Later that night, as Angela headed off for her honeymoon, the other girls went barhopping. Karla went along, but seemed disconnected. Kelly noticed. “Come on, Karla,” she said. “We’re here to party. Snap out of it.”
Karla was kind of quiet, and as they drove around looking for the next stop, she spoke up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’ve got to get me to a pay phone.” They obliged her and waited in the car while Karla leaned against the wall of a convenience store, the pay phone pressed against her ear, checking up on Christie. She just wouldn’t get off the phone. It was getting annoying. She had to ask her mother for every detail about Christie’s day.
When Karla returned to the car, she had an announcement. “I’ve got to go back to Ames.”
“What happened? Is everything OK?” Diana asked.
“Yeah, yeah, fine,” said Karla. “I just miss Christie too much. I want to go back.”
The other girls were still feeling young, still in a partying mode. And here was Karla, completely baby-focused. She seemed terribly conflicted.
“OK,” said Kelly. “We’ll drive back tomorrow. But for now, you’re with us, so let’s go find a bar.”
Karla agreed, and the girls went off to find another nightspot. They got back to their hotel well after midnight, talked for a while, and then fell asleep—but not for long. Karla woke up at 5 A.M., all churned up, and nudged Kelly awake. “We’ve got to get going,” she said. “I want to leave now. I need to get back to Christie.”
Kelly would have loved to sleep longer, of course. She hoped to have a leisurely breakfast in Kansas City. Maybe lunch, too.
“We have to say good-bye to the other girls,” Kelly said.
“We’ll leave them a note,” Karla answered. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Leaving at 5 A.M. was a crazy idea, but Kelly was so impressed by Karla’s urges regarding motherhood that she groggily agreed to accommodate her. They got dressed and loaded up Kelly’s little red Honda Prelude, and as the sun rose over Kansas City, they headed back to Ames.
Christie was a happy baby, and Karla loved watching her interact with Bruce when they visited each other. He’d spread out all six-foot-five of his body on a blanket on the floor, and he’d hang out there, talking to her and kidding around with her. He was just great at making her laugh, and she made him laugh, too. “Oh my God,” Karla would think to herself. “He absolutely loves her.”
“We’re pretty good little buddies,” Bruce liked to say, holding Christie in his arms.
When Karla’s divorce was final in the fall of 1990, she strapped ten-month-old Christie in her car seat, left Arizona and drove to see Bruce in Idaho. She talked to Christie on the entire road trip, and Christie babbled back at her, as if she understood everything.
Karla’s father died that December at age sixty-eight, and seeing her mother lose the love of her life made Karla realize that real love needs to be honored and embraced. By February, Karla was ready. She and Bruce decided to get married. Their wedding ceremony was at a bed-and- breakfast in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. They had a three-person honeymoon weekend of skiing in Sandpoint, Idaho, with one-year-old Christie happily wearing her first pair of skis.
After marrying Bruce, Karla told the other Ames girls that it was hard to say who was more content, her or little Christie. Both of them were completely in love with Bruce and in love with Idaho. (Karla’s ex-husband, Kurt, eventually signed away all parental rights to Christie, and Bruce formally adopted her.)
Karla liked to describe Christie as always smiling, always thinking, always paying close attention to adult conversations. Christie, even at that young age, carried herself with a kind of maturity that was unfamiliar to Karla. When some of the other Ames girls came to visit and met Christie, they were struck by how well mannered and mature she seemed. They’d joke that she couldn’t be Karla’s child.
Meanwhile, Bruce’s career had begun taking off, and he was making a good living, working his way up the management ranks at a computer-network hardware manufacturer. “I don’t fully understand all that his company does,” Karla told the other Ames girls when they’d ask. “Next time you see him you can feel free to ask him, but you still might not be able to figure it all out.”
One night, Karla was on the phone with Kelly and told her: “Christie and I are both deliriously happy. In the last few years, I could never have imagined being as happy as we are.” She talked about the little ski boat she and Bruce had bought, and how they were going boating every weekend. She talked about their German shepherd, Luke, who had become Christie’s companion and playmate. And she explained how Bruce was so easy to live with and to love. “There’s a calmness in my life now that I just appreciate so much,” she said.
One day, when Christie was just under two years old, Karla’s idyllic life in Idaho took a terrifying turn.
Karla and Christie had gone to Bruce’s parents’ house on Lake Coeur d’Alene to pick raspberries in their sprawling garden. At one point, while Karla’s back was turned, Christie opened the gate and walked off.
Karla called her name, but there was no answer. Where could she be? How far could a twenty-two-month-old go in that short a time? Was it possible someone took her?
Karla felt a panic unlike anything she’d felt before. From her in-laws’ house, she could run in two directions—up into the mountains or down toward the lake. She figured that Christie could survive longer alone in the mountains than if, God forbid, she had wandered into the lake. And so Karla sprinted through an open field down to the lake, screaming, “Christie! Christie!”
There was no response. Karla knew every second mattered.
Karla kept running and came to a two-lane road. There in the distance, she saw their dog Luke walking on the shoulder of the road. A pickup truck was on the side of the road next to the dog. And then Karla saw a woman holding Christie in her arms. Karla ran to them and hugged Christie with all her might, wiping away tears.
“We were driving along, and we saw the dog and your little girl,” the woman said. Her husband was still behind the wheel in the pickup. “Anyway, your dog kept pushing your little girl into the ditch on the side of the road so she wouldn’t wander into traffic. We saw what was going on and we stopped to help. You’re very lucky. Your dog here saved your little girl’s life. That dog is a hero.”
The woman said she would have brought Christie inside the pickup, but Luke just kept barking. He knew she was a stranger, and he was being protective of Christie. The woman felt as if Luke was telling her: “Don’t put this little girl in your vehicle. Keep her out here, where I can see her.”
Karla thanked the woman and her husband, held Christie tighter, and reached out to hug Luke, too.
Later, she would tell the other Ames girls about what happened—about the panic she felt in those awful moments before she found Christie unharmed, and about the relief she felt holding Christie in her tightest embrace. Karla was ahead of the girls on so many fronts—from marriage to motherhood. And in experiences both awful and wonderful, she was a reminder to the rest of them about the most visceral feelings of love that a woman could have.
10
“If Not for You”
In the living room at Angela’s, the girls are reviewing the boys they had in common back in Ames during their teen years. The photos they’re sharing are bringing back memories.
There was sweet Darwin Trickle, of course, who at different times dated Diana, Cathy, Angela and Sheila. As a celebrated jock, he was the guy at school who could pretty much have any girl he wanted. But he never took advantage of that. The girls remember him as a gentleman who wasn’t especially full of himself.
There was Jeff Mann, the cornfield keg organizer, who shared his first kiss with Marilyn in sixth grade, had one short moment with Sally at a party in high school and later dated Karen. He was a nice guy, a football player, who one day accidentally cut off his big toe while mowing a neighbor’s lawn. On the football field, Jeff became known as “The Nine-Toe
d Wonder,” a moniker preserved forever in the sports-page clippings pasted in Karla’s scrapbooks.
“He had to go to the hospital and he never finished mowing the lawn, so his neighbor only paid him for half the job,” Karen says. “Jeff wasn’t too happy about that.”
“Well, he could have finished mowing while they were waiting for the toe truck,” Cathy says. It’s a joke as old as the injury, but everyone still laughs. (Kelly recalls Jeff from their days together in a youth group at their Presbyterian church. Marilyn was also in the group. “Jeff was one of the few guys who could tell me to behave—and I would,” Kelly says.)
The girls keep naming names—laughing, talking, recalling.
“Remember who took me to the prom?” Cathy asks. Not everyone does, but a few of the girls pull up the memory and then break into smiles. Cathy went to the prom with a boy who had a crush on her starting in junior high. He asked Cathy to be his prom date in October of their senior year—a full seven months in advance. For a high-school kid, that’s a lifetime away. “I told my mom it was way too early,” Cathy says. “Who asks a girl to the prom in October? What if I fell in love with someone else in all those months?” But her well-meaning mom insisted she accept the invitation, and so she did.
Once the girls’ conversation turns to their lives after they left Ames, the male names they have in common dry up. In their college years and in their twenties, they were scattered. So they didn’t have the same kind of immediate shorthand they had as kids. Sure, they phoned often, wrote letters, visited each other. But they were mostly on their own, with too many miles between them.
When Marilyn went off to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, a part of her liked living in an environment where she wasn’t always being identified as Dr. McCormack’s daughter. She could just be Marilyn, even if she wasn’t sure just who Marilyn was. At the same time, she desperately missed her family, her dad’s daily wisdom, and especially the familiar connections she had with the other girls. Even though she had often felt like a slight outsider when the eleven of them prowled around Ames together, she now appreciated them more than ever. In a way, they were a lifeline for her.
Her college roommate was a girl who loved rainbows so much that she had a rainbow mug, coat, sweater, suspenders . . . everything! An arc of rainbows covered her side of the room. The girl had an upbeat rainbow personality—she was the type who’d happily say, “Have a nice day!” She and Marilyn got along; still, Marilyn never could match the easy and loving rapport she felt with, say, Jane. She’d sit in her dorm room, surrounded by all those rainbows, and she’d try to imagine the humorous comments that Jane and the other Ames girls would likely make about the décor if they ever visited.
Sometimes, Marilyn found herself feeling strangely emotional at unexpected moments. Freshman year, she was invited to someone’s house for Thanksgiving, and as soon as she arrived in the living room, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. She walked into the kitchen, and again she was choked up. What was going on? Why was she losing it? And then she realized: The home had the exact floor plan as Jane’s house in Ames. She missed Jane.
She wrote a lot of letters to Jane, who had stayed in Iowa to attend Grinnell College. Marilyn’s letters were often addressed to “my absolute bestest friend,” and some of them were wide-eyed travelogues about the thrills of freshman-year independence. She began one letter: “I’m having a good time, a yabba-dabba-do time!” But Marilyn would also honestly assess her college experience with a bluntness she couldn’t bring herself to share with any of her fellow students at Hamilton. “I want to fall in love,” she wrote in one letter to Jane. “I’m physically lonely.”
She told Jane about her yearnings for a real friend on campus. “Oh God, Jane, I’m depressed,” she wrote. “I need a close friend here, someone who knows what I’m doing and, more important, cares about what I’m doing. Every once in a while, I just feel bummed that nobody loves me here. I have a photo of you and me together above my desk. If not for you, Babe, I’d be an absolute basket case.”
Her birthday went unacknowledged by her college friends and acquaintances. In another letter to Jane, she said the day was bearable because of the cards and phone calls she received. “I heard from Karla, Diana, Jenny, and of course, you remembered. I knew you’d remember.”
In those years, as the Ames girls started spreading around the country for college and then jobs, Marilyn wasn’t the only one articulating a sense of longing and disconnection. It was impossible to re-create the comfortable lifelong friendships they had with each other in Ames. They missed their friendships terribly, and often questioned themselves. Diana, working as an entry-level accountant in Chicago, shared an apartment with two roommates. “I’ve been really bummed out, just going through a down period,” she wrote to Kelly. “My two roommates have been making dinner together almost every night. I know that when three people live together, two of them will naturally get along better. Still, I’ve cried over this. And I haven’t made any friends at work, either. I wanted to call you and ask why you are my friend, and why you think other people don’t want to be.” Another letter from Diana to Kelly began: “I get so sentimental about us sometimes. . . .”
From the University of South Carolina, Jenny told the other girls how she decorated her half of her dorm room. “It’s so ‘me,’ ” she wrote. “You know, I’ve got all kinds of Shit Sisters pictures around. It’s excellent!” In saying “me” she meant, by extension, “them.”
Karen, at Iowa State, lamented in letters to the others that the phone company was no longer allowing long-distance calls from the sorority house where she lived. In those days before cell phones, making long-distance calls wasn’t always easy for college students. The girls without regular access to phones often felt isolated, which is why letters became their lifelines.
Karen liked most of her sorority sisters, but she was struck by the phoniness and the prejudices of some of them. At one sorority meeting, the discussion turned to whether a certain girl should be invited to pledge. A few older sisters from back east announced that the girl was Jewish, insinuating that that could be a problem. Karen immediately thought of easygoing Jane—“Why in the world would being Jewish have anything to do with anything?” she said to herself—and she realized that what she loved about the Ames girls was how accepting they were.
In those first years apart, the girls would cling to the things that kept them connected. A simple birthday present would be appreciated as if it were a way to be in each other’s presence.
One summer Jane went to Portugal and brought Marilyn back a sweater. Even though it wasn’t yet cold, Marilyn started wearing the sweater in September, and she sent Jane a long letter with all the details: “I must have received at least 15 compliments today on the sweater you gave me. The sweater was perfect for walking from class to class, though it’s not cold enough to wear inside. So many people said, ‘You look warm’ or ‘Did someone make that for you?’ I told them, ‘My best buddy from home bought it for me in Portugal.’ ” Marilyn just kept going on and on about that sweater. “If it’s chilly outside, I’ll just put it over my outfit. If it’s really cold outside, I’ll wear it as my outfit.” It’s possible that no sweater ever has been described more exuberantly. Eventually, Marilyn sewed up her sweater commentary with a simple declaration: “I love you.”
Marilyn could reveal to Jane her dorkiest efforts to fit in at college. She had gone off to school with her dog-eared copy of The Official Preppy Handbook, the 1980 bestseller, and was earnestly dressing and conducting herself based on what she’d read in the book. Jane sent back letters reassuring Marilyn that she was wonderful just the way she was, even if she was carrying a few extra pounds or wasn’t dressing up to the standards set by the preppies on her campus.
As Marilyn yearned for love, a girl living on her floor—a senior—was having sex five to eight times a day. “It’s a problem,” Marilyn wrote to Jane. “She’s quite a moaner! But at least she’s graduating earl
y. I’m glad about that.” Rather than knock on her door asking her to quiet down, Marilyn found it easier to endure the moaning and just spill everything to Jane.
While Marilyn was at Hamilton, her older sister, Sara, was working on her master’s degree in psychology back at Iowa State. For her thesis, Sara had mounted a research project tracking loneliness. As the data accumulated, Sara was able to accurately predict where study participants would be on a scientifically calibrated loneliness scale. Not surprisingly, both males and females with close female friends were far less likely to be lonely. (Even when females spent time with male close friends, but little or no time with female close friends, their loneliness scores were high. Women need other women.)
As Marilyn’s sister explained to her: Men who’ve confided only in a spouse or girlfriend can feel lost after a breakup or divorce, because they’ve lost their only confidant. But for women with close female friends, the end of a romantic relationship is more bearable because they haven’t lost their entire support system. That’s also why retirement is easier for women. Men too often define themselves by their job, while women have a social network that provides a gauge for their self-esteem in their retirement years.
Marilyn found Sara’s findings reassuring. Even if she was at times struggling socially on campus, even if her romantic life wasn’t what she wanted, because of her bonds with the other Ames girls, she’d be OK.
When she was in high school, Marilyn was always making lists. That’s why the other Ames girls had once given her The Book of Lists as a birthday present. Now, in college, she compiled a long list of attributes she sought in a man and mailed it to Jane. She told Jane that she wanted to find a guy like her father. Her perfect-man laundry list included:
The Girls from Ames Page 16