The Girls from Ames (36 page)

 

 

W
hen Kelly thinks back to her childhood dreams, to what she wanted to do or be when she grew up, she always had a clear, four-word answer in her own head. “I want to write.”

She didn’t always articulate that to her friends. She recalls signing up for Career Day in junior high with some of the other girls. What career should they learn more about? They decided, like so many of their female classmates, to meet with the modeling agency that had come to school. As Kelly now thinks back to that day, she realizes that she went only to be with her friends. She has an image in her head of Diana, in a tan outfit with a hat and her Farrah Fawcett hair. Diana certainly could be a model! But Kelly? She wanted to be a writer.

She was and is a terrific writer. The girls have known this since childhood. They see her writing talents in her emails to them, and in the stories she sent them from her 2000-2004 stint as a local newspaper reporter, when she took a hiatus from teaching. Now back in the classroom, she feels she is living her writing dream by teaching journalism and writing to a new generation.

In her forties, Kelly senses that the word “writer” can be defined broadly. It’s about expressing emotion. It’s about helping people think. It’s about using words to understand herself. It’s about helping other people find their own words.

Briefly in high school, Kelly thought she might want to spend some time in the military. Later, in college, she flirted with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. “Teaching definitely fills that void,” she has told the other girls.

Kelly loved working as a newspaper reporter, but she returned to teaching because she missed interacting with kids, especially teaching them about First Amendment issues. She feels First Amendment rights have been restricted during the Bush years and wants her students to be more active citizens.

Many of her students call her “Zwag,” rather than Ms. Zwagerman. They say she is unlike any teacher at the high school. Spend a day with her students, and they speak openly about her. “Most teachers, you can’t argue with them,” one boy says, “but Zwag is the kind of teacher who thinks that what you say matters. She likes to go back and forth with you. She wants that give-and-take.” Says another student:

“She’ll mark up your paper with a red pen, and when you get it back, there’s so much red you can’t bring yourself to look at it. We don’t like it, but we do realize that she tells it as she sees it.”

As Kelly explains it: “Every red mark is an opportunity to teach.”

“She’s my track coach,” one boy says. “She coaches me in the hurdles. Even if you win and feel you had the perfect race, she’s always telling you what’s wrong and how you can improve. That’s not easy. Sometimes I get Zwag overdose.”

Kelly has talked with her students about her relationships with the Ames girls, and they are intrigued and full of questions. In the office of the student newspaper,
The Echo,
a group of the editors are sitting around and one girl says, “It’s great that Zwag has so many friends. I have one friend—that’s why we’re sitting here next to each other—and she’s my best and pretty much only friend. I wish I had more friends like Zwag has.”

These Faribault students talk about how groups of friends form in high schools today. There are the typical groupings—the druggies, the jocks, the nerds. But there are new subgroups now. At schools today, for instance, there are groups of girls who are all anorexic and sit together at the same lunch table every day, not eating. There are girls bonded together as “cutters”—their friendships bound in self-injury.

Kelly monitors her students closely, trying to stay aware of problems in their home lives, their friendships, their own fragile psyches.

Some of the Ames girls worry that Kelly is too open with her students. As she guides them through their own issues, she’s not averse to sharing personal details of her own life and struggles. She’s open about her own political views and her honest assessment of administrators with whom she has battled. She counts ex-students among some of her best adult friends now. They are in their twenties and thirties, and Kelly is both mentor and confidant to them. At the same time, they help her see the world from a younger perspective.

Kelly hears the other Ames girls’ concerns, but in her mind, they don’t quite understand her view: that she isn’t just teaching journalism to her students. She’s teaching them about the world beyond Faribault, Minnesota. And when a teacher and former student become friends, it’s an honor and gift to both.

The other girls notice that Kelly didn’t move far from Ames, that she took a traditional job as a teacher, that she is not the full rebel they predicted she’d be when they were all young. But Kelly still sees herself as strident. In fact, she thinks that in some ways, she’s more of a rebel now.

Gay rights is just one of many causes Kelly has embraced as an adult that wasn’t on her radar screen when she was a girl back in Ames. She is proud of a letter she received from a mother of one of her students who is gay. The letter arrived a few weeks before she headed to the reunion at Angela’s. Faribault is a mostly conservative town, of course. Kelly’s brave support of the gay boy did not go unnoticed by his mother, who wrote:

Kelly considers her greatest achievement to be the work she has done with students such as this boy. She also is proud of the efforts she has put into raising her kids, but knows her divorce has taken a toll. Because her three children live primarily with their father, and because she and her ex are not speaking, there have been challenges and difficulties. Her children have blamed her for the demise of the marriage, but now there seems to be a better understanding that both people in a bad marriage play a role when it fails.

In Kelly’s view, she did make attempts to save the relationship.

The very week of Christie’s death in February 2004, she had rethought everything. She was on leave from teaching, working at the local newspaper, and she just decided to quit the reporting job and add a year to her leave. She wanted to explore who she was and rethink her marriage.

She had been married since 1987, and she knew the relationship was floundering. Was there any way to save it? She thought she’d try. In the summer of 2004, she planned a five-week family road trip out west. She wanted to pull her family together, to show her husband, her two sons and her daughter that she appreciated them and felt blessed that they were all healthy. But the trip served only to drive home the obvious: Her marriage was over. A couple of months after the vacation, her family visited her husband’s relatives. “I knew I was seeing them for the last time,” she says.

Kelly tries to reflect on marriage and motherhood honestly. “I hope I’ve contributed in a meaningful way to my children’s growth and development,” she says. “Certainly, I provide the basic necessities, but I do wonder if lessons I’ve tried to teach them will make a difference in their lives. The jury is still out on this, with all three of them in high school. I’m holding my breath and I’m just hoping they make choices that keep them safe.” Kelly assumes they’ll experiment in ways that she and her friends did when they were teens. “But I had the other girls to catch me when I fell,” she says, “and I’m not sure my kids have such a strong support system from their friends. My children are very influenced by their friends, and I’m not sure they have the safety net I had with the girls in Ames.”

Kelly’s daughter, Liesl, is fourteen years old and has come to recognize how crucial friends can be. “I think friends are way important—sometimes more important than family,” she says. Why does she say that? “Because of divorce.”

She explains that she has been able to confide in her friends about her parents’ breakup because so many of them have divorced parents, too. She has bonded with several other girls over divorce. She’s had one particular friend since first grade, and that girl “is really wise. She gives me lots of good advice. I feel like she helped my through everything when I was really mad at my mother over the divorce. Even though I was mad, my friend told me to hang out with my mom.”

The parents of another friend have an amicable divorce, and Liesl envies that. “For Mother’s Day, my friend’s father made breakfast at his house and took it over to the mother’s house. So they were able to celebrate Mother’s Day as a family. That sounded nice.”

Liesl is saddened that her parents are not at the stage where they can spend time together. And because she has begun to look so much like Kelly, she says she wonders if her dad is thinking of his negative feelings toward Kelly when he looks at her.

But overall, Liesl says things are improving. For Valentine’s Day, Liesl came to Kelly’s house and they ordered a heart-shaped pizza and rented some romantic movies. They talked about Liesl’s long-distance boyfriend, who lives in a town that Liesl described precisely as “twenty-six minutes away.” The boyfriend is always texting Liesl, and she loves getting his texts. He has promised, however, that if he ever breaks up with her, he won’t do it by text, and she appreciates that.

Liesl’s texting stories have reminded Kelly of her own texting adventures, post-divorce. “The first text message I ever received was from a man I dated last spring,” she says. “There was something incredibly exciting and a little erotic about receiving ‘thinking of you’ as I was finishing the school day. I quickly taught myself how to send a text message back, and from that point on, we sent ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ messages every day.”

Kelly now trades text messages with her students—at all hours, if they have homework questions, they get in touch—and at times she has had all three of her kids in the car, and they’ve all been texting at once. She noticed how silent it was in the car, yet everyone was communicating.

And so Liesl’s texting love life, her fears about being dumped via a text—it all resonated with Kelly. And bonding with her daughter on Valentine’s Day was a thrill on other fronts, too. They vowed to each other that, at least for the foreseeable future, they’d try to spend a part of every Valentine’s Day together, so they aren’t just relying on the boyfriends in their lives.

Liesl said she was glad she spent last Valentine’s Day with her mom. “I love her,” she said, “and wanted her to know it.”

 

 

L
ike all the Ames girls, Kelly has given thought to the question of who she is now and what she wants from her life moving forward. “I want to be a strong female role model,” she says. “I want to be an inspirational and motivational teacher. I want to be a parent who builds a network of love and support for my children, which includes involving my parents in their lives. I want to be a kind and caring friend.”

Over the years, she has come to a realization about the Ames girls: All of them have close family ties—they’re close to siblings, parents, children. “These women seem to have an extraordinary capacity for strong connections, and not just with their families and the group of us, but also with their newer friends and colleagues. Maybe through our strong friendship we have learned how to more deeply care for others.”

Kelly’s liberal leanings are shared by some of the other girls, but not by all. “It’s therapeutic to talk politics with Cathy, Jane, Angela and Sally,” she says. “Some of the others are more private, and we respect that.”

Not long before the reunion at Diana’s, George W. Bush was inaugurated for a second term, and there were disagreements among the girls about his record and about the war in Iraq. At one point, the conversation turned to gay marriage, and it was obvious that others weren’t in agreement with Kelly’s more liberal support of it. She tried to steer the conversation off of that topic because she feared it might get unpleasant. One day they all went for a hike and broke into groups. When Kelly’s group returned, Cathy pulled her aside and joked, “You left me with the Republicans!”

Actually, because she lives in California, Cathy is grateful that some of the other Ames girls connect her with a part of conservative America she rarely sees anymore. She lives in the quintessential blue state. Almost all of her friends there are West Coast liberals. And yet when she sees the humanity, good intentions and mid-American values of someone like Marilyn, she says, it’s as if she’s getting a reminder to temper any urges to be dismissive of red-state conservatives. “Marilyn is also a face of the red states,” she tells herself.

The girls are proud that they resist getting into political arguments or combative philosophical debates. That would defeat one of the reasons they get together. As Kelly explains: “When I am with them, I am reduced to someone who simply experiences joy in the moment. It is like walking into a party where everyone knows each other and everyone is having fun. My gut aches from laughing when I am with them. How often do any of us experience exhilarating moments of happiness? So consider this: Every time I am with these women, even when mourning brings us together, I am lifted up with joy.”

 

 

I
n all sorts of ways, Kelly is happy to be in her forties now. “A lot of women in their forties look fabulous,” she says. “They’re working out, their bodies are fit, they take great care of their skin and hair. It’s no wonder that the acronym MILF has become popular.” (For those who don’t know the term: Just Google it.)

As Kelly sees it, almost everything she has learned about beauty has come from the other Ames girls. “I don’t spend a lot of time exploring new beauty products, and I often don’t know about new trends, but every time I get together with them, I learn ways to improve my diet, my skin, my hair. I get a crash course from them on what works and what doesn’t. They are truly a panel of health and beauty experts.”