JELL-O Girls Read online

  Was she truly so undesirable? Wanted only for her money? Were all men pre-programmed to cheat, lie, leave? Either way, Midge told herself, she wouldn’t enable men’s childishness. The second time her husband failed to return home, she picked up the phone, called her mother, and told her with a measured, businesslike tone what she needed to do. It would be a scandal, but both women had grown used to hushed gossip, whisperings of their failures and faults, whatever they had done or not done to drive the patriarch of their family into the choir leader’s arms.

  So within a week they’d packed their suitcases and boarded a plane for Reno. It was January, cool enough for furs. Mother and daughter donned their best coats and strolled arm in arm through the casinos, chatting, making bets, ordering drinks. When they returned home to LeRoy, it was as the recipients of two quickie divorces.

  Despite the talk around town, after her divorce Midge had felt free. And with Bob, whom she met a few years later, when she moved to Honolulu, she felt treasured in a way that assured her he’d never leave. Bob was different from the men from home, men like her father who rarely spoke and hid behind their papers, their glasses of bourbon. He was lighter, lighthearted. He stood in tiki bars with his hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers, leaning back on his heels and laughing, looking at her. He twirled her on the dance floor, his hand in the dip of her upper back, pressing into the space between her shoulder blades, her wings.

  This was everything she wanted, Midge had thought in the early months of her marriage to Bob: to be desired. But now, saddled with two babies, she felt stripped of the self she’d once been, peeled and reduced to a core, a body changed by pregnancy into an object of shame. Once, on a rare afternoon with Bob, when Mary was four months old and Tom was almost three, Midge sat in the front seat of a little rented car Bob wheeled around sharp turns, steep inclines, climbing into the Andes in low gear, the children wedged into the back on either side of a picnic basket. When the family stopped for lunch, Midge spread out blankets and unpacked the egg salad sandwiches she’d prepared that morning. She sat, exhausted, with Mary in her lap, watching Bob hold Tom up to point out the rusting carcass of a passenger train, cars scattered like limbs in the valley below.

  When the children began to cry, Midge and Bob packed them back into the car. Midge braced as the winding path back down the mountain rocked her family back and forth, as baby Mary straddled her, vomiting repeatedly onto her shoulder, down her back, across the front of her blouse. Each time, with each hiccup, each sob, Midge stripped away another piece of soggy clothing until she wore only her bra and panties. Bob laughed, his eyes on the narrow road, and removed one hand to playfully pinch the side of her stomach, once drawn into a firm cord of muscle and now doughy. He meant it as a joke, but Midge felt mortified. She feared she’d lost what had made her lovable; her body, the object of her husband’s desire, had changed—it belonged now to her children. Even her thoughts were suffocated by their screams. She looked down, down at her wailing baby, down at herself, her painful breasts, made conical by her brassiere, into which Mary’s body melded. There was no privacy in this life. No space just for her, her thoughts, her words.

  Once home Bob went inside ahead of the others and returned with a housecoat for his wife to wear in from the car. Midge wrapped the quilted fabric around herself, handed Mary to her husband, and climbed from the car, the baby screaming, arms outstretched, wanting to return to her mother’s body. I need a moment, Midge said to Bob, give me just a moment, as she walked inside and into the bathroom, shutting the door, silence embracing her.

  2

  Once upon a delightfully light and wholesome dream, Jell-O and America fell in love and lived happily ever after in marketing heaven. But, as in all great love stories, first there was transformation, and a journey.

  Long before Jell-O crossed oceans and landed in LeRoy, it was known just as gelatin, a product confined to the kitchens of European royalty, less a convenience product than a luxury. Throughout the fifteenth century, gelatin molds ornamented the feasts of kings and aristocrats. Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie de Médicis, and Richard the Second were all reported to have enjoyed the gelatin desserts prepared for them. In the Victorian era, the trend persisted; the ability to mold gelatin into decorative shapes appealed to the ornate aesthetic sensibilities of the time. By the nineteenth century, gelatin had finally found America and its people, and even Thomas Jefferson enjoyed a fancy gelatin mold at his Monticello feasts. But the work of scalding hooves, extracting and skimming fat, and adding flavor always fell to servants and took long hours of hard labor. There was always meticulous effort and human pain involved in its production.

  At least, that is, until 1845, when Peter Cooper—creator of Cooper Union, the Tom Thumb locomotive, and a gas-powered “flying machine” that partly blinded him—patented unflavored gelatin, which he sold primarily to commercial kitchens. Cooper, who also produced glue to fund his more adventurous ventures, put little energy into marketing or sales. While he worked to lay wire beneath the Atlantic, a LeRoy businessman named Pearle Wait worked to make gelatin attractive to independent consumers.

  Mr. Wait and his wife, May, made cough syrup and laxatives. But they barely got by, so Pearle spent hours in the basement, tinkering with formulas, trying to perfect a mix of gelatin and flavor. The result was Jell-O’s first prototype, which was made almost entirely of sugar. But nobody seemed to mind. Its taste was the slipperiest sweet, and it was nutritious, too! Good for the gut, hair, skin, and nails!

  May tackled the look of it: she began to experiment with the different shapes it might take, setting it in squares, then circles, just for fun. The Waits added an O to the name of their creation so that it matched Grain-O, a “pure food drink” billed as a coffee alternative for both children and adults, and then sold Jell-O to the drink’s manufacturer, Midge’s great-uncle-in-law, Orator Francis Woodward. The price tag for his purchase was $450: the modern-day equivalent of $4,000.

  I have read that Pearle Wait went bankrupt soon after he sold Jell-O, after the Woodward fortune, already sizable, doubled, then tripled, after America’s Most Famous Dessert sold box after box and piled into the cabinets of every kitchen in America, stacking up like so many clean white bricks. But it wasn’t luck that put it there, in the pantry, in the icebox, on the plate. It was Orator. A self-made man who had earned his fortune on patent medicines and fake nest eggs treated to de-lice henhouses, Orator was versed in the work needed to grow a product. When he bought the Jell-O patent, signing his name above Mr. Wait’s on a contract that hangs now in the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, he thought he might as well give this little product everything he had, give it every chance to succeed.

  So Orator traded his Grain-O for Jell-O, replacing silos and sifters with barrels of sugar and sacks of powdered gelatin, shipped in from factory farms. Trucks arrived each week heaped with the dusty remnants of tissue and bone, ready to be mixed with sweetness and dye to make the first Jell-O flavors—strawberry, raspberry, orange, or lemon.

  Animal parts were plentiful, as was sugar, but initially, Jell-O sales were slow. LeRoy myth says that Orator, exasperated by poor profits, once tried to sell Jell-O’s patent to his plant superintendent for thirty-five dollars. But nobody was buying. So Orator implemented every plan he could to move his product: on quiet weekday midmornings, he sent his handsomest marketing men to suburban front doors to flash white teeth and hold out white boxes to the women who answered. Immigrants en route to America were served Jell-O for dessert; when they landed at Ellis Island and walked shakily to solid ground, it was to be rewarded with promise and newness and a metal mold, round and ridged and just like all the others, Jell-O etched upon it in cheerful text.

  By 1902, Jell-O was manufactured just down the street from Orator’s house, the river outside the factory running colorful and sweet, changing color weekly depending on the flavor. Everyone in LeRoy worked for Jell-O. Parents packed powder into wax-paper pouches, which were then sealed and slipped into red-and
-white boxes. Some put on suits and went to work in the offices at the front of the factory, or in Rochester, or Manhattan, where Jell-O’s advertising agency was headquartered. Franklin King was one such man.

  An ad-man artist, King worked for Dauchy Company, the agency in charge of marketing the dessert. By 1904, he was frustrated by slow sales and looking for a new marketing campaign. So, in the confection’s first brilliant marketing twist, King staged a series of pictures featuring his own towheaded daughter Elizabeth preparing and enjoying Jell-O. The photographs ushered in a boost in sales, and the Dauchy agency eagerly sent Elizabeth King one hundred empty Jell-O boxes to replace her wooden blocks. After that, Elizabeth’s parents produced weekly photo shoots, during which Elizabeth would appear in a new outfit, enacting a new scenario with her Jell-O box toys.

  Little Elizabeth’s performance of young girlhood was vital to the product’s success. The brand’s aesthetic, still establishing itself, rested precariously on the impossibility of her aging. So, when Elizabeth turned eight and threatened to outgrow her alter ego, her father brought her into the office and had her stand, pretending to hold a teakettle, while Rose O’Neill, designer of the Kewpie dolls, sketched the lines of her body and drew a box of Jell-O into the frame of her fingertips.

  In that moment, the Jell-O girl was immortalized. She became forever a child, stitched to the polka dot dress, buckled into her black shoes, holding out a silver platter of Jell-O—offering, inviting. In the early ad campaigns that ran in Ladies’ Home Journal, she is alternatingly demure and feisty. Sometimes she politely offers Jell-O to her mother’s guests. Sometimes she sneaks into the pantry and pulls down a box, pours colored crystals into a bowl, adds water, and stirs. So easy even a child can do it! the advertisement proclaims. At Christmastime, the Jell-O girl adds candied cherries to the mix while Mother fetches Daddy a drink, and then it’s Surprise! and everyone is so happy to have saved room on their plate.

  In old images, her eyes are small, set deep into the bones of her face. She looks cheery, but not overly so. In some reprints, some copies of old newspaper ads, black ink intended as shadow has subsumed her eyes entirely, so that two dark sockets puncture her face like holes. I grew up knowing that her smallness and her silence were what made her sweet. I grew up knowing that this was true for me, too. I considered her a part of me, but now I consider her an emblem of something much larger: a silence that sickens.

  3

  Lima, 1948. Cocktails at the club to discuss leaving Peru, returning to LeRoy. There, Midge argued, Bob might work for her aunt Edith, ensure an excessive inheritance; there Midge might feel at home.

  The ceiling fans turned slowly, like airplane propellers winding down after a flight. Midge held the thin stem of her martini glass, looked down at the olive in its belly. She was exhausted. The children still felt like weight, heavier now than in pregnancy, where at least they’d been silent. The chatter of their bickering thickened in her brain, congealing. Oh, how she had wanted to write. To travel the world unencumbered. She hadn’t expected it would be so hard to do so—she’d pictured children as easy accessories to her adventures. But now she was confined to routines, to the house—she could be anywhere, and all she would see was the inside of her own home. She looked over the table at Bob, going on about the logistics of a move, the pros and cons of it, the dangers of losing their independence. Once she had wanted him in every city in the world. Now the memory of desire was like an erased word: faint gray marks where before there had been black.

  Midge was in mourning for the life she’d dreamed of. There was a life out there she’d almost had. She’d thought she wanted to be wanted, but now she wanted to be heard. But her grief was unutterable, even to her husband. Motherhood was supposed to be joyous. Everything she’d ever read or watched about being a woman had promised her this, and she’d believed it. And yet here she was, trapped, silenced, her identity subsumed. No longer was she witty Midge, the beautiful writer and dancer and lover of art. She was just Mother, Momma, Mommy. Every day she spent housebound, placating, pleasing, perfecting recipes out of boredom, every day compounded the urge to flee, to find the self she’d been before. She felt it bodily, a fluttering behind her sternum, a trapped sparrow, flapping its wings in vain. She knew it was hopeless. She knew there was no solution. What difference did it make if she lived in Lima or LeRoy? At least at home she’d have her mother. Her cousins. Aunt Edith. The nearness of inheritance and the ease of wealth.

  She shifted in her seat, slid her empty glass toward the edge of the table, scanning for the waiter. The band began a ballroom rumba. She could fall asleep right here. Bob reached across the white tablecloth and flipped his palm open for hers. She wouldn’t say no. Tension between them was another exhaustion to avoid. She wiggled her body off the banquette and followed her husband to the floor.

  And so by springtime it was decided. They would go. They packed their things and left Peru. This was the right decision, Midge was sure of it. Her children would live in the house on East Main Street where she’d grown up. They’d play hide-and-seek in the dumbwaiters, as she and her brother had; they’d fall asleep in their own bedrooms, Mary’s with the angel-shaped crack on the ceiling. They’d wake each morning to lemon light warming their cheeks, streaming through their bedroom windows, both with perfect views of the perfect golf course, its trimmed, smooth green unfurling like soft cotton, the finest fabric. They would have a perfect childhood, self-sufficient and safe, and she would finally have time to herself.

  * * *

  In LeRoy, Bob spent his days outside, overseeing Edith’s farms. Midge remained situated in the house. Her life revolved now around board membership on community organizations, the weekly menu—which she planned out every Monday with Elfrida, the maid—and cocktail hour at five sharp, every night. Drinking quickly became the best part of Midge’s life. It freed her from boredom, carving out the space she’d craved for herself in Peru. And it was social. Her cousins, Ann and Betty, lived around the corner. Her mother and aunt, just up the hill. Edith’s grandchildren, Joan and John, often drove in from Rochester. The house was always full.

  This was what Midge had hoped for in moving back: a partial return to the self she’d been before the tight constraints of motherhood had reduced her. It was the best she could hope for. Work and writing would always be an impropriety, now that she was a married mother of two. But at least in LeRoy she could be herself socially; at least now her voice could be used for laughter and not just hushed admonishments. Maybe she overdid it a little. Most nights she started with gin and tonics and switched to bourbons, winding up on Bob’s lap, his hands casually on her waist, before dinner and bed. Most mornings she reached for the bottle of aspirin on her bedside table. But the children were fine, she reasoned, self-sufficient here in LeRoy, where childhood worked best as a prepackaged product, a convenience. While the adults drank, the kids played, safe on their own in the streets, Tom riding his bike, Mary shouting Wait up! in his wake. It was only Elfrida, the maid-turned-nanny, who could call them home. Each night her bellow sounded out the back door, a commanding dinner bell.

  Elfrida lifted Midge’s responsibilities from her like they were feather light, the children nothing more than overnight bags, easily unpacked. Every day she occupied Mary with work, pinching the perimeters of the pie crusts, creasing ridges into round edges, pouring goopy fruit or creamy Jell-O pudding into the belly of the pan.

  “I’ve got a girl at home just like her,” Elfrida told Midge one afternoon, gesturing to Mary, engrossed in pressing a cookie cutter into a sheet of dough, producing an assembly of triangle-skirted women, each one identical.

  Midge nodded, said something to acknowledge Elfrida’s life outside the kitchen. But she worried this might make her uncomfortable. Elfrida rarely spoke about herself—it wouldn’t have been proper. But perhaps, Midge thought, she stayed so private because she wanted a separation, a distance between East Main Street and her home, on the other side of the train tracks, a sm
all white house packed full of girls. Midge knew Elfrida saw her children rarely, that she missed them while she worked, long hours cleaning and baking and entertaining Mary and Tom, rich little dumplings who waged petty wars against each other. She knew but did nothing about it, aside from Christmas bonuses and Sundays off. This was just how things were, her wealthy woman’s mind reasoned. Everyone had their curses to bear, and Elfrida’s blackness was hers.

  Mary was raised to understand the injustice Elfrida faced, but she still sentimentalized her, imagining her love as real. It was an unembarrassed whiteness she would carry into her adult life, immortalizing both Midge and Elfrida in her memoir less as real people than as superficial emblems of race and class. My archetypal black earth mother, she wrote, my elegant white goddess.

  The Woodwards were revered in LeRoy, and so they were constantly surveilled, their comings and goings often gracing the pages of the LeRoy Gazette’s society column. Around town, their name and money were everywhere: the airport, the factory, the municipal building, the Woodward mausoleum, which stood on its own in a shady part of the cemetery, a whole building made of granite with a Tiffany window nestled into the peak of the roof. And of course the Woodward Memorial Library, a large colonial building that looked like a temple.