Karla
Adopted at birth; lively and lovable, but as a girl, not always sure of herself; first to have a child (her daughter Christie). Now she’s a stay-at-home mom.
Sheila
The dentist’s daughter; considered the sweetest of the girls growing up; an incorrigible flirt. She left Ames for Chicago to help families with ill children. Never married.
Kelly
Free spirit of the group and the most likely to surprise them with her words and actions. Now divorced, she is a high school teacher in Minnesota.
Jane
Smart, studious, bonded with Marilyn, and the only Jewish member of the group. Now she is a psychology professor outside of Boston.
Diana
Known as the beauty of the group. Now married with three daughters. Certifed public accountant by profession, she now works at a Starbucks in Arizona by choice.
Cathy
Last of seven siblings, which made her more worldly as a girl. Never married. Now she works as a makeup artist in Los Angeles.
Sally
Smart, funny, but at the periphery of the group in early years; brought into the friendship by Cathy. Now she is a teacher and the only one remaining in Iowa.
Karen
The auto dealer’s daughter. Longtime nickname: “Woman.” Now she is a stay-at-home mom near Philadelphia.
Jenny
One of the archivists of the friendship; close to Sheila; last to have a child. Now she is the assistant dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Angela
Newest member of the group; arrived in town in ninth grade, when her father came to manage a hotel in Ames. Now she runs a PR firm in North Carolina.
1
The Girls in the Photos
The old photos are spread all over the kitchen table, and in so many of them, going back so many years, the eleven girls are completely mashed together. This is how they loved posing. Arms all intertwined. Or giving each other the tightest group hug. Or they’d line up, chest-to-back-chest-to-back, all scrunched up, KarlaSallyKarenDianaJennySheilaJaneAngelaMarilynCathyKelly, as if they were one living, breathing organism with eleven separate smiles.
There’s a photo of them in their school lunchroom, spent milk cartons in front of them, and they’re laughing and leaning into each other, arms draped over every available shoulder. In another photo from their teen years, taken from overhead, the girls are lying flat on their backs on a carpeted floor. Their heads are pressed together in a circle, with each body pointed outward, like rays from the sun. It wasn’t enough for them to be head-to-head-to-head, all of them beaming; some decided to hold hands, too.
They were just as tactile as they got older. In a photo taken when they were in their twenties, Kelly is pregnant, and the other girls have their palms on her belly. In another photo, from their thirties, they’re all squished on a bed at Karla’s house, their legs overlapping.
The “girls” are forty-four years old now, and these images of their younger selves are a reminder that in certain crucial ways, nothing has changed. The pictures are laid out tonight on this kitchen table at Angela’s home in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and as the girls look through them, there is an ease with which they touch each other. A hand will nonchalantly rest on someone else’s arm. Over on the sofa, a head will drop casually onto someone else’s shoulder. They’re comfortable sitting close together, four of them on a couch meant for three, almost on each other’s lap.
This summer visit to Angela’s is the latest Ames girls reunion, and ten of the eleven girls are here. That’s everyone except Sheila, though as far as the ten of them are concerned, she’s here, too. For one thing, Sheila is in photos all over the table, looking up at them with that full-on smile of hers. For another thing, as they explain it—well, they can’t quite explain it. She’s just here with them, that’s all.
They’ve been gathering like this all their adult lives. Every year or so, they fly or drive somewhere to be together, and once they arrive, it’s as if they’ve stepped into a time machine. Being in each other’s company, they feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see themselves through thousands of shared memories.
Yes, they’re all forty-four. But in their heads and hearts, they are also twelve and fifteen and seventeen and back in Ames.
As twelve-year-olds, they’d sit in a circle, combing each other’s hair.
As fifteen-year-olds, they knew what it was like to kiss the same cute boy. Kelly knew and Karen knew and Marilyn knew, but didn’t tell anyone.
As seventeen-year-olds, they were slightly wild and unwittingly cliquey, and every weekend, the eleven of them would squeeze into two cars, and off they’d drive, in search of eleven boys.
Growing up in the corn-and-college town of Ames, home to Iowa State University, they were exposed to so many of the same influences—the rural values of family and hard work, the focus on higher education, the constant presence of alcohol among their peers. Day after day, they shared the not-always-appreciated joys and often-exaggerated complaints about small-town life. But no matter what, the girls loved the place then and love it more now. It’s a town of just 53,000—about half of whom are transient Iowa State students—and it can be traveled end to end in fifteen minutes. That’s a small space, yet it offered the girls a microcosm of how the wider world worked. All around Ames sit cornfields, with a farmhouse here or there, and not much else off into the horizon. But in the town itself there was an energy, with adults falling in love and doing meaningful work, or making mistakes and paying the price, or taking the time to teach the girls life lessons they’ve never forgotten. For the girls, who often say they feel like sisters, Ames was their shared womb.
As friends there, they certainly weathered disagreements and disappointments. They traded harsh words and cold shoulders. They annoyed and angered each other. But they always vowed to remain that group of eleven, even after they left Ames and built new lives. What they could never have predicted in Ames were the exact numbers to come: They ended up moving in or out of seventeen different states. Between them, they found nine first husbands and two second husbands, and brought twenty-one children into the world. They have buried five parents.
They’ve come together for this four-day weekend at Angela’s not just to reminisce and review all that ground; they’ve also come to share tentative predictions and yearnings about what’s ahead in each of their lives. Sometimes two or three of them will disappear into a corner of Angela’s house for a private connection. Other times, all ten will sit and talk as a group. A few of the girls are facing serious moments of transition. It is a relief, they say, to have these hands to hold, these ears to hear them, before they embark on their uncertain futures.
Karla’s change is imminent. She has decided to move with her husband and kids from their home in Edina, Minnesota, to a new home they are building in Bozeman, Montana. Moving day is later this summer. To an outsider’s eyes, this may seem like no big deal; families move from one place to another all the time. But the Ames girls know that in Karla’s case, this is a move accompanied by painfully raw emotions, and their hearts ache for her. Karla’s decision to go is actually a way of attempting a new life after the life she and her family had together was forever altered. “Come sit with me. Let’s talk,” Jane says to Karla. And they do, well into the night.
After this weekend, Kelly’s life will also take a different path. Her divorce is just now final, after two years of struggling that left her without primary custody of her kids. She talks freely of how she envies some of the other Ames girls and their marriages. “I want to find a relationship as powerful and meaningful as the ones you have,” she says to them. “And I will.”
Marilyn has come to the reunion with a copy of a letter she wrote and mailed out just a week ago. It’s a letter to a truck driver she spoke to just once on the phone, in a conversation that lasted only a few minutes. She has never met him, and knows almost nothing about him, except
for a flash of memory from long ago, and a few things she has since learned through a Google search. She has the letter in her purse but hasn’t yet shown it around. Maybe later in the weekend, she’ll take it out. “When the time is right,” she tells a few of the girls, “I have something I’d like you to read.”
Cathy, meanwhile, is at her own turning point, because she’s on the cusp of changing her career. For many years, she has been a successful Los Angeles-based makeup artist, touring the world with Janet Jackson or working with the casts on sitcoms such as Frasier. Lately, however, the thrill of being what she calls “a face-painter” to the stars has passed, and she has decided to use other gifts—her dry sense of humor, her insights into people, her grasp of words. She plans to try to make it as a screenwriter.
Over the next four days, the Ames girls will pay little attention to the outside world, leaving their cell phones in their suitcases and their kids in the care of their husbands. They will spend time laughing so hard that they’ll have to make emergency trips to the bathroom. They’ll also cry over the deepest sorrows imaginable—matters they never contemplated back when they were girls.
“That couch out on the porch, for some reason, that has become the crying couch,” Cathy says at one point. “You sit down there, you start talking, you start crying.”
Angela’s house is perfectly appointed and spacious, with an understated Southern charm and comfortable furniture everywhere. But the girls don’t spend most of their time inside. Instead, they are drawn to that open-air back porch. The simple resin-wicker furniture faces into the backyard, where Angela’s seven-year-old daughter has a swing set. Just on the other side of the tree line, there’s a large tobacco field, dusty and sun-baked this time of year. And beyond that, 1,163 miles to the west, is Ames.
For the girls sitting together on the crying couch—holding cups of coffee in the morning, glasses of wine at night—Ames, or at least the Ames of their memories, feels far closer. They can actually reach out and touch it. All they have to do is touch each other.
How did it all start? When, exactly, did the eleven of them begin to bond? The answer, as they explain it, has a quasi-cosmic touch: It’s almost as if they remember each other before they remember each other. Or more accurately: They have memories in common that date back to the days before they even met. Most of them didn’t know each other as preschoolers, but in their own homes, they were sometimes having the exact same experiences at the same exact moment.
They’d all watch this local Ames TV kids’ show, The Magic Window, which for forty years was hosted by a woman named Betty Lou Varnum. In every episode, Betty Lou would introduce a craft-making segment by announcing the materials needed. These were always kid-safe items that could be found around the house. But the kids had to find everything fast, really fast, or Betty Lou would go on without them.
“OK, children,” she’d say, “you’re going to need an egg carton, string, two paper clips, cellophane tape, a pair of safety scissors, a piece of green construction paper . . .”
At that instant, all around Ames, the frenzy began. “It was like ‘Game on!’ ” Cathy says. “You had maybe a minute to round everything up. I’d yell to my mother, ‘Mom . . . MOM! I need an egg carton. I need string. Hurry! I need two paper clips. I need scissors. . . . ’ ”
Cathy can now deliver a perfect comic routine of how she’d scamper around the house doing Betty Lou’s bidding, and when she does, the other girls laugh in recognition.
Most of the girls don’t recall being formally introduced to each other. There was no magic moment, no feeling of love at first sight, the way some of them recall meeting their husbands. But that’s common when it comes to early childhood friendships. There are often just hazy memories of playing in the same vicinity in a class or on a playground (child-development researchers now call it parallel play), and then liking each other’s company, and then, almost always without fanfare, crossing that line from acquaintances to friends.
Jenny and Karla were born days apart in Mary Greeley Hospital, and were infants together in their mothers’ arms at the same church. It’s possible that one of their parents said, “Jenny, this is Karla; Karla, this is Jenny.” But the girls wouldn’t remember that. What they do remember is being four years old together at Barbara Jean’s Academy of Dance, and the costumes they wore. For one number, they actually wore itsy-bitsy-teenie-weenie-yellow-polka-dot bikinis—a live-action kid version of the 1960 novelty song. They also did a tap dance together in red satin Eskimo costumes, and they remember the soft white fur around their necks.
Most of the other girls didn’t begin meeting face-to-face until kindergarten or first grade. Cathy, Sally and Sheila went to St. Cecilia on Lincoln Way, the local Catholic school, and their friendships took root because of proximity and happenstance. As an adult, Cathy has spent time marveling about this. She admits that if she hadn’t met her Ames friends until adulthood, it would have taken more time to connect—or they might not have connected at all. After all, the friends she has made in Los Angeles tend to be nontraditional, having kids later in life and working in the entertainment industry or other creative jobs.
In Ames, the girls often landed in each other’s lives by virtue of alphabetical order or group homework assignments. Cathy became friends with Sally in first grade because their teacher at St. Cecilia made the match. Cathy had a broken arm and had missed the first week of school. When she showed up at the class, the teacher said, “Why don’t you go sit next to Sally?” The teacher figured Sally and Cathy were the two tallest girls. And Sally was smart, so she could help Cathy catch up on the missed work. From that pairing, a lifelong friendship was born.
Sheila became Cathy’s friend because they lived near each other. The two of them ended up walking home from school together every day. That brought Sheila into Sally’s life, too.
Sheila, whose dad was a dentist, had this spark about her that went beyond her sparkling white teeth. She was completely cute, with big brown eyes and that always-animated smile of hers. She was also tiny back then, which made her a favorite of the nuns at St. Cecilia. The sister who taught first grade liked to invite Sheila to join her up front when she read stories to the rest of the class. “Sheila would be sitting there, cuddling on the nun’s lap, and we’d be sitting on the floor, feeling jealous,” says Sally.
In second grade, their teacher got pregnant. (This particular teacher was not a nun, or at least, not anymore.) Given that the Immaculate Conception had been faintly addressed in religion class, the teacher decided she’d better explain her situation to her students. So she brought in a book titled I Wonder, I Wonder, which, in the most innocuous way, touched on how sperm meets up with an egg. The pregnant teacher read it cheerfully to the class as they sat on the big rug in the corner. For Sally and Sheila, however, the book only increased the wondering. They had always assumed pregnancy was a direct result of heavy kissing, and the book wasn’t about kissing at all. Luckily, Cathy had an array of answers, courtesy of information provided by her six older siblings. She gleefully offered up the F word.
“That’s the word they use. That’s the main word,” she told Sheila as they walked home from school the day I Wonder, I Wonder was recited to the class. Sheila had never heard the word before, didn’t have any idea how babies were created, and her eyes grew wider and wider as Cathy explained all the details. Sheila kept asking, “How do you know all this? Who told you this?” It seemed dangerously exciting just thinking about it. That day, she and Cathy made up a rhyming song with this new vocabulary. For weeks afterward, they sang it as they walked home from school.
These days, when the Ames girls spend time with women they didn’t meet until adulthood, they can act sophisticated, mature and worldly. They can’t do that as easily with each other, of course, because in the back of their minds, they have a full log of all the goofy things they said and did when they were young.
Jenny hasn’t forgotten all the odd excuses Karen would give in elementary sch
ool because she was too afraid to have a sleepover. “I can’t sleep at your house because I haven’t been baptized yet,” Karen said one afternoon.
Jenny was confused. “What does not being baptized have to do with it?”
“Well, when a Catholic hasn’t been baptized, they have to spend the night in their own bed in their own home,” Karen told her. “Otherwise, if they die in their sleep on a sleepover at some other kid’s house, they won’t go to heaven.”
Jenny, a Methodist, felt bad that Karen would be risking an eternity in hell by agreeing to a sleepover. She let it be. But she asked her mom about it, and her mom explained that Karen just had sleepover anxiety; it had nothing to do with Catholicism. Karen stuck to the baptism story for months, but Jenny was kind enough not to call her on it.
Eight of the eleven Ames girls spent their elementary years in public school. Most met up with Cathy, Sheila and Sally when the three of them came from St. Cecilia to Central Junior High, one of the two public junior highs in Ames. (Only Marilyn, Jane and Angela went to Welch Junior High.)
The girls got to know and understand each other in part through their quirkiness. Cathy had aspirations to be a model when she grew up—a hand model. She’d hold up her right hand and move it around oh-so-elegantly. Then she’d showcase her left hand. The other girls couldn’t stop laughing as she regaled them with predictions for her future life as a highly paid hand model. They imagined her as a spokes-model for, say, hand lotion or engagement rings, touring the planet in protective gloves.
The Girls from Ames Page 2