The Girls from Ames

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  He’ll love his own family, and eventually, he’ll love mine too. He’ll be educated. He’ll love the outdoors. He’ll appreciate the arts. He’ll have a good heart. He’ll want to cuddle with me. He won’t feel the need to belittle me. He won’t be afraid to plan for a future with me. He’ll have a great sense of humor. And he won’t chew with his mouth open.

  “I’m too picky, aren’t I?” she asked Jane.

  “Well, if you’re looking for someone like your father, that could be an impossible standard,” Jane told her.

  Marilyn’s reply: “I know. I’ll probably never get married because my expectations are so high.”

  At one point during college, Marilyn fell in love. He wasn’t necessarily the man of her dreams, but she appreciated that he helped her feel good about herself. He was so attentive and chivalrous that she felt loved. As she told Jane: “He carries my tray to the trash cans at dinner. He opens doors for me. He writes notes and puts them in my mailbox, saying that ‘a beautiful woman should always have mail in her box.’ ”

  Later, there was another guy who didn’t smile much, which bothered Marilyn, but he had a way of giving advice that reminded Marilyn of her dad. She was intrigued by him, even if she didn’t feel anything for him romantically. She confided in him that she wasn’t fitting in socially with certain girls at Hamilton. He told her she shouldn’t expect to re-create the lifelong, close friendships she already had back in Ames.

  “He says there are some people in your life that you will learn from, and then they will go their own way and you won’t need them in your life anymore,” Marilyn explained in a letter to Jane.

  Back in Ames, Marilyn and Jane had always loved cooking and eating together. Marilyn’s high-school diaries were filled with descriptions of meals shared and enjoyed. There were also plenty of descriptions of pounds added—of looking in the mirror and not being pleased with the image there. Knowing Marilyn so well, Jane filled her letters to Marilyn with encouragement and reassurances.

  “I might be happier if I didn’t put myself down all the time,” Marilyn said to Jane in one phone call.

  “You’re great just the way you are,” Jane replied. “You really are.”

  In the letters between them, Jane and Marilyn traded detailed plans for what they’d do together once they were home from college for the summer. They vowed to play the Hall and Oates song “Kiss on My List” again and again (because that’s what they did when it was first released in the spring of 1981, their senior year of high school). They also planned to sit in front of the fireplace at Marilyn’s house, sipping hot chocolate mixed with peppermint schnapps. Then they wanted to go over to Jane’s house and, as Marilyn put it, “boogie to the Carpenters!”

  Just before leaving college for the summer, Marilyn was in the computer center at Hamilton. Computers back then were these giant machines and were still being operated with thin rectangular cardboard keypunch cards. Marilyn was in the lab waiting for a fellow student. She had nothing to do, so she decided to play around and put together a computerized message for Jane. When she was finished, she stacked up all the keypunch cards and mailed them in a long manila envelope to Jane.

  Days later, when Jane fed the cards into the computer at her school—with all those punched-out numbers—the message that came up was: “Isn’t this groovy? I am so excited to see you in two weeks!!!! We will have a wonderful time!!!!! I . . . . . . LOVE . . . . . . . YOU!!!!!!!”

  Their friendship had entered the computer age.

  After graduating from Hamilton, Marilyn knew she wouldn’t fully enter adulthood if she settled back in Ames. She had spent her childhood bumping into people all over town who told her how great a doctor her dad was or how they had always admired her mom. Once, home from college on break, Marilyn went to a photo store to get film developed. When it came time to pay, she was $3 short. The woman behind the counter saw her name on the order blank, asked if she was Dr. McCormack’s daughter, and then said, “Don’t you worry about the bill, honey. If you’re Dr. McCormack’s daughter, the three dollars are on me.”

  A large part of Marilyn loved such Ames encounters. It made her feel special and lucky to be a product of her family. But, just as in college, she needed to establish her own identity. Besides, Ames was a college town and a family town. It was no place for a single woman in her twenties.

  She ended up in St. Paul, mostly because her older sisters were already there and it wasn’t a long drive back to Ames. It was a decision that felt safe to her. She landed a job teaching a ballroom dancing class for beginners at Arthur Murray Dance Studios, a natural fit for her outgoing warmth and ability to connect with people.

  At times, she felt inferior to some of the other Ames girls, who were taking more academic and professional paths. Jane was studying for her Ph.D. in psychology. Diana was working as an accountant. Jenny had gotten involved in politics. Sally and Karen were teaching. Angela was building a public relations career.

  Marilyn later got a job selling Mary Kay cosmetics.

  When she was deciding whether to take the Mary Kay job, she worried about what her friends would think. The company’s director said, “Do you generally rely on your friends’ opinions to make a decision?”

  “Yes, I guess I do,” Marilyn admitted.

  “Is that how you want to make decisions in the future?”

  “No, I really don’t,” Marilyn said.

  “Then, now would be a good time to start believing in your own strengths.”

  The director’s words tapped a source of confidence in Marilyn that gave her direction in jobs and relationships. Her energy, thoughtfulness and ability to read people eventually led to jobs in insurance, ophthalmology and the publishing business.

  For a while, Marilyn struggled romantically. She tried a couple of dating services. “Everyone I like doesn’t like me. They don’t call me back,” she confided in Jane. She dated one guy a few times and then casually asked him, “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” He actually took a step backward. “Whoa!” he said. “Back off.”

  Some men did show an interest in her. “But so far,” she told Jane, “the guys who like me, well, they’re not for me.”

  She and Jane—and the other Ames girls, too—would sometimes talk about how it was hard to find men who possessed the qualities they were looking for. “Why is it that I can find those attributes in plenty of women?” Jane would ask. “Why do so few men seem to have them?” She had decided that there seemed to be more interesting women in the world than interesting men. “There are definitely great guys out there,” she’d say, “but not a lot of them. So a lot of really neat women who’d be great wives are not going to end up meeting someone special.”

  The inability to find impressive men who’d also make them swoon could be disheartening for all the girls. Marilyn briefly dated a man in Minnesota. He was obese, without social graces, and without much personality, but he was confident. He said to her, “I’m everything you’re looking for!” As soon as the words left his mouth, Marilyn thought to herself: “You’re not what I’m looking for at all.” But she smiled and said nothing.

  Eventually, most of the other Ames girls started meeting their future husbands, and Marilyn felt stuck in place. Diana was set to marry a strikingly handsome businessman; her equal in the looks department, the other girls decided. When Marilyn met him she was happy for Diana, but envious, too. Here was this guy who looked like a prince and had a complete romantic streak. He once gave Diana a Louis Vuitton purse, and when she opened it, there was a string of pearls inside. That was an incident the Ames girls couldn’t stop talking about for months. Marilyn felt like the perennial bridesmaid, wondering if her time would ever come.

  Jane, meanwhile, after being Marilyn’s confidant in the “it’s so hard to find a good guy” conversations, finally met a very special man. Problem was, he wasn’t Jewish. So she put him out of her head as a prospect.

  At the time, September 1985, Jane was in graduate school at Ohi
o University in Athens, Ohio, majoring in experimental psychology. The guy—his name was Justin—was a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, and she first saw him while standing in line at orientation to get her ID card. He was wearing a blue-striped shirt and khaki pants, and Jane immediately thought, “Wow, this is a nice-looking guy.”

  “The thing is, he’s Catholic,” she later told Marilyn. “That’s fine. We can just be friends.”

  Jane and Justin got close pretty fast, having long talks over regular lunches and evening phone conversations. Jane was impressed by what a great listener Justin could be. He was so emotionally intuitive. At least to her, it felt platonic.

  But early in October, in a surprise four-hour conversation over the phone, Justin confessed to Jane that he felt far more than a friendship with her. It took Jane a few more weeks to admit to Justin that yes, perhaps she had feelings for him, too. But even at that point, the two of them had never had a romantic moment. They had never touched each other. They’d never kissed.

  Jane went back to Ames for Christmas break and told the whole story to Karen and her mom. “I think this could be it,” she told them. “He’s the greatest guy I’ve ever met, but I’m scared. I don’t know if I can marry a guy who isn’t Jewish.”

  Karen’s mom listened to all she had to say and then responded simply: “Honey, you have to go with your heart. If you do that, and your heart says this is the man, then you can work out the religious issues.”

  When Jane talked to Marilyn by phone, Marilyn offered the same advice. “You’ve got to go for it. Period.”

  After New Year’s, Jane flew into Columbus, Ohio, on the same day Justin flew in from his home in Rhode Island. He was standing waiting for her at her gate when her plane arrived. It was a seventy-mile drive to Athens in a rental car, and as Jane later explained to Marilyn, they both felt a heightened sense of things. “We were talking and talking. The whole conversation was just, ‘Oh my God, will this even work?’ ”

  Justin drove Jane to her apartment and parked the car, and she invited him in. It didn’t take long before they shared their first kiss.

  By the time Jane got married in 1989, with Marilyn by her side, the other Ames girls had decided that Justin reminded them of a Kennedy. He was this bright guy with a New England accent and this terrific smile. “I feel like I’m talking to JFK when I’m with him,” Karla liked to say. “He just has this East Coast charisma.”

  Jane and Marilyn at Jane’s wedding

  Justin and Jane would eventually settle in New England as academics—Justin at Brown and Miriam Hospital, Jane at Stonehill—and the girls were unanimous in deciding: There might not be enough quality guys out there, but Jane had found one.

  A year later, in the fall of 1990, Marilyn’s time finally came. She had joined the Jaycees board as a way to do volunteer work and to meet new people. At a Jaycees social event, she met an attractive fellow board member named Chris Johnson. He was on his way to a career as a business consultant, and he just seemed at ease with himself. The conversation had an effortless feel about it.

  Marilyn threw the bait in the water first, casually saying, “I don’t have anything going on this weekend.”

  Chris got the message. “Me, either.”

  He’d later say it was love at first sight. He was taken with Marilyn’s eyes and with her straightforward personality. He’d been in relationships that felt tedious, because there was such game-playing. But Marilyn just seemed so natural and honest, with a gee-whiz sense of life.

  For their first date, they went on a picnic together at Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. Marilyn packed a lunch for both of them, and they walked around the lake together. Eventually, they stopped to buy ice cream, and later, they went to Chris’s condo to listen to the Broadway original cast album of Phantom of the Opera.

  On the second date, Marilyn got bold. She asked Chris, “So how many children do you want to have?”

  He answered: “As many as I can put through college.”

  Marilyn smiled at that. She thought it was a perfectly reasonable answer. Maybe he’d end up a billionaire and they’d have 750 kids.

  Chris was a practicing Lutheran, and he told her that his faith guided his life. As he and Marilyn got more seriously involved, he encouraged her to find her way closer to her own faith. Her dad had been a questioning Christian, and that had influenced Marilyn over the years. As Chris got to know Dr. McCormack, he suspected that the 1960 auto accident had been a turning point for him. “Having lost a child in a tragedy like that, he couldn’t help but curse God,” Chris told Marilyn. “And your dad was a doctor, unable to find a way to save his son. That had to add to the pain. Anyway, that’s my hypothesis on his feelings about God.” Chris helped Marilyn better understand her father, and at the same time, he held her hand as she came to embrace a life more centered around faith.

  Within a year, Marilyn was on the phone with Jane. “I’ve got a question,” she said. “Would you be my matron of honor?”

  Jane thought of the thousands of hours she and Marilyn had spent talking about love, wondering about the possibility of marriage, doubting whether they (or any of the girls) would find their ultimate soul mate.

  “Would I be your matron of honor?” Jane asked, and paused before answering.

  If you’ve spent your entire life knowing you were the most qualified person in the world for a certain job, and then the offer finally comes, well, it’s beyond meaningful.

  “You know what?” Jane said. “I just happen to be free that day. I’ll be there.”

  11

  The Bonds of Pop Culture

  The girls have piled into two cars, and they’re headed to a restaurant in downtown Raleigh for the reunion’s only night out. In Angela’s car, Cathy is answering questions and the mood is giddy.

  As is often the case when they get together, the girls have been pumping Cathy for the latest trends from California. Over the years, Cathy has told them about enema-loving Hollywood stars who, while in her makeup chair, would gush to her about the therapeutic value of colonics. At other times, Cathy has told the girls about the good karma and positive energy to be found in crystals. And once, when Karla, Kelly and Diana visited Cathy in L.A., Cathy was in a soy phase. (Karla kept saying, “Look, I’m from the Midwest. I want dairy. I want cheese and a glass of milk. All you have in this refrigerator is soy!”)

  Now, here in Angela’s car, no one can stop laughing as Cathy reports on yet another trend she’s been hearing about on the West Coast: “the Aussie makeover.” Cathy has no personal interest in this, so-called down under cosmetic procedure. But she has learned the details about vaginal procedures that allegedly improve a woman’s self-image by correcting what Aussie makeover specialists call “asymmetrical” issues brought on by age and childbirth.

  From there, the discussion turns to anal bleaching, a new cosmetic procedure to bleach the pigmentation of the most private circle of skin on a person’s body.

  As the girls laugh and cringe about this, Angela comes up with a marketing plan. “A company could offer a service where they bleach a gerbil,” she says, “and then they send the gerbil right up there. They could call it ‘The Herbal Gerbil.’ ” Everyone roars at that.

  Eventually, the conversation morphs into a discussion about body image, dieting and the new horizons of healthful eating. “Mark my words,” Cathy says. “In two years, you’ll all be cooking with coconut oil.”

  “Or bleaching with it!” Angela says.

  The girls always have been each other’s pop-culture monitor and barometer. They’ve spent their lives trading stories of fads worth emulating, singers worth appreciating and their own celebrity sightings.

  In elementary school and junior high, Sally and Cathy shared crushes on teen idol David Cassidy. Sally was also partial to Bobby Sherman. Diana, meanwhile, had a “Donny Osmond Kissing Poster,” which was very useful when the other girls visited and had an urge to kiss Donny Osmond.

  The girls watched The
Partridge Family, The Cosby Show, M*A*S*H, and, in reruns, Gilligan’s Island. In their preteen years, they thrilled to the PG sexuality of Love American Style. Each week, the show offered a few unrelated episodes about love, romance and sexual urges, and it seemed so risqué at the time. The girls didn’t really notice that parts of the show were politically incorrect—the leering men, the women as playthings. It just seemed like a cool vision of adulthood, with the same large brass bed playing a role in so many of the episodes.

  In those days of just a handful of channels, the girls often would watch programming with their parents. Cathy liked to come home from school in the afternoon and sit on the couch with her mom to watch Merv Griffin. Her friends also watched talk shows with their parents: Dinah Shore’s Dinah’s Place or The Mike Douglas Show. It was so unlike TV viewing today. The Ames girls’ children are more apt to be on the computer in the afternoon, or they have all sorts of youth-focused channels to choose from—the Disney Channel, MTV, Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network—with programming designed specifically for them. As kids, many of the Ames girls liked watching stars from their parents’ and grandparents’ eras; it was kind of cool when Jimmy Stewart or Fred Astaire showed up on Merv or Dinah or Mike, offering a window into this older world. These shows helped young and old get to know each other’s icons.

  For those living in Iowa, the forces of pop culture emanating from the East and West Coasts could seem very far away. But sometimes there would be reminders that Iowa, too, was on the map. On Star Trek, the character of Captain James T. Kirk proudly hailed from Iowa. There was even a line in the 1986 movie Star Trek IV in which a woman from twentieth-century Earth comes upon Kirk and asks him if he’s from outer space. “No, I’m from Iowa,” he tells her. “I only work in outer space.”