JELL-O Girls Read online

  At lunch in a small café, Midge picked at her insalata while Mary ate osso buco, a dish she relished. “The rarer the better,” she always said when ordering, to which Bob guffawed and Midge cringed. Her daughter’s appetite was cavernous. She wanted it all. The finest lamb chops, tenderloins dripping bloody juices. And why shouldn’t she have it? Midge reasoned. She’d learn soon enough to curb her hunger, she thought, reaching across the table to touch Mary’s hand.

  “I’ve something to tell you,” she said. “Remember the doctors I visited with?”

  Mary nodded.

  “They found a lump in my breast,” Midge said. “It could be nothing,” she rushed, “but the doctors say it may be why I’ve been feeling so poorly.”

  Mary looked into her mother’s face. It did look paler. And Midge did look thinner than before.

  “Will everything be all right?” Mary asked.

  “Oh yes, of course, lambie!” Midge said, her tone suddenly brightening. “But we do need to see to it. I need to have an operation.”

  They would leave the next morning for Palermo, where there was a reputable clinic, she said. Mary stared at Midge. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to react, so she searched for clues in folds and creases, in the bloodlessness, of Midge’s skin, the slight frown above her eyebrows. What had Cousin John said about the curse again? She racked her mind, wondering what loophole Midge might have fallen into. No, she was a woman and therefore exempt. So it couldn’t be that serious, Mary figured.

  “Your father will stay with me,” Midge went on. “Mr. Smith will take you and Tom to Istanbul, Greece, Beirut, and Egypt, just as we had planned.” Afterward, Midge and Bob would meet the children in Portugal, and they’d all board a luxury liner, the Vulcania, together. They’d all go home.

  Home? Mary almost yelled. She couldn’t go home. Home was where her voice was punished. Home was where the boys were. Midge squeezed her hand. “Yes, but trust me, lambie, everything is fine—I’m going to be just fine.” But Mary was shocked, unable to understand what her mother’s illness had to do with her, unable to understand who was being punished, and for what.

  In a day, Midge was gone. Bob checked her into the clinic, only to wind up trolling the halls outside her room, carrying magazines rolled into tubes he hit against his thigh in nervous rhythms. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith took Mary and Tom on adventures. They rode the ferry to the Aeolian Islands, sea spray on their faces. They toured Agrigento, the Valley of the Temples, where crumbling columns and walls and roofs jutted from the landscape in jagged lines, like the aftermath of a battle, dismembered limbs scattered.

  Mary and Tom bickered fiercely on these outings.

  “I’ve been saying it for years,” Tom said. “We’ve been too much for Mother. We did this, we made her sick.” Mary always took the bait, and always lashed back. “Calm down,” Tom would tell her, his voice flat, emotionless. “I’m simply telling you the truth. Your oversensitivity is extremely taxing to be around.”

  Tom was usually this way in their arguments, infuriatingly calm, and Mary felt trapped by trying to defend herself without showing emotion. It was impossible. She always came off as crazy. She began to think her brother was right. Maybe she was that kind of girl. Maybe she was the crazy kind.

  On their third day in Sicily, Mr. Smith took Mary and Tom to the Capuchin Catacombs. As they descended a slippery staircase lit by torches, the wet stink of mildew grew, filling Mary’s head. She missed her mother with a sharp pain; she wanted to reach out and hold someone’s hand to steady herself. But neither Mr. Smith nor Tom felt appropriate to turn to. She touched the wall, slick with slimy condensate, then continued down. Tom and Mr. Smith had already reached the bottom.

  “Keep up, Mary!” Tom called.

  When she came to the foot of the stairs, she found herself in a dank corridor, its walls filled with hanging bodies, openmouthed and fully clothed, dried skin flaking from their bones. In the slackness of the skeletons’ jaws, the emptiness of their eyes and the tortured claws of their hands, Mary saw herself, her family, Edith and Ernest at home in LeRoy, packed into the family crypt and turning to gelatinous dust. She thought of the curse. She thought of her mother. So this is where we all end up, she thought. The prospect tightened in her sternum. And yet she followed, last in line, looking at her brother’s back, as the narrow path wound them deeper into the catacombs. Mr. Smith was narrating the journey, but Mary heard none of it. So when they entered a separate room and saw a porcelain-skinned, thin-lidded child, swaddled in gauzy white and wearing a dusty pink hair bow, asleep under glass, she caught her breath, as if realizing the promise of life eternal. “This,” Mr. Smith said, “is Rosalia Lombardo.” Mary and Tom gathered around. A small plaque hung below her casket. Nata 1918, Morta 1920. It was uncanny how perfectly preserved she was, little Rosalia. How close to life. Her body seemed to float, suspended, in the vacuumed air, a ripe peach encased, the daintiest Jell-O mold. Everything was sweet, pink, appetizing. Rosalia wanted for nothing, hungered for nothing. She was the ideal little girl, silent. She would never argue with her brother or make her mother sick. Mary bowed her head, suddenly guilty for wanting so much freedom. For the first time in her life, she issued a silent prayer. If I die, she prayed, please let me stay behind like this, perfect. At least in death, she wouldn’t disappoint.

  It was the early spring of 1958 when the family boarded the Vulcania and returned to New York. Midge was still recovering from her surgery, guarding the site of her mastectomy, ashamed of her flattened chest. She felt helpless, floundering to keep her head above the surface of the morphine she needed to cover the pain. The pain, inescapable and constant, a leaden throb radiating across the scarred terrain of her chest, down into the pit of her armpit, the space from which doctors had scooped diseased lymph nodes, little lumps of betrayal that pumped cancer into the whole of her. She felt compressed, her body squeezed of everything it had left to give. Now, entirely empty, she was less a woman than a woman-shaped hole. Every day she strapped on the stuffed mastectomy bra she’d ordered from a special company in New York. Every day she performed womanhood and wellness. But the impossibility of a convincing performance exhausted her. In fact, everything exhausted her. Especially the children, who’d bickered increasingly since returning to LeRoy. Every evening their thin voices nattered through the floorboards, the walls, becoming the sound track to Midge’s worsening pain. When it reached a crescendo, she packed a bag and checked into the hospital, this time Strong Memorial in Rochester, a hospital well funded by Woodward wealth.

  The prognosis was initially good. The pain was simply the pain of healing tissue, doctors said. But, lying alone in her hospital bed each night, Midge battled the voice inside her, telling her they were wrong. She couldn’t bear the thought of death, the unfairness of it. She thought of everything she hadn’t done, everywhere she hadn’t traveled. And of her children, too young to live motherless. Mary in particular was a source of concern. Who would usher her into womanhood? Who would teach her what to wear, what to say or not say; who would teach her what (or whom) to avoid? These questions spun in Midge’s mind, spurred by pain and a frantic, grasping fear. To silence them she slept, falling into a darkness made dreamless by the morphine she asked for anytime the pain whispered, knowing it would soon shout, then scream, always bearing the same truth: she was dying.

  The pain took its toll, as did the drugs. When Midge came home from the hospital, it was as a sliver of herself. It was as if her body were preparing to empty, a house packed with boxes, not yet vacated, but almost. She sat at the dinner table in her bathrobe, soft blue with pink rosebuds scattered over the fabric like the cherry blossoms that littered the front lawn each spring. She ate in tender bites, as if the inside of her mouth were sore. Afterward, seated in the living room, her feet on a small footstool, she stared at her swollen ankles, her purple toes with their lacquered red nails.

  Midge’s feet in particular disgusted Mary, who felt guilty for her repulsion, not knowing it
was simply fear covered over. What had become of her mother’s body, once soft and clean? Something evil, inherently bad, had changed Midge from the inside out. Mary began to avoid her, giving her a wide berth and swallowing her annoyance when Midge called to her from the sofa or bed, asking for water. Their relationship became one-sided. Consumed by her illness, unable to console her daughter, Midge became the needy one. She was always asking for something: water, towels, help to the bathroom, help back to bed. But when Mary asked her a question, she didn’t answer, just stared at the floor, the wall, instead. What’s wrong with you? Mary wanted to shout, but didn’t. Her mother was sick. Her mother was recovering. Her mother would return, Bob promised; she just needed time. So Mary stayed away, holed up in her room, reading romance novels with fainting ingenues on their covers. When school began in August, ushering Mary into the eighth grade, she bore the bullies, older boys determined to put her in her place. She had wanted to fit in, wanted to be a good girl to match the closet full of dresses Midge had ordered her from Sibley’s in Rochester in her last motherly act, each garment complacent, conforming. But LeRoy magnified Mary’s difference, and she railed against its smallness. Each night at the dinner table, she complained about the narrow-mindedness of the kids at school. “And the teachers,” she’d say, her voice rising, “they’re no better—they encourage it!” Her pomposity was extreme. She had been to Europe, she reminded her friends constantly; she had seen things. And she had. Mary was ahead in all her classes. She spent the whole year fantasizing about returning to Europe just to revisit Rosalia. Distance—from the boys, from her constant surveillance—became her purest reprieve.

  Soon, Mary began filling out boarding school applications with a determination she’d later describe as deluded. Mother will be better soon, she thought. And at a prep school, Mary imagined, she’d be suitably appreciated—praised, even—for her worldliness, a trait frowned upon in LeRoy. As it was, Midge, who usually stepped in to ground her daughter’s self-importance, was silent. She was asleep most days when Mary and Tom returned from school and woke some nights only to ease herself to the dinner table, stare at her plate, then return to bed.

  * * *

  In years to come, Mary would think of the night as a threshold, a transformative doorway she passed through in order to know her mother’s illness, to assume it. It was February, not late, but already dark. The moon was out, casting shadows on the snow, shapes Mary would later remember like specters, the looming bearers of bad news. Midge had been silent for days. She still moved about the house at mealtimes, but her eyes were newly glazed over, her expression permanently confused. Once seated, she required help to rise, and Tom and Bob stood on either side of her, lifting her upright by the elbows. She’d ask for an arm then, to make it to the bathroom, where she’d linger for an unnatural span of time, Bob knocking softly to ask if she was okay.

  This was how it started, that February evening, the soft knock, the pleading question. But this time, Bob entered after he knocked. When he came out, he was paler and strode in a fog toward the living room. At least this is how Mary remembered him, suddenly shocked by Midge’s decline.

  But perhaps it was she who was shocked. Of course Mary knew Midge was ill, but everyone kept saying she’d get better. And though her father seemed shaken when he walked from the bathroom, he must have already realized that Midge’s cancer was too rooted to cut out. He must have been arguing with her for days, weeks, even, about returning to the hospital. But Midge knew what would happen if she did. She emerged from the bathroom on her own after Bob left, faltering as she tried to stand, her brow furrowed, her bathrobe hanging limply from her shrunken frame.

  “Mary, darling,” she said to her daughter, who was standing in the kitchen, flipping through a magazine. “Mary, the ambulance is coming to take me away.”

  Mary looked at her mother’s face, her eyes at once wild and scared, changed by the morphine Mary didn’t know she needed.

  “Mom?” she said, rushing to her side, linking Midge’s arm as if they might go for a stroll. “Mom? Why are they coming? What’s wrong?” The doctors had continued to insist Midge was improving. Mary had chosen to believe them. But now she could hear her father in the living room, talking on the phone, his voice hushed and urgent. Something was not right. “One Forty-One East Main Street,” he was telling the operator. “Please hurry.”

  “It’s a mistake,” Midge said, suddenly panicked, her tone mimicking her daughter’s anxious alarm. “Your father doesn’t know what he’s doing—don’t let him answer the door,” she begged, tugging at Mary’s sleeve. “Hide me. Hide me!”

  Mary, unsure of what to do, put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, then recoiled at their smallness, the nearness of her bone. “Sit right here,” she said, propping Midge on a chair. “I’m going to go get help.” There were sirens in the distance now, wailing closer. They were only blocks away. She looked around. Where could she hide her mother? The linen closet? The basement?

  The ambulance was outside now. Midge was sitting, hands in her lap, rocking back and forth and gazing at the floor. “You have to hide me,” she kept muttering. She seemed to have no other words. Mary heard the knock on the front door. She heard Bob’s footsteps in the foyer, heard him open the door. She was panicking now. “Wait here, Mommy,” she said. “I’ll protect you.” But, frantic and confused, she did something that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Not knowing why, she bolted out the back door and into the cold.

  The immediate slap of the frigid air on her face felt good. The wet sting of snow inside her slippers gave her something to focus on as she crouched, a criminal, behind the toolshed, watching the red and blue ambulance lights bounce off the icy ground, turning the backyard into a stained-glass scene, a world of color. Into this world Mary placed herself as she waited for the ambulance doors to slam, the siren to wail again, loud at first, then diminishing.

  8

  Mary would have imagined her mother’s death, her own grief, in the grandiose terms of the novels she read. She would have pictured herself fainting, collapsing in a pale heap of bedclothes. She would have imagined herself inconsolable, sobbing violently for days. She would have imagined her appetite waning, sleep evading her. She would have imagined all this if she had known to. But in actuality, she hadn’t understood that Midge could truly die until she did. And even then, after the initial shock, nothing really changed. At least it seemed that way.

  After the ambulance came for her, after her attempt to escape it, Midge had stayed in the hospital for good. Bob was protective of her—or perhaps he was protecting the children; Mary couldn’t quite tell. Either way, he never let them visit, returning home with bloodshot eyes to answer their questions with assurances of Soon, soon.

  It was a late night in April when the phone rang. Mary heard it from bed and put down the book she was reading, climbed from beneath the covers, and came to the top of the stairs in her nightgown. Recently, she’d been admitted to Kent Place School, a boarding school for girls in Summit, New Jersey, and it was all she could think of. Would the other girls be better read? She spent most of her time tearing through the canon, imagining as she read how free she’d feel once she left LeRoy. She imagined herself an intellectual, debating with her classmates, bookish girls in glasses. She imagined she might bond with these girls, become sisters. She rarely thought about her mother. Midge’s death seemed impossible until it happened.

  She found Tom in the foyer that April night sitting at their mother’s desk, the receiver wedged between his shoulder and ear. She watched him as he scribbled notes, saying only uh-huh. When he hung up, he looked at his sister, holding the banister. He wore a stunned expression. “That was Dad,” he said numbly. “Mom just died. I have a list of people here to call.”

  In the days after her mother’s death, Mary found that instead of falling apart, she became obsessively detail oriented. She was efficient. She slept deeply each night and ate when meals were served. She preoccupied herself
with what to wear to Midge’s funeral. She worried about Bob. She did not think of the day she and Midge shopped in Rome, or the day Midge was loaded into the ambulance and taken; she did not think about her mother’s last words to her—Hide me!—and she did not think about the days and months and years to come. She was present, perfect, shocked into silence and her new role as a motherless daughter.

  On the morning of the funeral, Mary fastened one of her Roman brassieres and stepped into a white silk slip. She craned her arm to zip the emerald dress her mother had bought her. She was suddenly older, more beautiful, her dark hair newly cut to a short bob, so that the curls curved gracefully around the soft lines of her face. “A young Elizabeth Taylor,” people often told her, and she glowed in reply, her body a gemstone, absorbing praise like sunlight, hot to the touch. But today the knowledge of her beauty disappeared into silence, into the absence of her mother’s voice. Everything was muted. Everything was dull: the fabric of her dress, once rich and deep, the floral-patterned wallpaper outside her room, the array of colorful clothing in her closet. And the creamy powder on Midge’s armoire, one shade too light for her when she had puffed it over her face that morning, unsure of how to do so, mimicking her mother. “Mary Edith, you’re so pale,” people said to her at the reception, admiringly but concerned, and Mary thought to herself it was only the powder. She thought she’d fooled them. She thought to herself how unfeeling she was, floating above her life, her mother’s death, like the film at the top of a drink not yet shaken.