The Girls from Ames

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  For a while, the love of Sheila’s short life turned out to be a classmate named Greg Sims, who was a year younger than the Ames girls. He was, of course, extremely cute—a short, stocky guy with reddish-brown hair—and his dad ran the local car wash. When Greg showed interest in Sheila, starting late in high school, she’d just melt. For a while, she signed all her letters and notes “Sheila Sims.” But she knew Greg was problematic. He was the kind of guy you couldn’t always count on. He’d say he’d call and then he wouldn’t. He’d say he’d stop at her house to take her to the movies, and then he didn’t. “If Greg doesn’t call within forty-five minutes, I’m giving up on him,” she’d say. But she never really did. Once, they had a fight and he told her to get out of the car. She was barefoot, and it was a long walk home.

  “Sheila was the best thing that ever happened to Greg, but he ignored her,” recalls one of his friends, Steele Campbell. “She was going somewhere. She was great looking, she was fun, she had a head on her shoulders. We all thought: ‘What’s Greg thinking?’ ”

  Sheila confided to Karla and Jenny: “I love him so much, but he’s just so frustrating.” Given her relationship with Kurt, Karla could empathize. But both she and Sheila soldiered on, smiling, and waiting for their guys to get it together.

  In large measure because of the wilder boys they were hanging out with, the girls found themselves taking risks and making some bad decisions.

  One night during high school, Sheila, Jenny and Angela were among those in a car drinking from a bottle of vodka. They saw the police coming, so Sheila opened the car door and threw the bottle out. Bad move. The cops arrested them for being underage and having an open bottle of liquor. Jenny’s dad had to come down to the police station to get them.

  The girls were pretty freaked out, but most of their parents were forgiving, and tried to use the arrest as a wake-up call and a learning experience. Sheila’s mom was probably the angriest. For weeks, she wouldn’t let Sheila have any contact with the other girls.

  “She’d just ignore me because her mother forbade her to talk to me,” says Jenny. “It was sad. I’d say, ‘This is stupid. Why won’t you talk to me?’ She’d just say, ‘I’m sorry, Jenny. My mom won’t let me.’ ”

  Sheila’s father had a premonition that he’d never make it to old age. That’s what Sheila told some of the girls. His own father had died young of a heart condition, and Mr. Walsh assumed the same fate awaited him.

  Sheila’s dad was an excellent athlete, especially at tennis, and he often played basketball with guys half his age. Still, he had a sense that his good health and athleticism wouldn’t translate into longevity, and he was right. Eight months after Sheila graduated from high school, her dad was running up the basketball court and died of a heart attack. He was forty-seven.

  The Ames girls saw how devastated Sheila was by his death. They noticed, too, how her mother, as a young widow, remained strong and kept the family on track. It seemed almost heroic to them. “I just remember how she held it together for those boys,” says Sally. “You’d walk in the house, and she’d be helping all the boys with their homework. She became a very focused single mom.”

  Sheila ended up attending college at the University of Kansas and then Iowa State, and after her father died, she took a special interest in grief-related issues. Eventually, she designed a major that would train her to counsel families that had just learned that their kids were ill, often with terminal illnesses. In 1986, she got an internship doing that type of counseling at a hospital in Chicago.

  At the time, she was hanging out with a gregarious man she knew from Iowa who worked for Budweiser. She called him “Bud Man”—most of the other Ames girls met him, but never knew his real name—and he was also in Chicago.

  On a Saturday night in March 1986, she and Bud Man were driving home from a bar and she had to go to the bathroom. At least that’s the story the Ames girls recall hearing at the time. Sheila and Bud Man allegedly stopped at a friend’s apartment building to use his bathroom, and he wasn’t home. What happened next remains unclear, but somehow Sheila fell from that building. No one seems to know whether she was on a roof, a ledge, a balcony or a high porch. There were conflicting reports: She had jumped over a railing. Or she tried to jump between buildings, from one balcony to another. Or she tripped on wet leaves. Was she being pursued? Was she pushed? On a Saturday night, lots of young people are drinking. Was that a factor?

  She survived the fall and remained in a coma for two days. Then, for a brief moment she woke up, looked straight at a nurse and said, “Dad is coming to get me.” She died soon afterward.

  Mrs. Walsh donated Sheila’s heart, lungs, kidney, corneas and liver to transplant patients. A Chicago TV station aired a story about how her organs had gone to seven different people, saving some of their lives. A tape of that piece was played at Sheila’s house after her funeral, though the station got Sheila’s last name wrong, calling her “Sheila Marsh.”

  Only half of the Ames girls, by then spread across the country, had enough money to fly back for Sheila’s funeral. “I was in Ohio at graduate school,” says Jane. “I had no car, no money. When Karen called me with the news, I felt completely paralyzed, but I couldn’t think of how to get there. I remember someone saying, ‘Gee, if we can’t go to each other’s funerals, what are we?’ ” (The five Ames girls who didn’t make it to the memorial service have great regrets about it now. They say they had no closure. “Sometimes, I feel like Sheila never really died,” says Angela.)

  At first, no one suspected anything sinister had happened to Sheila. Her family described her death as a terrible accident, and few details were offered. The Ames girls, just starting adulthood, accepted the bare-bones story they were told: Sheila had fallen and hit her head.

  But a week after her death, Karen got a call from one of the boys she knew in high school. He asked her, “Did you hear what really happened to Sheila?” And then he told her what he had heard: Sheila had been found in an alley. Maybe she had been attacked. Karen was livid that he’d say such a thing. She hung up on him and somehow put what he said out of her mind. For a year after Sheila’s death, she sometimes stood in the shower for a long time, crying. Thinking sweet Sheila had died in such an awful way was too much for her to contemplate. And yet when she thought back about that call, she had to wonder. The boy who told her the story was very religious. He wouldn’t lie about something like that, nor would he joke about it. What was the truth?

  Sheila’s mother moved to Kansas City, and for the next eighteen years, the Ames girls never ran into her. But then in 2005, at the funeral for Cathy’s mom, they saw a familiar woman. She looked older, naturally, but she was still a great beauty. They all recognized her. It was Mrs. Walsh.

  When Sally thinks back to that encounter with Sheila’s mom, one moment stands out for her. It was when she first saw Mrs. Walsh across the lobby of the church. “She ran over to me and hugged me,” Sally says. “I’d known her my whole life, and she had always been nice and polite to me, but that was the most warmth I had ever felt from her.”

  Truth is, by hugging each other, they were really embracing a sweet young woman they both loved.

  At lunch after the memorial service, the girls sat with Mrs. Walsh. She asked them how their lives had turned out, about their children and husbands. The girls made sure they spoke about their good memories of Sheila. And then Kelly, always willing to pose difficult questions that needed to be asked, said to Mrs. Walsh: “We never really got the story on how Sheila died. Can you tell us what happened?”

  Mrs. Walsh seemed taken aback. “I don’t know if I can bring myself to talk about it,” she said. She told them that, yes, there were many unanswered questions after she lost Sheila. At the time, she was feeling such grief that it was too hard for her to look into all of them. And besides, she said, it wouldn’t change anything. Sheila was gone.

  Sheila’s obituary

  5

  Kelly

  Kelly is pro
udly liberal and often disarmingly outspoken. That’s been her role in the group since childhood, and here at the reunion nothing has changed.

  “I have such respect for you, Kelly,” Marilyn tells her at one point, “for your heart, for your ability to write, for all your knowledge and how smart you are. But there are things you do in your life . . .”

  Kelly is smiling, waiting . . .

  “. . . that I would never do in my life,” Marilyn finishes. That’s absolutely OK by Kelly. Marilyn then adds, “But I don’t judge you.”

  Well, in truth, the girls do judge Kelly. And they do talk about her to each other. And they do worry about her. But most of all, as Karla explains it, they do love her.

  Kelly has offered some details to the girls about not being completely faithful in her marriage, and about spending almost $30,000 on her divorce, much of it for a custody study and discussions concerning parenting arrangements. Since her divorce after twenty years of marriage, Kelly has had a social life that some of the other girls consider more active than they’d engage in. “Kelly doesn’t need everybody’s approval,” says Marilyn, who calls her, delicately, “the strongest personality” in the group.

  As long as everyone can remember, Kelly has tended to be purposely argumentative and predictably unpredictable. “She goes for the shock value. She always has. And she just spills,” says Diana, her closest friend, both as a kid and now. As Cathy sees it: “A lot of times, I think Kelly just likes the debate, whether she’s passionate about the subject or not.” Since their teen years, Cathy has advised her to consider the ways she comes off, including to men. “When a guy walks in a room, he can tell the girl who’s totally going to sleep with him,” Cathy tells her. “You don’t want to have that energy about you.”

  As always, Kelly listens, smiles, and does her own thing. She thinks it can be valuable to experiment in life. (She was the only Ames girl to have her eyebrow pierced; she did it in her early thirties and has since let it close up.) She is proudly sensuous, incorrigibly flirtatious and, at the same time, a thoughtful feminist. She’ll speak without a filter and ask any question that she thinks deserves an answer.

  For twenty years, she has taught high-school journalism in the small town of Faribault, Minnesota, two hours north of the Iowa border and an hour south of Minneapolis. Students usually go one of two ways when it comes to her. Either they consider her the most refreshing and inspirational teacher they’ve ever had, or they don’t know what to make of her. She encourages her young journalists to tangle with administrators over free-speech and First Amendment issues, and she leads the charge with sometimes bruising results. At times, she has barely been on speaking terms with the school principal, which is why she requests that a union rep be present when she and the principal have to interact. She has a fearless attitude, and luckily, she also has tenure.

  Kelly has always had the ability to give the Ames girls an amusing jolt, and the jolt discussed at this year’s reunion is “Kelly’s swinging email.” The email was actually a response to an email that Jenny sent out to all the girls. Jenny had attached photos of her young son. Kelly typed back that Jenny’s son was a beautiful boy, and then she got chatty. She told the girls that she recently had been to a night-club with a female friend, and they ran into a few swingers. Naturally, Kelly began asking a lot of questions about how these married couples handle their swinging sex lives. The email began: “I had my first experience with swingers, a husband and his wife. And I think she’s better looking than he is!” (Kelly later told the girls she didn’t actually take the couple up on their offer; she was joking about the “experience.”)

  In any case, she clicked “reply all” on the email, just like always, and her story headed out to the other nine Ames girls. What she didn’t realize, however, was that Jenny had sent those photos in a mass email. It had gone out not just to the Ames girls, but to other friends and relatives, including Jenny’s parents and in-laws. So did Kelly’s swinging response.

  Kelly is not easily mortified, but she was a bit embarrassed. A few months later, she ran into Jenny’s mother. “She was completely gracious,” Kelly says. Jenny’s mom told her, “I’m glad you had a good time that night.”

  In truth, Kelly was mostly just intrigued by the swingers culture. Whenever she went out to nightclubs with friends, she found herself meeting more and more swingers. She even considered writing an article about the prevalence of swingers for a Twin Cities alternative magazine, but because of her divorce proceedings, she feared that writing a story might hurt her custody situation. However, she did trade a few friendly emails with that original husband-and-wife team that had approached her. “I wondered,” she later said, “if it wouldn’t be better to ‘date’ a couple rather than try to find a good man.” She reflects on her feelings: She was hurting from the divorce and not able to imagine herself ever married again. “I was looking for kindness and stability. Maybe it would be nice to be with a kind, stable woman.” But as she wrote in an email to the other Ames girls, when the female half of that swinging couple flashed her large breasts at Kelly in the ladies’ room, Kelly was reminded of what she already knew. “She held out these gigantic things from this tattered lavender bra,” Kelly recalls, “and I said to myself, ‘I am so way, way straight!’ I looked at those things and I knew that this was not for me. A part of me was feeling like I don’t want to discriminate between men and women. But after that experience, no . . .”

  Of course, the swingers email that went to Jenny’s loved ones was an “oops” that got away. But Kelly also writes some of the most thoughtful and literary correspondence in the group.

  Email has been a great gift to the Ames girls’ friendship, as it has to so many other women’s friendships in recent years. As a teacher of written expression, Kelly has talked to her students about how communications between the girls have evolved. When they were kids in Ames, they passed notes in class or wrote each other long letters from summer vacation. In their twenties, they’d trade letters and phone calls, but because they were getting so busy raising their families in different parts of the country, their interactions sometimes tapered off dramatically. Then, starting in their mid-thirties, email became their foremost bonding tool. Suddenly, they could write to all the other Ames girls immediately, simultaneously and daily. Long notes, dashed-off comments, quick questions—“reply all” became their favorite computer command. How wonderful it was that they no longer had to lick stamps, stuff ten envelopes and drive to the post office. (When they first took to the Internet, some of them shared email addresses with their husbands. But, not surprisingly, they soon saw the value in having their own private addresses.)

  With reply-all emails, Kelly says, “each of us can choose to be an active participant in a conversation or to simply read without commenting. The important thing is that we are all part of the conversation when the group emails go out.”

  At the reunion, Kelly laughs about their early forays into email, back in the mid-1990s. Marilyn, proving herself the consummate stay-at-home mother, at first told the other girls that reply-all emails would be good for sharing “innovative dinner recipes.” Kelly rolled her eyes at the suggestion, as did some of the others. Kelly joked that the only food-related emails she’d be sending out would be about the drive-through restaurants she sometimes resorted to feeding her kids at.

  In practice, it turned out, Kelly’s emails to everyone else often became impassioned essays about the uncertainties of womanhood and motherhood. One email she sent out just before this reunion was about teaching her fifteen-year-old son to drive. He’s the first of the Ames girls’ kids to get a driver’s permit, and she began her tale by reaching back to the moment she fell in love with him. “Quin was born almost six weeks early,” she wrote, “and I held off loving him because I was afraid of losing him. It was not until two weeks later when he was home, in good health, that I felt the immensity of the miracle of my baby. I was on the couch holding him while he slept, and I wept as a vision of
his life flashed before me, and I felt all the joy that had yet to be shared between us.”

  From that sweet memory, she moved on to her current experiences of letting him take the wheel of her car, while she sits in the passenger seat “frantically screaming, flailing my arms, warning him of danger, danger, like the robot in Lost in Space. ‘LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! STOP, DAMMIT!!’ ” She described her son as cocky and oblivious—“someday destined to explode mightily through my garage door as a result of forgetting to open it, so confident is he in his driving skills that he need not look back.” She explained that she had come to realize that his death-defying driving lessons were part of a continuum. “He was reckless as a toddler, too, and we put a big padded winter hat on him until he was steady on his feet.” She explained to the other girls that she struggled to strike a balance. “I do not want to be an uptight mom who wears holes in the floor mat, always needing to put brakes on her child.”

  Her email ended with a recollection of the time she taught her son to ride a bike when he was four years old. She took off his training wheels, and he got his bearings quickly. Begging her to let go, he sped down the driveway, pedaling away. “There were about two seconds of ecstatic joy on both our parts as he took off and maintained his balance,” Kelly wrote. “But as the bike moved faster and faster, we both suddenly understood he couldn’t stop.” She had forgotten to tell him how to use the brakes. He crashed into the nearby woods and hit his head on a tree, which left him “knocked out like a bird thunking into a window,” Kelly wrote. “I said ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’—every mother’s mantra—as I ran into the woods to retrieve him.”