The Girls from Ames (41 page)

“I certainly see my life divided into sections,” Kelly says. “I was a daughter in my parents’ home for two decades, until I graduated from college. Then I got married and was a wife and mother for twenty years. I think the next stage of my life involves loving people without necessarily living with them.”

Middle-aged women also start to have a clear sense that their friendships with other women likely will be the longest-lasting relationships of their lives. There are about 12 million divorced women in the United States, a figure that has doubled since 1980. There are another 12 million widows, and as baby boomers pass on, that number is expected to rise sharply.

The Ames girls certainly see the need for female friendships when they consider their mothers’ generation. Women over age sixty-five outnumber men in that age group three to two. By age eighty-five, there are only four men for every ten women. Karla’s mom has been a widow since 1990. Marilyn’s mom lost Dr. McCormack to Alzheimer’s years before he died in 2004. Both Karla and Marilyn see that their mothers’ bonds with female friends have been vital and sustaining through the years. If a woman doesn’t want to burden her children with her emotional and companionship needs when she’s older, it’s vital to nurture female friendships.

The Ames girls feel so lucky to have each other that they feel less pressure to make their other friendships as deep as possible. The friends the Ames girls have made later in life, outside the group, often have been important to them, but there are limitations. “My husband asked me if I missed the friendship I had with Marilyn, that intense junior-high friendship,” says Jane. “No, I don’t have anyone in my life like that now. In junior high I so wanted a best friend. I don’t need that now. I don’t need someone else to make me whole. I have a family. I feel whole as a part of that.

“My friends back home are important, but I don’t get to see them much. I joke with my close friend at work about our phone relationship. We talk on our way to and from work.”

Kelly says that for a while she had what she calls a “bad friend,” a woman who joined her when she went to nightclubs to listen to music and dance. They sometimes lived on the dark side—drinking too much, being too wild—and so they were “bad” together, Kelly says. The friendship ended over Kelly’s disapproval of the woman’s behavior and her inability to trust her. Her relationship with the woman left her all the more grateful for her bonds with her Ames friends.

Cathy says she got a midlife taste of the limits of friendship. She had been getting closer to a woman in Los Angeles; they’d spent a lot of time together, and Cathy was carving out time to be there for this woman. Then Cathy’s mother died, and this woman never even acknowledged the loss. “Not a text message, not a call,” says Cathy. Four months went by without the woman mentioning anything.

Cathy was hurt and angry. In therapy, she talked about how she should be grieving for her mom, but she was angry at this woman—“and angry at myself for believing that someone would show up for me when it turned out she wouldn’t. I realized she would never be the kind of person who’d be there for you when you were down, even though all she had to do was say, ‘I’m thinking of you. I’m here if you need me.’ ”

In therapy, and already in her forties, Cathy realized she was discovering something important. “The lesson was that this was about me. I was projecting on her what I needed her to be. I had to accept her limitations.”

Cathy has continued her relationship with the woman, but sees her far less frequently. “I never said anything to her about how I felt,” Cathy says. “I took it as my lesson.”

And, obviously, this experience left her all the more grateful that she had the Ames girls in her life.

In their forties, the Ames girls have discovered reasons why their relationships with each other often seem easier than some of their relationships outside the group. Perhaps, they say, it is because over the years, they have come up with unspoken or barely acknowledged ground rules that seem to work.

They don’t brag about their husbands’ jobs or incomes.

They talk about their children’s achievements, but not in a gloating way. They root for each other’s kids, just as they root for each other.

They make every effort to be with each other for key events in their lives: weddings, serious illnesses, funerals.

If they have disagreements among themselves, if they have negative opinions about each other, if they have things that need to be hashed out, it all remains in the group. They don’t go to their husbands with their complaints. They don’t tell their friends outside the group.

One upside of being in their forties, the girls say, is that they feel like they’ve grown beyond a lot of things. They’re beyond a cutthroat kind of ambition, they’re far less competitive, they’ve lowered their expectations of others, and they’re learning to find satisfaction in just living. They’re seeing what feels good: something as easy as just being together, talking on Angela’s porch.

I
t’s getting late on the final night of the reunion, and Angela has a surprise activity for everyone. She invites them off the back porch and over to the area of her backyard where she has lit the logs on a large outdoor fire pit. Chairs have been arranged into a circle around the fire.

“Everyone get comfortable,” Angela says. “It’s time to answer a few questions.”

She pulls out a cloth bag. Inside of it are twenty pebbles, all with numbered stickers on them. The numbers correspond to fill-in-the-blank statements that Angela has typed up on a sheet of paper folded on her lap. Each of the girls will reach into the bag and pick a number.

“It’s a great game,” Angela says. “Just answer honestly. We have enough pebbles for two rounds. It’s going to be fun.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing we’re drinking wine,” someone says.

Angela shakes the bag and holds it in front of Diana, who reaches in and picks out the pebble with the number 14 attached. Angela looks at her list, finds 14 and reads: “When I tell people where I’m from, they say_____.”

Diana’s first thought is that she is “from” Scottsdale, Arizona, where she now lives. “Sometimes I don’t tell people I’m from Scottsdale,” she says, “because they’ll say ‘Snotsdale?’ So I just say I’m from Phoenix.”

The girls notice, of course, that she didn’t say she was “from” Ames. What was she thinking?

“Oh, yeah, of course, I tell people I’m from Iowa,” Diana says. “And that’s when they say, ‘Idaho?’ ”

“When I lived in South Carolina, so many people were provincial and had never left the state,” says Jenny. “I’d say ‘Iowa’ and they’d say ‘Ohio?’ ”

Karen says that where she lives, outside Philly, “people think Iowa is cold and wet. They ask, ‘So what is there to do there?’ ”

“People in Minnesota don’t really like Iowa,” adds Kelly. “I didn’t know that until I moved there.”

“In Minnesota, they say the best thing to come out of Iowa is Interstate 35,” says Angela.

I-35 and then, of course, all of the Ames girls.

Next it’s Sally’s turn. She picks pebble 2: “The angel on my shoulder keeps saying___.”

“I guess my mom is the angel on my shoulder,” she decides. “Some people say, ‘What would Jesus do?’ I find myself thinking, ‘What would JoAnn do?’ And I guess JoAnn on my shoulder tells me to be less judgmental.”

“I literally had this angel on my shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” Kelly says, “and then I did it.”

“Did what?” Diana asks.

Kelly just smiles and everyone laughs.

Marilyn picks the pebble numbered 15: “None of you know it, but in my twenties I _____.”

“None of you know it,” she says, and pauses, “but when I was in college, I slept with some boy on a cruise ship—the Norwegian Cruise Line—in the Caribbean.”

The lineup today (left to right): Karla, Sally, Karen, Diana, Jenny, Cat hy, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane and Angela

In response, there is something of a group gasp, and several girls start asking questions at once. “If everyone is quiet, I’ll tell you,” Marilyn says. And then she shares the story of how her older sister was the ship’s doctor, she went along for the cruise, met some boy, and that’s what happened.

Jane gets pebble 12: “You think you know me, but_____.”

“You think you know me,” she says, “and that I’m a pretty together person. I’m together on my job. But I’m actually a very sensitive person. I have one friend back home who is confrontational sometimes. That’s hard for me. Please don’t ever yell at me. I don’t like being yelled at.”

Karen picks pebble 6: “In ten years I’ll be____.”

“Fifty-four,” she says, “and an empty nester, and possibly teaching again. I had a job offer for this coming year, but I turned it down. It was a Quaker preschool where my kids went to preschool. My oldest son is going into high school, my second son is in middle school. There are too many changes in our lives right now. It wasn’t the right time to go back. But in ten years? I think I’ll be teaching.”

Jenny pulls pebble 16 from the bag: “None of you knew it, but in my thirties I____.”

She thinks for a moment. And then she smiles. “None of you knew it, but I went to Egypt and had a romance with a sheik.”

The other girls start buzzing. “A romance with a sheik?” Karla says, trying to picture it.

Jenny explains. It was back when she was single and worked for the congressman. The congressman was on the foreign affairs committee, and this Egyptian sheik came over on business. He asked Jenny to come to Egypt for a job interview. She was always adventurous and figured even if she didn’t take the job, it’d be an experience. The sheik flew her to Egypt first class, had a chauffeur meet her at the airport, and then he put her up in a fancy hotel suite. He took her on his private plane so they could rendezvous with his yacht in the Red Sea.

“Was it oil money?” the girls want to know.

“I’m not sure,” Jenny says.

“Did you know the sheik’s intentions?” the girls ask.

“I was a girl from Iowa,” she says. “I thought I was going for a job interview. I believed him.”

“I hope he showed you a damn good time,” Kelly says.

“He showed me a good time, he did,” Jenny says. “I was supposed to be there for a week and I stayed for two. But I also had the feeling that I should do what he wanted or I might not get back home. It wasn’t like I was kidnapped. It’s just that women were subservient there, and I just had this sense about it all.”

“Was he cute?” Karen asks.

“He was,” Jenny says. “He was probably about forty-four. But he seemed so much older than we are now. It turned out to be a wonderful time, honestly.”

Angela has a question. “What did you tell your parents?”

“That I went for a job interview,” Jenny says, and everyone laughs.

 

 

R
ound two. It’s Diana’s turn again. She picks pebble number 11: “The most appealing famous man is _____.”

“Dead or alive?” she asks.

“Try one dead and one living,” someone says.

She opts for John F. Kennedy and Johnny Depp.

The other girls start naming names: George Clooney, Bono. Karen likes Jon Bon Jovi because he’s still married to his high-school sweet-heart. Sally mentions Mike Rowe, host of
Dirty Jobs
on the Discovery Channel. (It’s fitting. Of all the girls’ husbands, Sally’s has the most physical job. Back in Iowa, he’s a project supervisor for a company called Hog Slat, which builds hog confinement units.)

Kelly says she likes Kenny Loggins. She enjoyed his 1998 book about the secrets to an undying love, written with his wife, who happened to be his former colon therapist. Kelly says she resisted the easy ways to dismiss the book: that the enema-giving Mrs. Loggins “knew Kenny inside and out,” or that the couple had no prescriptions for marriage and romance, considering their 2004 divorce. Kelly says she understands that not all love lasts forever, but that doesn’t mean it never existed.

Jane picks her second pebble: “In thirty years I’ll be_____.”

“I’ll be seventy-four years old,” she says, “and taking wild trips all over the world. With Justin.”

“You notice she involved Justin,” Karen says. “That’s good.” Karla picks pebble 3 out of the bag: “I’ll move back to Ames when _____.”

While Karla is thinking, no one says, “when hell freezes over.” And Karla soon has an answer. “I’d move back if my mother got ill and needed me,” she says. Some of the others agree; they’d consider moving back to help their parents.

And then Cathy says, “I’ll move back when all of you move back.” It’s such a perfect answer that the girls actually applaud. “We should get one big house and we’ll all live there together,” says Karen. Angela adds: “Or we should just build the Shit Sisters Retirement Community.”

Now it’s Karen’s turn, and she picks pebble 1: “The last time I cried was ______.”