JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  18

  When I turned two, my mother began to disappear. I looked for her in her studio, in the kitchen, the garden, but found her in her bathroom, hunched over the toilet bowl, little tears in the corners of her eyes. “Hi, honey bun,” she’d say, frowning and holding out her arms to me when I cried at the sight of her. “Everything’s all right”: a refrain. But she turned pale, grew thin. She went to doctors, one after another. “It’s stress,” they told her. “You’re being hysterical,” they said. “But look at my family history,” she insisted. She brought out the paperwork from Riggs, the psychiatric evaluations. “Well, here you go,” doctors told her, suggesting her symptoms were probably part of a psychotic episode. Their coincidence with her menstrual cycle made it all the more likely that she was suffering from conversion disorder, or PMS, which was itself considered a kind of hysteria. They suggested tranquilizers. “You’re perfectly physically healthy, Ms. Fussell,” they said as their pens scratched across their prescription pads. Not, it would one day turn out, unlike the girls of LeRoy, who, following doctors’ visits and ER trips, were told the same thing as my mother. Anti-anxiety drugs, hormonal birth control, and pamphlets on stress relief remained, by the time the LeRoy girls sought help, twenty-four years after my mother’s first symptoms, the first line of defense for doctors faced with complaints historically attributed to “female problems.”

  At first Mary tried to believe them. Better stress than cancer. She tried the drugs. She tried calming teas and long naps. She tried meditation, self-help books, classical music. Years passed and she remained sick. “Nothing helps,” she told a new doctor, who suggested she cut wheat and yeast out of her diet. So she did. Nothing changed, and she wondered if she was imagining her illness after all, conjuring it like a shadow from her childhood, her memory of Midge, whose symptoms had arisen at this very age.

  I was four when another pregnancy confirmed Mary’s well-being. “Women your age don’t get pregnant unless they are perfectly healthy,” her doctors said. She touched her stomach and imagined a boy, my brother. She thought of Tom. And my father, whose distance had grown alongside her illness, his fear and frustration running parallel to hers; who yelled when they fought, and often: “You’re being crazy.” Suddenly, he was turning, changing into a volatile version of himself, exasperated by her inability to name the symptoms she experienced, the pain she felt. If George couldn’t see it, it wasn’t real. Especially when it came to the body, which he saw as something to ignore, to use like a tool. Later, though, after my mother’s illness, he would come to see it as something to control, something to perfect through excessive exercise, the vitamins he began to take by the handful, the protein shakes he ate instead of meals.

  But before all that, as Mary struggled to solve her symptoms through elimination diets, George ate. Pints of ice cream, a dinner of hot dogs, six at a time. Their bodies diverged, curled onto separate sides of the California king bed they’d bought with their new wealth. It was ironic, Mary thought, that as her inheritance paid for the bed she slept in, the house she loved, her symptoms persisted and her sanctuary by the water became yet another place in which a man she trusted insisted that she quiet down.

  The day she told George she was pregnant again, he ran his hands through his hair, filled his cheeks with air, and exhaled slowly. Keeping the child was a question now. She was forty-five, Midge’s age when she died.

  A week later, my mother heard screaming from the backyard where my friends and I played. “Mary, Mary!” a choir of girl voices called. “Allie’s stuck on the monkey bars!” She didn’t hesitate. She ran. Out to the swing set where I hung, paralyzed. She held up her arms to catch me and felt in that instant the blood between her legs.

  “It would have happened anyway,” she told me years later, knowing what I needed to hear. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Two months before I turned five, my mother turned forty-six. She found a new doctor, a young woman with a thick brown ponytail who met her eyes when they spoke. This doctor listened and ran tests, and though they remained inconclusive, Mary’s symptoms worsened. “Well,” her doctor said, “I’d like to go in and look around.” It was the very thing so many men before her had warned against: elective surgery and with nothing but the patient’s word to warrant it. But it was the only way to truly know. So Mary signed the paperwork, tucked her curls into a surgical bonnet, and climbed onto a gurney. In a theater, under fluorescent lights, surgeons cut her from sternum to pelvis. They pulled feet of small intestine from her belly. I imagine them wrestling with it like a venomous snake, yellow and malignant. They counted the tumors then, the one large one, the other smaller satellites. “It would have killed you in a year,” they later told her, standing in a faceless group over her bed, delivering her diagnosis. It was carcinoid, they said, sucking their chins into their necks, a rare form of cancer characterized by hormone-secreting tumors. This, they said, was the reason for her miscarriage, and for the sickness that plagued her each month, with each period, like a punishment.

  The seam in Mary’s stomach beat in time with her blood. She imagined that the tumors had also aligned with this rhythm, pumping venom before they’d been found and cut out, just soon enough to save her. She wanted to scream at the doctors, at her husband, to impress upon them the gravity of their mistake, the life of her little daughter who’d been nearly left alone. She had known she was sick. She’d been saying it for two years, ever since the symptoms first appeared, arriving like a prophecy when she turned forty-two, the same age Midge had been when she’d found the lump.

  But how had she known? Lying alone and awake in her hospital bed, Mary thought about the legacy of illness, wondering if her fixation with Midge’s early death might somehow beget her own. “In matters of health, you manifest what you imagine,” one of the naturopaths she’d consulted had said, which seemed at the time ridiculous and now—Mary weak and drugged and plugged into wires, an eight-inch scar down the middle of her stomach—prophetic; her cancer a penance for so much negative thought, for the badness she’d been branded with as a child. What’s wrong with me? she’d asked so many times in her life, and now she knew.

  In truth she’d saved herself. But in the anesthetic haze, she saw only her own part in her illness, how she’d conjured it somehow, staying silent with the boys, her cousin; staying hidden when Midge had needed her the most. Later she’d learn to turn the thought around, to rage at the medical establishment instead of herself. But it never stopped trying to get through.

  “The voice may be in us, but it’s not us,” she’d one day promise me when the same invisible meanness perched behind my ears, whispering of my inadequacy. “That’s the voice of patriarchy,” she’d tell me, “and it’s our job to tell him to shut the fuck up. Trust me, honey bun,” she’d add, “this isn’t your fault.” How many times did she assure me of my blamelessness? This isn’t your fault, she’d insist, squeezing my hand, trying to shake me out of whatever hole of silent self-loathing I’d fallen down. And when the girls of LeRoy began to show symptoms, I imagine their mothers said the same, knowing, as my mother did, that their daughters lived in a culture that told them the opposite.

  * * *

  There is a series of photographs taken of Mary the day before her surgery. She kneels in the winter sunlight and does not smile. Her white button-down shirt is tucked neatly into the waist of her full denim skirt. She has rolled small circles of blush onto the apples of her cheeks, but the rest of her is so bloodless and thin that the makeup looks artificial. And then I am beside her, wearing my dress-up clothes and carrying a basket as if I am about to gather wildflowers. I remember little of the time surrounding this surgery, but I can recall this day and this photo shoot in some detail. Enough at least to remember that I had been excited by the premise of these pictures, the spectacle of them, and asked to pick my own outfit, selecting with care the floor-length blue dress made for an adult woman, which draped, tentlike, from my five-year-old frame. I thought it was a game,
I thought it was make-believe. Cancer was as appropriately amorphous to me as, I imagine, it was to my mother when Midge fell ill. As little girls we lived in the now, a state my mother would one day try to reclaim. I’m all right now! she’d chime from hospital beds and gurneys, echoing the Eckhart Tolle self-help audiobook she listened to in her car when she was well enough to drive. By then, she’d become familiar with the realities of her illness, the nearness of her own death: the paperwork she signed before going under the knife, the long rehabilitation and painful complications when she woke.

  But when I was a child and she first fell ill, she appeared shocked. For years she’d insisted there was something physically wrong with her. When it turned out there truly was, fear opened for her like a matryoshka doll, diagnoses, symptoms, and treatments nested inside one another in the shape of a shrinking woman’s body, all leading to a single, solid truth: her own death.

  * * *

  After the surgery, Mary stayed in the hospital, and without her, time stretched, and shrank, so that I couldn’t decipher its passing. Days, weeks, I couldn’t tell. Our family routines disappeared. My father and I ate pizza and Greek salads. We rented movies from the local Reel to Reel. He picked me up after school and took me home to a quiet house, only the dogs waiting, tails thumping, for our return. On the weekends he dropped me off at a friend’s house, where her mother seemed extra gentle, extra willing to pile us into the car for frozen yogurt and mini golf.

  One evening, he picked me up and kissed the top of my head when I buckled myself into the passenger seat. “Should we go see Mommy?” Excitement shot up my legs, turned to buzzing inside my stomach. Yes, yes, let’s go. All the way to New Haven in the blue Volvo station wagon, inherited from my father’s father. He held my hand, and we walked from the parking garage through a tube suspended over the street below, into the hospital. “This is where I was born,” I announced proudly, as if it were news to him. My father always told me that the day of my birth was the happiest of his life. But today he was quiet, worried. He knelt down to my level before we entered my mother’s room. “Try and speak softly,” he said.

  Inside the dim room, my mother slept. We shuffled in, and she blinked her eyes open. “Hi, honey bun,” she said, her voice sticky. The bed was high, and I could barely see her, but my father lifted me up and propped me on the side. I leaned across her, desperate for a hug, a little weight landing on her stomach. She winced. “Does that hurt?” I asked, pulling away. She shook her head and smiled, rearranged me, then drew me close.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a small plastic cup of pink Jell-O, covered with a tinfoil lid. “A treat just for you.”

  In a week she was home and set up on the couch. In a month she was walking and painting again. A synagogue in New Haven commissioned four walls’ worth of stained-glass windows—the story of Moses from start to finish—and she threw herself into designing them. But she wanted to get back to nature, wanted the quiet of the woods, the patter of raindrops on the roof of a tent in which she slept, safe and warm.

  She finished the windows in the early spring, receiving the check for her work like an emblem of her value. With it she bought a powder-blue tent for three, a Coleman stove, three brown sleeping bags, and an old rust-spotted Suburban. She swung the truck doors open and stood out in the driveway and packed for days, filling the cavernous truck from floor to ceiling. When school let out, we left, my father behind the wheel, my mother looking out the passenger-side window, and me buckled onto the bench-style front seat, in between the two of them.

  My mother still placed her palms over her stomach then, still slept in the afternoons, her head drooping into the seatbelt. My father listened to tapes, mouthing the words, patting the steering wheel softly, keeping time, keeping his eyes on the road. We camped from Connecticut to Idaho, stopping from time to time at a hotel, where I’d flounder around in the swimming pool and my parents would shower and brush their wet hair, my mother’s curls separated by plastic teeth, transformed into smooth, wet grooves.

  My parents had arranged a whole backseat world in the Suburban for me. A hammock slung along the window housed my favorite stuffed animals; a box below it held my books. They’d imagined me reading and singing and playing in the backseat while they drove, the way I had in my bedroom at home before the surgery. But I rarely did. My mother’s side was where I stayed. She would angle herself next to the window and prop her feet up on the dashboard, and I would fit myself into the hinge of her armpit. She would nap, my father would turn up the CB radio he’d bought before the trip, and we’d listen to the truckers talking shop and comparing routes. Once, a disembodied voice from the Chiquita banana truck we kept passing complimented my mother’s legs, her slender feet, with such persistence that my father reached over and woke her up. She blushed, took her feet off the dash. My father always said my mother had racehorse legs. He said this playfully, but this time he seemed more angry than proud. In truth he seemed this way for much of the trip, constantly aggravated, like he had swallowed his guilt for not believing her and it had turned sour in his gut. When they spoke, he struggled to find words, as if he were trying to speak a language only my mother knew, as if he were trying to decipher how she spoke her despair.

  There are several photographs—taken by me, I suppose—of my parents fighting that summer, our campsite behind them, the Rocky Mountains strung across the skyline like jagged teeth. My father has his arms spread open, his elbows bent. His palms face the sky, and his shoulders shrug as if he is asking, What do you want from me? I wonder now if he was simply angered by what he couldn’t see, tumors and fears.

  That autumn, we returned, and Mary began to write her memoir, a bid for her own sanity that she would ultimately leave unfinished. She told me in desperation how much she needed to write herself down. I didn’t know it then, but her work would become a kind of spell book for me, a story I’d consult, looking for the answers to illness and loss.

  At first, the book grew with urgency. Piles of pages cropped up around my mother’s desk, her body, which swayed, trancelike, while she wrote. Sometimes it stilled itself and she read, her forehead creased into a look of concern. The book became her job, her obsession. She began every morning, a cup of coffee separating from its cream, forgotten on the desk beside her, and worked through the afternoon, into the evening. She was always late to the dinner table, always asking for just one more word. When my father bought her a computer, she learned to type in a practiced pattern dictated by a chart she kept posted above her desk, and churned out pages with a mechanical rapidity. “There is this stream inside,” she told me, “there is this current.” It runs like blood, but it beats to be released.

  “Tell me again what you’re writing about,” I’d often ask when she first began, the answer still novel. I was six years old and wondering where my mother was, wondering what story had absented her from ours. “I’m writing the story of my life,” she’d say, not yet ready to explain she was writing about the curse she felt, always hanging over her, a gloaming. If I pressed, she’d tell me about Jell-O, LeRoy, and Riggs. Years later, when she was still writing and I was old enough to read her work, the stories from Riggs read familiarly, as if they were mine as well. But the workshop groups she attended told her the book was muddled and unclear. “This is pointless,” she’d say, pulling her forehead through her hands, a gesture of surrender.

  But she never gave up for long. When Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted came out to glowing reviews, she said, “She beat me to it,” as if her story had been stolen. For a week she stayed away from the studio, paying bills at the kitchen table and gardening, hunched over and frowning into her neglected flower beds. She went to therapy, talked to her friends, then cut out a review of Kaysen’s book, taped it to the beam above her desk, and kept writing. She bought books on agents and publishers. Letters went out, rejections came back. She joined more workshops, came home upset and angry. And still, over the years, she kept writing. She wrote as we packed boxes,
moved everything from the dream house on the water to a house in the woods of New Hampshire—dark brown where the other had been yellow, A-framed and isolated, set off the road by a long, winding driveway full of ruts. In her new office she wrote, surrounded by unpacked boxes. I tried to accompany her as she worked, as I had in her Connecticut studio, curled on a cushion in the afternoon sun. But the light was harder to find in this new house, which was always cold, the sun always sinking behind it, enveloped by the surrounding woods too early in the day, so that darkness always seemed to be falling.

  In years to come, my mother and I would look back on the house and wonder how we didn’t know. How did we not see the place for what it was? Cold and dark, hundreds of miles from the water and from West Woods, the path we loved, this new house was an echo chamber for our three voices: my father’s short and distant, my mother’s high and pleading, and mine slowly falling silent in the space between them.

  As years passed in the New Hampshire house, my parents’ fights became more frequent, their strained voices seeping through the floorboards that separated their room from mine, an anxious lullaby I’d later find it hard to sleep without. They raged at night. In the mornings, they’d be quiet, working around each other, around me, each one off to their separate home office. By this time my mother had been working on her memoir for several years. But she was, she sighed, no closer to an end point. My father, who’d once proudly proclaimed that Mary would soon be promoting her book on Oprah, now held up a story I’d written in my fourth-grade English class, scoffing, “Allie will probably be the first published author in this family.”