JELL-O Girls Page 13

  Once my father had called my mother’s art “genius” and built her a studio to house it. But the longer we stayed in the New Hampshire house, the more disdainful he became of her, and the more I, too, began to think of her as self-indulgent, what my father called “high maintenance.” What does she think is so special about her life? I would ask, the first hints of exasperated adolescence thickening my voice. She’d purse her lips, affronted, and return to her work. I was supposed to know the answer.

  What I think I know now, what I think she meant then but couldn’t yet say, was that my mother hoped her life might serve as a warning to other women, including me. Mary’s mother loss and illness, her fear of being labeled hysterical and her willingness to believe it when she was, had silenced her throughout her life. In writing her memoir she was reclaiming her voice, even as she failed to notice that I was losing mine. But she was obsessed, blinded by an imperative to keep speaking and to stave off sickness. Patriarchy and its cursed mandates had performed itself through her doctors, all of them conspiring to keep her quiet, and now she was going to write a spell to keep cancer away, her work a message to other women that they should do the same.

  19

  In 1995, Jell-O sales got a boost from Jiggler Eggs, debuted for Easter and featured at the White House egg roll. In 1996, when astronaut Shannon Lucid embarked on a 140-day mission to the Russian space station, Mir, where she would serve as the station’s first female astronaut, she brought powdered Jell-O packed in drinking bags. Lucid ate her Jell-O only on Sundays, to remind herself of home and to keep track of the days until her return. This was, and perhaps always has been, Jell-O in a nutshell: an emblem of home, a keeper of time, equal parts powder and water, nostalgia and modernity.

  By the time Jell-O’s hundredth anniversary arrived, in 1997, the product’s identity was leaning more toward adulthood than childhood. The sugar-free products popular with dieters accounted for 40 percent of Jell-O’s sales. The introduction of a limited-edition Sparkling White Grape flavor—rolled out in celebration of a hundred years of Jell-O, and so popular it became permanently available—necessitated club soda to make and replicated a sort of congealed champagne. It was served in fancy flutes at a birthday gala thrown by Kraft (which had merged with General Foods in 1990) at Cooper Union, and was accompanied by a new catchphrase: Jell-O Always Breaks the Mold.

  In LeRoy, Sparkling White Grape was unveiled at the annual Oatka Festival, known best for a rubber ducky race across Oatka Creek. In 1997, however, the Oatka Festival showcased not only a new Jell-O flavor but a new Jell-O gallery, the brainchild of LeRoy town historian Lynne Belluscio. Once a narrow hallway exhibit at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, with funding from Kraft, the Jell-O Gallery took up residence in the old LeRoy high school, transforming the space into a mix of children’s museum and serious documentation of Jell-O’s origin, manufacture, and marketing.

  Mary had always been hesitant about Jell-O, rarely keeping it in the house, rarely talking about our connection to it, how it supported our life. She had been hesitant, too, about the curse. She didn’t want me to believe I was at a disadvantage because I was a girl. She didn’t want to scare me. And maybe that’s why we stayed away from LeRoy the way we did, visiting only a few times when I was a baby. But she must have thought a hundred years of Jell-O was her chance to gently show me something about where I came from and what to avoid. Maybe she assumed I’d see in LeRoy, with its pristine and perfect small-town image, the patriarchal stronghold she saw. Maybe she assumed I’d understand the curse through osmosis. She was wrong. Whereas Mary always said she could feel the town’s dark underbelly, unhealthy beneath its sweet exterior, I felt safe there. Or I thought I did. Thinking of it now, I wonder if I felt safe in LeRoy or if I simply felt safe with my mother, wherever we were.

  The day before the celebration, we drove in on Main Street, making our way to the east side of town, where the trees cast shadows, wide and flecked with light. In the cemetery we found Midge’s and Bob’s headstones, tucked like ornaments into the bright-green grass. They were so small and unimposing, enveloped by the earth. Soft moss crept quietly over the etched name and date of Midge’s older headstone, erasing her entirely. “Oh,” my mother said as she kneeled before her mother’s grave, placing her hands firmly into the soil as if she might sink in if she pressed hard enough. I trotted around, gathering sticks, and together we scraped the moss away.

  As we worked, I pressed for stories about my grandmother. My mother often told me tales that began When I was a little girl, and these were my favorite. I wanted to know what she was like when she was my age; she wanted to talk about her mother. Talking about Midge had become, in the years directly before and after my birth, an obsession for Mary. For most of her life, she’d been ruled by guilt, the image of herself crouched cowardly behind the shed, unable or unwilling to save her mother; and by the image of Midge as distant and diseased, the bad mother whose decomposing body haunted her nightmares, a punishment. But with Ray, she’d learned to rewrite the story, to cast Midge in the light, to forgive her for her distance, and for leaving her only daughter alone too soon. So the grandmother I learned of was forgiving and saintly, the elegant white goddess my mother wrote her as. It was only when I became a woman myself that I returned to Midge’s letters, interpreting in her careful prose hints of her true feelings about motherhood, the ways in which she felt rent apart by the responsibility of it, the way she loved her children even as she felt they’d torn from her the life she could have had.

  That night my mother sat on the side of my bed in Tom’s guest room, telling me stories about my family. Orator and Pearle Wait, signing the Jell-O contract. The rainbow-colored river. Holidays at Uncle Ernest and Aunt Edith’s mansion, Edith summoning servants carrying glittering Jell-O molds by touching her toe to a button hidden beneath the table. At first her stories were light! and dainty! But as she went on, I sensed a familiar darkness there, behind her words. She talked about Mr. Wait’s misfortune, how he died impoverished, forever sorry he had sold his best invention. She talked about the frightened animals who spent their lives in cages before their bones became Jell-O. She held my hand. My eyelids fluttered, chasing sleep. “There’s always a dark side to the light,” she told me. “The dark, it chases us especially, and we need to be careful.”

  “Why?” I asked her, waking up now.

  “Well,” she said, “there’s a curse, and though it’s everywhere, it’s particularly strong in our family, in Jell-O and in LeRoy.”

  “What’s the curse?” I asked her.

  “I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure that out.” She sighed. “Growing up I learned it was money. Now I think it’s silence, and the sickness silence plants, like seeds, inside women.” As she spoke, she mimed planting seeds with her fingertips along the thin line of my forearm.

  “Is that what made my grandmother sick?” I asked.

  “Probably,” she answered.

  “Is that what made you sick?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But how does Jell-O make women silent?” I asked, entirely confused.

  “By convincing us we’re less powerful than we really are,” she told me. “That’s why I need to write. That’s why I need to tell the world about my life. I need to break the silence.”

  20

  If my mother were to warn the world about the curse, I would help her. I would write, too. So when we returned from LeRoy and I turned eleven, my father set up a table for me in my New Hampshire bedroom, with a desk lamp and a container for my pencils and pens, my paper clips and highlighters. But the room stayed dark, shaded by the woods that began outside my bedroom window, a front of tall trees stretching on for acres. They were beautiful, the trees, their long trunks gathered, but something about their nearness, the edge of the dark world their bodies shaped so close to the light childhood world I still lived in, always felt like a warning to me. Like so many of my nightmares, I ignored it.

  Another yea
r passed. I turned twelve. My body toed the waters of womanhood while my mother wrote. I lay on my belly by her feet and wrote as well. Downstairs, my father was in his home office, investing money he’d inherited from his father, a hobby turned occupation. He earned some, enough to buy himself a fancy car and skis and running shoes, but it only supplemented Mary’s Jell-O money. Maybe this made my father feel trapped, this financial dependence on his wife. It seemed he was always running from something. Running was his escape, he said. He needed it. He needed to keep his body conditioned, lean and trim and flexible, an inhospitable environment for disease. He subscribed to a magazine called Life Extension and ordered supplements he swallowed by the handful. He spoke with disgust of the way he used to eat as he loaded the blender with protein powder, preparing to run, as he did every evening, up and down the country roads, wearing fractures into the arches of his feet. This was when he was happiest.

  * * *

  The director of my eighth-grade musical seemed to take a special interest in me, her star performer. For weeks before opening night, she marked out with masking tape the pivots for me to make as I walked across the stage. She stood at the back of the auditorium with her arms folded and called out, “Louder!” She cinched the waist of my costume, fitting her cold fingertips into the creases made by my belt and skirt, smoothing out the fabric and tucking a pink heart-shaped stone into the waistband. “For good luck,” she said. When I climbed into my father’s car at the end of the day, I found a matching crystal in the cup holder.

  I didn’t say anything. Not even after I found a pair of black panties in the laundry, definitively not my mother’s. But it all unraveled quickly anyway. My father’s affair, my mother’s betrayal. She’d walked in on them, she said. “He was unzipping her fucking dress,” she told me, spitting her words, her tone so violent I cowered in my seat. I closed my eyes against my tears and pressed my body into the door, as far away from her, as far away from the truth she spoke, as I could get. She said nothing as I rocked back and forth, just put a hand on my shoulder. But I recoiled from her touch, the nearness of her skin calling me back to my own, which ached. All I knew was that I needed to escape this ache. All I knew was that I needed to disappear.

  In the small community of my middle school, gossip ran rampant. Before long, everyone was whispering about my parents, the drama teacher, and me. My mother blushed bright red when she dropped me off at school. She bought a pair of sunglasses—which she normally never wore—to hide behind. She looked so diminished, her face masked by dark moons, and for the first time in my life, I wondered if she was strong enough to bear her pain.

  About all this my father said nothing. So finally I mustered the courage to ask him: had he really cheated on Mom, like everyone was saying? In response he slammed his palms on the steering wheel. “Your mother’s hysterical,” he warned, while I disappeared into the passenger seat beside him, imagining myself blending in with the upholstery, camouflaged like prey. Afterward, he fell silent again and stayed that way. Even as my mother moved her things from the New Hampshire house, curls bouncing as she bent beneath the weight of boxes, he pursed his lips, storing up anger to unloose later, over something benign—the sleeping dog he tripped over on his way to the kitchen, the lamp left lit after I left a room. Jesus Christ! he’d scream, a man unhinged. His rage terrified me. But his silence was worse. In it I could sense him brewing a winter storm, gray clouds growing heavy before unloading a whiteout and erasing the world.

  My parents would split custody, it was decided. This was the humane way to handle one element of a divorce that was quickly turning into a battle. Please don’t leave me, I wanted to beg my mother. Without her, the New Hampshire house became a sinkhole, dangerous and dark, a bottomless pit of empty time, threatening to consume me. How would I spend my afternoons without my mother there to write with? Who would I talk to? Who would I hide behind when my father was upset?

  My mother’s removal from the New Hampshire house put me in my father’s line of fire. So I learned to stay silent and small. I learned to side with him, to assume his version of reality rather than suffer the repercussions of contesting it. I got so good at playing the role of my father’s perfect daughter, perfect sidekick, perfect secret keeper, that I forgot how to be anything else. I maintained his version of reality for the sake of self-preservation, but I did so with a vehemence that, eventually, made me question reality itself.

  My dark-green room became for the first time a sanctuary, and I spent most of my time sprawled out on the floor, listening to music and writing in my journal, the carpet pressing scratchy impressions into the skin of my thighs, which were suddenly hideous to me. I stared at them constantly. It was as if I’d awoken one day to a world in which I was fat and ugly and unwanted. How could I have missed this before? How could I not have known to be vigilant? I pushed and pulled at the skin, trying to arrange it to appear lean and diminished, like that of the girls on the pages of my Seventeen magazines. I wanted everything about the girls: their concave legs and straight hair, their flat chests and innocence. I bought bras to squash my incoming breasts, then practiced an apathetic slump, the waifish posture of the thin and hungry. I was thirteen, about to graduate from the eighth grade. My body was a transformative object, changing from child to woman, a conversion I understood as burdensome. With maturity, I realized, thinking of my mother, came the promise of pain. But if I could stop it, if I could arrest my own development, maybe I could return to being the girl I had been before the affair, the divorce, and the unbearable weight of the grief I now wore like an injured body, draped over my shoulders.

  Every morning my father made me a heaping bowl of oatmeal I tried to chew but could hardly swallow. He made eggs then, huge mounds of yellow scramble topped with cheese. But questions caught in my throat—Why wasn’t she good enough?—and, unable to ask them, I couldn’t swallow. All I could think of was the drama teacher, the smallness of her body, how she never seemed to consume, her appetite satiated by her own perfection. On some level I knew my efforts to stop time and stay a child were futile. But if I had to become a woman, I decided, I wanted to be a woman like my drama teacher, a woman my father approved of. I could see how painful the alternative was.

  Across the river, in her new house in Vermont, Mary started Weight Watchers. Each night she added up points on Post-it notes she stuck to the cupboards, the fridge, until the glue gave out and they fell, yellow squares fluttering to the floor like leaves. “I really think you should try to stay with this,” I said anytime she complained, assuming my father’s exasperated voice, running my eyes from her toes to the top of her head like a disparaging man. My mother’s failure to diet right, to control herself, was suddenly disgusting to me. I wanted her to talk back to me, to reclaim her body and the strength that had seeped from her since my father’s affair, leaving her pale and tired, unable to fight the curse. But she couldn’t, and in her silence, the curse whispered to me, urging me to show my mother how to restrict herself, how to make the sacrifices necessary to become desirable. So I joined Weight Watchers, too, and points became all that mattered; they gave our world order. We made sugar-free Jell-O together, preparing big vats of raspberry and grape we kept in the fridge, a “safe” food we could eat with abandon, the faintly metallic taste dissolving on our tongues. Sometimes Mary made a face when she spooned it in like medicine.

  “It’s really not good,” she’d say, still eating.

  “Don’t eat it, then,” I’d snap, annoyed.

  “But I’m so hungry,” she’d say, like an admonished child.

  Most nights we sat together at the kitchen table, a bowl of wobbly pink in the space between us, spooning it into our mouths as we tallied up the day’s intake. I always beat her. The game, for me, was easy. When she dropped out, I continued. I felt victorious. I felt I had somehow won proof of whatever it was that would spare me her fate, imperfect and discarded by my father, a man, whose gaze defined us both.

  The ground was always threa
tening to crack and open like a wound. Someone could always get sick, someone could always lie and leave. I feared catastrophe, and so I counted, ordering the world with numbers. Calories and clock hands, pounds of body weight, the hours between meals, the hours before sleep, which I induced with pills stolen from my mother’s cabinet—the only way to free myself from the nightmares that plagued me. I fixated on numbers, and I fixated on the drama teacher’s body, the way she baby-oiled it so that her skin shone sun-kissed and sleek. I thought of this as I oiled my own, fresh skin. I thought of the places where she was aging and pillowy while I ran hands over myself, making notes on what I liked, what I disliked, what I wanted. I imagined cataloging the woman in the same detail, counting her freckles, noting dark roots or that particular sweep of her thin hair through the headband of her sunglasses, perched atop her head. I matched myself against her, against my mother. I already knew the woman was the better one. But I could best her, I decided; I could make myself desirable and different, the woman so perfect no man would ever leave.

  In the end I felt I’d won.

  The drama teacher started coming around. “We’re just friends,” my father maintained, always telling me reality was different from the scene before my eyes. But she cried like a jilted lover on the couch one night when she showed up unannounced at his house. Too much white wine, too many painkillers, I suspected, thinking I recognized her particular brand of fallen apart. I remember her holding on to the sleeves of my sweatshirt, pulling at them, talking about my father’s anger.