The Girls from Ames (35 page)

“We will speak again after I read your letter,” he told her. “Thank you for calling.”

When Marilyn finishes telling the other Ames girls about that phone call, she pulls out the letter she wrote and passes it around. Jane and Karla read it earlier, in a back bedroom. Now the other girls are seeing it.

In the letter, she told Elwood the things she knew about the accident, how it had led to her birth, and she reassured him that her parents never blamed him. She asked him what memories he had of that day, what injuries he had endured, how his family reacted.

As the other Ames girls consider the letter, one paragraph Marilyn wrote stands out for some of them. It begins: “I wanted to write to tell you that I owe you thanks. Had it not been for the accident, I wouldn’t have been born. I wouldn’t have had the great childhood I had growing up in Ames. I wouldn’t have the friends I made there. I wouldn’t have my wonderful husband and children.”

She ended her letter: “Not many people get the opportunity to communicate, in a positive way, about a life-changing accident. I would like to get a letter from you to find out how your life has been. I wonder if you’ve been happy, if you’re happy now. I want to let you know that if you ever had or still do have any anguish over the accident, well, I think that God has a way of planning things. I am relieved that you were receptive to giving me your address when I called you. I look forward to hearing from you.”

A couple of the girls tell Marilyn that it’s a very moving letter, that it could bring closure, that they’re eager to see if and how Elwood responds.

“My daughter says the story of how I tracked down Elwood could be a movie,” Marilyn says.

“If they made a movie,” one of the other girls tells her, “you’d be single, he’d be gorgeous, you’d fall in love, and you’d drive off in his truck and get married.”

 

 

S
ix of the girls are taking a hike on a state park trail a half hour from Angela’s house. Marilyn is walking with Kelly, while Jane and Karla are a little farther up the trail, discussing the letter to Elwood that Marilyn showed them earlier in the day.

“Marilyn wrote it from her heart,” Jane says, “but I just couldn’t get past her saying ‘thank you.’ Those aren’t the right words. If you say them out loud, it’s like saying, ‘Thank you for killing my brother.’ It made me angry that she said that. It bothered me. She shouldn’t be thanking him.”

“I thought exactly the same thing!” Karla says. “That line jumped out at me.” It felt to Jane and Karla as if Marilyn’s thank-you was offering Elwood an opportunity to say, “You’re welcome.”

Marilyn catches up with them, and Jane speaks to her frankly. “I found the letter a little troubling. I just didn’t think ‘thank you’ is what you meant to say.”

“No,” Marilyn allows, “that isn’t the message I wanted to give.”

“What would have been a better way to say it?” Karla asks, and Jane considers the question as they walk through the woods.

“I guess,” says Jane, “that I would have worded it something like: ‘I just want you to know the full story of my family, in case you’ve wondered. The accident happened. We can’t change that. We understand it was probably painful for you, too. And I just want to put things in context for you. I want you to know that I am a consequence of what happened. My birth is a consequence.’ ”

Marilyn has already put the letter in the mail. It’s too late to edit out her thank-you. But she smiles at her old friend. “Context . . . consequence . . .” Perfect words. Why hadn’t she shown that letter to Jane before she mailed it? It means a lot to her that Jane would parse the letter, looking out for her.

“Thank you,” she says, and this time, she means exactly that.

I
t’s time to go to sleep, and the girls are in various bedrooms at Angela’s. Kelly joins a conversation in the room Cathy, Karen and Diana are sharing, and the talk turns to hairstyles.

“All my life, I wanted beautiful long hair like yours,” Kelly tells Karen, “but my hair grows very slowly and I get tired of my style. So I end up cutting it short in a fit of restlessness. Then I have to slowly grow it all out again.”

The girls tell Kelly that her hairstyle hasn’t changed much since high school. That surprises Kelly. In her mind, she recalls times when she had arranged her hair differently over the years. But here are her friends telling her that when they look at her, they see the same old Kelly with the same old hairdo.

Maybe that’s because Kelly always looked her best in the same haircut. But she certainly had her hair moments that came and went. In junior high, her mom took her to get her hair cut by a woman who had a salon in her basement. Ice skater Dorothy Hamill was the woman influencing style at the time, and Kelly was talked into getting her hair cut into that cute bob. Given her very curly hair, Kelly thought she looked ridiculous in that style. She never ventured into that basement again.

Kelly, Karla, Sally, Marilyn

In ninth and tenth grades, she and the other girls carried big combs in the back pockets of their first designer jeans. In the summers, they used lemon juice to try to lighten their hair.

Early in high school, Kelly got her first perm by a stylist Cathy and her mom recommended. She took Diana with her and enjoyed meeting the openly gay stylist. She had what she called “enormous eighties hair” for a while.

And then there was the time
Grease
came to a theater in Ames, and Kelly and Diana attempted to dye their hair before attending. Kelly the brunette tried to go pink, and blond Diana tried to go black. The results were iffy at best, but Kelly recalls feeling proud and radical.

In her adult life, too, Kelly had different hairstyles. But here are her old friends telling her they see her as predictable. And so Kelly makes a decision, but doesn’t articulate it. She’s going to grow out her hair—make a real change—and then come to the next reunion with a new look. It’s past time, given the changes in her life, the divorce, her arrival in her forties. What will she look like with long hair? What will the girls say when they see her? Kelly can hardly wait for the next reunion.

At this moment, none of the others know the unexpected direction in which life will take Kelly, or what her hair will say about her when they next see her.

 

 

K
elly and her husband made the decision to separate in 2005, right before the reunion at Diana’s house in Arizona, and about a year after Christie’s death. Kelly arrived early that weekend, before everyone else, and when Diana picked her up at the airport, Kelly was an emotional wreck. She hadn’t yet told any of the girls she was getting divorced, and on the drive to Diana’s house, she spilled everything.

Kelly admitted she enjoyed spending time with another man she knew from work. The new man was appealing, Kelly said, because he was “organized, tidy and kind, and maybe that’s what I think I need right now.”

Kelly was so grateful for the ways in which Diana was there for her. In Kelly’s view, her old friend was being nonjudgmental. Kelly felt like, in that moment, she was finding out what it was like to have unconditional love from a friend.

On several fronts, Diana disapproved of the ways in which Kelly contributed to the breakup of the marriage.

This was the second time Kelly struggled with the concept of staying faithful in a marriage where she wasn’t happy. The first time was when she’d been married for three years and her husband was traveling a lot for work. As Kelly explained it: “My affair was with a man who was handsome and carefree. He was also around, while my husband was often gone, working in another state. It lasted six weeks, and then I vowed never to have an affair again. But then I met someone after Christie’s death, and I had no desire to stay faithful.”

Diana listened and offered sympathetic words when appropriate, and silence when that seemed right. She kept Kelly busy with projects. Years earlier, Karla and Kelly had started a reunion tradition in which the host put together an amusing welcome gift for the others. Diana had decided that she wanted to make slippers to give the girls when they arrived at the Arizona reunion.

“Kelly, you’ll help me,” she said.

The slippers would be made with, of all things, Maxi Pads. A woman in Diana’s church had a crafts table set up in her home, so Diana told Kelly they needed to go over there to learn the process. Each slipper would require two Maxi Pads. One would become the sole of the slipper, and the other one would wrap around the toes, forming the top of the slipper. The pads would then need to be glued together and decorated with beads, flowers and charms.

Kelly considered the whole process. “I am not a crafty person,” she said. In fact, she was proud of one of her Christmas letters to the other girls that had poked fun at Martha Stewart.

“You can do it,” Diana said. “It’s going to be fun.”

Diana took Kelly to the grocery store and they stood in the feminine hygiene aisle, discussing what types of pads to buy.

“Extra long or extra thick?” Diana wondered.

“I don’t know,” Kelly said.

“I’m thinking extra long,” Diana decided.

Kelly was thinking: “This is totally surreal. My life is an uproar. And I’m making crafts out of Maxi Pads.”

But maybe that was exactly the diversionary therapy Kelly needed. She had stepped into a foreign world, where Maxi Pad crafts enthusiasts were connecting with each other online, emailing amusing suggestions for how to describe the slippers on gift cards: “soft and hygienic,” “built-in deodorant feature to keep feet smelling fresh,” “no more bending over to mop up spills.” At least these crafts-crazy women didn’t take life so seriously.

When they returned to Diana’s house, Diana put Kelly in charge of the glue gun. They started assembling the slippers, adding on plastic flowers and other baubles. It went on like that for a couple of hours; they talked, they glued, they took apart Maxi Pads. Kelly confided in Diana about wanting to be with another man. Sometime after that, she left her glue gun tipped sideways, and Diana snapped at her.

“What are you doing, Kelly? Will you watch it please? You can’t leave the glue gun tipped sideways! Come on.”

Kelly found herself thinking: Here was one of life’s great ironies. Diana seemed to be understanding about Kelly leaving her marriage. But here she was, chastising her for a sideways glue gun. Maybe Diana’s feelings about Kelly’s questionable decisions were showing up on the Maxi Pad front.

As the night wore on, Kelly and Diana got so caught up in the slipper assembly line that, until the phone rang, Diana didn’t realize that she’d forgotten to pick up one of her daughters at church. Diana rushed out of the house, and Kelly was left holding the glue gun.

As she worked, one of Diana’s other daughters asked if she would test her on her spelling words.

And so Kelly sat there, gluing baubles on Maxi Pads, calling out words and making sure they were spelled right, all the while contemplating the end of her marriage.

The next day, the other girls arrived and Kelly began filling them all in. Most listened, resisted being judgmental, and occasionally shared a helpful story of divorce that their siblings or other relatives went through. Like Karla, Angela had gotten divorced and remarried, and both of them were able to offer Kelly their perspective that light comes after darkness. As they spoke to her, Kelly thought to herself: “It’s comforting to have people who can give you stories that make a difference when it’s so bleak.”

Upset and distraught over the breakup, Kelly’s husband had her cell phone service stopped because he was angry at her and didn’t trust her while she was at Diana’s. So she was in Arizona without a phone. Then her husband wanted to talk to her so he called Diana’s house several times. Unpleasant conversations were sure to ensue if Kelly took the phone, so she didn’t. Her husband always got along well with the other Ames girls. He respected and liked them. “But he assumes you’ll unify behind me,” Kelly said, “and that’s hard for him.”

It was obvious that Kelly’s husband was caught up in his anger and the swirling emotions he was feeling. Diana finally and firmly told him to stop calling, to just give Kelly this time alone with her friends, and he complied. Kelly was grateful that Diana took this stand. The weekend with the girls became a brief respite from so many hard issues swirling back in Minnesota.

A large part of Kelly was beside herself. But through it all, she also found herself having fun. Just being with the other girls made that inevitable. At one point, the women all put on their Maxi Pad slippers, circled up the way they did as girls, and each put one foot forward. Then they aimed their cameras downward to capture what looked like the March of the Maxi Pads. They couldn’t stop laughing.

There were times that weekend when Kelly felt desperate, confused and shattered. But she also felt embraced and loved. And that sustained her.