JELL-O Girls Read online

  She didn’t attend the funeral a week later. She didn’t want to see John, or return to LeRoy, where everything felt predicated on her silence. Once she had believed the curse was strongest there. Now she was more confused than ever about what the curse truly was. She was sure now that Cousin John had been wrong; it was the women, not the men, who suffered. But why? What was it that afflicted them so? Something to do with LeRoy, the dullness and rules she’d sensed even as a child? Or something wider, more insidious? She thought of Midge, Elfrida, and Joan, searching her memory for clues. She thought of her summer in Manhattan, how even there she’d felt something stifling her. Even now, after the drug run, after Bea’s distance, Mary felt as if she were fighting for her life. No, better not return. Better to stay in bed, covered up and hidden.

  When Bea came to visit, Mary accepted her awkward coos, but with a new sense of reserve. She wouldn’t speak, just shook her head yes and no. And when Bea asked her careful questions—“Do you need anything?”—Mary couldn’t help but think there was nothing Bea could give. Her answer had always been reliably simple: another drink, a needle, a pill.

  “Okay then, Fussell,” Bea said, a hint of exasperation in her voice as she left Mary’s room. “I’m going to New York with Hollis,” she said on her way out. She lingered in the doorway, hesitating for a moment before walking through the door. “Be back in a few days,” she said over her shoulder.

  Maybe she’d been too harsh, freezing her out. But as time passed after the botched drug run and Bea’s departure, Mary slept better. She got better at waking herself from nightmares. She read. She drank red wine from a tannin-tinged cup she’d long ago filched from the dining hall. She walked in the fall drizzle, gazing at the gray sky, the red leaves so brilliant they seemed accidental, like beautiful stains. She thought about Bea. She wondered if she could save their friendship after all.

  One night the rain picked up, and she ducked into Simm’s, cold and wet. She straddled a barstool, picked peanuts from a metal bowl, and ordered a bourbon. She sipped, the liquor warm and soothing as it made its way inside her.

  “Mary,” someone said, and she swung around in her seat, startled by the crowd suddenly gathered around her. Everyone was speaking at once, voices panicked and rushed. She was hazy, her brain slow. What are they saying? Something about rain on the Taconic, the tinny body of a car wrapped around a tree trunk. Something about the body of a girl trapped between metal and wood. Mary held out her hands, opening her palms and pushing at the air, her gesture like brakes pumping. Slow down. What? “Bea’s dead,” somebody said.

  In an instant Mary knew it was true, knew it because of the blood behind her eyelids, shading everything a blotchy red, like the circles of stick and essence stained on Bea’s fur coat, rain soaked when they pulled her from the wreck. She had lived a while afterward, someone added. The cops had said she was a nice girl.

  14

  In the late 1960s, as Mary entered her mid-twenties, as she mourned her best friend, Bea, her cousin Joan, and her mother, Midge, the country transformed. The divorce rate crept up, preparing to skyrocket in the mid-seventies. The Vietnam War raged. Women raised on the rhetoric of the domestic-science movement left the home to protest and to work. Proper housekeeping and the preservation of the nuclear family were no longer paramount; the 1950s were over, and with them went all the effort Americans had poured into managing and forgetting wartime trauma. Early in the decade, Jell-O had urged normalcy and routine, leaning on the importance of domesticity to assure Americans that a well-kept home in a well-kept country would keep trauma a distant, ever-fading memory. But now America was knee-deep in another war, packing up children and sending them off to risk death. How could anything be routine at a time like this? Domestic science had been roundly wrong, Americans realized. The doctrine of technologically advanced housework was simply an instrument in capitalism’s grand scheme to sell neatly packaged imitation products promising the American Dream. Perhaps the dream itself was the problem.

  Women’s particular dissatisfaction with their old roles proved a serious adjustment for companies like Jell-O, who were accustomed to profiting off women’s imperative to be the perfect housekeeper and wife. How to reach an audience newly interested in natural foods? What about those concerned that Jell-O was the domain of old folks and squares? What about the growing population of divorcées, back to work and back to dating? Maybe, ads suggested, women such as this could just sprinkle Jell-O powder on yogurt, cupcakes, ice cream, and fruit? Would that be too much to ask? Or perhaps they would consider returning to the kitchen if reminded of how happy it made everyone else. Make Someone Happy, advertisements urged, reminding women of their roles. Make Someone Jell-O.

  It seemed, however, that these admonishments fell on deaf ears. So Jell-O tried again. Somehow It’s Always Right, a 1971 slogan assured as the company struggled to keep up with the changing times. But marketing to women outside the scaffolding of domestic duty proved a challenge, and sales waned.

  And then came an ill-fated series of print ads from the 1970s, pointed, I guess, at cheekiness. The ads feature close-ups of different women’s faces as they hold different variations on Jell-O pudding up to the camera, angled above them. The adjacent text is in quotation marks, as if spoken to a husband. One woman looks guilty and holds her pink-nailed hand over her mouth like a naughty girl as she offers up a slice of Jell-O pecan pie, made with vanilla pudding. This, the advertisement states, is the “Guess what happened when I backed the car out of the driveway, dear” pudding. In another, identically formatted advertisement, a woman wears a fur coat, price tag prominently displayed, and presents the “Notice anything different about me tonight, dear?” pudding. Next we have the “Congratulations, dear, but what exactly does a vice president do?” pudding, offered by a young brunette, her eyebrows raised and her eyes opened wide, in a pantomime of dumb curiosity. The final ad in this unfortunate vein features a slightly older woman, one who has perhaps birthed and raised and released children into the world. She looks hopefully up at the camera as she holds out a slice of Jell-O chocolate cheesecake. This is the “Dear, don’t you think I’d be a more interesting person if I went to work?” pudding.

  Women didn’t buy Jell-O’s latest sales pitch, apparently. Sales remained in a slump. They knew they’d be more interesting outside the house and were done asking their husband for permission to leave.

  So The New Joys of Jell-O—a revision to the popular 1961 cookbook—marketed itself to independent women, women advertisements portrayed out to lunch in urban landscapes, gelatin salad Niçoise and salmon mousse on their plates. For the hippie audience, a Green Goddess Salad Bowl also graced the pages, the recipe calling for a mixture of lime gelatin, garlic, sour cream, mayo, and anchovies, to be garnished with crabmeat. Although far from natural, the recipe gestures at a growing cultural interest in health food, particularly given its presentation, the pale-green Jell-O portion cut into thick cubes resembling avocado. Maybe, advertisements and recipes suggested, the Jell-O that had once so pointedly masked and molded natural ingredients could now celebrate them, connecting women to nature and to each other. The impulse, though understandable, was a failure. Jell-O, with its dyes and chemicals, could never make it as a natural food. The era of imitation foods had disappeared with the 1950s, and the dessert again found itself in need of a new angle, a new avenue by which to reach its target audience: women. But what did the newly liberated, newly single women of America want?

  This was the research question posed by Betty Friedan, a wife, mother, and scholar who in 1952, during her second pregnancy, lost her job and devoted herself to stay-at-home motherhood. In her new role, Friedan found an emptiness she couldn’t peg, a question she feared asking: Is this all?

  Among Friedan’s theories in The Feminine Mystique was the notion of a myth around womanhood, constructed and perpetuated by all-male advertising agencies and magazine editors. Every day, Friedan wrote, women sat down to watch TV, or read their newspape
rs and magazines, and were faced with the heavy-handed reminder that all women were either fulfilled as homemakers or miserable in their careers outside the home. There appeared to be no in-between.

  But what if there could be? she asked, and her question became the fertile soil in which second-wave feminism took root. Not surprisingly, second wavers developed a vehement response to domestic science even as they ignored any headway the movement had made. In reducing the domestic-science movement to a pawn in patriarchy’s game, feminists overlooked the radical yet rational approach it had taken, over decades, to empowering women. Empowering women in theory, anyway.

  Early proponents of domestic science sought to alleviate food insecurity among America’s impoverished population through mass-produced, nutritionally balanced food items, and to access modern science, technology, and creativity within the “feminine sphere,” the only space, they believed, in which they’d have a fighting chance of doing so. And to a certain extent, women did gain power from the domestic-science movement. Kitchens and home economics classrooms were opened to them and became, for a short time, spaces in which they could experiment and create, if only in a culinary fashion. At its best, domestic science connected women to each other. So it was only natural for nostalgia to set in as Americans entered the 1970s and reflected on their newly shifted societal landscape. And it was onto this nostalgia that Jell-O attached, finally finding the marketing strategy that would carry it into the future.

  “To give salads a holiday look,” a disembodied male voice says in a Jell-O commercial from 1973, “start with Jell-O gelatin.” As he speaks, viewers watch a busy brunette mom shepherd kids in the front door of a brownstone, drop her briefcase with a sigh, and remove her coat. This is Mrs. Susan Dando of Boston, we learn.

  “This time of year we have friends over more than ever,” Susan says, speaking to the camera, “and I like to do special things for them like my mother did for her friends.” This, she continues, is easier than she’d previously thought. She quickly models the Jell-O mold recipe her mother made—cherry flavor impressed with nuts and slices of peach. Mrs. Dando surveys her work. An expression of wistful satisfaction passes over her face. “This looks beautiful,” a guest remarks in the next scene as she accepts a plate and affirms the culinary capabilities of her friend. Mrs. Susan Dando of Boston is a busy working mother. But she still finds time to make the Jell-O she enjoyed as a girl, returning each year to the recipe that reconnects her to an absent mother. Perhaps it is a ritual for her, the ad suggests, especially when holiday grief overwhelms, to perform the caretaking activities her mother enjoyed, slipping into her mother’s role, her mother’s recipe, just as she might slip into a housecoat. Perhaps it is a comfort.

  Book II

  15

  By 1982, Mary had found some semblance of order. After Bea’s death, she’d followed the rules at Riggs, and though she’d never quite found her voice in therapy, nor figured out the meaning of the curse, after two years of treatment she was ready to reenter the world.

  Before leaving Riggs, Mary had reconnected with boarding-school Judy. It was obvious to both women that they shared something, the knowledge of motherless girlhood, the knowledge of grief. They could never undo this bond, but they could depend on it. In reclaiming their friendship, they gave each other what a mother might: the courage to move fully into the lives they wanted. Judy urged Mary to finish her degree, and in 1969 she did, living in Vermont for a year while she studied studio art at Bennington, and then in Boston, where she received her MFA. After that was New York, where she shared an apartment with Judy on the Upper West Side and built sets for off-Broadway shows. Judy had become a lead lighting designer, and the two wound up touring Europe with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, doing set design and lighting.

  From time to time over the years Mary had returned to LeRoy to see Bob, who was remarried to the ex-wife of an old Panagra buddy. When Cousin John fell ill in the late seventies, she’d flown to Rochester to see him once more. “You were the one, Mona,” he’d croaked from his sickbed, his eyes blurry with morphine and light. She’d felt shocked and thrilled. Once, John’s approval had been the ultimate accomplishment, and for a brief moment she’d let herself beam with pride, as if she’d just won a precious award. But then she’d caught herself. What was she thinking? John’s regard wasn’t where her worth resided—all the psychoanalysis she’d done since leaving LeRoy should have at least taught her this. And how easily she was reeled back in. The thought of her own weakness made her nauseous, her insides acidic. She had to get out of there. “Rest now,” she told John as she backed from his room.

  Soon after John’s death, Mary left the city for a cottage, following Judy to Short Beach, a boozy strip of land along Long Island Sound, just north of New Haven. She still drank to excess and slept around, but she also kept a studio in New Haven and went three times a week to therapy with a Jungian named Ray, who told her myths of mother goddesses and witches and suggested they work to heal the Bad Mother archetype within her. “Tell me everything,” he said, and Mary, finally, spoke.

  As her work with Ray progressed, Mary read all of Jung, then moved on to feminist revisions of the Bible. She read of witchcraft and goddess worship, she learned practical spell work to protect herself. She lay in bed in her cottage one night, glasses sliding down her nose, Adrienne Rich open on her lap, and read of a power that “permeates everything, even the language in which we try to describe it. It is diffuse and concrete; symbolic and literal; universal and expressed with local variations which obscure its universality.” She sat up and bent over the book, rereading the lines. This was it, she realized in a dumbfounded flourish of relief; how could she have missed it all this time? This was the curse, the very curse she’d built her life around avoiding. And it wasn’t confined to her family. No, the curse was felt by others, named by others. The curse was patriarchy, and, as my mother would later write to me, the patriarchal temperature was high in her family, in Jell-O, and in LeRoy, birthplace of America’s Most Famous Dessert, gravesite of the country’s first women’s university.

  After that, Mary consumed every feminist text she could get her hands on. Evenings she sat out on her porch and read, caring for herself with books and stories and language, just as she had as a girl. But she needed something else, she decided, something other than herself to think of. So she bought Lilly, a standard poodle puppy with a mass of brown curls that matched her own, and treated her like a daughter, taking her for long walks on the salt marshes every day, then bathing her in the tub, cooing as she scrubbed.

  Enter the man: my father. At the time, he lived next door with a golden retriever and a girlfriend named Peg. He was blond and tall and thin, with shoulder-length hair, aviator sunglasses he never took off, and a dented Porsche he drove too fast through the stoned beach community. It seemed he was always leaving, tearing off late for work in the mornings, or after an argument at night, the screen door slamming in his wake, its tinny closure reverberating. It wasn’t her business, Mary told herself.

  Sometimes she and Lilly would pass the man and his retriever on the beach, walking in the opposite direction, and the two dogs would sniff around each other, then leap into play. “I’d be happy to take her out with us during the day,” Mary said, gesturing at the dog. “Anytime,” she added for good measure, trying not to seem too eager. He thanked her, took off his glasses, and held out his hand. “George,” he said.

  They met again at a wedding after they’d each moved away. Mary wore a pink sun hat, a cream-colored dress she belted at the waist with an old scarf. The hat cast a wide-brimmed shadow over her face. Sunlight picked up hints of red in her hair. She smiled. She sipped. She was not yet drunk—she’d learned long ago how to pace herself—but she was relaxed. George wore a beige suit, tucked his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. He drank from a sweating bottle of beer, holding it lightly by the neck. It had been a year since he last saw her, and now, in the quiet light of the summer evening, he was struck by her
beauty all over again. She was stunning, small-waisted and soft-breasted, with long auburn curls haloing her face.

  They talked about where they’d ended up, Mary a few towns over in an old farmhouse by the water with a chicken coop out back and a barn for her art; George in a bachelor pad. “I’ve always wanted to build a big house,” she told him, “but I’ve settled for just rebuilding one.”

  When he saw the place for himself, later that night, he rocked his weight to his heels, placed his hands in his pockets. He looked almost hungrily through the dark at the peeling barn, the chipped drywall, the color-splashed canvases and red- and blue- and gold-stained glass, the sculpture. Mary’s artwork had changed since she left Riggs. In place of the nightmares she’d shaped before, she was working now on a series of nurturing female shapes. Zaftig women giving birth, dancing en masse, a naked coven, howling beneath a low-slung moon. These were the women she’d admired as a child, the European mother-witches she’d always related to. These were the women she would work toward for the rest of her life.