JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  After that Mary and George were often together. They took dog walks every other day, made dinner in Mary’s new kitchen. George moved in. He fixed things around the house. Mary cleared the table, rinsed wineglasses, turned them mouth down on dishrags to dry. They’d linger then, talking about their families: George’s father, wealthy and excessive, who wrapped Jaguars around trees in blackout drunk after blackout drunk, who went to rehab multiple times before it stuck, before he became a spokesman for AA and helped others do the same; and Mary’s: LeRoy and Cousin John; the Jell-O money she lived off of, the hold she felt it had on her, tethering her to her family even as it afforded her the freedom to paint.

  This relationship, between Mary and money, dependence and freedom—would push and pull at her for the rest of her life. I saw its grip on her until the very end. She was incredibly fortunate; to that she would anxiously admit. She had a freedom most artists never have: the freedom to make her art outside the economic hardship of the artist’s life. She could be a nonconformist and keep her house, her studio, her picket fence. She could afford to have me and pay for my day care so that she could work. But could she truly be a feminist? Could she truly resist the curse of patriarchy when she depended on a fortune built by patriarchal ideals? She felt guilty for this, as if she’d cheated. She’d never had to work. She’d never proven to herself that her work could make it. Maybe this was why, for most of her professional life, she avoided the recognition she craved. She was always taking classes rather than teaching them, and offering advice for free, always insisting she didn’t know enough, even with her master’s degree, to accept people’s money. She was a compulsive gifter of her work. If someone walked into her studio, pointed at a painting, and said, “I like that,” she’d tell them, “It’s yours!” and then regret it later. Every few years she’d decide to overhaul. She’d hire someone to build her website, or print business cards, then fizzle out and enroll in yet another oil class. “I guess I’m just not hungry enough,” she’d say, defeated. “I’ve never had to work for it.” But she could have. Her money could have been turned around, used as a catalyst for her voice, her art.

  It was something deeper that held Mary back, some fundamental reluctance to be heard. Even after Riggs and Ray and feminism, even after she’d finally named the curse, Mary’s silence persisted. Where did it come from? Could it simply be chalked up to the rules all little girls of her generation had been inundated with since birth—that they should be dainty and demure, seen and not heard? Or was it something else, some indelible lesson she’d learned from Tom and his friends and, later, from Cousin John? Something about how her worth and her body were entwined and inseparable, something about how, by discarding her, they had marked her as unlovable; something about how their opinion mattered because they were men? She’d thought that Cousin John’s hazy deathbed confession might free her, might allow her to go on to make a living for herself independent of his legacy, the Jell-O fortune he left behind. But instead the money worked like a cord, a binding spell, keeping her from proving, once and for all, that her voice had value.

  * * *

  The day she found out she was pregnant, Mary drove home, worried about how to tell George. She wasn’t sure how he’d react. It didn’t seem a child was in his plans; certainly it wasn’t for her. She was forty. She’d thought that door was closed. Her hands trembled, and she felt cold, then warm and sweaty. “I’m going to have a baby,” she announced, standing in the doorway of the chicken coop, facing George. His hands flew to the side of his head. His hat fell off, and he hollered, scooping her up in his arms and twirling her through the air. Only then did she feel elated, only then did she allow herself to hope for wholeness and health, the child that might heal the child so damaged within her.

  16

  As Mary’s belly grew with me inside it, George took pictures of her, pulling up her shirt to show the camera her pregnant body. The farmhouse is in the background, blue-gray and peeling; the brick path she stands on is mossy and wet. Her long, messy hair is piled on top of her head, and she is smiling shyly at my father on the other side of the lens. I imagine him teasing her gently, calling her sexy. This is how I tell myself I remember him, childlike and quick to laugh. He sang to me in my mother’s belly, tender songs he made up, or the Beatles. My body knows it, remembers the muffled warmth of his voice seeping through my mother’s skin, imprinting my cells and hers, painting our insides with the very best of his.

  They married on a whim on a winter afternoon shortly after my birth. In the only image of the ceremony, they both wear winter coats. The dogs sit at their feet. George has a beard and long hair; Mary wears a flower crown. They hold me, not yet one year old, in the space between them.

  After my birth, my mother and I were always together. Before I could walk she wore me like an appendage in a sling across her chest. She took me with her everywhere. I was all she could talk about. She felt whole, fulfilled. The world was all sunrise. She walked in the morning light, with me strapped tight to her body, and felt newly moored. She almost forgot about the curse, all the hurdles it would present to me, all the lessons she’d have to impart. It all seemed smaller now that she was a protector, a mother-witch. Her newfound confidence began to conjure the career she’d always wanted: commissions from New Haven and New York, teaching gigs at local arts centers and private schools. In the afternoons she set me up in her studio, in a crib at first and, later, with coloring books and pencils on an old wedge of couch. She painted, and eventually so did I, the classical radio station in the background. She watched me grow and thought about Midge, dead at forty-five. She watched the sun go down outside her studio in the evenings, reflecting in shades of orange and red over the Sound, producing an upside-down image of itself in the gray water.

  I always knew there was something different about my mother. Her games and stories often took dark turns before becoming light again. The world, she told me, was a dualistic place. Darkness and light fought for a balance they sometimes couldn’t strike. She told me stories about what would happen when we died. How a big red pickup truck would be waiting on a sandy beach to drive us away. She set my pet goldfish free in the three-foot-deep plastic wading pool in the backyard, then marveled at their frozen corpses when winter came and the water turned to ice. At Christmas and on both our birthdays, she sent us gifts from Midge’s ghost, books and big bouquets of flowers.

  Maybe Mary’s morbidity fed my nightmares. There was never a time when I didn’t have them. Vivid scenes of witches and vampires finding me where I hid, separated from my mother, alone in the world. I’d wake in tears, muster all my courage to sneak through the hallway and to her side of the bed, where I’d shake her awake. “I had a bad dream again,” I’d say, and she’d whisper Shhh, swing out of bed, and walk me to my room, my father grumbling and putting a pillow over his head as we left.

  My mother would sit by my bedside then, rubbing my back while I told her what had happened, intricate stories of black magic more powerful than I. To this she suggested Jungian dream bargaining, in which I closed my eyes, returned to the dream, and confronted the evil I found there. “What do you want from me?” I asked the monsters that chased me. I imagined my little self, defiant and sure, a sorceress who used her power only for good. “I want to kill you,” they always answered. This shook me. How should I respond? I asked Mary.

  “Not an option,” she would coach. “Go in and tell them they have to pick something or someone else, something in the light.”

  It was a lengthy exercise, too mature perhaps for a child my age. But like everything my mother taught me, the point came back to assertiveness, to the imperative that I learn, as she never had, to use my voice.

  Even so, my nightmares persisted, normalizing so that in sleep I expected only darkness. The waking world, where my mother was, was where I found the light. For my whole life I felt, with her, that anything was possible. Great magic, great loss. After I started school, my mother picked me up each afternoon, a snac
k in the center console of her beat-up station wagon, paint under her nails, and we drove straight to West Woods, a patch of state forest full of winding trails, hidden streams. The path is wide there. It welcomed my mother and me like a road to home. The dogs ran ahead, and Mary and I held hands over the rocks. Close to her, I could smell the turpentine she painted with, a thin layer of poison under which she smelled inherently clean, like a gently soaped room, candlelit and glowing. We stopped to rest, sitting on a log, picking up leaves and twigs. We found a fort someone else had built, a shelter of branches and leaves; we made our way to my favorite place, a creek that blocked the path, falling over rocks and foaming shades of yellow and brown. The dogs would sniff around, run ahead, and return, but when it came time to leave, when we rounded the bend and saw the parking lot, my mother’s dog, Lilly, would disappear. Mary called and called for her hidden dog, who stood like a statue behind the biggest tree she could find, hoping we’d decide to stay forever in the woods she loved. Over time I took to imitating her, hiding behind a tree as if frozen. But I always revealed myself to my mother, stepping out from the shadows and introducing myself to her as someone new.

  “I’m Rosy,” I’d say, and she would always play along, extending her hand to shake mine.

  “Hi, Rosy,” she’d say. “Where are your mom and dad?”

  “I’m not sure,” I’d tell her.

  “Well, come along with me. I’ll take you home.” She’d smile and hold out her hand. “I’ve always wanted a little girl.”

  With Ray’s help, Mary quit drinking before I was born and kept sober afterward. She liked herself better this way, she said, clear of the wash of red wine and bourbon brown she’d worn since her mother’s death decades before. Here was her authentic voice, untarnished by booze. But the further into sobriety she ventured, the more my father drank.

  At first it was moderate. Then it was the occasional Friday night, during which he’d stay out drinking, copping coke, which he inhaled like the lightest fragrance, the smoothest stinging scent. When he came home, dim-eyed and contrite, a tail-tucked dog braced for Mary’s anger, they would argue into the night, George asking what the big fucking deal was and Mary yelling about abandonment. But they would try to forgive each other, settling back into domestic life—public television and Cherry Garcia on the couch—until the next cycle of misbehavior, argument, forgiveness. George would go out and Mary would stay up, standing at the window as if awaiting her soldier’s return from war. “I developed all these nervous habits,” she wrote in a letter to me once, a ritual she started when I was in college and she was sick again, “although who knows if they were really emotional or not. My stomach was a mess, and my whole body ached. My hands shook. Sometimes he’d go out, and I’d put you into the car, load up the dogs, and drive and drive, looking for somewhere safe. I’d park and sob. I’d reach over, get you out of the car seat, and hold you in my arms.”

  When I was three years old, George’s father died, falling on the couch in his South Carolina bungalow while his heart struggled, then stopped. Several years later, Bob passed away in the dementia ward of an Arizona nursing home, leaving his wife, Ramona, alone and befuddled, dependent on an iron lung and the cinnamon sticks she plugged into her lips, pretending they were smokes.

  Bob and Ramona had been my only grandparents, but they quickly faded from memory once Bob died. But when I was three and four and five, we visited them once or twice a year in their posh senior living community in Sun City. Even then, my grandfather struggled to remember the simplest things: the state he lived in, the cereal he favored, my name. My mother seemed tender with him about this, and everything. If ever she resented him for disappearing into dementia, she never showed it. When Bob truly began to die, she flew to Arizona to wait at his bedside. My father and I followed behind days later for the funeral, where there were large bouquets of white flowers and little else, a final nod to Bob’s confirmed atheism.

  After Bob’s death, Mary began drawing up plans for her farmhouse, picking trim colors and wallpapers. I watched as men arrived in trucks to paint everything on the outside yellow, even the barn and the chicken coop behind it, where George set up his stuff: car parts and dismembered motorcycles; calendars with Jaguars and Porsches hugging tight corners; red chests of tools; a chair with wheels and a gray sheepskin cushion. The whole place smelled like oil and leather. He quit his management job with Saab, strapped on a tool belt, and became a contractor, gutting the old barn to build a studio for my mother, a spiral staircase, a fluorescent light table on which she spread slides and traced colors. Outside, the crab-apple tree dropped its fruit, ringing itself with bruised and mottled bodies. Pieces of mossy plywood were nailed into the bark, a onetime ladder going nowhere. It was, my mother said, everything she’d always dreamed of. A house in which she was contained. A studio for her art. A family. Even if all of it came from Jell-O, she chose to see it instead as coming from Midge. This was a gift, her mother to her, a reward for so many years of feeling lost, ungrounded, unsafe.

  Every night in that house by the water, the Amtrak express and Shore Line East connectors blew over the salt marsh, snaking along the Long Island Sound. Mockingbirds called down the sun. In the spring, the water rose up and covered the road, swamping the front yard. George put on thigh-high waders and strode through the water, looking for important things it covered over, things he needed to find, to save.

  17

  The 1980s. Power women, armored in power suits, climbed the corporate ladder. Young mothers returned to school. Single mothers worked full-time to support the independence they’d won during the seventies divorce boom. Where once they’d been silenced, contained, financially dependent on marriage, now they were self-reliant, in possession of the something more Friedan had promised. But alongside liberation, many women discovered what underprivileged women had known for decades, and what Friedan had failed to mention: single, working motherhood was a struggle.

  There was, in fact, quite a bit that Betty Friedan had failed to mention. In the decades after its publication, The Feminine Mystique, like the feminist wave it spurred, was taken to task for its racist and classist exclusions. In her book, Friedan had given voice only to a select and privileged population, omitting in the process the experience of the majority of American women. Soon, third wavers arrived to sardonically ask if Friedan had considered whether it was a richer emotional experience to stay at home and mother, or to enter the workforce as a prostitute or sweatshop laborer. The question became serious. Well, third wavers decided, it all depended on one’s standpoint. All women’s experiences could be inherently feminist. Do what you want, they argued. Wear your heels and lipstick; watch your porn, sell your body. Anything you do carries with it the potential for liberation. Even a Jell-O salad can be radical if made from a sex-positive standpoint. But Jell-O salads were last on women’s list of things to make with their newfound liberation. Snacks for the road were where it was at for women under fifty, women with children: Jell-O’s target audience.

  Enter Jigglers, the creation of the team of MBAs tasked with finding Jell-O’s next big thing. Every day for months, they gathered around a table at General Foods headquarters in New York, awaiting a new concoction by General Food’s on-site chefs. Duds abounded. Too complicated or time consuming. Too retro. But when a platter arrived bearing squares of concentrated Jell-O you could pick up and play with, the team knew they had found what they were looking for.

  By the late 1980s, there were Jiggler displays in supermarkets and recipes on the backs of boxes. Jell-O sent alphabet molds to schools and sold heart-, star-, and half-moon-shaped Jiggler cutters to guilty working mothers looking for something quick and fun to do with their neglected kids. By the time Bill Cosby signed on to represent Jigglers in the early 1990s, Jell-O sales were up by 47 percent. More important, Jigglers helped Jell-O transition from dessert to snack, a change pivotal to steady profits, which increased with Jigglers, and with Cosby, whose twenty-seven-year contract with Jell-O
made his the longest continuously running advertising deal between any celebrity and product.

  Even so, allegations of rape and assault were constant for Cosby over the years. The stories, of which there were more than fifty, spanned decades. But it was the 2018 testimony of Andrea Constandt—with whom Cosby settled a 3.38 million-dollar lawsuit in 2006—that resulted in a guilty verdict. As of this writing, the now eighty-year-old comedian faces up to thirty years in prison on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault.

  Following the verdict, newspapers trumpeted Cosby’s trial—at which five of his alleged victims testified—as a triumph for women and a direct result of the #metoo movement. For decades, like that of so many powerful men of his ilk, Cosby’s behavior had been an “open secret.” But to come forward against him was particularly dangerous, the accuser risking an onslaught of victim blame and vitriol exacerbated by her tormentor’s public persona. Cosby was beloved, his fan base wide and loyal. For them he triggered childhood nostalgia, home and safety and sweet, sweet Jell-O. What good was a woman’s word next to all that?

  In commercials from Cosby’s heyday, he is equal parts daddish and infantile, flinging Jigglers with kids in one ad, then donning a Cosby sweater and reminiscing solo to the camera about his childhood in another. He is versatile, molding to consumers’ needs. He is comforting in his sameness over the years. He simply wants to spread the word about light and wholesome Jell-O. He is threatening no one! He is symbolic of racial harmony in America, the square and safe black man we can all agree to love. He is the patriarchal passive nudger, guiding women back into the kitchen with a hand lightly placed on the small of their backs.