowed never to buy it again. They knew what they’d had was special.

  LeRoy’s sudden crisis reflected a larger, national one: looming cultural and economic upheaval, an identity in limbo. Like many small towns in America, LeRoy
was actively losing the jobs that had made it prosperous. They knew no magical mass-produced cash cow would come their way again. And although Haloid Xerox, Lapp Insulator, and Eastman Kodak, staples of Rochester’s economy, mercifully stayed put (for the time being, however: Kodak laid off thousands of employees in 1997 and declared bankruptcy in 2012), the decampment of Jell-O marked the beginning of the end of the region’s boom time.

  The decline has been significant since then but drastic in the last decade. As recently as the 1980s, the median income in LeRoy was nearly 9 percent higher than the national average. Since then it has fallen to well below the national average. The stress of unemployment, specifically the loss of the factory work that once helped it prosper, performs itself in LeRoy through the transformation of the town’s once-formidable homes—Gothic and Greek revival houses with butler’s pantries and enough bedrooms for large families—into multi-unit rental properties. Families, too, have changed, their structure altering alongside the disappearance of factory work. In 1980, LeRoy had fewer single mothers than the rest of the country. But in the past thirty years, that number has surpassed the national average.

  The absence of strong father figures and nuclear families in LeRoy would become, in 2011 and 2012, a talking point for journalists and doctors investigating the origins of the LeRoy girls’ sickness. Financial instability and tenuous support systems were eventually targeted as key contributors to the girls’ condition, which was, doctors argued, fundamentally rooted in deep insecurity and stress. But stress and insecurity were quickly ignored in favor of older, more familiar narratives concerning the dangers of female desire. Watered-down versions even appeared in popular novels such as Katherine Howe’s Conversion and Megan Abbott’s The Fever, both fictionalized accounts of the girls’ illness. Where Howe’s novel posits that the tics and twitches come from the history of the town (moved, in the novel, to Danvers, Massachusetts) as a site of witch trials, Abbott’s The Fever frames the outbreak as a repercussion of the afflicted girls’ burgeoning sexuality and the “increased physical vulnerability” that accompanies their transition from children into adolescents. Abbott suggests this change is “a kind of witchcraft,” but by the end of the novel, the characters’ symptoms are revealed to have been caused less by magic than by a mélange of poison—administered by one particularly jealous girl—deception, and mass psychogenic illness, which Abbott barely defines. The whole fever, it turns out, revolved primarily around competition for the attention of a popular boy.

  This, of course, is a common story, that of malingering and manipulative women, their competition and precarious sexuality, which must be tamped down, contained, lest it lead to sickness, crime, catastrophe. This is also the story that the mothers of the real LeRoy girls rejected. Their daughters weren’t faking, or poisoning each other; they weren’t insanely jealous or sexually deviant. Nor were they victims of unstable home lives. Many of the mothers found themselves in the position of wearily defending their ability to single-parent—or to parent despite their own illness—asserting with understandable defensiveness that they, and they alone, could handle motherhood, breadwinning, and the onset of this outbreak. They’d always had to, after all, and their daughters were stronger for it—not weaker. So there must be a physical origin to the girls’ condition. Emotional trauma couldn’t touch these girls, their mothers argued, because these girls had been raised by women strong enough to bear it.

  Emotion as weakness, desire as instability, trauma as failure: these correlations came up often in regard to the girls of LeRoy. These girls were strong, mothers insisted, not traumatized. But the two are not mutually exclusive, my mother argued, even as she wistfully doubted all the girls would get the help they needed. “They need to express themselves,” she said, “but they don’t live in a culture that teaches them to.” Trauma needs to be spoken, she said, it needs to be heard. The girls’ conversion disorder was essentially a coping mechanism, a system their minds found to tolerate the intolerable until they were able to find help. Disorder is, she said, in its own way, an ingenuity.

  13

  ADMISSION REPORT: SEPTEMBER 2, 1964

  This is the first psychiatric hospitalization for Mary Fussell, a nineteen-year-old, single college student who is referred to Austen Riggs by Dr. Berger of Rochester, New York, because of probable impending psychotic decompensation and a need for treatment away from her family. The patient’s extended family background is a chaotic conglomeration of great wealth, marital strife, divorce, heavy drinking, suicide, and general unhappiness. As a child she was left to the care of a maid. Childhood difficulties included excessive dreaming, fear of the dark, and fear of school.

  The patient dates the onset of her current problems to age fourteen, when she started prep school at Kent Place School in Summit, New Jersey. This was several months after her mother died of cancer of the breast. At this time she began to feel that everything and everybody was unreal and she did not belong anywhere. She became increasingly tense, had severe spells of depression and difficulty controlling her temper. She was a leader of rebels against school traditions. As these symptoms worsened she began to drink sporadically but heavily for relief. She became increasingly tense, fearful, insomniac, suffered terrifying hypnogogic states, and had episodes when she felt as if she were “falling apart.”

  Mary made herself small on the bed, knees bent and pulled in, arms wrapped around her shins. She was in her nightgown now, the baggy clothes she’d worn all day in a careless pile on the floor. She hadn’t bathed yet. She could smell herself, contaminated by her own sweat and juices, and for once it didn’t matter. It was over, all that effort. She was here, she had arrived, and she didn’t have to do anything.

  Here was the Austen Riggs Center, the open psychiatric center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she’d wound up after Bob fetched her from Manhattan and installed her back in LeRoy. She’d only worsened there, confined to the East Main Street house, holed up in her room, hiding from Cousin John, who had assumed his usual cheerful persona, sitting in his favorite chair in the living room as if nothing had happened. He’d even placed his hand on her knee once when they were alone. But at his touch, Mary felt her body begin to freeze. It was suddenly as if the whole of her had been sat on, trapped beneath a heavy weight, each limb numb and bloodless. She wanted to say something but couldn’t find her voice. It was stuck beneath her solar plexus, squeezing. This was a feeling she was getting used to: the sensation of drowning any time she tried to speak, her lungs flooding with imagined fluid. When her father walked in, it took everything she had to force herself to stand and leave the room. Finally Bob drove Mary to a shrink in Rochester, who frowned as he checked her arms for track marks, then picked up his phone, covering the receiver to tell her he was calling the Austen Riggs Center—she needed immediate hospitalization.

  That morning, Mary’s first at Riggs, she’d met with the therapist assigned to her, Dr. Marcus, who sat in his wing-backed chair with his legs crossed, a clipboard in his lap, waiting for her to speak. But she’d been unable to begin, unsure of what to say about her life since her mother’s death. Everything since she’d hidden from Midge’s pleas had been ugly and shameful. She didn’t want to expose herself this way to Dr. Marcus, who was young and handsome, like John. She wanted him to think her beautiful, as John had. She wanted him to prove something, something salvageable, redeemable, about her, despite her problems.

  After her silent session, Mary had walked into town for cigarettes. Now she was alone in her blue-walled room, sitting on her bed, chain-smoking and thinking about dinner. But to eat alone, all those eyes on her—the new girl? She pulled a Parliament from the carton, stared at the bunch of sheets around her ankles as she smoked, looking up when the roll of a clear glass bottle clinked against the wood of her bedroom door.

  It was almost empty. A moment later, her door was pushed open. “Yoo-hoo,” someone said. The voice was female and gravelly. Mary cleared her throat, and in came a short girl in a mar
igold turban and a gray poncho, her right hand wrapped around the neck of another bottle. “Care for a drink?” she said, grinning and bad.

  Bea’s body filled every room she entered. The smell of patchouli and vodka preceded her coming, Joplinesque, through every doorway, staggering with grace over every threshold. The night they met, she sat on the edge of Mary’s bed with her legs splayed wide and a bottle propped against her crotch. She poured two paper cups to the halfway mark while Mary waved her hand, a gesture of refusal. “I’m trying not to drink,” she said.

  Bea’s eyes widened. “Whatever for?” she asked, her voice breathy.

  “I think it’s making me sicker,” Mary said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Bea said. “Don’t be a wimp.” She held out a cup, giving it a little waggle for every second Mary hesitated.

  When Mary took the cup, Bea sat back, satisfied, and sipped hers in between drags of a long white cigarette. She smoked Kools, and they suited her. Mary felt timid in her presence and held her cup with both palms wrapped around its cylindrical body.

  “I thought drinking was against the rules,” she said. Bea shrugged.

  “Everyone does it.”

  The warm liquid burned Mary’s throat when she swallowed, a familiar sort of singeing. A cleansing. She was disappointed. She’d thought the rules would be firmer here, the boundaries surer.

  “So, what’s your deal?” Bea asked, taking a sip.