JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  The air-conditioning in our hotel room that night rattled and died over and over, and still I slept heavily, burdened by dreams I couldn’t remember. We woke tired, itchy-eyed, and I sprang out of bed, worried we’d be late to meet Tom, who was expecting us at ten. I’d told him my terms for the day, what I’d like to do. I didn’t want to wind up sitting on his sofa making awkward conversation. Instead I wanted to go to the Jell-O museum, but mostly I wanted to go to the cemetery.

  Tom’s house was exactly as I’d remembered it, matching Buicks and all. He welcomed us with stiff hugs, and then we left, driving first to the museum. Tom rode in the front seat of our car, issuing directions. We passed over the bridge, and I mentioned Main Street. “It looks just like I remembered it,” I said, noting that, compared with many places, LeRoy still seemed prosperous. “But things aren’t good,” Tom said quickly, speaking then about the loss of the factory work that once drove the town. “Many of the houses along Main Street are rentals now,” he said. “Nothing is kept up the way it used to be.” I realized then that the changes to LeRoy I’d read about have taken place over many years; a slow fade, a disintegration from the inside out. I imagined how the town must have looked at its best, every storefront filled, every resident working, the creek running Jell-O-sweet and colorful in the summer, solid and sure for every skater at Christmastime. I imagined my mother and Tom, gliding over the crust of icy water, walking home in soggy coats and mittens, Tom all business, with his blades over one shoulder, his hands in his pockets, and my mother trailing along behind him, shaping snowballs and touching her tongue to their flavorless absence. Given this, given what my uncle must remember, it makes sense, the depressed emptiness he sees in the town now. But he’s stayed.

  We arrived at the Jell-O Museum, a one-room building full of framed advertisements and recipes. We took the short tour, then wandered around. Jon initiated a photograph, and Tom and I stood, stiff and smiling, against the archaic backdrop. Tom put one arm around my waist with a formality that belied only fear, and I felt suddenly awash with a tenderness I’d not imagined I could muster. Maybe it was something about the nearness of blood, the nearness of my mother; maybe it was simply that I felt sorry for him, estranged from her for so many years.

  Afterward, we walked the Jell-O Brick Road from the museum to the LeRoy House, an old white colonial. Inside it was quiet and musty, the floors thick with oriental rugs, the walls lined with relics, including a life-sized portrait of my great-great-aunt Edith wearing a blue silk dress and smiling like the Mona Lisa.

  In the next room was a small exhibit, nothing more than a glass display box with a few waxy documents, a few images. But the box caught my eye, and I walked over to look closer. Inside was a drawing, tinted blue, of the town of LeRoy as it must have looked one hundred years before, bustling with horses and buggies, boaters on the creek, women with parasols waving to them from the bridge. And a campus, dormitories, and a library, all of it flanked by the words Female seminary, Ingham University, 1876. “Apparently there was a vote put to the people of LeRoy,” Tom said, coming up behind us. “Bail out the school or let it sink.” But the town did the latter, the school was leveled, and from the rubble the Woodwards built their own library, the etched capitals of their name erasing INGHAM for all time. Never in all my research about Jell-O and LeRoy, never even in my mother’s writing, had I read that Ingham’s closure boiled down to a town vote. Never had I known it was the town’s decision.

  Heavy, the weight of this history, so heavy that in the moment I had nothing to say, no adequate response. Now I wonder what would have changed in LeRoy if the rise of Jell-O had somehow coincided with the rise of the country’s first women’s university. For a moment I imagine the dessert supporting the school, my family’s wealth funneled into educating women outside the kitchen, the myriad ways to make the perfect pointless mold. All of this was a choice. Money and conformity over intellectualism and free thought. This choice was what my mother hated about LeRoy; perhaps this choice was what first cast the curse that kept LeRoy frozen in the patriarchal past.

  In the car on the way to the cemetery to see Midge’s grave, I sat in the backseat while Jon drove and Tom directed. For some reason I’d been nervous to ask about the girls, but I couldn’t see my uncle’s face, and this emboldened me. “So,” I said, “what happened with the girls a few years back?”

  “Oh,” he said, rearranging in his seat. The moment felt pivotal, and I realized I’d expected him to deny the whole thing, to call the girls hysterical, to accuse them of the emotional problems he’d charged my mother with. But now I was suddenly unsure of what he’d say. I pulled my phone out of my purse and recorded him without asking, so I wouldn’t forget his answer, but I fumbled with the buttons and botched the whole thing. The resultant audio is short and foggy, rising and falling with Tom’s nasal upstate accent:

  “As I understand it,” he says, “—turn left here—there had been a girl at the high school who had kind of Tourette’s syndrome. Well, she was a popular girl, and everybody thought very”—he pauses—“very highly of her, and the theory seems to be she was a role model for these other girls, and it was kind of a, if one does it then another one does it then another one does it, and I think it was kind of proven to be true because all the girls that got therapy got better, overcame their…problems.”

  Their problems. Their emotional problems. What Tom referred to when he wrote that Mary suffers from emotional problems that cause her to see the world unrealistically. At the time I wondered what about the world was unrealistic through my mother’s eyes. Was it simply that she believed she should be allowed to control her own money? Was this an unrealistic request? I imagined what my father would have said if he’d read the letter, how he might have agreed, asserting once again that my mother had imagined his affair, telling me the same if I dared to question him. It was my mother’s emotions that were to blame for my parents’ divorce, he asserted time and again, not his own actions.

  Given this sort of rhetoric, it’s no surprise that in the small, conservative town they lived in, in the larger misogynistic culture they lived in, emotion was indeed a problem for the girls of LeRoy. So, like generations of women before them, they tried to block out their feelings and ignore their pain. But it had to come out eventually, didn’t it?

  As Tom spoke of the girls and their problems, I thought about my mother as a child, craning her neck to watch the Italian women mourn, rending their garments, shaking and screaming. I imagined her at Riggs, frozen before a panel of men issuing her diagnosis, informing her of her problems. What might have changed in Mary’s life if she’d been allowed to speak her trauma and her loss in the first place? I wondered the same of Katie Krautwurst, Thera Sanchez, and myself; I imagined what might still change for us if we gave ourselves over to wandering through the dark forest of our grief. Could we trust ourselves to forge a path? Could we trust that we’d someday emerge?

  Tom knew just where the grave was. When we arrived, Midge’s stone was smaller than I’d remembered. Where once her handwriting was crisp and new, now it had faded, her name indistinct. I felt suddenly panicked, realizing that I had to return to my mother with images of the faded stones. I’d meant my pilgrimage to LeRoy to be a healing journey, from which I would return bearing images of Midge’s permanence, reassurance that when my mother went to meet her, she, too, would be remembered by those she left behind.

  The three of us stood for a few moments, gazing at the stones. Then I took photos, knelt by Midge’s headstone to scrape away moss, just as I had on that trip to LeRoy as a child. But within minutes there was nothing more to do. We shifted awkwardly, then returned to the car and drove back to Tom’s house. In the driveway, we hugged again, and then Jon and I climbed back into our car and pulled in reverse away from my uncle.

  * * *

  “Tell me all about it,” my mother said when we returned to her house after dark, exhausted from the drive, carrying our bags, our bodies drooping under the wei
ght. I told her it was good, but couldn’t think of what else to say, so I said, “I’ll give you all the details later.” She seemed disappointed. But she was tired, too, she told me, and by the time I’d showered, she’d changed into her nightgown and climbed into bed. While Jon made dinner downstairs, I knocked softly on her door, pushing it open just enough to see the light still on. She was reading, her knees little mountains beneath the covers, her dog under the bed, snoring, the cat settled in beside her, cleaning his face with his paws. There were several water glasses on her bedside table, her phone, an array of pill bottles. She rubbed her eyes, said again she was exhausted. She enunciated exhaaaaausted, punctuating her a’s with little lurches. I climbed up beside her. “Want to hear about it?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “He was in his element, I suppose,” she said of Tom when I told her about the tour. She was quiet, expecting a climactic event, but I wasn’t sure what else to say. “Did you go to the graveyard?” she asked. I told her we did and tried to avoid explaining how weather-beaten the headstone was. But she found out the next morning at the breakfast table, when I pulled up pictures on my phone. She was crestfallen at the sight of her mother’s grave. “It looked better in person,” I told her.

  She spent the rest of the day in the studio, writing. Jon and I were eating dinner when she came in, the screen door slamming behind her, the sound of dog’s nails on the hardwood floor preceding her coming. “I put some writing together for you,” she said, bending at the waist to lug a limp TPN bag from the fridge. She sighed. “It’ll tell you everything you need to know.” She patted the bag like a good dog. “Get nice and toasty,” she said, addressing her dinner, which needed time to warm before she “hooked up.” Too cold and it would freeze the thin membranes of her veins.

  * * *

  A month into autumn, after I’d returned to Texas for the fall semester, Mary called to confess she was losing weight again. “They’re upping my weekly intake,” she said, “no big deal.” There was an edge to her voice. It remained each time we talked, a distraction in the background of our chatter, a distant vibration, like a radio playing on one speaker’s side of the line. “What’s that noise?” I wanted to say, but didn’t, not for her sake but for mine.

  I’d always called her often. “What’s up?” she’d say. “Just chatting,” I’d answer, and she’d say, “Oh good,” and we’d settle in. I’d talk to her while I drove, did laundry, made dinner, made plans. She’d talk to me while she painted, walked the dogs, or skimmed the pages she’d written that day. But now when I called she answered in a muffled voice, as if just waking up. “I’m in bed,” she said any time after five o’clock. At first I ignored the edge in her voice that grew each week after we left Connecticut. “It’s the cold,” she said when I finally asked. “It’s the thought of another winter.” By the time she admitted it was her body, the first snow had fallen. “I don’t know what happened,” she said, “but everything has gone to hell in a handbasket.” The first CT scan revealed nothing, the second showed shadows, tumors drifting in again like clouds across the surface of her liver.

  My mother had many times said, “This is the last time I will do this.” She said so after trips and surgeries and marriage. She said so after too much time spent alone, too much time spent in the company of others. For the most part, she meant what she said when she decided never to do something again. I learned to trust her. But I suppose I should have known that her past pledges to never go under the knife again couldn’t be taken seriously, not when spoken by painkillers and pain. And I suppose I should have considered that fear, the fear of doing nothing, would drive her to act, to undo her past decisions not to. She was not one to do nothing. I should have known all this, but I was still surprised when she told me about a surgery, another one, to remove her latest tumors. “Yale said it couldn’t be done,” she scoffed, “but I’ve found a liver specialist at Sinai who says he can make it work.”

  So Jon and Judy and I flew to New York a week before Christmas. The city was cold but dry. We prayed for snow. We waited for it to fall while we waited for her to survive surgery, which she did. The surgeon told us it was successful, told us he planned all weekend for the difficult maneuvering he did around the blood vessels onto which tumors had leeched themselves. He looked proud when he said “best possible outcome.” Still, it was always all the same, surgery and recovery, my mother’s sticky nightgowns, her matted hair; pumps and pill schedules and alcohol swabs; Jell-O and pink pitchers of water and juice; roommates who whined and wailed from behind curtains; the cold air to kill infections inside the hospital, the cold New York December outside.

  30

  After I left my mother and returned to Houston, the distance expanded, magnified. Before I’d always felt her body alive on the other side of the country, that energetic umbilical cord still tethering me. Now the connection felt weaker.

  At Mount Sinai, there had been improvement but little resolution as we prepared to leave for Texas and a new semester I both looked forward to and dreaded. She was feeling worse, she said, shaking. She was short of breath, the result of fluid still stuck in the lungs, not pneumonic, not yet. Walk, sit upright, cough it out, eat and drink, get your strength up, the doctors ordered. She nodded obediently, ate little. The physical therapist arrived and had her stand, balancing on one foot, then the other. “This isn’t hard for you, right?” he asked. She shook her head. When I left for the airport, they were marching in place, my mother’s forehead furrowed, her gaze fixed on the unknowable distance in front of her.

  From Houston, I called her daily, looking for reassurance. “Are you there?” I’d ask the machine if she didn’t pick up. “Are you eating?”

  “A little,” she said when she answered, her breath heavy on her side of the line. I could tell she was lying, protecting me. By then she was alone again, Judy gone to her house in Florida.

  “Well, who’s helping you with groceries? Who’s helping you walk the dogs?”

  “I’m managing,” my mother said, sounding a little affronted. “Your father,” she added, to which I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  A year before the CT scan and the cloudy tumors, before the surgery, my father had arrived on her doorstep. All the way from New Hampshire to ask her if she’d like to take a dog walk. I picture him, in his Levis and his leather jacket, antsy at the threshold of her house. I picture him entering, greeting her dogs, spending too much time petting them to avoid the awkwardness of looking in her eyes. It had been so long, so many years, he said. But their daughter would be getting married soon, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could celebrate the day together?

  This, they’d both understood, would take time. So they’d returned to the autumn beach where they’d walked hand in hand twenty-seven years before. Two weeks later, he’d come again, and they’d walked again.

  All of which scared me. I’d hungered for this for years, for the normalcy of parents who cared for each other. But now I was indignant. Why now? I wanted to know. Why only now, when I was settled in life and love? “We just weren’t ready yet,” my mother said. “We both had so much growing up to do.”

  After the surgery, after Judy and I left, as Mary’s strength began to wane, my parents stopped walking and started driving, my father piloting them around for hours, making jokes, making sure they passed all their old haunts, and Mary watching from the passenger seat as the world whipped by.

  She looked forward to these dates, she told me. Even depended on them a little. But it was me she called one morning in February, two months after the surgery. She couldn’t stop vomiting, she said, her voice panicked and thin, and she didn’t want to go to Yale.

  “Okay,” I said, switching into crisis management, “let’s find a way to get you to Sinai.”

  “I was wondering,” she said timidly, “I was wondering about asking your father.”

  I paused. “I think that’s a good idea,” I said. I could tell it scared her but also made her feel safe. She’d always want
ed a man to save her, even after she’d learned she had to save herself.

  I called my father before she did. “Absolutely,” he said when I told him what was happening, and drove through the night to get to her.

  Jon and I flew to New York. There was a new room, a new roommate. IV fluids to get her strength up, and the insertion of a G-tube, which fed from a hole in her side to her stomach, where it was designed to drain fluid before she could throw it up. The tube hooked to a bag that hung from the side of her bed, a clear pocketbook of bile. “It’s all clogged up,” I’d tell the nurses. Judy arrived and said the same thing. “It’s working,” they’d assure us. But anyone could see it wasn’t. She was still vomiting. They tried a bigger hose. When it fell out, they put the old one back in. Eventually they sent her home. “Take it up with her gastroenterologist,” they told us. “Ask her oncologist,” they said. Judy and I sent emails, made calls, most of which received curt answers, if they were answered at all. Mary had been an interesting case two months before. Now everyone was retreating, a team of doctors suddenly childlike in their powerlessness, walking backwards on their tiptoes.

  On Mary’s birthday, Jon bought an inflatable crown and an array of balloons, boxes of black cherry Jell-O, and a can of Reddi-wip. Together we stirred the powder, watching it dissolve, then returning hours later to see if it had set. We poked the mold. It wiggled resiliently. Jon flipped it over onto a platter while I said, “Careful careful,” shaking the mold to dislodge the perfect purple mass. We topped it with candles and a mountain of whipped cream, creating a comical mountain of sugar. “It’s ready,” we called to Judy and Richard, who gathered round the table, waiting while I fetched Mary, who leaned on my arm, entwined with hers, as we walked to the table. She sat like a queen in her crown and fluffy white bathrobe, clapping while we sang “Happy Birthday.” Jon dolloped Jell-O onto everyone’s plate, and we ate it, equal parts disgusted and delighted.