JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  I was calling my father nightly then to keep on his good side, and told him about the surgery from my usual perch in the stairwell of my dorm. At first he was silent, and my brain raced, trying to figure out how this would go. Would he be supportive? Angry? Or would he shut down, shut me out, become punishing and cold?

  “I’d like to come,” he finally said, his voice sullen and soft. “I’d like to be there to support you.”

  “Sure,” I said lightly. But inside I was panicking. I knew my mother wouldn’t like this, and I couldn’t say no to my dad.

  “Absolutely not,” Mary said when I emailed her about it. “I do not want him there.” She had already organized a posse of her friends to wait with me. These people were, she reminded me, like family. But I couldn’t tell my father not to come. I couldn’t risk hurting him. What if he waits outside the hospital? I offered, and we went on this way, back and forth, negotiating.

  In the end, we arranged that my dad would pick me up at the train, the morning of my mother’s surgery, drive me to the hospital, wait around until she’d gone under, then maybe come inside and wait with me. It all seemed pointless to me, and I tried to passively urge him not to come. “It’s really not a big deal,” I repeated, but he insisted. And when I exited the station that morning, scanning the street for my father’s car, I remember feeling relieved, looking forward to my father’s control, comforting in a crisis.

  I approached the car. Time slowed as I reached for the handle, then withdrew my hand suddenly, as if I’d been burned. The drama teacher was sitting in the passenger seat. Everything went blurry as my mind raced to reorganize itself. How could he have brought her to this? How could he not have told me? I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch him repeatedly. I wanted to cry. But instead I swallowed the lump in my throat, blinked my eyes, and climbed into the backseat, smiling and making small talk as we drove the few short blocks to the hospital, then urging them to just drop me by the entrance. Maybe we could meet for lunch, my father offered. Maybe. I nodded. I walked into the hospital alone.

  In pre-op, my mother’s friends gathered round, kissing her cheek, assuring her they’d see her on the other side. They left one by one, exiting the curtained staging area, then waiting outside in the hospital hallway. Soon we were alone. She looked small on the gurney, shower-capped and crying. I towered over her, dry-eyed but suddenly a child, frightened and ashamed. What’s happening? I wanted to ask her, or someone, anyone. I searched my mind for numbers to count, a structure to lean on, while I looked down at my mother’s face, sticky with tears. We were silent for a long time before she told me she loved me. She knew even then what she wanted her last words to be.

  “I love you, too,” I said, and felt relieved and sunken afterward because it was so true. And yet she had often thought it wasn’t. She had said as much—You don’t love me—when I refused to change for her, refused therapy, and refused her attempts at intervention. “You’re all spirit,” she had said, “you are a girl in trouble.” We waged war over the battlefield of my body, even after I left for college. Over the outside of it, how it looked, what anyone could read from my dark circles and jutting collarbones. She was terrified for me, she told me. What will become of you? she asked. At the time I couldn’t tell what she meant, not really. But now I think that her fear for me was inseparable from her fear for herself. What would become of me? she wanted to know, because she was terrified she wouldn’t live long enough to save me herself.

  She stayed under for hours, although the exact number has been lost for me among all the operations that followed, all the other hours. I waited with her friends until I could stand their company no longer, and retreated to the cafeteria with some textbooks. But I couldn’t read, couldn’t focus. I just sat, staring mindlessly at the indoor fountain, the water cascading, recycling, and returning, the way I imagined it might come from me if I let it, an endless supply of tears. When my father called to check in, I answered, ready to dodge lunch. But he was at IKEA anyway, shopping with the drama teacher.

  It was evening by the time my mother’s surgeon came out and gave the okay. I made some excuse about class in the morning and left, climbing back into my father’s car, then back onto a train to New York. I didn’t want to make him wait, didn’t want to tell him to go home and leave me here, either. I could see it was important to him to feel like he’d helped me with this. I didn’t want to let him down, then suffer the consequences later.

  Back in my dorm room, I stood in the shower and ran the water as hot as I could take it, my skin turning the raw pink of a fresh burn. I needed to feel something, anything. I was afraid I’d forgotten how. Beneath the beating water, cloaked by steam and the rattle of the fan, I sobbed dry tears. They were all I could muster.

  The next day was a Wednesday, a class day, and I went about my business as if nothing had happened. I was scheduled to return to New Haven on Friday afternoon, following my last class, and I occupied those two days with everything but my mother. It was only in dreams that I encountered her. Beneath the cover of sleep it seemed my dreams melded with hers. There I saw her, shadowed by a wash of opiate-den purple and painkiller blue, helpless and alone.

  She was still in ICU when I arrived on Friday, propped up and yellow in the white-sheeted bed, with Judy in the plastic armchair beside her, wiping her dry lips with a green sponge on a stick. “She’s in and out,” Judy told me. But I could tell my mother could feel me there, hear my voice. I could tell because she kept her eyes closed, stayed shrouded in dream, but shook her head and furrowed her brow and said Don’t let him in here, do not let him in here, over and over, while we all pretended not to know what she was talking about.

  This was the first time I’d seen my mother this way, drugged and debilitated. I remember thinking during that visit how dead she looked. But I shrugged off the shock of it, took her to the bathroom to pee, or try to. This was the first time I placed the urine hat, smelled the fluid she emitted, concentrated and soupy, her very own bone stock. She could already walk, and the nurses showed me how to hoist her from bed so that we could shuffle the halls, she holding the rolling bar of IV bags and cords, and me holding her elbow, her waist. Judy was on the phone. “Yes, she’s here,” I heard her say, “she’s walking her mother down the hallway,” and I remember feeling relieved that for once I hadn’t disappointed. For once my obsession with perfection hadn’t kept me from my mother’s side.

  23

  I’d relied on sugar-free Jell-O as a safe food throughout high school, but during my first year of college, sugar-free Jell-O pudding also became a staple of my diet. I liked the little cups it came in in the cafeteria, and bought extra from the Gristedes down the street to keep in my mini fridge. It was smooth and sweet and sixty calories per cup. If placed in the freezer for a half hour, it became akin to soft-serve ice cream. Each bite was an allowed indulgence, exactly what the Kraft Foods marketing department wanted it to be. I ate it guiltlessly and with relief.

  Jell-O’s appearance in my college cafeteria, and in others around the country, is part and parcel of a wider food-service presence Kraft cultivated over the years. For decades, Jell-O has been served in schools, jails, and hospitals. Everyone eats Jell-O, particularly when sick, not only because it molds itself nicely to restricted diets, but because it melts in the mouth from a relative solid to liquid, making it an easy segue into solid food for patients recently out of surgery—patients like my mother. Although at first she rarely partook, she was given Jell-O after each surgery. It arrived on her tray like a consolation, a lighthearted food to distract from the pain of resection. She saw it as irony, an emblem of what had made her ill in the first place. Even so, she received it with humor. When I was little, she passed it off to me. When I was older she offered it to her roommate. At the end of her life she allowed it, her acceptance a sign of resignation, a sign of the end, a sign I didn’t know to look for.

  Jell-O’s established place in hospitals, and as a sick food in general, has recently waned. I
t may melt in the mouth, and Jell-O may be comfortingly nostalgic, but it’s also laden with concerning chemicals, so much so that in Europe (where Jell-O is less popular) boxes come marked with a warning label referencing the product’s use of artificial dyes and ingredients. Specifically, Jell-O contains red dye number 40 and BHA, both linked to health risks, as well as an array of unnamed “artificial flavors,” most likely petroleum derived, and gelatin obtained from factory-farm leftovers.

  Nary a hospital nutritionist, nary even an eating disorder nutritionist, I would come to find out, has called out Jell-O’s health concerns. But the recent cultural push for whole, antibiotic-free, natural food has resulted in some hospitals’ changing their menus anyway, swapping out white bread and pasta for whole wheat, for example, or offering cage-free eggs and unmedicated meat. Jell-O remains widely circulated in institutional settings, but, given this shift, it’s only a matter of time before it gets nixed altogether.

  * * *

  “I don’t see how forcing us to eat a thousand calories of this crap is going to help anything,” Grace said. She was seated in one of the big armchairs, legs pulled up to her chest, elbows on her knees. “Like,” she went on, “the other night my boyfriend and I were walking and we stopped at Burger King and he was trying to get me to eat and I was like, I legitimately don’t want that. I know I’m disordered or whatever, but I’m also fucking sick of poisoning my body.” Around the room other girls nodded. Some just stared blankly or looked down at the pillows they hugged tight, like children, in their laps. I scanned the room before fixing my gaze back on Grace’s face. Her skin was clear, makeup-free. She looked effortlessly clean. I craved that cleanness, a naturalness I wondered if I could ever achieve. It was a feeling akin to the desire for safety, the pleasurable emptiness, that had fed my compulsions. Now, though, it was a desire I wanted to fulfill healthily. I wanted to safeguard my body with health foods. Whole heads of fresh green broccoli. Thick strips of meaty salmon. I wanted it all to nourish me. I wanted it all to pin me to the earth.

  But even here, at a center in midtown Manhattan dedicated to treating adolescent eating disorders and their attendant mental health issues, the artificial safe foods I’d eaten for years were easy to find. Even Jell-O—albeit in its full-sugar form—was on the menu. At the communal meals we patients shared and processed, Jell-O pudding was a dessert option at least twice a week. I ordered it when I could, which wasn’t often. Diversity was what we were supposed to strive for by taking on “trigger foods” in the center’s safe environment. Typical safe foods like steamed vegetables and fruit were mostly disallowed.

  One night, I challenged myself to try the pizza, which reminded me of happy times with my dad. I peeled open the Styrofoam container it came in and transferred the food onto a paper plate. The slice looked like it had been microwaved; the cheese, now turning cold and hard, had been frozen before. I lifted it to my mouth and bit. The room stayed upright, the world spun on. Afterward, when we went around the table, each of us sharing what our meals had raised for us, I said the pizza had turned out to be just pizza. I’d feared that eating it would uncover a sinkhole of sadness and anger, threatening to suck me in. But I was safe here at the center, tethered. I learned I could probe the edges of the sinkhole and know it wouldn’t engulf me. A year had passed since Mary’s surgery, and, though her oncologist insisted on CT scans every six months, her body was cancer-free. But healing this way had only turned my mother’s focus more fully toward me. She became insistent on my treatment, finally holding tight and refusing to let go, the way I hadn’t let myself ask her to.

  “This isn’t your fault,” she told me, “but you do need help to fix it.” Hearing this was the permission I needed to save myself. So when summer arrived and school let out, I voluntarily admitted myself to the center. And although I wept with nerves before the first meeting, I quickly felt encircled by a coven of women who shared my story. “How did I get here?” I asked at the first dinner, looking around the table for signs of recognition in the other girls’ faces. I found them. After that I spoke often, voicing the secret compulsions that had structured my world, emboldened by the other girls’ stories, uncannily similar to mine.

  For three months I attended the center every other night, peeing into a cup, standing in line to be weighed, sitting at a long table with twenty other girls for our diverse communal dinners, ordered from Gigi Café, a New York panini chain known for convenience, not quality. As Grace pointed out, the system was flawed, attempting to strengthen girls’ starving bodies with food that sat like canola-oil anvils in our empty stomachs. For many patients, the food was too much; the pendulum swing from denial of any food to consumption of heavy, fattening processed food was too drastic. For others it was a jump start on the binge-and-purge cycle they’d fall into once they left the center for the night and went home. For me it was a start in a good direction. Although I understood Grace’s rebellion, I wanted to move toward discharge, and I knew protesting the shitty panini chain would only keep me admitted longer. Learning to truly nourish my body would be a lifelong process, the therapists kept saying, and I knew that for me, the process had to entail natural foods, homeopathic remedies, and organic ingredients, foods in line with the tradition of witchcraft—women’s bodies—from which I’d been separated by my disorders. I imagined healing soups, rich with medicinal herbs, working their way through my gnarled insides, fixing me from the inside out; and cleansing juices and tonics: spirulina for my blotchy eyesight, flaxseed and golden turmeric milk to clear my skin, thicken my hair, evening primrose oil to bring back my period. I knew this approach would be ideal for me—for all of us girls at the center—and I knew it was just too expensive. So we ordered Jell-O and pizza and chicken sandwiches. We cleaned our plates, then discussed how to parse our food from our feelings. Whereas today a steady diet of Gigi Café would make me feel oily and lethargic, I was so starved when I entered the center that it brought my brain back to life. After a week I could read again. I could hold a conversation. Which isn’t to say my compulsions didn’t remain, or don’t linger still, only that they lessened when I began to speak as much as I counted.

  On art therapy nights we girls gathered around a big table covered in brown packing paper. Some girls rolled clay or cut out images from magazines for collagist explanations of their negative body image. I painted, holding the brush at its end like my mother, letting the water move color across the page. I painted women’s bodies, copying Mary’s images of mother-witches, powerful protectors. I painted the salt marsh outside my childhood bedroom, remembering the smell of sulfur when the tide rose up and flooded the front yard. I put my parents and myself in one corner, embracing while a dark-blue hole seeped slow and syrupy from the edge of the page into the center, threatening the whole of the canvas, threatening to consume us.

  When at the end of the night we girls spoke about our art, we spoke in circles. We often talked this way about our bodies, perambulating some essential desire to erase them, as if, disembodied, we’d be free. Although we sometimes struggled to articulate it, we all knew we’d been saddled with an unbearable weight, one assigned to us at birth by a culture bent on silencing us. Taken this way, our response was a reasonable, albeit impossible, one. Lose the body, gain the freedom. We weren’t self-indulgent, hysterical, or vain, as is often theorized: we were physically protesting a cultural system bent on oppressing us. We weren’t complying with it; we were trying to transcend it. The task was learning how to do so while nurturing, rather than diminishing, ourselves.

  Finding a way to speak, connect, and stay embodied wasn’t easy. At the center someone was constantly relapsing and regressing and disappearing from group, leaving community circles to sneak pills in the bathroom, or to wedge over the toilet and dispense with dinner, or to check into the center’s inpatient locations in rural, isolated places. This was not how I wanted to spend my time. I told my mother this in an email, to which she responded in one word, “Good.” We’d agreed not to speak
for the first month of my treatment. If I decided my disorder was tied to her, my mother reasoned, I’d need space to plan my disentanglement. This was a journey I had to begin on my own, she said, although she would be watching from a distance, ready to join me if I asked her to.

  Still, as my first month at the center faded into my second, I began to call her. When we spoke, my voice wavered, as if getting used to its own volume. We talked about my father and me, and, slowly, we talked about each other, about seeing each other. “I’m coming into the city this week,” she said, and I told her, “I’ll meet you.” It was bright out, and hot, the day we met. I walked west to Chelsea and straight into the sun. She came out of the gallery as I was going in and our bodies touched and she wrapped her arms around me like it was instinct and my body sobbed into her shoulder, all instinct. “You came back,” she said. It was a return; it was an answer.

  24

  In 1883, French physician Auguste Fabre wrote that “all women are hysterical…and what constitutes the temperament of a woman is rudimentary hysteria.” Hence the imperative to rein women in, confine them like animals to suburban landscapes, ranch-style homes, kitchens ornamented in charming copper molds. Hence the imperative to mistrust my mother, and scores of women before her, when they arrived in the exam room, dressed in their paper gowns, sure that something was wrong. Hence the tendency to see the anorexic, bulimic, obsessive-compulsive woman as disordered and vain rather than the logical product of the culture she’s grown up in. But it’s always easier, doctors quickly learn, to pat your patient on the knee, tell her she’s crazy, abnormal, bad, give her some Valium, and send her home. It’s always easier when she’s been primed her whole life to believe you.