The Girls from Ames (22 page)

He had a Tom-Selleck-in-the-eighties look about him, but with a mullet haircut. (Given the times, that haircut looked just right on him.) Karla had immediate feelings for him. Bruce couldn’t help but notice Karla, too, and thought she was beautiful and vivacious.

Bruce carried himself with a gentleness that Karla found striking. He was “kind”—that’s the word that came into Karla’s head. It was a form of kindness she hadn’t experienced from a man before. For his part, Bruce told Karla that she had this passion within her—“gusto,” he called it—and that impressed him. They felt natural together. Eventually, a friendship turned into romance.

Karla told the girls that Bruce had moved back to Idaho, where he had gone to college. They were staying in close touch, and the realization was hitting both of them that they wanted to spend their lives together, raising Christie.

At the reception after the ceremony, Cathy, Diana, Kelly and Karla sat at the same table, and the discussion turned to love and friendship. “In the end, who is more important in your life, your girlfriends or your men?” Kelly wondered. “I say friendships last a lifetime. The hell with men.”

Karla listened to her and then answered quietly. “I want to be completely devoted to a man and to have a man completely devoted to me. That’s what I dream of.”

The other girls were taken with her optimism. She still had this utopian ideal.

“You can’t count on men,” Kelly said. “I believe that if we had an ideal society, we’d fall in love a few times.”

This wasn’t exactly appropriate talk for a wedding reception. And in any case, Karla remained firm. “There’s a soul mate for everyone,” she said. “I believe that.” In her heart, she was sensing that Bruce would be hers.

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.

 

 

C
hristie 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.

 

 

O
ne 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.

I
n 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-Toed 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.

 

 

W
hen 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.”