JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes he’s just so mean.”

  I nodded. “You have to stand up to him,” I said, and she told me she couldn’t, not the way I could.

  “Because he loves you so much,” she said. “How can I make him love me so much?”

  My father had thrown up his hands and left her there with me, even though her presence always made me fluttery, my hands shaking, my heart palpitating in my head. When he returned, it was to carry her to the car while she punched at him, screaming, “No, I want to stay!” He drove her home, thirty minutes away in the blinding snow that night.

  When I mentioned her episode the next morning and said I wanted to talk about it, my father told me there was nothing to say. “It’s in the past,” he said, his voice thickening with the promise of rage. “You need to get past this.” This was what he always said. To press him only made him mad. So I stopped talking about any of it, stopped talking entirely, stopped crying. I feared that if I allowed even a single tear to fall, I wouldn’t be able to stanch the deluge that would follow. And I knew what would happen then. I imagined my father’s house, flooded with my tears, and him standing by, dry and impervious, calling me hysterical, the label he’d given my mother. The label, eventually, he gave the drama teacher, too. I knew, like them, I would become unlovable.

  21

  Our month on Weight Watchers was the only time my mother and I made Jell-O together. But there was plenty of low-point Jell-O to be made. Weight Watchers recipe books and blogs teem with “safe” dessert recipes. Whole websites still exist, lauding the utility of sugar-free Jell-O for the modern dieter. But America’s obsession with calories (a term coined in the late 1800s, just before Jell-O itself was created) started in the late 1970s, gaining traction throughout the eighties and nineties, when diet plans predicated on restricting or counting calories proliferated. The idea that all food was created equal, that a calorie is a calorie, be it from broccoli or beer, reigned supreme and remains the basis for modern programs. In the late 1960s, low-fat cottage cheese and cantaloupe arrived on many American menus, and green salads made a comeback, particularly among women, who were under cultural pressure to stay young and thin, a pressure that seemed to grow with each stride they made toward equality.

  Around this time Jean Nidetch, a homemaker from Queens, frustrated by her inability to lose the excess forty pounds she’d gained as a newlywed, began holding impromptu meetings in her living room. Once a week Nidetch and her friends gathered to chat about their diet programs, share tips, and bemoan failures. From these meetings, Weight Watchers was born. The plan was simple, based in part on a diet developed by the New York City Bureau of Health, where Nidetch was a patient at the obesity clinic before striking out on her own. Whereas in decades to come, Weight Watchers would be known for its trademarked “points system,” at the outset it consisted more of practical recipes and lengthy lists of food to be avoided.

  It was onto the “forbidden list” that original Jell-O was placed, perhaps because in the process of containing and masking ingredients, it also added “empty” calories from sugar. As if in rebuttal, an entire chapter of The New Joys of Jell-O, published in 1974, is devoted to “Salads for the Slim Life,” all of which clock in at under 350 calories and come with considerate serving suggestions for those who value keeping fit. The molded ham and egg salad, for example, could be served over a bed of Boston lettuce with two slices of tomato and a cup of chicken broth, should diners wish to confine lunch to the 350-calorie mark. The jellied turkey salad should be paired with romaine lettuce, a quarter cup of cottage cheese, two green pepper strips, five thin carrot sticks, and a teaspoon of low-cal French dressing, all of which adds up to exactly 235 calories.

  Nidetch’s Weight Watchers concept arrived at an opportune moment for Americans recovering from the economic glut of the 1950s and ’60s. The country was entering a transformational time, and American women followed suit. Nidetch was a prime example; by the time she sold Weight Watchers to Heinz in 1978, her body, not just her bank account, had undergone a conversion. She’d lost forty pounds and changed her hair from a modest brown bob to an elaborate blond bouffant. It was at Heinz that the Weight Watchers program changed as well, overhauling the old recipes and instating the point-based “exchange program” for which the franchise is known today.

  Jell-O had worked long and hard to associate itself with the dietary needs of housewives and nuclear families. But in the midst of second-wave feminism and the divorce boom of the seventies, Jell-O seemed a throwback to an era women in particular were eager to forget. Although older women continued to buy it, the younger women who represented the bulk of America’s buying power did not. Add to that the discovery of Jell-O shots and Jell-O wrestling by fraternity brothers across America, and the dessert was suddenly tainted, considered less wholesome by its target market.

  Though sales picked up with the arrival of Bill Cosby in 1974, and the advent of the pudding pops he peddled to kids, it was the diet craze of the mid-eighties that really allowed Jell-O to make a comeback with its original audience: women. Sugar-free Jell-O, containing NutraSweet, arrived on the scene in 1984 as a replacement for D-Zerta, a product that had never really taken off, due in part to its artificial taste but also public distrust of the saccharin it was made with, an additive linked to blood-borne cancers and associated with serious health concerns. Although also associated by some with an array of illnesses, NutraSweet has somehow escaped the public’s wariness of its saccharin cousin. Sugar-free Jell-O is now considered a Weight Watchers zero-points-plus food, so safe that you can eat a whole bucketful and not feel guilty.

  “My childhood loves were dessert and Tommy,” a permed brunette tells the camera trained on her face. She speaks as if confessing something personal, a secret she wants to keep between the two of us. The camera stays close as she lifts a spoon to her mouth, letting it linger before lusciously pulling it away. “I got over Tommy,” she says, smirking, “but I still love dessert.” The next shot is of a blue box with red lettering, JELL-O. “Eight-calorie sugar-free Jell-O gelatin,” the woman’s disembodied voice says, “the dessert you don’t have to desert.” Cut back to her, her whole body this time, tall and thin in skin-tight jeans. “Eat your heart out, Tommy,” she says, making eye contact with her audience before spooning in another bite.

  Oh, what a dream. To eat what we most desire and still be desired by Tommy. To eat as if it doesn’t count. This in particular was an adolescent fantasy for me. Sometimes I’d ask myself, If I could eat anything and not have it count, what would it be? Plates and plates of pancakes, perhaps; a whole pizza topped in fried eggplant and sprinkled with black olives; a dripping bacon cheeseburger with all the fries. Or the entire birthday cake my mother dreamed of. She finally ate it, not long after she left my dad, not long before Weight Watchers, backed up against the kitchen counter in tears, steering fat forkfuls of carrot cake into her mouth as if they didn’t count, as if they wouldn’t be followed the next morning with guilt that weighed a body’s worth.

  Luckily for my mother, there was sugar-free Jell-O. Luckily for all women, advertisements suggested. Just eight calories a cup and zero—count that—zero Weight Watchers points. And what’s more, eating sugar-free Jell-O will aid in your never-ending quest to win back the man who left you. “Hey, Danny,” a jilted pudding fan says in another late-eighties commercial, nodding at the mirror as if speaking to herself, “here’s one figure you miscalculated.”

  22

  In college I could forget. My mother, my father, and the drama teacher were far away, distant like old nightmares, faded in the light. Mary was in Connecticut, busy setting herself up in an old house—the site of many holidays and parties during my childhood—still owned by Judy, who now lived part-time in Florida. My father was on the mountain in New Hampshire, eating chili in his winter coat. And I was in New York, safely contained by my small, warm dorm room strung with twinkle lights. Each night I fell asleep on a skinny mattress, count
ing the hours of sleep I would get, counting the yellow orbs blurring into darkness above me.

  I’d chosen New York for the independence it might give me. I’d imagined myself free from the small world New Hampshire and Vermont had confined me to, and I hoped the big city might cure me of what was now becoming a serious problem. Weight Watchers had turned into an obsession; I’d traded points for calories, compulsive rituals, and a preoccupation with “safe” foods like fat-free yogurt and sugar-free Jell-O. I counted up the empty plastic containers, once filled with chemical lightness, and stacked them by the sink, a reminder of what I filled my body with. I heated up Lean Cuisine and Smart Ones dinners, standing in front of the microwave and counting the seconds until the bell rang. I sat in front of my steaming food, eyes on the clock, waiting for the minute hand to tick its way toward the hour at which I’d previously decided I could eat. Interruption of this ritual, loss of my count, rose up in my body like all the anger I’d never exorcised. Anger at my father for lying—for forcing me to accept his lies; and anger at my mother for leaving me alone in the cold New Hampshire house with my rageful dad.

  My mother was angry, too. Each time she caught me in front of the microwave, or cutting my food into minuscule bites I arranged on my plate, easily countable, she slammed her palms down on the table or countertop. “This needs to stop!” she yelled, her voice thinner than normal, terrified by my shrinking body. But her fear seemed nothing in comparison with mine. She knew little of what I lived with. My father, dark and unpredictable, the voice inside my head, punishing and mean. So I’d fend her off with the language of my oppressors. “What are you talking about?” I’d yell, calling her crazy, assuming my father’s stance: denial.

  But deep down I knew she was right. By my junior year of high school I knew it wasn’t normal to fill my journals with calories instead of dreams or crushes or fears. Even my on-again, off-again boyfriend barely made the pages. I knew this was odd. And I knew it was odd to tally each bite I took, counting every hour, the hours until my next meal, one two three four five six. I berated myself for my abnormality at the same time I felt I needed these rituals. Their performance was like a spell to me, and I needed it to keep myself safe.

  Food and the scaffolding I built around its consumption had become a way of enabling the silence my father had forced me into with his rage, his refusal to acknowledge his affair. Any time I questioned him about anything at all, he exploded in anger or, worse, fell silent and said nothing for days. He froze me out. He gaslighted me, maintaining that my mother was hysterical even as he brought the drama teacher over for white wine and shrimp cocktail. Unable to tell what was real, I leaned on numbers—points and calories, seconds and minutes and hours of time—to structure my world.

  Once I got to college, I reasoned, I could free myself from my parents and the space between their truths, and I could begin to get better. I pictured myself a New York girl, laughing with my friends at mimosa brunches. I imagined ordering in. I fantasized about meeting the boy who would magically free me from my own compulsive curse. In my mind he greeted me at the threshold of an apartment we shared, warm and well lit, and slipped my mental illness from my shoulders, as if undressing me in preparation for a long, safe sleep.

  I wasn’t ready for him. I was eighteen, saddled with a coping mechanism I still needed. But I still looked for him everywhere. In classes. In the dining hall, where I plucked my safe foods over and over from the plethora of options. I looked for him in bars, the lines to nightclubs. Maybe this one, I thought with each boy I met, each boy I slept with, looking for approval. It’s not a unique story, how I sought to disprove my father’s lessons about the source of a woman’s worth in an array of boys too young to do anything but confirm them.

  What felt unique, or what feels unique now, a decade later, is how internally I experienced my father’s rage, my mother’s self-doubt. It seemed the sight of me produced in Mary an anxious fear that she couldn’t break through long enough to help me. But somewhere inside, hidden even from myself, I longed for her help, I longed for her to hold me, brush my hair off my forehead, and call me her little girl. Any time she tried, I jerked away from her touch, afraid of the feelings I knew she’d pull from me if I let her. But deep down I wanted her to force me, to hold me tight and squeeze from my miserable body the tears I couldn’t shed. Even then, even as I stopped crying, stopped eating, stopped speaking, I knew there was a sadness that lived inside me, knocking on the walls of my insides, asking to be freed. But there wasn’t room, I reasoned. My parents’ emotions had also taken up residence inside my body, pulsing to be heard. Even the drama teacher herself had nestled in beneath my solar plexus, right next to each boy I slept with and never saw again, all of them whispering reasons to keep counting, keep starving, keep silently searching. My best had to be better, they whispered, I had to control myself and my surroundings, if I were to avoid my mother’s discarded fate.

  It was winter—December or January—when my hand froze. I was out with friends, all of us dancing, when I ran into a boy I knew vaguely from philosophy class. He was tan, with eyes that bugged from his face and nothing much to say. I can still picture his dim outline, the striped polo shirts he wore, the way he meant nothing to me. The way I knew in the moment that he was a new low. Because with him I was no longer searching for the boy who might save me; I was simply looking to feel wanted, even though I could tell his desire was situational, fleeting.

  His apartment in a high-rise on Union Square looked out on the side of a brick building. On it, a Godzilla-big billboard for Bacardi and cola had been painted, and the thin Afroed spokesman and his mustachioed sidekick raised their glasses to me as I looked out the window, the boy’s hands fluttering hungrily around my waist, fiddling with the zipper on my jeans. My mouth tasted dirty and dry. I wanted to be wanted. I wanted to leave.

  I went through the motions. I watched myself move, flopping like a doll from window to unmade bed. The comforter was cheap and red. The sheets were black. The boy played with my panties, rubbing them between his fingers, feeling their scratch, their stick. His dick felt like a child’s through the cotton of his boxers. I didn’t want to see it. “Take these off,” he ordered, tugging at my panties. The slur of his voice, demanding and infantile, told me I would never take them off, not for him. So I flipped over and straddled him, pulling his pants down around his ankles, pulling his boxers down and closing my eyes. I wrapped my lips around his cock, and he thrust it into the back of my throat, punching my gag reflex until he came and I spit sour jizz, let it dribble out of my mouth and down my chin, let it cake into my hair, so that when I woke up a few hours later, naked and spinning, I felt like I’d been cast and set, like plaster.

  Was it then that I noticed my hand? Or had I dimly recognized its vibrating numbness before, figuring it’d be gone in the morning, that with the light it would dissolve? Was I too busy figuring out why I was naked, if in my sleep I’d stripped myself or if in my sleep I’d been stripped? At the time, it barely mattered. I rolled off the bed. I opened and closed my mouth, placing my few unfrozen fingers at the hinge of my jaw to feel its connection. The skin over the bone radiated numbness, like it was dripping off my cheek and slurring toward my shoulder. But it wasn’t. In the boy’s bathroom mirror, flecked with toothpaste and short, stubbly hairs, I examined myself, raccoon-eyed and crusty. Everything was in its rightful place. But my fingers had to be forced open, my jaw continually jiggled. I tiptoed back into the bedroom. The boy was sprawled on his back with his dick out, his head jerked to the side, his mouth open. I plucked my things from the floor, pulling my jeans back on with one hand, the light slanting through the window blinds, the Bacardi banner outside toasting the rising sun.

  I walked home, disappointed and self-punishing. What had I expected? Shouldn’t I know by now how unlovable I was? My body hummed with it, the whispered truth beneath the rituals I performed to make myself feel safe. It hummed with the disappointment of that boy’s dick slapping my face, h
itting the back of my throat, stifling and mean.

  Months later I saw him standing outside a bar with a clot of guys, all polo shirted and cologned. I was carrying groceries, teetering along in heels, yellow bags of fat-free yogurt and Jell-O digging ruts into my bent fingers. The boy looked at me and turned away and whispered to a friend, who leaned closer. The rest huddled in. I flipped my hair and walked by, looking straight ahead, thinking, Fuckholes, blinking tears. By then my hand had frozen other times, blurred into a claw. Sometimes my face followed suit and I thought I was having a stroke. I didn’t know this had happened to my mother, too, not until I read her memwah a decade later. Nor did I ever consider doing anything about it. It made sense, I reasoned, that my body would fuck up, that I would fuck it up. I knew perfection on the outside took its toll within. I knew the spells I relied on to keep myself safe for now would kill me in the long run. It wasn’t just the calorie restriction, the counting: I blew chemicals up my nose almost nightly by then, I filled my lungs with smoke. I pictured the clove cigarettes I bought from the corner market, thin and fragrant in their black-and-gold box, puncturing holes in my heart.

  * * *

  That spring, during my freshman year of college, Mary’s cancer returned. Carcinoids metastasized in her liver, secreting hormones that made her blood pressure spike, her heart skip beats, her bowels dissolve into diarrhea. She made folders of CT scans and bloodwork and organized her care after the surgery, which she scheduled for later that spring.