The Girls from Ames (45 page)

I love the photo on the cover of
The Girls from Ames
. I love how tightly pressed together they all are. It’s a magical image. And I realize: You’d almost never see a photo of boys or men squished against each other like that unless it was an action shot taken at a rugby game.

We have heard from a smattering of men who’ve read the book; some say they were looking for enlightenment about women’s lives. Most men, though, explain that the book is not for them. Consider this email from a sixty-year-old Ohio man.

“Unfortunately, I do not have plans to read the book, but please convey to the girls from Ames that I think they are pretty hot.”

Thank you, Tom from Ohio.

 

 

I
am constantly asked for updates on the Ames girls. Well, here are some glimpses:

The summer after the book came out, Jane and her family went to Montana to visit Karla and her family. Jane reported back to the other Ames girls:

“Karla’s new house in Bozeman is just lovely, with its porches and patios for every phase of the day—the front porch for morning coffee, the back patio for happy hour and sunsets, the screened porch with a fireplace for cozy evenings. And each of these spaces has such incredible vistas of the valley filled with barley fields and then the surrounding mountains.

“Christie permeates the space. Her pictures are scattered throughout the house and her name comes up easily in conversation. Christie is still very much a part of the Blackwood family.”

The two families took daily hikes on the Blackwoods’ property, and also went rock climbing together. Karla’s son Ben served as a patient teacher for Jane’s family, and they couldn’t believe how skilled he was; he did his climbing in his bare feet!

One day, driving back from a hike, Karla asked Jane’s fifteen-year-old daughter Hanna if she had ever driven a car before. Hanna explained that she was still too young; she hadn’t gotten her permit yet in Massachusetts.

“Well, this is private land,” Karla said. “So why don’t you get in the front seat and drive us home?” Hanna’s eyes widened. If it was OK with the landowner, it definitely was OK with her. Jane smiled at how seamlessly Karla orchestrated the event.

“I’m not sure who was more proud, Hanna or Karla,” Jane wrote to the others. Having read chapter six in
The Girls from Ames
, Hanna knew that Karla, at age fifteen and with no license, had driven her friends home one night from a cornfield kegger. Now Hanna had her own cool story of taking her first solo drive at age fifteen.

One night, Karla and Bruce took Jane and her family to a cowboy bar, and introduced the visiting New Englanders to “Rocky Mountain oysters.” It’s a delicacy made from buffalo or bull testicles coated in flour and deep-fried. Jane’s daughters weren’t told this until after they ate the “oysters,” and they were understandably shocked and grossed out.

“Later that evening, we had a rollicking family game night,” Jane wrote to the other Ames girls. “We were all howling with laughter on the screened porch. I kept thinking how lucky we were that they didn’t have immediate neighbors, as we would have been disruptive in the wee hours of the night.

“The kids got along so well together, which isn’t a given with teenagers. Karla and I were so happy about that.”

Karla and Jane both were impressed with each other’s children. Jane’s daughters, Hanna and Sara, have become thoughtful, articulate, beautiful young ladies. And Karla’s kids seem to be thriving in Montana. Her daughter Jackie is a cheerleader at Bozeman High School and was selected by her classmates as “Homecoming Royalty.” Ben is a free spirit who loves being on the climbing team. They’ve both made a lot of friends, though they don’t always let other kids know they had an older sister who died. It would be too hard for them. Sometimes, it feels better to just keep Christie in their hearts.

Marilyn did finally meet Elwood, who in 1960 caused the car accident that killed her brother. The get-together happened at a diner in Spirit Lake, Iowa, on the night of a torrential downpour. Marilyn brought Kelly and Sally with her.

At first they were a little nervous about meeting Elwood. They ordered drinks, thinking that might make the conversation easier. But as the three Ames girls and Elwood huddled together at a small table, any jitters passed quickly.

Elwood turned out to be a likeable, salt-of-the-earth, sixty-four-year-old man. He said he’d been through a lot in his life—the car accident when he was fifteen was just the first of more challenges to come—and he was warm and engaging. They talked for more than an hour, with Elwood sharing stories of his six grandchildren. Kelly found herself thinking: “I’m glad he survived the accident and went on to be there for those he loves.” She later told Marilyn: “He just seemed to have this generous spirit.”

Elwood said he has had pain in his leg for forty-nine years, a daily reminder of the accident. Marilyn was sorry to hear that, but she was glad that he felt he hadn’t suffered emotionally because of his role in her brother’s death. What purpose would that have served, if he had been another victim?

Watching Marilyn and Elwood bantering with each other, taking photos together, and then hugging good-bye, Sally felt like she was witnessing something special. “It was very touching,” she emailed the other girls. “Theirs is really a story of good will, forgiveness and grace.”

 

 

K
elly’s life continued to be eventful, and the Ames girls had new reasons to be proud of her.

In 2009, she made national news as adviser to the newspaper at Faribault High School. The student journalists at the
Echo
were set to report that a middle-school teacher had been removed from the classroom and was being investigated for alleged inappropriate correspondences with a student. (There were questions about text messages the teacher sent, and she ended up resigning. Police never found evidence of wrongdoing.)

The superintendent demanded to see the
Echo
story before it was printed, and when the students declined, fearing censorship, he shut down the paper. Kelly supported her students’ efforts to publish their story in a local newspaper and online, and they won several awards for their work to uphold the first amendment. “People don’t want kids to be taught to speak up,” says Kelly.

On the personal front, Kelly also had news.

In a scene toward the end of
The Girls from Ames,
Kelly vowed to find a love that equaled what some of the other Ames girls had. And so readers, moved by her optimistic declaration, have often asked about her love life.

The update: Kelly ended up sorting through 1,200 matches on eHarmony, none of whom interested her romantically. But then at a restaurant in her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, she met a divorced former Marine who now works in construction. He said he graduated from Faribault High School in 1995.

“That’s where I teach,” Kelly told him. She was teaching there in 1995, but never had him in class and they didn’t remember each other.

“He is thirteen years younger than I am,” Kelly says, “and I’m a little uncomfortable with the age difference. I really bristle at the term ‘cougar.’ I wasn’t out prowling for someone younger. But certainly there are advantages for someone like me who wants a lover and not necessarily a full-time partner.”

Kelly says that this man didn’t ask her to talk about her breast cancer and her treatment until she was ready. Given that she is scarred from her surgery, she says, “I have had a difficult time feeling like a whole woman. But he has helped me feel more confident about my body. Even if our relationship runs its course and I stop seeing him, I am grateful to have spent time with such a caring, sensitive and incredibly sexy man.”

The Ames girls have continued to visit North Carolina to see Angela. Though she had wanted a double mastectomy, her surgeon removed only one breast. He thought it best to get her right into radiation, without risking infection on both sides, and then remove her other breast in 2010. “When they do the other mastectomy, I’ll also be able to have reconstructive surgery using my belly fat,” Angela told the other Ames girls. “What a bonus—a tummy tuck and a boob job at the same time!”

Unlike Kelly, who can’t bring herself to show the Ames girls what her chest now looks like, Angela has done so. She feels it helps with the healing when a woman can expose herself: This is who I am. This is what I look like. “I didn’t mind showing them,” Angela says. “Every woman is curious. They wonder: ‘If it happened to me, what would I look like?’ I wanted them to see. It actually heals nicely.”

Because her cancer is very aggressive, Angela has endured sixteen weeks of chemotherapy and thirty-three radiation treatments. But she feels lucky. Unlike her mother, she was properly diagnosed and treated very quickly. She’s optimistic. Before surgery she was devastated; sad and crying. “But now that it’s over, I realize, you can live through it. It’s not so bad.”

Jenny visited Angela five times, including once with Kelly and once with Karla. On her first trip down from her home in Annapolis, Maryland, she brought her four-year-old son Jack and her two-month-old daughter Jiselle. Her plan was to cook, clean, babysit Angela’s daughter Camryn, and lend a hand in whatever way she could, physically and emotionally. However, because Angela was such a gracious host, “Angela was the one doing the cooking and cleaning,” Jenny says. “I was the one who needed emotional support. I needed to be there, to see Angela, to talk to her and hear her voice. I needed reassurances that she would be OK. So Angela was the one who needed to be there for me.”

Karen and her eleven-year-old daughter Katie, who live near Philadelphia, and Diana and her ten-year-old daughter Gabi, who live in Scottsdale, Arizona, flew to Angela’s on another weekend. Katie, Gabi and Camryn became fast friends.

It wasn’t planned, but the three young girls all had gifts for each other. Camryn gave Katie and Gabi pretty notepads and pens. Gabi brought board games. Katie went to a crafts store and bought yarn to make friendship bracelets.

Karen was very moved by Katie’s eagerness to make those bracelets. It reminded her of the time, a decade earlier, when Christie had made friendship bracelets for the Ames girls’ older children. “It just seemed so perfect, so right, like Christie was leading the way for all the younger kids,” Karen said.

When the three young girls got together, they ended up making more friendship bracelets for each other. They did a lot of laughing together, too. Karen and Diana took turns driving Angela to her radiation appointments, while the other one stayed home to look after the girls.

“Camryn, Katie and Gabi had such respect for each other’s feelings,” Diana wrote to the other Ames girls. “It was so fun watching them play together, and heartwarming to witness Angela and Karen as the incredible mothers they are. Karen gained Gabi’s trust when she needed to have her tooth pulled out, and I later saw her comforting Camryn when Angela was gone from the house, getting her radiation treatment. And I loved watching Angela teach the girls about the baby bluebirds in her backyard.

“When we got on the plane to go home, and I was putting our luggage in the overhead bin, I saw Gabi was sitting in her seat crying—and then sobbing. I assumed that maybe the woman in our row had said something that hurt her feelings, but when I asked Gabi what happened, she said she was crying because she was sorry to be leaving her new friends.”

 

 

T
he Ames girls kept finding reasons to bring their daughters together. Sally, Kelly, Marilyn and their daughters had dinner together in Minnesota. Jane, Karla and their daughters bonded in Montana. Diana, Jenny and Karen all brought their daughters to see Angela and her daughter in North Carolina.

And so emails began flying: What if they made their 2010 gathering a mother/daughter weekend? Karen in suburban Philadelphia offered to host everyone. They could plan mother/daughter outings to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. They could even drive up to New York to see
Wicked
on Broadway. It would be a blast.

“We’ll get each of our girls a T-shirt,” said Jane. “On the front of it we’ll put the cover of
The Girls from Ames
. On the back, we’ll have the words: ‘The Next Generation.’”

This book began with a list of eleven names. Well, here are fourteen more:

Jackie, Liesl, Emily, Hanna, Sara, Jiselle, Katie, Camryn, Katie, Lindsay, Alexa, Gabi, Maddie. And Christie.

None of them grew up in Ames, and they’ve always been far apart, all over the country. But all of them were born with Ames in their DNA, to mothers who’ve been blessed with the gifts of each other.

It sounds like the beginning of some beautiful friendships.

W
hen the Ames girls and I began this project, there was no road map. I knew of no man who had ever tried to immerse himself inside the friendship of eleven women. For their part, the girls had never had a journalist asking them such intrusive questions.

We mostly had a lot of fun, though at times, honestly, there were tense moments and hurt feelings. I pushed on certain fronts, making some of them uncomfortable or unhappy. Reading diaries or letters given to me by several of them, I’d learn details about the others that they hadn’t intended to share. That led to debates within the group.

I watched the girls hash things out, issue by issue, and they’d almost always rally together into a united front. Though the book project became a test of their friendship, their great loyalty to each other always seemed to win out, and their friendship emerged as strong as ever. I thank them for everything they did, individually and collectively, to see this through to a finished book.

I am also grateful to their parents, siblings, spouses, children, former classmates and others in Iowa who graciously shared their memories and insights. Thanks to Lynn and Larry Zwagerman, Bernie and JoAnn Brown, Neala and Chuck Benson, Ingrid and Hugh Brady, Hanna and David Gradwohl, Hank and Kathy Bendorf, Barbara Derby, Sylvia McCormack, Meg and Vaughn Speer, John Highland, Warner Jamison, Justin Nash, Bruce Blackwood, Chris Johnson, Peggy Towner, Mary Calistro, Lynne Scribbins, Jeff Mann, Darwin and Jolene Trickle, Kevin Highland, Greg Brown, Jeff Benson, Steve Gradwohl, Polly McCormack, Jim Derks, Nancy Derks, Jim Cornette, Tom McKelvey, Jeff Sturdivant, Steele Campbell, Meg Schneider, Mark Walsh, Sunny Walsh, Mike Walsh, Susan Blowey, Liesl Schultz, Hanna Nash, Elwood Koelder, Carole Horowitz, Chuck Offenburger, Merle Prater, Pat Brown, Jahanshir Golchin, Dick Van Deusen and Kelly’s students at Faribault High School. Special thanks to Marilyn’s sister, Sara Hoffman, who offered wonderful advice throughout the reporting and writing.