JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  Later, alone in the kitchen, I couldn’t stop picking at the leftover mold. I peeled back the Saran Wrap covering the Jell-O, poked a spoon in, and doled a little out, covering it back up as I went. It tasted tinny, like chemicals and red dye and the source of sickness. But I went back for more and didn’t stop until the bowl was empty.

  31

  For 120 years, Jell-O has survived economic upheaval and cultural change. It has weathered the public-relations nightmares wrought by frat culture and Bill Cosby. It has shape-shifted from dessert, to salad, to diet food, to snack. But now it appears to face only decline. Outside of Utah, where Jell-O is the official state snack, sales are low. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before America’s Favorite Dessert becomes a relic of the past.

  I wonder if Jell-O’s fate will ultimately have to do with what my mother hated about it: the brand’s association with domestic science and 1950s suburbia. Jell-O isn’t sexy, and it’s certainly not healthy, both attributes of growing concern to a country knee-deep in dueling epidemics of obesity and celebrity. Even with the recent introduction of Simply Good, a small, “natural” line free of dyes and preservatives, Jell-O is, for many, now considered a grotesque junk food of the Spam variety, a far cry from the light and wholesome persona it owned for decades. Whereas once Jell-O’s artificially bright colors and ability to contain a fridge full of leftovers were the draw, now blogs and BuzzFeed lists abound, chronicling the grossness of old recipes.

  Jell-O may not be sexy, but making it can be a joyful affair. This according to Kraft’s senior marketing director, who has recently announced that his team is currently at work rebranding Jell-O as a “fun food.” When did we lose track of food for fun? he wants to know, although it remains unclear how much fun he considers the carcinogenic chemicals and dyes still featured in most Jell-O products.

  I suppose Jell-O could be a fun food for some. But to me, despite the violence that has always made and marketed it, Jell-O is still all about caretaking. Mothers caring for husbands and children and entire congregations of potluck-goers; friends caring for each other; children caring for their parents; daughters and dieters—like me—caring for themselves by making the delightfully lite choice. In the twenty-first century, even men have gotten in on the action.

  Corporate marketing’s recent discovery of stay-at-home dads and the consumer potential in this demographic is reflected by today’s Jell-O commercials, several of which feature fathers and sons bonding over an after-work/after-school treat. In a 2013 spot for Jell-O pudding, a redheaded, apron-wearing dad greets his young redheaded son, who is fresh off the bus after the first day of school. “It’ll be easier tomorrow,” the dad assures him, passing his boy a bowl of chocolate pudding. “I have to go back?” his shocked son says, pausing midbite. “Better make it a double.”

  In another ad, an overweight, balding dad sits at the kitchen table with his son, swirling his spoon through a plastic cup of Jell-O while he describes how miserable the rest of his life is. Dead-end job, long commute, hair loss, the list goes on. Jell-O is the one bright spot in his day, he suggests. “You need this more than me,” his son says, sliding his pudding cup across the table so that his father now has two desserts rather than one.

  This particular motif of a child caring for a parent is constant in Jell-O’s mythology over the decades. From the first appearance of the Jell-O girl herself—So easy, even a child can do it—and her penchant for surprising Mama, to a spot from the eighties in which a loving daughter makes her parents an orange Jell-O mold in the shape of fifty, the number of years they’d been married. And finally to my mother and me, slowly walking arm in arm toward the kitchen table, where a jiggling birthday mold waited, offering, inviting, the last meal she’d ever eat.

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  Two months after we left New York, Jon and I packed up the car in Texas and drove through days and nights and time zones, arriving in Connecticut on a clear spring night, smatterings of stars like tumors in the cold, dark sky. We’d talked the whole drive about the wedding we were planning for Mary and Judy’s garden in June. A DIY affair with three days of camping for our friends in the back woods, and karaoke in the garden. “It’ll just be a big party with a wedding attached,” we said, not worrying that we still needed tents, catering, a dress for me, a ring for Jon.

  The casual approach had been my idea, avoidant in a way. I’d never dreamed of marriage. A white meringue dress and a diamond always seemed a trap to me, and, like Mary and Midge, I dreamed of travel, freedom, roads stretching endlessly before me. But I dreamed, too, of Jon, a love strong and tender. I dreamed of him with such specificity, I sometimes think I conjured him. But we were good as we were, cohabitants for years by the time the wedding arrived. What would change with the exchange of rings? This question didn’t seem to cross his mind. He wasn’t worried, he said. But I imagined how I might fade within our marriage, become a woman too domestic to desire, dulled as if by magic the moment the ring slid onto my finger. I thought often of Midge and her writing, how quickly it had been abandoned to wifedom and motherhood, how she’d pined for the life she could have had. I thought of the drama teacher, how her power stemmed from her otherness, how in marriage I could never be my husband’s other woman, and how that made me vulnerable to his betrayal. I thought, too, about the Jell-O money Jon would marry into, the way it had changed my parents’ relationship, and how we might work together to escape their fate. I called my mother often to discuss. “You’re different than I was,” she insisted. “You know yourself better.” The sureness in her voice was the sureness she brought to our conversations about the LeRoy girls and what happened to them. “No doubt in my mind,” she’d say about the origins of their illness, and about my ability to avoid their fate.

  “We’ll set it all up together,” my mother had said, “we’ll make this wedding perfect for you.” But when she answered the door, the night of our arrival, dogs milling around her, I lost my breath at the sight of her, her body halved since I’d seen her last, just a wooden doll composed of hinges, her face swollen as if stung. “Hi,” she warbled, reaching out to hug us, and we hid our shock, held her close. But upstairs in my attic room, surrounded by my childhood things, I sobbed to Jon. “What will we do if she dies before June?” He swept my hair off my face, touched my cheek. “We’ll have the wedding anyway,” he said. For a moment, I felt repulsed, even as I myself had brought it up. How could he think of going through with our marriage on the heels of my mother’s death? He was trying to comfort me, to tell me he’d hold me in her absence. But I couldn’t imagine doing anything without her, let alone getting married. There were so many new roles I was about to assume. How could I fill them without her? How could I leave my twenties, become a wife, and cease to become her daughter? It seemed the world would stop with my mother’s last breath. In a way, I wanted it to.

  We slept deeply in her house, our small attic room cool and dark. We rose late, unsure of what to do. We wandered aimlessly around the backyard, pointing out places where we’d like to have this or that—a makeshift shower for the campers, a table for snacks. We took trips to Costco, reading to each other off crumpled lists. We hid out at the local Planet Fitness, having suddenly realized that we were not in wedding shape. In the backyard we built a campsite around the fire pit my mother had commissioned from her landscaper a month before, when she could still walk around outside, when doing so didn’t drain her of everything she had. Now she stayed in bed all day, vomit bucket within reach, curtains open, gazing at the garden she remembered Judy planting thirty years before, blooming in yellow and blue. “There were always parties in this house,” she said when I climbed in bed with her one night. “Remember,” she said, “we cut flowers for bouquets, shucked corn on the back porch.” We danced sprinkler dances, jumping through the waving fan of water, kaleidoscopic in the afternoon light. I remember.

  “Tell me what you think of this dress,” I said, changing the subject, thumping up the attic stairs outside her room and re
turning with the latest of my online shopping efforts, a wispy cream-colored gown with a skirt that swept the floor, and a simple low V-neckline. “It’s very revealing,” she said critically when I put it on for her. “But then, what do I know?” she said when she saw my disappointment. “I wore a winter coat when I married your dad.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, but climbed the stairs back to my room feeling miffed, feeling I should wear whatever I wanted to my wedding, set the tone early on for the freedom I wanted my marriage to embody. Feeling my mother should understand the desire for freedom more than anyone. But freedom was hard to conjure in those days, the house like a capsule in which we lived, waiting for marriage, waiting for death.

  “I just can’t stand it,” Mary would say when the waves arose again, sweeping over her as she retched for long minutes, her empty body trying to empty itself further. When finally she agreed to the hospital, it was a relief to know she was there, safe. Jon and I visited daily, cued up our first-dance song on his iPhone and practiced our Texas two-step for her in the cramped, curtained room. She closed her cotton mouth over a smile, placed her palms together in silent applause. “You two,” she said, miming the A-okay sign.

  My father visited when he could, all the way from New Hampshire, to stand by her bedside and rearrange the flowers he brought because, she said, “they’re fighting.”

  “They’re friendly now,” he said, kissing her forehead, and all I could think was that for years he couldn’t say her name.

  A few weeks before the wedding, a palliative care nurse named Ursula pulled me into the hallway to discuss hospice options. But I brushed her off, said I’d think about it, and returned to the room indignant that she’d suggested such a thing. George and Jon were whispering about where to buy the cases of wine. My mother was asleep, openmouthed. Later, when she woke, I took her hand. “I had an interesting conversation with Ursula,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  We went on this way, avoiding. “We’ll deal with it after the wedding,” I reasoned, but called hospice anyway. At home I picked a dress, returned the rest. Jon and I settled on the cheapest catering we could find, an Indian restaurant that wound up giving us both indigestion.

  My mother returned home days before the wedding, setting up once more in a rented bed in the sunroom. “Don’t say hospice,” we told the nurses who came and went, bearing IV bags of comfort, patches of painkiller, dissolvable Dilaudid because she vomited anything she swallowed. “Don’t tell her why you’re here; she’s still not ready.” But I wanted her to be ready, and strong enough to know the truth: she was dying. I wanted her to be strong enough to answer the questions that stung from the sliding place inside me. But she lolled in silent space-time on her sweaty cot. She’d entered the hospital cancer-thin, all sinew and bone. But they pumped her full of saline, and now her body resembled an inflated plastic glove, translucent white and reaching.

  The day before the wedding, friends arrived and camped out back, stinking of booze and bug spray and weed. My father carried boxes of wine and ferried people in from the airport. Jon’s family arrived from California, grilled rehearsal dinner, sang karaoke, and showed up the next day wearing pressed linen. Through all this, my mother stayed shut in the sunroom like a secret, sleeping, resting up for the ceremony she was determined to attend. “Is it wrong that I just want this all to be over with?” I asked Jon one night, numb and exhausted. “Try to enjoy it,” he said, looking hurt. “Let go, enjoy it,” I repeated to myself each time I started to dread the wedding and the looming question of my mother’s attendance. Will she make it? we all asked. Just walking to the bathroom had become a herculean feat. “Maybe we could FaceTime her in from the sunroom?” someone said. “Or film it and let her watch it later?”

  Early morning on my wedding day. I woke with the sunrise to walk in the woods, looking for shafts of light. Inside, my mother had risen, too. Judy and her other close friend of forty years, Penelope, corralled her into the downstairs bathroom to wash her hair and dress her in the only outfit that would fit her suddenly corpulent body—a pair of silk PJ pants I’d given her the Christmas before, and a long beaded jacket. In the hours before the ceremony they dressed her, let her rest, held the pink tub for her while she vomited, little tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

  A stylist arrived to do my hair; my girlfriends gathered in my mother’s empty bedroom, which had become for that night the room I would share with Jon. We popped champagne, took pictures. Rain arrived to flood the garden, and we watched from the upstairs window as guests retreated to the dinner tent, with the overwhelming smell of curry wafting over from the Indian buffet, the awkwardly assembled sound system, the laser light show that zigzagged across the canvas ceiling in fluorescent purple and green.

  In the mirror, I was not myself, primped and bridal, teetering on my too-high heels. I had wanted to look free and easy, not like the airbrushed brides on the covers of magazines, their princess dresses promising a perfection no life could match. But now I looked more like them than myself, masked in makeup and an intricate updo. There was nothing I could do about it. I grabbed my bouquet and descended the stairs.

  “If you want to see your mother, now is the time,” Judy said, and I followed her into the sunroom, unsure of what I’d find. Maybe Mary had magically transformed, as she had so many times before, to the mother of my childhood, protective and strong. But I found her unfamiliar, rouged like a corpse, her tumid ankles peeking out, inflated and purple. “My little girl,” she said, suddenly lucid, suddenly herself, as I leaned over her bed, saying, “Mommy,” repeating the word to calm the blood pounding in my torso, my head. I was exhausted. I wanted only to curl in bed beside her, melt into her body as I did in my childhood. But I withdrew, afraid of ruining my makeup. Then she was gone, swept away by a bevy of friends and nurses, who carried her distended form to her seat in the tent.

  I looked at her there, during the ceremony, and wondered if she was looking back at me or if she was simply gazing through me, toward the shadowy distance ahead of her. I looked back at Jon, swearing to be my heart’s companion, its protector, its equal in all things, and thought him beautiful, made more so by the yellow light of the tent, the storm beating at its outer walls.

  In the weeks that followed, my first weeks of marriage, after friends and family left, after my mother returned to the hospital, Judy and I returned to caretaking. Jon waited patiently outside my mother’s room while we leaned over her, fiddling with the malfunctioning G-tube. Some days during a lull in the vomiting or the tube leakage, I put my ear to the door of her room. Was she sleeping? Staring into space? She rarely spoke, afraid she’d vomit if she did.

  “Did she say anything?” I’d ask anyone who went in her room without me. Usually it was Jon, who sat with her each day, reading to her or sometimes just holding her hand. “Not really,” he’d say, and I’d stomp off, frustrated with her for not addressing the obvious. Death was unutterable to her even as it approached. But I wanted to hear her say it. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she’d murmur when Judy or I tried to broach the subject.

  Sometimes, though, when a group was gathered, she’d hold court, Mother Mary speaking painkiller gibberish while I made notes in my phone, scrolling through them later, trying to decipher a hidden code. She talked about Edith’s mansion—Every Sunday flowers arrive, each one a different message—and her childhood bedroom—A crack in the ceiling where the fairy was trapped. She talked about my father—Here’s the shadow of a man. Who is it? George?—and she talked, I think, about me—Chicky gets off the plane and goes straight to the hospital.

  But the closest she ever got to talking about death was with Jon. “At least she’ll have some freedom,” she said out of nowhere, holding his hand. He nodded along, not knowing what she meant. But I did.

  Time slowed down. Nurses came and went. She slept on the patio, sun on her face.

  33

  My mother’s last meal was the Jell-O we
served her on her birthday in March. Her last words to me were “I love you, go go.” She died on a Tuesday, the first day of September, alone in her bed in the sunroom. Judy was already up, in the garden. Jon, Richard, and I were still sleeping. For days we’d waited, sitting with her voiceless body, from which her spirit waned in stages, her breath like breaking waves, the ocean echoing through the curl of a conch shell.

  We’d spoken to her, held her hand, told her we were there, to rest, to let go. The nurses had lifted the sheets to show me her body, mottling in shades of yellow, turning cold with the weather, the shortening summer days. Even so, I hadn’t believed it, not until I felt her lifeless body, finally free of itself. Not until I kissed her cheek, touched her unresponsive hand, then signed the paperwork to permit the man in the black SUV to wheel her away. And even then.

  Even now I expect to hear her voice, receive her call. I look for her words everywhere. In her memoirs, the binders of her writing I read obsessively, and in the old journals I scour, or our old emails about nothing at all. I send text messages to her number, still saved to the Favorites section of my phone, knowing she won’t respond. And still I crave her voice, her protection. I crave her assurance that somehow, through writing her story, Midge’s story, my story, I can save myself from the curse. Our words will free us, my mother believed. Through them we can assume the magic that must be our mantle, in a world determined upon our silence.