Phoning Home: Essays

An Absence of Jell-O

An Absence of Jell-O Lime Jell-O, as served up in my grandaunt’s kitchen, was a weapon of torture. Among my earliest childhood memories are the threehour drive along the backbone of Long Island to the cozy, tchotchke-cluttered home of my mother’s aunt and uncle, Eddie and Shirley Sadowsky, who had escaped the Jewish ghetto of the Bronx for the tidy uniformity of suburban Patchogue. My uncle had earned his living in the tire business . In his youth he’d been quite the ladies’ man—he was already divorced when he married into my mother’s family, an unspeakable blemish for the suitor of a respectable girl in the 1920s—but by the time I knew him, he had mellowed into an irascible geezer who passed his retirement in petty warfare with his sisters-in-law. My aunt had once been damaged An Absence of Jell-O 71 goods too, her neck disfigured by a savage scar from where her thyroid gland had been extracted in her teens. Since she died when I was only nine, I recall little of Aunt Shirley, a softfeatured woman who concealed both her hair and her throat beneath a cloak of faded schmattas. What I do remember vividly is her greeting me in the foyer, amid the swirl of hugging and hanging of coats, and whispering into my five- or six- or seven-year-old ear that there was to be Jell-O for dessert—if I behaved! I was not to tell anyone, warned my aunt. The Jell-O was to be our secret. That Jell-O was to be spoken of in hushed tones—like divorce or cancer—was not shocking to me at that age. My parents kept a strictly kosher home. They didn’t distinguish between the trace of porcine collagen in gelatin-based desserts and procuring a ham-and-cheese sandwich or a suckling pig. Not that I didn’t know the nirvana of Jell-O firsthand: my mother’s stepmother, who had little patience for arbitrary doctrine, took a sly pleasure in treating me to trayf delicacies. At Aunt Shirley’s house, however, I never managed to behave well enough to earn my slurpy, sugary reward. Sometimes I tried to prolong our stay, feigning sleep or even illness, hoping that my aunt would find a way to sneak me a spoonful of my favorite snack. Inevitably, though, I left Patchogue with an empty stomach and a soul brimming with dejection. Another ten years would pass before I realized that there had never been any lime Jell-O. My grandaunt had been senile, demented, soft-in-the-head. Today we’d say she suffered from Alzheimer’s 72 Phoning Home disease, but, for my working-class relatives in the 1970s, Aunt Shirley’s mental lapses were just an expected and unpleasant part of growing old. Pythagoras of Samos, writing in the sixth century before Christ, described old age as the time when people “return to the imbecility of the first epoch of infancy.” Chaucer lamented that “with old folk, save dotage, is namore,” while Dickens captured the essence of cognitive decline in his sympathetic portrait of “The Aged P” in Great Expectations. Although the German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer first reported in 1906 the disease that would take his name, describing the ailment ’s distinctive amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the preserved brain of housewife Auguste Deter, and Emil Kraepelin included the condition in an edition of his Textbook of Psychiatry in 1910, senile dementia was widely regarded as a normal variant of the aging process into the early 1980s. Patients suffered without a formal clinical diagnosis, often alone, although sometimes very publicly, as the actress Rita Hayworth did for nearly fifteen years. Nobody knew what caused the accumulation of deformed proteins in the brains of some senior citizens, while others lived into their eighties and nineties with minds as sharp as talons. When Uncle Eddie asked his family physician why his wife was having difficulty recalling names and recognizing faces, he received an answer that reflected cutting-edge Carter-era neurology: “Bad luck.” As a result of the genetic revolution of the last two decades , we now know that much of the “bad luck” that causes Alzheimer’s disease is mediated by our genes. In particular one An Absence of Jell-O 73 locus on chromosome 19, the apoliprotein E, or ApoE...