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!”
By 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.
The girls didn’t talk much to each other about their parents’ jobs, but when they did, they were often quizzical. There were certain occupations that were easy to figure out. Karen’s dad, of course, sold families their Chevys. Sally’s mom was a music teacher. Kelly’s father was the junior-high guidance counselor, and her mom was an administrative assistant at Iowa State. And several of the girls had Marilyn’s dad as their pediatrician and Sheila’s dad as their dentist. But some of the girls’ fathers held jobs with secret code words and clear expectations about how the girls should talk about them.
Diana’s dad was a well-known swine nutritionist at Iowa State. City types would assume he was creating weight-loss programs for pigs, but as Diana explained it to everyone, “He wants them bigger, fatter, faster.” Actually, that wasn’t exactly it. Her dad was really researching ways to build muscle weight, as opposed to fat, and to do it rapidly and cost-effectively. He always instructed Diana and her friends to say “swine” rather than “pigs” or “hogs.” To his ears, and in people’s minds, “pig” sounded unclean; “hog” sounded uncouth. And so, when he’d bring piglets into Diana’s grade-school classrooms for show-and-tell, the operative word was “swine.”
Cathy’s dad, meanwhile, was a soil scientist at Iowa State. Her father considered “dirt” to be a dirty word—a four-letter word. Dirt is what you get under your fingernails when you work in soil. “I study soil, not dirt,” he’d say.
“Well, soil is also a four-letter word, Dad,” Cathy replied.
Cathy and her siblings were discouraged from using the word “dirt” in the house, but behind their dad’s back, they jokingly called him “Dr. Dirt.” One day, some of the Ames girls came over to work on their soil-gradation projects for science class. Cathy’s dad helped them, explaining the difference between the D word and the S word, as Cathy rolled her eyes.
Karla and Sally both had fathers who worked for Iowa’s Department of Transportation, which was based in Ames. Karla’s dad was a civil engineer who designed bridges. Sally’s father was a materials engineer; he handled materials inspection. Both helped build many of the highways now crisscrossing Iowa. They had their own language protocol, too. Whenever the Ames girls were around Sally’s dad, if they were ever referring to a roadway, they had to use the word “concrete,” not “cement.”
“Cement is a binder. It’s a component of concrete,” Sally’s dad would say. “Highways are made of concrete.”
Concrete, not cement. Swine, not pigs. Soil, not dirt. The Ames girls took it all under advisement, giggling, but mostly they just focused on their own young lives.
If you’re a kid hanging out with a bunch of other kids in a small town (or even a large city), you don’t ever stop what you’re doing and say, “Hey, wait a second, how did we all get here?” And so, it took years—in some cases, well into adulthood—for the Ames girls to learn the details of how they all ended up being raised within a few square miles of each other.
Several of the girls’ parents, not surprisingly, first came to Ames to attend or work at Iowa State. Karla’s dad and Diana’s dad both enrolled at the university in 1942. Kelly’s dad, being so much younger, didn’t enroll until 1963.
A few of the families ended up in Ames by happenstance. Ames sits in the center of Iowa, forty miles north of Des Moines, and people heading due north or south often have little choice but to pass the town on Interstate 35.
Sally’s parents were born in North Dakota, and in March of 1956, when her dad was ready to graduate from college there, he drove to a job interview in Peoria, Illinois. On the way, he happened to stop in Ames. It had been cold and snowy that day in North Dakota, but Ames was warmer and brighter. He liked what he saw, found a job in Ames as a civil engineer for the Iowa Highway Commission and stayed the rest of his life. In a town with brutal winters and sloppy, slushy springs, Sally’s dad was one of the few residents w
ho actually moved there for the weather.
Jenny’s family, meanwhile, was in Ames because of an incident that happened on July 4, 1944. Her dad was nine years old then, living in southern Iowa, and that day, Jenny’s grandfather was out driving and came upon a car accident. There had been a police chase, and the officer’s car ended up attached to the mangled bumper of the car driven by a robber on the run. When Jenny’s grandfather stopped to help, the policeman asked him to lend a hand lifting one car’s bumper off the other. He obliged and immediately felt something snap in his neck. From that instant of exertion, he suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, or bleeding onto the surface of his brain. By the next day, he was in a coma—barely living proof that no good deed goes unpunished. He was forty-three years old, and doctors gave him a one in ten thousand chance of surviving a year.
He lived, however, remaining in a coma until 1947. Without his income as a county agent for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, his family struggled. “We only ate what friends, neighbors and farmers brought to us,” Jenny’s father would tell her. “I know what it’s like to have a can of beans for seven people.”
Even after Jenny’s grandfather came out of the coma, he was blind and couldn’t speak, so Jenny’s grandmother had to support the family. She ventured to Ames in 1949 with her incapacitated husband, taking a job as social director at Iowa State, with tasks such as overseeing sorority rush and selecting party chaperones. She ended up holding the job for decades. Jenny’s father went to Ames High, where he befriended Sheila’s dad. Jenny’s grandfather eventually recovered his sight and speech, and lived until 1976.
That’s the story of how Jenny ended up calling Ames home, but few of the girls were aware of that. When they were young, they were most apt to ask her dad, “Can Jenny come out to play?” They wouldn’t have thought to ask him, “So what brought you to Ames?” Only in adulthood have the girls come to recognize and appreciate the thousands of different destinies and decisions, going back generations in their families, that brought them all together.
In junior high, the most thrilling weekend activity in Ames, at least for thirteen-year-olds, was the basement make-out party. Most homes in town didn’t have finished basements like middle-class homes have today. The basements then were cinder-block dungeons with bugs and dusty storage boxes. But in those damp basements, back in the early 1970s, the Ames girls got lessons about a changing world.
At a party on the last day of seventh grade, the boys and girls played spin the bottle, and the little pecks being issued weren’t enough of a sexual charge for some of the faster kids. So a suggestion was made. All the boys would put their names in a hat. Each girl would pick a name. Then the matched couples would go off to some quiet or dark corner to make out more heavily in private. All of the girls knew, going in, that one of them would end up getting a certain boy’s name. When they agreed to the game, they implicitly agreed to making out with him. Or did they?
Kelly and the other girls looked across the room at the boy—the only African-American in attendance. He was a nice kid and sort of a friend, but what if they got his name? Would they kiss him? Would they let him slip his hand under their shirts to touch their breasts? Ames was a town with hardly any black people, and Kelly recalls feeling frightened by the possibility and, at the same time, excited by it.
The hat was passed around and Kelly picked a name. She opened her slip of paper, and it was like winning the jackpot; she had gotten Scott, one of the cutest, most popular boys in school, a kid with dark hair set off by sweet blue eyes. The girl who ended up getting the black boy’s name was not one of the eleven Ames girls. That girl opened up her slip of paper, her eyes met the boy’s, and with hardly a pause for a breath, off she went with him. The two ended up pawing and kissing in their corner, just like everyone else.
A part of Kelly felt relieved that she didn’t pick that boy’s name. But she also felt great admiration for the girl who did. That was really something, how the girl just took the boy’s hand and off they went to make out. Even today, when Kelly gets together with the Ames girls, she tells them she still wonders: What would she have done if she had pulled that boy’s name? What would the other Ames girls have done? Kelly briefly dated a black man later in her life. But how would she and the other girls have responded with that slip of paper in their hands, in that junior-high moment, in a basement that was damp with sexual and racial tension?
By high school, the girls had coalesced firmly into that group of eleven. Not every girl was close to every other girl in the same way. There were definite pairings—Jane/Marilyn, Kelly/Diana, Cathy/ Sally, Jenny/Sheila—but like a corporate flow chart, all were linked to one another through someone else. Each girl had a distinct way of interacting with each of the other ten, meaning there were ninety-nine different one-on-one relationships between them. All sorts of variables played into how they got along: Who was irritable because of menstrual cramps? Who felt she’d been given short shrift by one of the others? Who had a boy at the moment?
Still, what happened in the group almost always stayed in the group. Every time they confided in each other without spilling details to their families or acquaintances, they were laying the foundation for a deliberate loyalty that would serve them well in adulthood. Sure, when some of the eleven weren’t around, the others might talk about them—they still do—but they rarely bad-mouthed one another to those beyond their group.
As a clique, they had a reputation for being flirts—more social than academic, and more apt to tease boys than to please them. In reality, though, most of the Ames girls were very good students. And a couple of them actually pleased more than they teased.
They were mostly well liked at school—they were definitely one of the “popular” groups—but everyone knew they were a closed society. It was the eleven of them, period. If any of the 620 other girls at Ames High hoped for an invitation into the inner circle, the eleven girls were too wrapped up with each other to notice. In their recollections today, they swear that no other girls really wanted to join them. But they admit that they may have been clueless about the urges of outsiders. (Friendship researchers today would refer to them as a closed clique, as opposed to an open snowball group, which keeps growing as it welcomes members.)
As a group, the girls sometimes seemed like they had an over-abundance of attitude and self-confidence. After Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” came out in 1979, their sophomore year, they loved to strut around singing it. But most of them, as individuals, were insecure. They didn’t really want to ask that question and they didn’t want to hear the answer.
They were not stereotypical mean girls, except within the group a few times. Still, some fellow classmates found their cliquishness irritating. Other girls assumed that the eleven of them phoned each other every morning before school to see what they’d all wear that day. One outside observer, Nancy Derks, was a member of the female jock crowd. She would notice one of the eleven girls wearing a hat in the hallway, and she knew, she just knew, she’d soon see the rest of them meandering down the hallway in hats. Or if one was wearing sweatpants, they’d almost all be in sweats. Or if one was all dolled up in a dress, there’d be the ten others wearing dresses. “They’re conformists,” Nancy would say. (In the final days of high school, she and a friend would hatch a simple scheme to get back at the eleven girls for all their perceived prissiness and conformity.)
The girls deny always moving in lockstep—in their own heads, they were very much individuals—but they did come to realize that being part of a group meant being defined as a group, for better or worse.
Once, when a few of the eleven girls dated boys from nearby Marshalltown, Iowa, the Ames boys were jealous and upset with them. Marshalltown High, the archrival of Ames High, had the bobcat as its mascot, and some kids in Ames dismissed Marshalltown athletes as “bobcat shit.” (It was a term coined by a group of boys that included Jenny’s and Jane’s brothers.) That led certain Ames boys to start calling the eleven gir
ls “the Shit Sisters.” Soon enough, others at Ames High picked up on it. The girls later toned down their moniker to the Shisters. But today, when their kids ask why they refer to each other as “Shisters,” it’s hard to give a G-rated explanation.
In any case, their Marshalltown fixation was fleeting. Mostly, the girls were loyal to Ames and its boys. On many nights, they organized their social lives around Ames High football games, and fashioned their fantasies around the Ames athletes. Several of the girls maintained meticulous scrapbooks about the football team’s exploits. They even did this in their junior year, when the team went 0 and 11. Karla was diligent. In her scrapbook, she neatly pasted newspaper clippings about the team and every photo she could find of the boys in action.
The girls saved stacks of the notes they passed in class. These folded-up sheets of notebook paper were often devoted to specific interactions with male classmates, giving their correspondence a definite immediacy. Sally, who was often shy around boys, was better able to express herself in writing, such as this play-by-play note to Jenny, written one day at the library:
Jack just now walked over to the table next to me. You’re right. He does look excellent today: red Adidas shirt, Nike shoes with a red stripe, Lee jeans and a little bit of comb sticking out of his back pocket. I wasn’t sure if I liked him anymore but I just decided that I do.
Now he’s sitting at a different table with some guy, facing me. There’s a stupid pillar in the way, damn it! Now he just burped, but that’s OK because he said “excuse me.” Besides, it’s a normal human function. Well, enough about him. Time to go to lunch. Bye. Love Sally.
Jenny has held on to notes like this for three decades now, little moments preserved in time.
The Girls from Ames Page 3
