JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  A day later I went to my mother’s primary care doctor to show her the cut and announce I was sure it was cancer, rare and hidden inside me, that was causing these sudden blackouts. Or maybe, I offered, the heart condition I’d been assured was benign was, in fact, serious. The cardiologist had called it congenital, but why, then, I wanted to know, was I only recently experiencing symptoms? My mother’s doctor sighed, cleaned the cut. “We’ll do bloodwork,” she said. “And I’ll order an EEG if you’d like, but honestly I think you’re just taking on your mom’s illness here a little.” When the results came back normal, she wrote a script for Valium. “You really should talk to someone,” she said. My diagnosis? Conversion disorder. The conversion of stress, preemptive grief, the intolerable sight of my mother’s condition, into my own body, my own symptoms.

  * * *

  “I think that most girls are naturally empathetic,” my mother said when we first discussed the outbreak in LeRoy. She was speaking of what is arguably the oddest feature of MPI: its predominance among women. Auguste Fabre would have said it’s in our nature, something uncontrolled inside us, something in need of taming. Scientists today say it’s a mystery, although my mother said she understood.

  I laughed. “That’s called essentialism,” I said, putting on my haughty academic hat.

  “What is?”

  “Nothing,” I said, taking the hat off because, truth was, I admired my mother’s essentialism, even if I knew it was dangerous or, in academic parlance, “problematic.”

  Given the psychic transference of symptoms through space and time that my mother said is natural to most women, it made sense to her that the lives of the girls of LeRoy were inextricably bound to the women in her family, who were themselves sick and bound to Jell-O, to what became of LeRoy without it. If we could speak to each other through our bodies, my mother reasoned, share stories through symptoms, perhaps we could pass down history as well. So she pictured whole generations of women, their struggles for freedom and escape, written like recipes on the genes they passed down, one woman to her daughter, and so on. The girls of LeRoy were reacting to violence and loss and oppression not only in their own lives, not only in each other’s lives, but in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives as well. We are all connected, we women, we Jell-O girls, bound by a web of common experience, a common language we express through our bodies before we learn it is safe to speak.

  * * *

  Patriarchy is how the underbelly, the vampire side, the group hysteria, evolves, my mother wrote in 2012, the summer she found out about the girls. That summer, she began sending me clippings by mail and links by email, a constant stream of her own observations and analyses—as if, on top of being her caretaker, I was to be her documentarian, a living record of her enthrallment with these girls. In that first package, she’d sent me her copy of the New York Times Magazine feature and a handwritten letter on legal paper, her graceful cursive hemmed across the yellow page. It’s all connected, she wrote, the misogynistic temperature in LeRoy is high. When the town let Ingham fail, she wrote, when they invested in Jell-O instead, they solidified the patriarchal legacy they live out today. She signed off by writing: Remember, this stuff has been given to us for a reason; it presents us with the possibility of becoming more conscious. This is all part of our story.

  My mother understood MPI as a condition of the empathetic and therefore a condition to which women were especially susceptible. Scientifically speaking, her theory makes some sense, particularly when placed alongside other phenomenological “mirroring” behaviors such as yawning or menstrual synchrony. But like so many of my mother’s arguments about women, her claim that we are naturally more empathetic than men breaks down in study after study, most of which identify difference, but none of which can parse nature from nurture.

  Regardless of their gender, patients experiencing sympathy pain, phantom pain, pain with no discernible medical cause, arrive in doctors’ offices on a daily basis. Large-scale MPI outbreaks, wherein the affected patients are numerous, are less common. But for DENT Institute doctors McVige and Mechtler, the diagnosis for the girls of LeRoy was obvious. Although MPI is rare, LeRoy is just the sort of insulated community in which it most often manifests. Salem, too, with its puritanical charter as a perfect society, a city on a hill, was ripe for conversion symptoms and their psychogenic spread. But it can be hard to believe what we cannot see, and harder still to understand a phenomenon in which multiple people inexplicably and involuntarily develop identical physical symptoms with no discernible physical cause. So just as the people of Salem searched for the devil, the girls and their parents, the town of LeRoy, searched for contaminants—barrels of waste, chemical-laced cafeteria food, airborne infections—something to explain what confused and frightened them. They searched, too, for authority, for someone with knowledge to tell them what the problem was and to give them an answer they wanted to hear.

  After the diagnosis from DENT, many parents in LeRoy pushed back, refusing to believe their daughters’ “mystery illness” could be emotional. It must instead be environmental, they said, the result of something toxic, something inherent in the town that was making the girls sick. When I heard this, I thought of Oatka Creek, how it ran red, orange, and yellow with sweet chemicals for years. How charming this story seems at first blush, quaint somehow, but dark underneath, Jell-O waste, a poison to the town’s central artery.

  In February 2012 a panel of school officials and environmental experts sat at a long table in the school auditorium and fielded angry questions from a crowd of parents. Katie Krautwurst’s mother had contacted famed environmental activist Erin Brockovich about the town’s potential contamination by a 1970 train derailment, and Brockovich had flown in, brightening the anxious media spotlight on the town. The EPA subsequently became involved but quickly determined there were no contaminants in the majority of the soil that had been affected by the train disaster, sealed off in drums and kept on site in LeRoy. (They only tested 203 of the 235 drums, however; the other thirty-two drums remain unspoken for but were sent to a toxic-waste removal site in Michigan.) The site of the Jell-O factory, and Oatka Creek, into which it once pumped refuse, went untested.

  Not surprisingly, conspiracy blogs spouting theories of government cover-ups, and superficial news articles accentuating the mystery of the girls, cropped up. The town fell into a media-saturated malaise marked by confusion and contradiction, an environment that was universally detrimental to the girls’ condition, which worsened with each news story published. The rumors of toxic-waste spills and chemicals left behind when manufacturing abandoned the town still ran rampant, even after months of testing. Footage of the meeting, featured prominently on local news reports and immortalized now on the internet, shows parents pointing fingers like pitchforks at school superintendent Kim Cox. “You are not doing your job at all,” one woman yells. The crowd applauds.

  The visible, angry fear of that meeting stemmed in part from the fact that for weeks preceding it, letters had been arriving by the boxful on Cox’s desk. In them, everything from poisoning to possession to malingering was proposed—but of all these theories, the most popular was that the girls had all smoked the same synthetic marijuana just before their symptoms began. Synthetic marijuana, also known as spice and K2, was legal and unregulated at the time, although it has since been banned in New York State. Much in the same way that accusations of malingering suggested that the girls themselves were to blame for their condition, rumors that synthetic pot was to blame for the outbreak insinuated that these girls were bad girls, a tale the American media still loves to tell. A tale that also performs a common societal tic: we tend to blame the female body for the array of collective anxieties it’s often saddled with. We tend to think that when a woman expresses her bodily pain or suffering, her very expression of it is also her crime. She is both perpetrator and victim of her own trauma. But in doing so we cover over the complicated truth of our anxieties, placing them instead inside the ima
ge of a woman, a girl, making her a vessel for all our fears.

  29

  Many years ago now, after my mother and I visited LeRoy for Jell-O’s hundredth-anniversary party, after we scraped moss from Midge’s overgrown grave, Mary found herself distressed by the state of her mother’s headstone. She hadn’t yet left my father then, and we returned to the dark house in New Hampshire, where the grave remained all she could think about, as if in her absence the ground would swallow up the stone, taking with it the world’s memory of Midge. My mother had fought hard to hold on to her memories of her mother, and even so, she sometimes felt like Midge had been a figment of her imagination. This feeling washed over her in unpredictable waves, and she would respond by spending afternoons hunched over the binders she kept of her mother’s letters, closing her eyes to try to hear Midge’s voice.

  Even when she found it, an echo of Midge’s soft tone in her distant mind, she still fixated on the headstone. And so she decided to make a new stone, a better stone, one more suited to her mother’s true character. Together, we drove to a quarry and walked through rows of granite, looking for the perfect marker, something small but sturdy, a subdued gray, like Midge herself, but threaded with traces of pink to keep it warm, to show her heart. When we found it, when the stone was finished, Midge’s handwriting, Mary Jane Fussell, laced across the granite, as if she herself had signed her approval.

  My mother, father, and I drove the stone to LeRoy in the early summer, less than a year before she’d move to Vermont. There, we gathered with Tom and his wife and children at the cemetery for a ceremony—insisted upon by my mother—for which only she and I dressed up. Tom’s wife and I awkwardly sang “Amazing Grace,” everyone else staring solemnly at the new stone. At the time I couldn’t tell why this was a big deal to my mother. Tom and my father seemed equally clueless. But she wept as we sang, and as we drove away, as if she were leaving her mother all over again. She was disappointed, she said, that it hadn’t gone the way she’d planned. “What did you expect to happen?” I asked. She took my hand and squeezed. “Oh, I don’t know,” she sighed, wiping her tears with the sad resignation of a woman who’d spent most of her life trying to know a ghost.

  I wonder now if it was on that trip that my mother realized she’d never return to LeRoy. Perhaps she knew that her relationship with Tom had reached a natural end point. Perhaps she understood, once and for all, that Midge wasn’t there in the ground, not really. Midge was in her memory, in her memwah, and in me.

  Even so, she kept Midge’s old gravestone, which weighed down the back of our car as we drove home to the woods, where she put it in the garden. Nine months later, when she left George for her farmhouse in Vermont, she took it with her. In 2004, when she moved back to Connecticut, it came along, and my mother, knowing somehow that this would be her last home, had it built into a stone wall, where it remains.

  The year my mother returned to Connecticut, shortly after her first liver resection, and midway through my freshman year of college, she proposed that Aunt Edith’s trust, money she and Tom shared, be split between them. She had always felt shackled to the money, to LeRoy and Jell-O; and to Tom, with whom she’d barely spoken since the gravestone ceremony. She was tired, she said, of maintaining a relationship dependent on how closely she adhered to Tom’s ideas of normality, propriety, a productive life. A life like his, which is a LeRoy life, a life of the law, his practice on Main Street, his house modest enough to hide his fortune, his wife and children, the shiny matching Buicks parked in the drive.

  But at first all she would say was “We have different investment goals,” unwilling to admit what she really wanted was freedom from Tom, and from the big bank, its corporate management policy, each portfolio the same. She had found a money manager in Vermont she liked, but without the split she couldn’t move her share. They ended up in a lawsuit. There were questions about how the trust should be split and how it should be managed, but, most hurtful, there were statements and arguments from Tom in which he appeared to reveal a lifetime of feelings—loss and anger and betrayal. Mary, he indicated, was irresponsible and wasteful. She had never been normal. It was no wonder she’d wound up in a mental hospital. As an adult she had chosen the life of a starving artist but had spoiled me, her only child, by sending me to private schools. His children had gone to public school in LeRoy. They were hardworking. They had families to support. And anyway, Aunt Edith never trusted Mary; although she had set up the trust when Mary was five, she could already tell her young niece was dramatic.

  While the court ruled first in favor of my mother, the ruling was overturned on appeal. The final verdict preserved the shared trust but proclaimed that should Mary die first, the trust would end, splitting in half between me, her only heir, and Tom. If not, the trust would divide four ways, between my mother (and later me), and Tom’s three children.

  By that point it didn’t matter to Mary. She was exhausted by the expense of the lawsuit and the meanness of Tom’s words. She didn’t want to talk to him again, she said, not in anger, but in sad resignation. “It was deeply hurtful,” she said any time I asked, “the culmination of a lifetime of conflict. I just couldn’t take any more.” Her only regret, she said, was never again seeing her mother’s grave. “Just to check in on her,” she said. “But I’ve made peace with it, I’ve let all that go.”

  I wondered if that was true. Already she was slipping away. Even if I didn’t know it yet, I sensed it. And though in 2014 I asked my graduate program in Texas for money to visit LeRoy and research the girls, what I really wanted was to visit Midge’s grave, as if my body could serve as an avatar for my mother’s, bringing her closer to her mother and giving her the peace she needed to travel fearlessly toward death.

  I’d tried several times to reach the LeRoy girls, but since the article in the Times magazine, they’ve vanished from the public sphere, guarded by mothers who’ve had it with the media attention that was only making their daughters sicker. Did I want to contribute to their illness? Did I want to be part of the problem? I did not. But I did want to be close to them, to stand in the town center, shut my eyes and see if I felt whatever had pulsed inside them, whatever trauma they’d shared; I wanted to see if I shared it, too, trauma or memory, the feeling of my grandmother’s ghost, assuring me there was something more, something beyond the physical, something I might reach for when my mother’s body passed away.

  So that summer, when my mother was still well enough to walk around her garden, planning the wedding Jon and I would have there in a year’s time, I wrote to Tom, saying I was interested in our family history. “Visit anytime,” he said, and so we did—Jon and I borrowing my mother’s car, backing from her driveway while she waved at us from behind the red garden gate. “Go find out what happened,” she called, but I just waved, hoping I’d return with the knowledge she craved, fearing I wouldn’t.

  We drove north for hours before cutting up into the Berkshires. It was early July, and the landscape grew up around us in mountains of verdancy. We passed by Stockbridge and pulled off the highway to drive through Riggs. We stopped in Rochester for coffee with Marcia, Mary’s childhood friend. By the time we reached LeRoy, the sky was blue and dusky, the bugs were emerging.

  We drove in on a two-lane road, the gray pavement carrying us through green fields that dissipated over time, changing to small plots with little houses on them, little front yards ornamented with windmills and birdbaths and American flags. When we hit the edge of town, a sign welcomed us: Welcome to LeRoy, Birthplace of Jell-O. We slowed down for Main Street, which looked, on the surface at least, exactly as I remembered it. I had imagined total dilapidation. But the storefronts that remained were well kept.

  We passed the Woodward Library, dipped over a hill across the railroad tracks, to the Jell-O factory. We pulled in, parked the car, and got out, holding our hands up to our foreheads to squint at the building’s disrepair. In the front were offices, or maybe just storage rooms, of a company whose purpose I cou
ldn’t make out. But the back of the building, the factory itself, was empty and paint splattered, used from time to time for paintball battles. The lawn was grassy and unkempt, hemmed in by a fence separating the factory land from the short lawn of the town cemetery. At first I couldn’t believe the two locations were so closely linked. I hadn’t remembered them this way. But it seemed somehow fitting, and I wedged my toes into the fence and stood up taller so that I could see across the sea of stones to the Woodward Mausoleum, imposing gray with columns and stained-glass windows. I squinted, scanning for Midge’s headstone, although I knew it was small, tucked somewhere away from the Woodwards, somewhere I’d forgotten entirely.

  Jon called to me, and I walked over to where he was standing, and, on my tiptoes, peered into a broken window. He helped me up onto a pile of rocks outside it, and I tried and failed to fit myself around the shattered pane and into the building. With just my head poking through the sharp circle of broken glass, I squinted at the tiled floor, the industrial lamps hung from taut wire, all of it brightened by the dusky sunlight cutting through the windows in thin squares, like pages of light. For a moment, I wanted to curl inside their warmth and never leave, but the feeling passed away. “Oh well,” I said, stepping backward carefully, over the rubble, to solid ground. I felt relieved, then guilty when I landed, as if I should persist, should draw blood breaking through the glass and crawling past its jagged edges. I thought of the LeRoy girls, so close by. I imagined finding their homes and knocking on their doors, fighting my way inside, as if I could force my way into their stories to better know my own. Was that what I should be doing?