The Girls from Ames (4 page)

Marilyn has come to the reunion with a copy of a letter she wrote and mailed out just a week ago. It’s a letter to a truck driver she spoke to just once on the phone, in a conversation that lasted only a few minutes. She has never met him, and knows almost nothing about him, except for a flash of memory from long ago, and a few things she has since learned through a Google search. She has the letter in her purse but hasn’t yet shown it around. Maybe later in the weekend, she’ll take it out. “When the time is right,” she tells a few of the girls, “I have something I’d like you to read.”

Cathy, meanwhile, is at her own turning point, because she’s on the cusp of changing her career. For many years, she has been a successful Los Angeles-based makeup artist, touring the world with Janet Jackson or working with the casts on sitcoms such as
Frasier
. Lately, however, the thrill of being what she calls “a face-painter” to the stars has passed, and she has decided to use other gifts—her dry sense of humor, her insights into people, her grasp of words. She plans to try to make it as a screenwriter.

Over the next four days, the Ames girls will pay little attention to the outside world, leaving their cell phones in their suitcases and their kids in the care of their husbands. They will spend time laughing so hard that they’ll have to make emergency trips to the bathroom. They’ll also cry over the deepest sorrows imaginable—matters they never contemplated back when they were girls.

“That couch out on the porch, for some reason, that has become the crying couch,” Cathy says at one point. “You sit down there, you start talking, you start crying.”

Angela’s house is perfectly appointed and spacious, with an understated Southern charm and comfortable furniture everywhere. But the girls don’t spend most of their time inside. Instead, they are drawn to that open-air back porch. The simple resin-wicker furniture faces into the backyard, where Angela’s seven-year-old daughter has a swing set. Just on the other side of the tree line, there’s a large tobacco field, dusty and sun-baked this time of year. And beyond that, 1,163 miles to the west, is Ames.

For the girls sitting together on the crying couch—holding cups of coffee in the morning, glasses of wine at night—Ames, or at least the Ames of their memories, feels far closer. They can actually reach out and touch it. All they have to do is touch each other.

 

 

H
ow did it all start? When, exactly, did the eleven of them begin to bond? The answer, as they explain it, has a quasi-cosmic touch: It’s almost as if they remember each other before they remember each other. Or more accurately: They have memories in common that date back to the days before they even met. Most of them didn’t know each other as preschoolers, but in their own homes, they were sometimes having the exact same experiences at the same exact moment.

They’d all watch this local Ames TV kids’ show,
The Magic Window,
which for forty years was hosted by a woman named Betty Lou Varnum. In every episode, Betty Lou would introduce a craft-making segment by announcing the materials needed. These were always kid-safe items that could be found around the house. But the kids had to find everything fast, really fast, or Betty Lou would go on without them.

“OK, children,” she’d say, “you’re going to need an egg carton, string, two paper clips, cellophane tape, a pair of safety scissors, a piece of green construction paper . . .”

At that instant, all around Ames, the frenzy began. “It was like ‘Game on!’ ” Cathy says. “You had maybe a minute to round everything up. I’d yell to my mother, ‘Mom . . . MOM! I need an egg carton. I need string. Hurry! I need two paper clips. I need scissors. . . . ’ ”

Cathy can now deliver a perfect comic routine of how she’d scamper around the house doing Betty Lou’s bidding, and when she does, the other girls laugh in recognition.

Most of the girls don’t recall being formally introduced to each other. There was no magic moment, no feeling of love at first sight, the way some of them recall meeting their husbands. But that’s common when it comes to early childhood friendships. There are often just hazy memories of playing in the same vicinity in a class or on a playground (child-development researchers now call it parallel play), and then liking each other’s company, and then, almost always without fanfare, crossing that line from acquaintances to friends.

Jenny and Karla were born days apart in Mary Greeley Hospital, and were infants together in their mothers’ arms at the same church. It’s possible that one of their parents said, “Jenny, this is Karla; Karla, this is Jenny.” But the girls wouldn’t remember that. What they do remember is being four years old together at Barbara Jean’s Academy of Dance, and the costumes they wore. For one number, they actually wore itsy-bitsy-teenie-weenie-yellow-polka-dot bikinis—a live-action kid version of the 1960 novelty song. They also did a tap dance together in red satin Eskimo costumes, and they remember the soft white fur around their necks.

Most of the other girls didn’t begin meeting face-to-face until kindergarten or first grade. Cathy, Sally and Sheila went to St. Cecilia on Lincoln Way, the local Catholic school, and their friendships took root because of proximity and happenstance. As an adult, Cathy has spent time marveling about this. She admits that if she hadn’t met her Ames friends until adulthood, it would have taken more time to connect—or they might not have connected at all. After all, the friends she has made in Los Angeles tend to be nontraditional, having kids later in life and working in the entertainment industry or other creative jobs.

In Ames, the girls often landed in each other’s lives by virtue of alphabetical order or group homework assignments. Cathy became friends with Sally in first grade because their teacher at St. Cecilia made the match. Cathy had a broken arm and had missed the first week of school. When she showed up at the class, the teacher said, “Why don’t you go sit next to Sally?” The teacher figured Sally and Cathy were the two tallest girls. And Sally was smart, so she could help Cathy catch up on the missed work. From that pairing, a lifelong friendship was born.

Sheila became Cathy’s friend because they lived near each other. The two of them ended up walking home from school together every day. That brought Sheila into Sally’s life, too.

Sheila, whose dad was a dentist, had this spark about her that went beyond her sparkling white teeth. She was completely cute, with big brown eyes and that always-animated smile of hers. She was also tiny back then, which made her a favorite of the nuns at St. Cecilia. The sister who taught first grade liked to invite Sheila to join her up front when she read stories to the rest of the class. “Sheila would be sitting there, cuddling on the nun’s lap, and we’d be sitting on the floor, feeling jealous,” says Sally.

In second grade, their teacher got pregnant. (This particular teacher was not a nun, or at least, not anymore.) Given that the Immaculate Conception had been faintly addressed in religion class, the teacher decided she’d better explain her situation to her students. So she brought in a book titled
I Wonder, I Wonder,
which, in the most innocuous way, touched on how sperm meets up with an egg. The pregnant teacher read it cheerfully to the class as they sat on the big rug in the corner. For Sally and Sheila, however, the book only increased the wondering. They had always assumed pregnancy was a direct result of heavy kissing, and the book wasn’t about kissing at all. Luckily, Cathy had an array of answers, courtesy of information provided by her six older siblings. She gleefully offered up the F word.

“That’s the word they use. That’s the main word,” she told Sheila as they walked home from school the day
I Wonder, I Wonder
was recited to the class. Sheila had never heard the word before, didn’t have any idea how babies were created, and her eyes grew wider and wider as Cathy explained all the details. Sheila kept asking, “How do you know all this? Who told you this?” It seemed dangerously exciting just thinking about it. That day, she and Cathy made up a rhyming song with this new vocabulary. For weeks afterward, they sang it as they walked home from school.

These days, when the Ames girls spend time with women they didn’t meet until adulthood, they can act sophisticated, mature and worldly. They can’t do that as easily with each other, of course, because in the back of their minds, they have a full log of all the goofy things they said and did when they were young.

Jenny hasn’t forgotten all the odd excuses Karen would give in elementary school because she was too afraid to have a sleepover. “I can’t sleep at your house because I haven’t been baptized yet,” Karen said one afternoon.

Jenny was confused. “What does not being baptized have to do with it?”

“Well, when a Catholic hasn’t been baptized, they have to spend the night in their own bed in their own home,” Karen told her. “Otherwise, if they die in their sleep on a sleepover at some other kid’s house, they won’t go to heaven.”

Jenny, a Methodist, felt bad that Karen would be risking an eternity in hell by agreeing to a sleepover. She let it be. But she asked her mom about it, and her mom explained that Karen just had sleepover anxiety; it had nothing to do with Catholicism. Karen stuck to the baptism story for months, but Jenny was kind enough not to call her on it.

Eight of the eleven Ames girls spent their elementary years in public school. Most met up with Cathy, Sheila and Sally when the three of them came from St. Cecilia to Central Junior High, one of the two public junior highs in Ames. (Only Marilyn, Jane and Angela went to Welch Junior High.)

The girls got to know and understand each other in part through their quirkiness. Cathy had aspirations to be a model when she grew up—a hand model. She’d hold up her right hand and move it around oh-so-elegantly. Then she’d showcase her left hand. The other girls couldn’t stop laughing as she regaled them with predictions for her future life as a highly paid hand model. They imagined her as a spokes-model for, say, hand lotion or engagement rings, touring the planet in protective gloves.

Karla, meanwhile, had become adept at creating a world very close to the one described and photographed each month in her
Seventeen
magazines. She turned her bedroom closet into a magazine-worthy showcase closet. She had hooks for necklaces, hooks for purses, shoes arranged in a particular order—like a fireman’s boots, ready for action. The other girls would come over and stand at the closet, oohing and ahhing, as if
Seventeen
’s closet committee had actually come to Ames to certify that Karla’s layout met their specifications.

The girls were always observing each other closely. They were constantly wondering, speculating, judging, measuring. They wanted to know everything about hygiene, acne, puberty, sex, and they learned by monitoring each other. That led to a lot of blurting and blushing on their road to discovery. Kelly, by far the most strident of the girls, was relentlessly curious, always willing to ask the question everyone else was thinking.

During the winter of eighth grade, some of the girls went on an overnight church retreat together. Back then, Marilyn always slept on her stomach, and she liked to keep her hands warm by tucking them neatly under herself. Kelly looked at her for a few minutes and then just had to ask: “Marilyn, what are you doing?”

All Marilyn could sputter was “Well, I’m not doing
that
!”

 

 

B
y junior high, the girls had begun establishing nicknames for each other. Jenny, whose last name was Benson, became “Jenny-Benny.” Karla, whose last name was Derby, became “Kerby.” Diana Speer became “Spiana” or “Spi.” And then there was Karen, whom they always called “Woman.”

Woman got her nickname from her father, the chattiest, friendliest auto salesman in Ames. She was the youngest of his five kids, and starting when she was a toddler, he loved to call her “my little girlfriend.”

He’d introduce her to other adults: “This is my little girlfriend.” In her earliest years, Karen was OK with that. She’d smile bashfully when people would tell her dad, “Well, Hugh, your little girlfriend is very pretty.”

However, when Karen entered third grade, she’d had enough. That September, parents and students were invited to an open house at school. As she and her father walked to the school, Karen found the courage to say: “Dad, when we meet my teachers, I don’t want you calling me your little girlfriend.” Her dad listened to her, thought for a moment, and replied, “OK then. I understand. I’ll just call you my woman.” Once the other Ames girls got wind of that father/daughter exchange, she was their woman, too. That’s what they still call her today: “Woman.”

All of the girls were basically middle class or a little above or below that. In fact, that described pretty much the entire town. There were no snobby neighborhoods with mini-mansions. There were a few snooty people here and there, but between the Ames girls, any class differences were noticed and noted, and then everyone moved on. When shopping for school clothes, not all of the girls’ parents could afford to drive them 350 miles east to Chicago, or 180 miles north to Minneapolis, where there were more fashionable stores. But there weren’t many complaints among those who didn’t get to go.

These days, young girls are more class- and status-conscious, measuring every article of clothing, and every earring, that their friends have on. The Ames girls somehow stayed mostly clear of that. There was actually an urge to downplay what they had. Marilyn, always aware of being the daughter of a doctor, knew that her family was likely the most comfortable financially. Her home was bigger than most, and on a large piece of land. But her family wasn’t showy at all. Marilyn was mortified the day Karen came over and noticed the shampoo in her bathroom. It was regular shampoo, just like Karen had at her house. “Why don’t you have fancier shampoo?” Karen asked Marilyn. Marilyn thought she was implying that a doctor’s daughter should have more luxuriant hair products. (For her part, Karen was just being curious about brands.) The comment sat with Marilyn, leaving her wondering whether the other girls also thought about the products her family had or didn’t have, and talked about them behind her back. In truth, though, most of the girls were oblivious when it came to parents’ pay-checks or economic status.