The Girls from Ames (6 page)

 

 

I
n certain ways, the girls were not unlike Ames girls of previous generations. As teens, several of them read a memoir titled
Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood
by Susan Allen Toth. The author grew up in Ames, and her book offered an evocative look at life there in the 1950s. She described Ames High back then as an institution dominated by boys’ athletics. “Boys played,” she wrote. “Girls clapped.”

In the 1970s, Ames girls were still clapping. But the broader world wasn’t quite as innocent, and neither were they. The longtime Ames High cheer—a spirited repetition of the words “Ames High aims high!”—was rejiggered by mischievous students. At school sporting events, both girls and boys couldn’t resist cheering “Ames High gets high!” School administrators were unamused, but powerless to stop it.

Still, despite a growing drug and drinking culture, Ames mostly remained unchanged, and several of the girls were reassured by Toth’s lyrical memoir. She described mid-century Ames as “a quiet town . . . but against that backdrop of quiet, a girl could listen to her heart beating.” Jenny saw the book as confirmation that Ames was still a quiet, wondrous place. Kelly, on the other hand, found the book far too sweet. “Where’s the dirt?” she’d ask. “That woman is writing about how much she loved the Ames Public Library. OK. Fine. I love it, too. But the book is too much nostalgia and not enough dirt.”

That was typical Kelly, of course. She was always the most opinionated. In fact, she was the “most” on a lot of fronts. She was the most likely to ignore her parents’ curfew, the most athletic, the most focused on women’s rights, the most vocal about her views on political issues, whether in school or in the nation. She was also the most forward with boys. She was unafraid of them. She enjoyed them.

From the start, Kelly’s role in the group was often to do or say things that the other girls marveled at or shook their heads about. “That’s Kelly,” they’d say. In some ways, they envied her lack of inhibition. But they also saw it as their job to rein her in from time to time.

Like Kelly, each of the girls had an identity in the group. Diana was the fresh-faced blonde whom boys compared to supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. She never seemed too full of herself, which the other girls appreciated. Still, they couldn’t help but feel like afterthoughts whenever they entered a room with her.

Sheila was the cutie-pie, the big flirt with the big white smile, a walking advertisement for her father’s dental practice. She had wavy brown hair and these thick eyelashes that helped make her a natural beauty who required no makeup. She also had this effortless, genuine charm that enabled her to connect with people, from little kids to the oldest person in the local nursing home, where she volunteered.

Jenny was the former tomboy who became more and more feminine. She was a chronicler of the group, an organizer of their activities, and the girls’ constant chauffeur, driving a 1947 Willys surplus jeep she got from her dad.

Angela was the bouncy, vivacious newcomer; she didn’t arrive in Ames until ninth grade, when her dad came to town to manage a local hotel. She wasn’t part of the group right away, because the nerdier girls at school had quickly befriended her. Angela knew that she was being embraced by those in need of a friend, and she was OK with that at first. But she was cooler than those more desperate girls. She met Jane on the junior-high basketball team. Then she got to know Jenny in geometry and honors English class because they were seated alphabetically: Bendorf, Benson. Through Jenny and Jane, her entrée into the lives of the other ten was secured.

Karen/“Woman” was the girl who had gorgeous long hair down to her rear end. She also had three popular older sisters, and a mother who was a realist about teen behavior by the time Karen came along. Her mom knew all about the secret keggers staged each weekend deep in the cornfields at the edge of Ames. She’d advise Karen and her friends to coat their stomachs with milk before drinking beer.

Sally, back in those early years, was the in-the-background friend, an extremely bright girl who was sometimes dismissed by the others for not being cool enough, for not flirting with boys enough, for being too much of a follower. She got into the group because of her longtime friendship with Cathy. Though she wasn’t always certain about her status among the others, she wasn’t going to change herself to fit in. Cathy liked to say Sally was “authentic.”

Cathy was the self-confident, sassy member of the group, who viewed herself as Sally’s protector. She was the pioneer in some respects, with all this inside knowledge gleaned from her six older siblings. She was the first of the girls to highlight her hair. Sally helped her do it with a home highlighting kit.

Marilyn and Jane were the two intense and studious ones, each of whom desperately wanted a best friend and found it in each other. Both had similar short haircuts and dressed conservatively. Their parents, like a good many of the other Ames girls’ parents, were cerebral and cultured. Marilyn’s dad, the doctor, and Jane’s dad, a renowned anthropologist at Iowa State, were both men with great presence and much to say, and Jane and Marilyn were captivated by them, eager to listen and learn. It was Jane who brought the more reserved Marilyn into the broader group.

And then there was Karla, the lovable, funny, full-of-life friend who laughed so hard and long at the movies that everyone in the theater would turn around. She was tall, regal and beautiful, but because of her uncertain self-esteem, she never seemed to realize it.

 

 

S
o that’s who they were. And by their teen years, they were absolute confidants who assumed they’d be friends forever. Once high school ended, and most made plans to move away, they maintained their bravado about remaining close. In their hearts, however, they struggled with the uncertainty of splitting up.

Late one night in the summer of 1981, Jenny sat with her father, a fellow night owl, on the front porch of their house on Hodge Avenue. It was too dark to see each other’s face, but they always liked it that way. It made it easier to talk.

Jenny would soon leave for the University of South Carolina. “The girls are all heading separate ways,” she said, “and I’m going to miss them so much.” She told her dad she was OK with that, because she knew they’d always be in each other’s life. “I just know it,” she said. “I just do.”

For years, her dad had watched and admired the loving chemistry between the eleven girls. But he was an insurance executive who spent every day monitoring statistics and actuarial tables. He was aware that in any group of people, odds can be determined for almost every outcome and every tragedy that might befall them. He told Jenny she needed to be realistic.

“Listen, honey,” he said, “these were beautiful childhood friendships. But adulthood is different. Who knows what life will be like ten or fifteen years from now? Don’t be surprised. Your friendships might not survive the road ahead.”

“No, no. We’ll all be together,” Jenny said. But she was listening.

Her father explained himself. “You’ve got to look at the odds. Odds are you won’t all be friends as years go by. And it’s unlikely that everyone’s life will go smoothly.” His actuarial instincts overtook him, and he couldn’t resist being specific: “My guess is, in fifteen years, one of you girls will be estranged from the group. Two of you will be divorced. One of you will still be single. One of you may be dead. You have to expect that. Because that’s just how life works.”

Today, Jenny and her dad both have a vivid recollection of that conversation—where they were sitting, how her dad’s words hung in the air, in the darkness, and how she sat there thinking he had to be wrong.

M
arilyn has her camera out, and she’s walking around, snapping away. She has decided to be an unofficial photographer for the reunion at Angela’s. It’s a role that suits her. She’s able to be part of the group and, at the same time, to stand away from it as an outside observer.

It always has been this way. Marilyn loves all the girls, more now than ever, but at times she feels an ambivalence regarding her connection to them. From early on, some of the others had her pegged as the squarest of the Ames girls. Sure, she was often right there with them at the high-school keg parties—she even hosted some—but she also saw each decision as a test of her conscience. She never wanted her parents to be disappointed by her behavior. She felt an obligation to be studious, respectful, appreciative—to stay safe. When some of the other girls would arrange sneaky escapades, misleading parents about their plans or whereabouts, Marilyn was adept at deflating the moment by voicing her reservations and reminding them of the dangers. This was true even though her mom and dad were among the most lenient and nonjudgmental of all the parents.

The girls found themselves being different around Marilyn. Even here, at the reunion, when she is in the room, they sometimes seem more proper, more careful about what they say or do. There’s this continued earnestness about Marilyn that seems to keep the others in check. “You were always the one talking about doing the right thing, and you still are,” Kelly says to Marilyn when the two of them get to talking. “It’s your nature to confess. That was never part of my nature, but I’ve always tried to understand you.”

When she was young, Marilyn would do almost anything for Jane, her closest friend of all, but Jane knew that Marilyn’s allegiances to family superseded everything. Marilyn was especially connected to her dad, a pediatrician who reminded people of TV’s Marcus Welby. He was a beloved figure in Ames, and he was even more than that to Marilyn. He was her absolute hero. Certainly, she grew up identifying herself as one of the Ames girls, and she reveled in her bonds with Jane. But when she defined herself, right down to her core, it was as “Dr. McCormack’s daughter.”

Jane understood this better than the other girls. She spent so much time with the McCormacks; she loved them, too. She also knew details about Marilyn’s family life and history that the other girls did not. As Cathy recalls: “I always knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what it was.” Now, as adults, all of the girls know almost everything, and it helps them to better understand Marilyn.

“Pretend I’m not here,” Marilyn says to a few of them as they lounge on Angela’s porch. She lifts her camera. “Beautiful. You all look beautiful.”

 

 

T
o understand lifelong friendships, sometimes you have to go back to a time before any of those friends were even born. And so in a way, Marilyn’s connection to the Ames girls can be traced back to September 25, 1960.

That day, her parents decided to drive her four older siblings to a friend’s farm sixty miles north of Ames. It was meant to be a fun excursion on a bright Sunday morning, a chance for the kids to ride a tractor, check out the inside of a barn, and pass by thousands of acres of cornfields. Dr. McCormack was always trying to expose his kids to the wider world, to help them appreciate nature. This was just another one of those adventures.

The McCormacks’ oldest child, Billy, then a few weeks shy of his seventh birthday, had been sitting in the third row of the station wagon, the row facing backward. That allowed him to smile and wave at all the Sunday morning drivers on the road behind them, while the corn whizzed by out the side windows.

When they left Ames, Marilyn’s mom was in the front seat. But at about the halfway point, she decided to take a nap and switched places with Billy. He got in the front passenger seat, put on his seat belt—the car hadn’t come with seat belts, but Dr. McCormack had them installed—and they continued driving.

The family was on a gravel road about a mile from the farmhouse when a fifteen-year-old boy in his parents’ car appeared out of nowhere and slammed, broadside, into Dr. McCormack’s car. Because it was September, the cornstalks were near their tallest point, obstructing the view at that intersection. An experienced driver, familiar with the dangers on rural roads, would have known to be cautious at such an intersection. But the boy had his foot hard on the gas; police later estimated he was traveling ninety miles an hour.

Each member of the McCormack family was seriously injured in the collision. Sara, age five, had a forehead wound. Three-year-old Polly had a ruptured spleen. One-year-old Don was bleeding profusely from the back of his head. Mrs. McCormack had a shattered collarbone. Everyone had multiple lacerations. The boy who had driven the other car was also badly injured.

The McCormacks’ front passenger door had taken the brunt of the impact. As a result, Billy, still buckled in the front seat, was the most severely hurt. Dr. McCormack, his hands and arms bleeding from windshield glass, his ribs cracked from the steering wheel, pulled his son from the car, and called upon all his medical knowledge to try to save him. For an hour, he hunched over the boy on that gravel road, attempting to stop the bleeding, to make sense of the internal injuries, to talk to his son. Ambulances arrived, and some of Dr. McCormack’s medical colleagues sped in from Ames to offer their help. By the time they got there, Billy had been pronounced dead at the scene.

A story about the accident ran on the front page of the next day’s
Ames Daily Tribune
. The top of the page was dominated by a photo of two horribly damaged cars smashed together. It was hard to tell which car was which, given all the twisted metal. The headline: “Accident Fatal to Ames Boy.”

The story mentioned that tall cornstalks at the intersection were a factor, and that the boy in the other car was driving illegally. He had a school permit, allowing him to drive only on a direct route from his house to school. There was no explanation given for what the boy was doing on that rural road; the scene of the accident was about two hours from his home.

The three younger McCormack children recovered, and Mrs. McCormack forced herself to focus her emotional energy on being grateful for that. Most of the time, she did not allow herself to feel guilty for switching seats with Billy just before the crash. Her reasoning was this: Had she died in the front seat, she would have left Dr. McCormack to raise all of their children alone. As she saw it, her life was spared because her surviving children needed a mother. And so the accident left her doubly committed to motherhood.