On Chandra’s first day at UBC she sits alone at the end of a long table in the residence cafeteria. At the other end, a group of students gather. Returning students, Chandra assumes, since they seem to know each other. They don’t notice her; their attention is focussed on one young man in a Thunderbirds T-shirt. He scoops a large cube of red Jello from a saucer and places it on the inside of his wrist. Through a series of muscle twitches and finger movements, he makes the Jello wobble-walk up his forearm. When the Jello reaches his elbow, he snaps his arm straight and the Jello jumps into his mouth. The students around him erupt in cheers.
Chandra finishes her soup, pretends she hasn’t been watching the Jello guy. His trick confirms her worry that university will be full of people with unfathomable talents, like making Jello march up an arm. How could Chandra have prepared for, or even imagined, such a thing. Her new shag haircut and acid-wash jeans aren’t going to help in this situation.
She leaves the cafeteria and heads outside, where the cloudy September day has turned blustery. Not ready to return to her dorm room to unpack, to settle in for a year of not knowing anything, she goes for a walk. First she meanders around the brick residence buildings, and then, feeling bolder, she crosses Marine Drive and looks for a way down to the ocean. When she comes upon a set of steep stairs heading down through the maples and blackberry bushes, she takes them. Near the bottom she can see the wind kicking up the sand in front of the ocean. A voice from above calls out, “New at UBC?”
She looks, and there, in a cedar tree, a naked middle-aged man hangs upside down, his knees hooked over a branch. Chandra averts her eyes. Is he talking to her? Yuck.
“I see a laboratory in your future,” he says.
This isn’t exactly the sort of encounter Chandra’s parents warned her about, although she feels sure it would fall into the warning category. So, although it is only a short walk to the ocean, she turns around and starts up the stairs she has just come down.
“I’m never wrong!” Nude-Upside-Down Man calls after her.
Chandra can’t imagine anything further from her interests, or her planned course of study, than a laboratory. Nude-Upside-Down Man is clearly a nut, even without his laboratory predictions. Chandra picks up her pace, taking two stairs at a time all the way to the top, where the wind dies down.
Once Chandra gets to know a few people from her floor in residence, she asks if they’ve ever encountered Nude-Upside-Down Man. No one has seen him or heard of him. In contrast, Jello Guy is famous. At least once a month, in front of an adoring cafeteria crowd, he walks a cube of red Jello up his arm and snaps it into his mouth. Chandra and her new friends sneak saucers of Jello from the cafeteria and take them back to their rooms. But they can’t make the Jello walk. Even though it is the same Jello as Jello Guy uses, they blame the consistency, claiming the Jello falls apart just when they feel they are close to making it move up their arms. They blame the cold sliminess of the Jello which, they say, makes them shiver, which, in turn, makes the Jello fall. They blame their thin forearms, even though Jello Guy doesn’t have large arms.
Chandra completes her first year, returns to her hometown, to her parents (who say it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she brought her marks up in subsequent years), and to a forgettable summer job at the humid, chlorine-scented pay-desk at the local swimming pool. At night, she makes red Jello, telling her parents that she has learned to love it while at university. But, after her parents go to bed, she stands at the kitchen counter and tries to make Jello cubes walk up her arm. She stops blaming the consistency of the Jello. She uses less water and makes it firm. She takes off the fridge-chill by warming the Jello to room temperature. Still, she can’t make the Jello walk. She spoons it off the counter, she washes it down the drain. By the end of summer, before she returns to UBC for the fall semester, Chandra gives up on Jello walking and decides that Jello Guy must be some sort of magician.
***
Chandra spends her 30th birthday in the hospital, on leave from her job at a Vancouver bookstore. Her parents bring her six-year-old daughter to visit. They all make awkward comments about how the daughter’s new tracksuit and matching scrunchie – bought for this birthday visit – are accidentally the same blue as Chandra’s hospital robe. While Chandra’s parents go for a coffee that Chandra knows they don’t want, her daughter climbs on the bed, snuggles in close, young face full of worry. Chandra rolls the meal tray towards them. She describes a trick she saw in the cafeteria during her first year at UBC. She puts a cube of Jello on the inside of her wrist. And she puts a cube on that same spot on her daughter’s wrist. The Jello in this oncology unit is yellow.
Attempting to make the yellow Jello walk makes Chandra’s daughter laugh and laugh. And that laugh fills Chandra’s heart. She tires easily and gives up her Jello-walking efforts after a few tries. Her daughter persists. Carefully setting cubes of Jello on her little forearm, wriggling her small fingers until all the Jello has crumbled on the bedsheets. The other patient in the room, an elderly woman with a constant cough, gives her yellow Jello to Chandra’s daughter. So thankful, the woman says, for any diversion.
After all the roommate’s Jello has refused to walk and has also fallen on the sheets, Chandra’s daughter leans back against her mom’s pillow and says, “Maybe Jello Guy was a wizard.”
***
Twelve years later, Chandra is back in the hospital. Her daughter, a teenager now, in a denim miniskirt and UGGS, sits on the edge of Chandra’s bed and reaches for the yellow Jello on Chandra’s meal tray. She places a cube on her inner wrist, just above all her multicolour plastic bracelets. The Jello moves only a short distance, slides to the floor. Chandra’s daughter nudges it with her UGG. Chandra can’t see her daughter’s face but suspects she is crying.
“We’ll try together when I get home,” Chandra says.
Her daughter nods. Scoops the Jello off the floor with a napkin and drops it in the garbage.
Chandra does get home. And they do try again. They sit side-by-side at the kitchen table, a full tray of orange Jello in front of them. Orange is their favourite colour. And halfway through that tray, her daughter walks a Jello cube from her wrist to her elbow and, snap, pops it into the air and catches it in her mouth.
Chandra is wonderstruck. Although she hadn’t shared this with her daughter, she’d given up on Jello ever walking and, maybe because of her recent medical treatments, had even begun to doubt her memory of Jello Guy.
Her daughter cuts another cube from the tray and completes the Jello walk-and-pop again. Then her daughter smiles widely at Chandra and squeezes the orange Jello through her teeth – which is gross and makes a mess and makes them both laugh.
On Labour Day weekend, Chandra drops her daughter off for her first year at UBC. After a more perfunctory goodbye than she expected, although she did get a decent hug and the promise of future texts, Chandra, stoic yet weepy-eyed, decides to go for a walk on her own before returning home. She strolls along University Boulevard. Good grief, War Memorial Gym is still there? Now that’s a surprise. Also surprising is how strong Chandra feels. She feels almost hale and hearty, to use an old phrase of her parents. She feels like she could go on as long as that gym.
She retraces her route along University Boulevard, crosses Marine Drive and, as the wind starts picking up, finds the path to the ocean, now clearly marked with a Wreck Beach sign and a “clothing optional” disclaimer. The stairs have been structurally improved. There’s even a handrail to help her on the way down.
Near the bottom, a voice from the trees calls out, “Hey!”
Chandra looks up. It’s Nude-Upside-Down Man from years ago. Swaying in the same cedar tree. His appearance unaltered.
“I remember you,” he says. “What’s happening in the lab?”
“I’ve never worked in a lab. Not back then, not now.”
“Who said anything about working in a lab?” he asks.
Chandra shrugs, takes off her sandals and walks through the sand, weaving around washed-up logs, until she is at the ocean. She closes her eyes, lets a gust of wind blow directly into her face. And she thinks about her daughter in her new-to-her room in residence. Maybe she has already gone to check out the cafeteria. She has an on-trend bucket hat. She knows how to walk Jello up her arm. She’ll be fine.
When Chandra returns to the base of the stairs, she doesn’t see Nude-Upside-Down Man. She starts her slow steady climb up the stairs. Then she hears him.
“You still have time.” His voice comes from high in the trees. “I’m never wrong.”
She turns, looks hard, still can’t see him. It’s like he’s magic.
The alumni UBC Short Fiction Contest
“Walking Jello” was chosen as one of three finalists from over 70 entries in alumni UBC’s second annual short fiction contest for alumni. Many thanks to UBC’s School of Creative Writing and UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies for their support.
