The Girls from Ames (43 page)

Kelly was honest with her friends. “I believe there’s a strong chance of cancer returning,” she said. “It is likely I have cancer cells resistant to treatment that have traveled through my body and are tucked in some fertile spot, biding their time until there are enough of them to make their presence known—and wage war.” She said she tried not to focus on that possibility—such thoughts are “not helpful,” she kept telling herself—and instead tried to think positively.

The other girls understood her reluctance to have a mastectomy, and were supportive. As Jane summed things up: “I think she feels that if the cancer is just going to come back in three years, she might as well have a breast until then.”

Kelly posted her profile on the dating site
eHarmony.com
, explaining that she’d like to be an example of how a woman with breast cancer can remain sexy. Always the writer, she found it cathartic to compile clear-eyed reports of her dating experiences:

“I’ve had two lovers since my lumpectomy. My first was a man I’d been with for 18 months. He’d been with me all through treatment. He was supportive and didn’t seem to mind when I lost my hair, including my eyebrows and eyelashes. But the first night I stayed with him after my surgery, he refused to look at my breasts. I felt humiliated. I felt ugly. I felt unlovable. Our relationship ended that night.

“My second lover was a man I met through eHarmony. His brother recently died of cancer, and this tenuous connection is why I trusted him. Although he claimed he wasn’t bothered by the scars on my chest, I was afraid of his reaction to my breast, so I asked if I could keep my bra on. Although there had been lots of chemistry when we first met, the same passion didn’t carry into the bedroom. Once again, I blamed my breast, and once again, I felt unattractive.”

 

 

A
year after the reunion at Angela’s, the girls ended up getting together in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Jenny’s family belonged to a time-share program, and so they were able to stay in two condo units not far from a lake, a spa, a Shaker village and a Norman Rockwell museum.

Before her cancer, Kelly had wanted to show up at this reunion with long hair, to show everyone how ready she was for a new look and a new life. Now as fate had it, she had a new, unwanted look. Her hair had begun to grow back after the chemo, but it was thin and close to her scalp.

The girls told Kelly that she looked radiantly healthy. They complimented her on her tan. They said she looked more fit than ever before in her life. But Kelly confided in Diana: “When I look at my reflection, it just doesn’t feel like me. The person who looks back is so very different than who I was one year ago.”

Kelly joked with the other Ames girls about her dating experiences, but resisted telling them too much about her insecurities regarding her body. As she later explained it: “I didn’t tell them that I am working hard at getting all parts of my body fit so that a lover might decide that nice legs or a firm bottom will compensate for ugly breasts. I didn’t tell them that I needed to keep my bra on when with a man. I knew they would all say to me that my body is beautiful no matter what shape or size. I wondered if they understand that if I had a longtime partner, I wouldn’t be at all ashamed of my breast. Perhaps I would have even agreed to have a mastectomy. But since I’m dating, it feels like I have to market myself, and so breasts are, I’m ashamed to admit, important.

“Now that my left breast is misshapen from my lumpectomy, I have discovered how difficult it is to walk the talk. It’s one thing to intellectually know that breasts shouldn’t be so idealized in our society. But it’s quite another thing to present to the world a body that has slightly deformed breasts, and might someday be without breasts.”

In the Berkshires, the girls again did a lot of hiking. (Some would trek to the top of Jiminy Peak Mountain, because that was the only place they could get cell phone service to call home.)

At one point, Karla and Kelly were hiking next to each other.

“I think the fresh air is really great for me,” Kelly said. “It has to be beneficial for my health.”

Karla agreed. And that brought a thought into Kelly’s head. She wondered aloud how Karla and Christie were able to stay healthy when they were cooped up day after day in the hospital. Karla told her that parents at the hospital had talked of wanting an area where they could go for fresh air. “But we agreed it couldn’t be up on the children’s floor,” Karla said, “because that was eight stories up. If there was an outdoor balcony, the parents would all want to jump.”

Karla told the story in an upbeat way with a slight smile, and everyone laughed. But Kelly noticed that when the laughter subsided, it just felt as if everyone wanted to cry.

 

 

K
arla and her family had moved to Montana as planned, and she spent the year overseeing the building of a new home on a gorgeous piece of land that Bruce’s dad generously gave them. Bruce was promoted to general manager of his company, which manufactures equipment for the telecommunications industry. That meant he had to spend part of the week in Minnesota, plus a few weeks a year at the company plant in Costa Rica. Karla missed him when he was gone, and vowed to travel more with him when the kids got older. But for now, she had embraced living in Montana, and had thrown herself into the building of the house.

“I loved our home in Edina so much,” she wrote to the girls, “but this one is going to be great. The views alone are incredible, and the architect maximized them in her design.” She liked the community and the people she met in Bozeman. She loved being able to go skiing and hiking as a family. Jackie and Ben had enrolled in a new school and were doing wonderfully academically. And Bozeman felt awfully safe, she said. The most noteworthy “crime” in the local police report was someone “mooning” out a car window.

Karla felt great joy in watching her kids riding their horses as they cantered around the property. Ben and Jackie were the fifth generation in the family to live on that land, and Karla also loved to see them walking up and down the gravel roads—beautiful kids set against such natural beauty. When Bruce was home, he’d have coffee with Karla on the deck every morning, after which he’d “commute” to his office right there in the house. It felt pretty romantic sometimes.

Nothing was forgotten, of course. Karla was in Montana on the day that would have been Christie’s eighteenth birthday. “It was a hard one,” she wrote.

Back in Minnesota, Edina High School remembered Christie at its graduation ceremony by setting out a vacant chair with a single rose on it. “What a kind gesture,” Karla wrote to the other girls. “It meant a lot to us.”

A few weeks later, Kelly happened to find herself in Edina, meeting a man set up through eHarmony. She and her date were walking to a restaurant for ice cream, and Kelly realized that the last time she had been in this restaurant was on her birthday two years earlier, with Marilyn and Karla. Just then, by coincidence, Karla called.

“Can I call you back?” Kelly asked her.

After the date was over, Kelly drove over to Karla’s former house, parked on the street out front and put the top down on her convertible. A memory came into her mind of the day she came by this house to pick up Karla before the fortieth birthday gathering at Jenny’s. Christie was out front in her soccer uniform, her hair, short and fine, blowing in the breeze, a smile on her face as she waved good-bye and told her mother to have a great time with her friends.

Kelly pulled out her cell phone and called Karla’s house in Montana.

“Guess where I am?” Kelly asked.

The two of them ended up talking about Kelly’s health, the other Ames girls, life in Montana, Kelly’s date.

“I’m trying to take an intellectual approach,” Kelly told her. “I want to be smart about dating. I don’t want to be like a man and think with my penis.” To reiterate her point, Kelly found herself speaking loudly into the cell phone: “I’m not going to think with my vagina this time!”

At that moment, a man was walking by and heard every word she said.

When he passed, Kelly told Karla: “This guy—I’m guessing he’s a former neighbor of yours—well, he just gave me the strangest look. Guess that’s life with the Shit Sisters, huh?”

Both of them laughed. Then things felt more subdued as Kelly found herself looking at Karla’s former house and just remembering.

 

 

J
enny ended up losing the baby she was carrying at the reunion at Angela’s. Especially given her age, the miscarriage was a blow. Would she be able to get pregnant again?

Some of the other Ames girls assumed she might not try, but she did, and she showed up at the Berkshires reunion with a surprise: She was pregnant. Several of the girls were in tears when they saw her. They wanted to plan a shower for her, but Jenny asked them not to jinx anything. She said she wasn’t preparing the baby’s nursery. She wasn’t thinking about names. She wanted no gifts until after the baby was born.

Kelly asked if she could put her hand on Jenny’s stomach while the baby moved, and Jenny welcomed that. “I did this when you were pregnant with Jack, and we were staying at Marilyn’s for Christie’s memorial service,” Kelly reminded Jenny. Jack turned out to be such a terrific kid, and so Kelly hoped for a similar blessing this time for Jenny.

The pregnancy was indeed uneventful, and at age forty-five, Jenny gave birth to a beautiful and healthy baby girl. The baby was named Jiselle.

 

 

I
n October 2008, Angela in North Carolina had her own unwelcome news. She, too, had breast cancer, and it was a particularly aggressive form. It was the same type of inflammatory breast cancer that took her mother at age fifty-two.

“The cancer has not moved outside of my breast and the lymph node under my arm pit,” Angela wrote to the other girls. “My chemo starts next week. My oncology team is also treating Elizabeth Edwards, who could go anywhere in the country for care, but has stayed here. So I do feel as if I have an A-team of professionals, and feel so blessed that somehow I ended up with them. Thanks for your friendship and love.”

All the girls responded quickly, with love, advice and humor. (Marilyn joked: “I hope we don’t become the Sisterhood of the Traveling Hats.”)

Kelly made plans to fly to Maryland and stay with Jenny, and then they’d drive down to North Carolina together to be with Angela. They timed the visit for the period—ten to fourteen days after the first treatment—that Angela would need to shave her head. Kelly thought it was important for her daughter, Liesl, and Angela’s daughter, Camryn, to see their mothers go through cancer treatment with their friends. “That view of life is certainly a gift we can provide our girls,” Kelly told Angela. Jane talked to a nurse she knew in Massachusetts, and she suggested that perhaps eight-year-old Camryn could be shown photos of Kelly without hair, so she’d see that the hair will grow back.

On learning of Angela’s cancer, Kelly sent an especially heartfelt note to her:

Kelly then alluded to the next Ames girls reunion:

There’s a Spanish proverb: “Tell me who you’re with, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

The story of the girls from Ames will have many more chapters, of course. To end here is arbitrary, because each year will bring new interactions, new reasons for reflection, new insights into who they are. There will be losses ahead, they all know that, but there will be great joys, too. And they have no doubt that they will be there for one another always, whatever happens. That now goes without saying.

There was a photo taken at Jane’s house back in Ames in 1981, their senior year of high school. In the snapshot, every one of the eleven girls was smiling. In the back row stood Karla, Cathy, Sally and Karen. In the middle row: Jane, Angela, Marilyn and Sheila. Seated on the floor: Diana, Jenny and Kelly. They had no idea that day where their lives would take them, or that they’d bring twenty-two children into the world, or that they’d all remain so central to each other’s life. On their faces, there was no indication that the ride would not always be easy, that they’d have disappointment and great grief. Just full-on smiles. Adult life awaited them.

During the reunion at Angela’s in North Carolina, they posed on the back porch steps for a photo replicating that 1981 picture. All of them took the same positions, with only Sheila’s spot unfilled. This time, their smiles were even broader. They touched each other even more effortlessly. They looked even happier. And why not?

In this moment, 1,163 miles from Ames and half a lifetime later, not much had really changed. There was much to be grateful for. They still had each other.