JELL-O Girls

by Allie Rowbottom

  Six months after her death I consult a medium who sees a garden and asks about my mother’s book. “Your mother will visit you in dreams,” she says. “She already does,” I tell her, not mentioning how dark they are, how tinted with madness, these visitations I both look forward to and fear.

  In them I meet my mother, broken and confused, not living but not yet dead. One night I find her corpse, forgotten in a bedroom, then realize she is still alive. She rises, vampiric, from her bed, holding her arms out to me, asking for embrace, and I am elated, repulsed, and finally unable to tell her she’s not alive. The next night she is beautiful. The next night she is lost. The next night I watch her walk confidently out onto a bridge that will not hold, then fall into a ravine. When I peer over the cliff’s edge I see her body, small and contorted on the snowy ground. I run to save her, to protect her, to lift the whole of her, broken and unconscious, in the cradle of my arms. I walk back up the cliffside.

  Always in these dreams is the shadow of the conversation we never had. “Can we talk about what is going to happen to you?” I ask her one night. We are at a restaurant, eating Jell-O in our nightgowns. She looks down. She might cry. Yes, she says, of course. I am aware, in the moment, that I already know what her death will look like. The dream ends there. We never have the conversation.

  Sometimes I can almost hear her in my head. The medium said this was her, but I’m skeptical. I think it may be me instead. Or perhaps it is both of us, perhaps when I thought she’d lost her voice, I was wrong. Perhaps her silence was a gift—her voice, to me.

  This is, I realize, the best I can hope for, this inner mother voice. This is the voice I must channel for the rest of my life, as my mother did before me, imagining Midge every birthday and Christmas, every time she felt lost.

  At night, afraid of dreams, I lie awake and consider motherhood, the daughter I could have. The prospect of parenthood seems impossible without Mary. But I have always pictured myself the mother of a daughter, perhaps because the relationship with my mother was the most important of my life. I was so intrinsically her child, her girl. I was bound to her. For everything I can’t remember, for everything I’ve lost, I feel that sense of oneness like a phantom limb. It is almost unbelievable that a woman so marked by her own mother’s loss could bring herself so fully to her child’s life. And yet it happens all the time, doesn’t it?

  “I have never been so grounded,” Mary told me once when I asked her how it felt to be pregnant. She sounded self-possessed and sure, her voice colored by the confidence she reserved almost exclusively for when she spoke about me and how happy I would be, how safe in my marriage and my life. It was the same sureness she brought to our conversations about the LeRoy girls. “I know,” she said, “I know I know I know.” Looking back, I’m glad I let her stay so sure. Because I need to remember her this way, this strong. I need to believe she was unafraid to leave me and that I will make it without her, that my love will make it, that my writing will make it; that I will be half the mother she was, that if my daughter disappears beneath the weight of womanhood, if she loses her voice to tics or tragedy, I will have the power to call her back again.

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  Acknowledgments

  Carolyn Wyman, in her brilliant history of Jell-O, Jell-O: A Biography, provided me with much of the history of America’s most famous dessert found in these pages. I am greatly indebted to her, and to Laura Shapiro, whose Perfection Salad educated me extensively about the origins and rationale behind
the domestic-science movement. Ditto Susan Dominus, whose 2012 New York Times Magazine essay “What Happened to the Girls in LeRoy” was not only the single most thorough and insightful piece of reportage about the girls, but it was also the first article sent to me by my mother as she prodded me to start this book. Thank you to these three brilliant writers, and to all the other sources I drew from as I worked on Jell-O Girls.

  Thank you to my teachers: Mat Johnson, who urged me to write this book and gave me the deadlines I needed to do so; Pete Turchi, who read and commented and made himself endlessly available to my anxious questions; Nick Flynn, who inspired my early writing and my first years in the program at the University of Houston, to which I am also greatly indebted. Thank you to Inprint for their generous financial support as I wrote, and Tin House for offering me the scholarship that helped me finish.

  Thank you to Maggie Nelson, whose mentorship and correspondence over my MFA and PhD years have given me confidence and clarity. Thank you to Janet Sarbanes for always giving close reads, invaluable advice, and the very warmest encouragement to keep going. Thanks also to the MFA program at the California Institute of the Arts, and my teachers there, Maggie and Janet, Mady Schutzman, and Jon Wagner. I have never been so happy and inspired and alive in language as I was during my time at CalArts.

  Thank you times a million to my brilliant lioness of an agent, Marya Spence, who understood this book and helped me to do the same. And to Carina Guiterman, editor extraordinaire, who urged me to name the curse, and to write ever closer to its undoing. Thank you to the whole team at Little, Brown for the joyous care you’ve given to me and to Jell-O Girls from the outset.

  To Richard Mogavero—thank you for being my companion, and Mary’s, in waiting rooms and kitchens, on wooded dog walks and errand runs. Thank you for endless cups of tea, endless dinners, movies, music—thank you, most of all, for being my Unkie.

  Thank you to Ariella Rojhani, Penelope Bodry Sanders and Mack Goode, Jane Hesford, Marcia Gamble, Ray Walker, Ashley Wurzbacher, Emily Kiernan, Liz Hall, Amanda Montei, Sarah McClung, Cecile Just, Nicholas Katzban, Marco DiDomenico, “Team Jo Ann Beard,” all my other angels, and all of Mary’s angels—you know who you are.

  To my father, George Rowbottom, who has come to the table with me on this book, line by line, bravely and with love, just as he came to my mother’s front door after so many years, bravely, with love. Dad, your willingness to meet me here, in this new emotional space we’ve written, is one of the great gifts of my life.

  To Judy Rasmuson: you have showed me what generosity means, you have showed me what sisterhood means, you have showed me what the future can look like, as we move forward into new memories together. We were so lucky to have had Mary for so much of both our lives—we remain so lucky to have each other. I may never find the words to thank you for your presence in my life—but I’ll keep trying.

  And, last, to Jon, dearest beloved, heart, husband, friend. Thank you for all our dreams. For our great love. You have tended me like a plant. Without you I would be unblossomed.

  About the Author

  Allie Rowbottom received her BA from New York University, her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Memorial Barthelme Fellow in nonfiction and was awarded the Marion Barthelme Prize in creative writing. Her work has received scholarships, essay prizes, and honorable mentions from Tin House, the Best American Essays series, the Florida Review, the Bellingham Review, the Black Warrior Review, the Southampton Review, and Hunger Mountain. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

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