Over the years, Mrs. Derby tried to locate the woman. Her full name was on Karla’s birth certificate. Mrs. Derby would go to the Ames Public Library to look through old phone books and city records, trying to figure out what became of her.
Then one day about a decade ago, Mrs. Derby came across an article in a newsletter she received through work. The author had the same first and last name as the birth mother. There was a photo of the author, a full body shot of her walking. She looked so much like Karla—tall, thin, striking—and the way she was walking, her gait, was also so completely Karla. The moment Karla saw the photo, she was certain. “I know that’s her,” she told her mother.
The woman’s article was about how cancer was prevalent in her family. She had lost her mother and a sister to breast cancer, and another sister had also been diagnosed with the disease. The article detailed the author’s anguished decision to have both breasts removed as a precaution, even though she had no sign of cancer.
Understandably, Karla was upset by the article. If this woman was her birth mother, what cancer risks had Karla passed on to her three children? She went to the doctor to be tested and was told she showed no signs of cancer. Still, the uncertainties raised by the article remained with her.
Mrs. Derby felt 99 percent sure that she had found the right woman, and one night she worked up the courage to call her. The woman answered some questions, declined to answer others, and was vague about several points. She insisted she was not Karla’s mother, and Mrs. Derby ended the call without confirmation that her suspicions were true. Karla, however, needed no convincing.
“We found her. That’s her,” Karla said. “But she never wanted me and she now wants nothing to do with me. All I’d want from her is a medical history. I feel that’s what she owes me. And if she’s not going to give me that, then we’ll have to live with it. You’re my mother. I don’t need her.”
Karla’s relationship with the other ten Ames girls began forming in infancy. She and Jenny were babies together in the same church nursery during Sunday services. They’d take naps in adjoining bassinets.
Karla met Diana at Fellows Elementary School. Diana was the prettiest girl in the popular group, and Karla would see her playing with her other pretty friends at recess. “Those of us in the unpopular group, we were in awe of them,” Karla says. It wasn’t just that the girls were pretty. It was how they carried themselves through recess, with this air of confidence, no matter if they were on the swings or playing kickball or just standing around talking.
Karla tiptoed her way into Diana’s popular group in seventh grade at Central Junior High. There was a boy-girl party and, somehow, she and Jenny were invited. Karla couldn’t believe her good fortune. She thought to herself, “Wow, we’ve finally made it!” The party turned out to be a mind-opener for them. Right there on the couches, boys and girls were making out in plain view. Hands were everywhere. Kisses were long and wet. It was so much more than Karla expected. She was too overwhelmed to participate.
Karla remained painfully shy and insecure around boys for most of her childhood. That partly was because she was flat-chested longer than the other girls were. She was taller, too, and that felt like a handicap. In the presence of boys, she didn’t know what to say, didn’t feel smart, couldn’t always articulate herself, didn’t realize she was as beautiful as she was. Kelly thought that Karla never tried too hard to make herself appealing to boys. When other girls were discovering their sexuality, Karla seemed to be holding it at bay.
She ended up going to her share of junior-high and high-school dances, but they were always affairs in which the girls got to ask the boys. She’d get up her courage, ask a boy to be her date, and by the end of the night, she’d have another formal, five-by-seven portrait—of her and a boy, all dressed up, uncomfortably holding hands—to place in her scrapbook.
When she was with the ten other Ames girls, Karla was far more self-assured. She had a sense of humor that was self-deprecating, with few inhibitions. For the girls’ amusement, on demand, she could stick her entire fist in her mouth. No one in Ames—certainly no girl—had that combination of a small hand and a large mouth, and if they did, no one was as willing as Karla to prove that one fit into the other.
Karla was sometimes the goofiest, most fun-loving of the Ames girls. Before they had their driver’s licenses, several of them tooled around town on those mini-motorcycles called mopeds. One Halloween, Karla swiped a large carved pumpkin from Karen’s house. She put her head through the hole in the pumpkin, looked out through the carved-out eyes, and was able to mount her moped and drive it over to Cathy’s house, with Karen riding in back. As she pulled up, she looked like some crazy half-human/half-pumpkin escapee from Planet Jack-o’-Lantern. Cathy’s mother saw them coming and couldn’t stop laughing.
Karla was also a bit of a pop-culture princess, always eager to apply things she read about in her teen magazines, or saw on TV, to the lifestyles of Ames inhabitants.
When the movie 10 came out in 1979, Karla convinced the others that Karen, who had the longest hair, needed to get the full Bo Derek cornrow treatment. It took the girls hours to get the job done. “She looked so great,” Karla recalls. “She was shaking it all around. She thought she was really hot.” Soon enough, that didn’t sit well with the others.
Someone had to say it: “Who the hell does she think she is? Bo Derek?”
Karen was taken aback. She was swinging her hair around mainly to give her cornrow-installation team a thrill. “When I finally saw myself in the mirror,” she says, “the cornrows were so crooked. Some were big. Some were small. My hair didn’t look like Bo Derek’s at all.” She didn’t have the heart to tell the girls that, even after they decided she’d gotten too full of herself. Eventually, Karla figured out the dynamics and owned up to it. “I guess the rest of us just got jealous. Sorry.”
Back in the seventies, aluminum-colored reflective tanning blankets were advertised on TV, and Karla, who always had the best tan in the group, decided that she and the other girls needed to buy some.
Karen, Karla, Diana and their prom dates
One spring day, Sheila, Sally and Jenny skipped school with her and they all sat in her backyard, tanning on those weird sparkly silver blankets. They looked like they were lying on flattened astronaut suits. It was a short-lived adventure, however, because Karla’s father caught them and—they couldn’t believe he’d be such a party pooper—turned them in to the school principal. Their aluminum tans faded, but the detention slip was proudly displayed for posterity in Karla’s ever-growing scrapbook.
For Karla, scrapbooking was risky business. On the one hand, she wanted to document everything going on in her life. On the other hand, if her parents came upon the scrapbooks, they’d have evidence of things she didn’t want them to know about. In the end, her urge to preserve her memories almost always won out, and so she became a scrapbook risk-taker, pasting in everything from notes passed between her and the other Ames girls (about real and humorously imagined liaisons with boys) to photos of everyone holding a beer at a party.
In one scrapbook, she had photos of the girls sitting in a sea of stoned Iowans at a Ted Nugent concert. In another, she posted photos of her dad’s car covered with huge clumps of mud and cornstalks. There was a story behind that one, of course. She had just gotten her license and, with Sheila riding shotgun, had accidentally driven the car into a ditch. A farmer happened by on his tractor and pulled out the car, but by the time he got it back onto the roadway, it looked like it had been swallowed up by a cornfield. Karla and Sheila hosed it off with a few hundred gallons of water from the garden hose. “My parents can never find out,” Karla told Sheila. “Never. This car has to be spotless!”
Still, she couldn’t resist taking before-and-after photos so she could show all the other girls proof of the adventure. And after she carefully preserved the memory in her scrapbook, she casually left it lying around her room.
Her parents never went through tha
t scrapbook, though they weren’t completely in the dark about things. Karla’s mom recalls a night when several of the Ames girls’ mothers decided to meet at a bar. They shared stories and compared notes, had a few drinks and some laughs. “We knew the girls were doing some things we wouldn’t want them to do,” says Mrs. Derby. “But we knew they were good girls inside, and they were good for each other. They’d be OK.”
From the time Karla and the other Ames girls were in their early teens, they always tried to get jobs together. Each job carried its own secrets or naughty moments or lessons learned. Several summers when they were in junior high, the girls worked together detasseling corn. What sounded like a wholesome summer job was actually hot, dirty, itchy labor—the hardest work they had ever done in their lives. It was also an eye-opener for them. The older boys on the crew would gather among the farthest cornstalks to smoke pot. And their crew leader was a woman with enormous breasts who, after dark, was a champion wet T-shirt contest winner.
Later, when they were fifteen, the girls found jobs that were easier and more fun. Karla and six of the others signed on at Boyd’s, the ice-cream shop famous for its big plastic cow out front. The girls often had the run of the place. Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, the owners, weren’t always there, nor was the manager. So the girls often felt a rush of power—as if they controlled all the ice cream in Ames.
In the late 1970s, Channel 5 in Ames had a promotional campaign for the station, showing upbeat scenes around town. There was a catchy jingle with the station’s motto: “5’s the one!” For one spot, the film crew stopped by Boyd’s and got shots of the girls dipping five giant scoops of ice cream onto one cone.
That was the only time they were filmed at the store. Lucky thing, too. They wouldn’t have fared too well if the Boyds had ever installed hidden cameras to monitor them.
When things were slow, the girls would sit on the counter licking ice-cream cones, chatting away. And when things got busy, they could be very magnanimous. They were the guardians of the ice-cream containers, and the cuter the customer, the less likely he was to have to reach into his pocket. Two good-looking boys would walk in. Free ice cream for them. Friends and family would stop by. Cones and malts were on the house. If an entire boys baseball team came through the door, Karla and the other girls would fight off the urge to give them whatever they wanted free of charge. Once, Karen gave her siblings free ice cream, and when her dad found out, he was horrified and told her she had to return her next paycheck to Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, as repayment for all of the pilfered profits.
It hadn’t exactly occurred to the girls that their generosity at the ice-cream counter wasn’t fair to the Boyds. When you’re young and there’s ice cream available, you just feel this urge to spread it around.
Usually, enough ice cream was sold to keep the Boyds in the black, but there were times when the girls unintentionally damaged the shop’s bottom line. One night after work, Karla and Sally were asked to defrost all of the ice-cream freezers. It took a while, and then they headed to Karla’s house for a sleepover. In the morning, Sally asked Karla, “Did you plug the freezers back in?”
Karla replied, “No, I thought you did.”
Panicked, they called Mrs. Boyd, who met them at the shop. Sure enough, everything had melted into goop: ten gallons each of twenty-five flavors.
The girls stood there, looking at the goop, staring at their feet. Finally, Mrs. Boyd said, “Well, girls, that was an expensive mistake, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t make them pay for the lost inventory, and they didn’t lose their jobs. But Karla and Sally shared the bond of feeling guilty and stupid and of disappointing Mrs. Boyd.
Before leaving high school in 1981, Sally filled out a Boyd’s gift certificate, addressed it to herself, and pasted it into her scrapbook: “To Sally Brown: 20 extra thick malts.” In the space labeled “valid for” she wrote: “50 years from date of issue.”
The certificate would have been good until 2031—when she and Karla and the others could return as senior citizens for two malts apiece—but it’s now unredeemable. Boyd’s, which opened its doors in 1941, closed in 1987. Mrs. Boyd died in 2004.
Midway through high school, skinny, flat-chested Karla began to fill out, and the other girls knew that her moment would soon come. They kept telling her that, and they were right. By senior year, she was dating Kurt, an Ames High football player. He might not have been the first boy to notice Karla, but he was the first to show great interest in her, and she fell for him.
Kurt was very attractive and popular with the jock crowd—the sort of fun, macho guy who seemed like a necessary ingredient at a Friday night keg party. He wasn’t tall, but he had wavy brown hair, a jock’s body and a chiseled face with a nice smile, despite two chipped teeth. He was always a sharp dresser, and he’d drive around town in a white 1975 Monte Carlo, a car celebrated for its long hood and state-of-the-art concealed windshield wipers.
To his friends on the football team, Kurt could be just plain cool. He had this swaggering self-confidence and a slick way with words. He was always coming up with funny catchphrases that other boys would adopt. Years before it became famous in a Budweiser commercial, he’d walk around asking other guys, “Whazupp????” They’d repeat the phrase back to him, and there’d be laughs all around. “Whazuppp?!?!!” When the beer commercials first came out, those who’d lost track of Kurt wondered if somehow he’d gone into advertising.
Male friendships are often born on athletic fields, and in Kurt’s case, his bonds with other boys sometimes grew out of visceral physical confrontations. At one football practice, there was a scrimmage in which tailback Jim Cornette was pitched the football. Steamrolling right toward him at that moment was Kurt, playing defensive back. It was an almost maniacal charge. “We knew it would be a monster wreck,” Jim recalls. The two boys got within a couple of feet of each other and the coach blew the whistle. Both boys stopped. No contact was made. But for two decades after that, as their friendship grew, they’d kid each other. “I would have kicked your ass!” Kurt liked to say. And Jim would answer: “Yeah, right, I’d have flattened you and kept running!”
Jeff Sturdivant, the quarterback, was Kurt’s best friend starting in junior high. They were always comparing biceps or challenging each other to foot races. Jeff knew Kurt had a temper, ever since that party in eighth grade when a girl broke up with him and he put his fist straight through a wall. But when it came to Kurt, it was all part of the package. “He was very intense, but you were just drawn to him,” says Sturdivant.
A lot of boys idolized Kurt, and not just for his cockiness, his physicality and his sense of humor. They also were impressed that he had been able to woo Karla. By high school, boys were recognizing that she had grown into a beauty, and that she had this loving sweetness within her. Seeing her growing devotion to Kurt, they figured, maybe he also had something special inside of him, something he couldn’t easily reveal or articulate.
There were, however, people who thought otherwise. Some girls outside the jock sphere described him as arrogant. As for the ten other Ames girls, they certainly recognized Kurt’s charm and charisma, but they didn’t tell Karla everything they saw or thought.
Jane, for instance, had a story she chose not to share with Karla. Even though there were few Jews in Ames, Jane never really felt blatant anti-Semitism except once, from Kurt. It happened when she was in fourth grade and a bunch of kids had gathered after school to play kickball. They were picking sides when Kurt announced to everyone, “I don’t want that Jew on my team!” Jane never forgot the incident and never told Karla until they were adults.
In eleventh grade, Marilyn wrote in her journal that she felt uneasy watching Kurt lay into his younger brother “for taking some of his munchies.” That same day he spilled a beer on his brother for unknown reasons; Marilyn had to take out a hair dryer to dry the boy off. Though Kurt could be great fun, a part of him seemed out of control. Marilyn chose not to articulate any of this to Karla.
> Angela knew something about Kurt, too. While he was dating Karla, he wasn’t always faithful. Once, even Angela made out with Kurt. They snuck into a bathroom at a party, and it happened. She didn’t feel right about it, of course, but she sensed that he probably fooled around with a lot of different girls. All the Ames girls had concerns about Kurt. But at least early on, no one believed Karla would stick with him.
Kurt had other issues, too. He was often mad at someone; there was always a reason. And because he took such pride in his toughness, other boys noticed that he’d often go looking for trouble. Once, after a football game, he got onto the bus filled with players from the opposing high school and started kicking and swinging at them. It was a dangerous decision. To bystanders, it was a surreal scene, as if one crazy guy had decided to declare an unprovoked war on an entire broad-shouldered army. Luckily, he wasn’t injured.
Jeff Sturdivant became a more devout Christian later in high school, and his friendship with Kurt ended. Still, even though the two boys were taking sharply different paths, he continued to admire Kurt from afar.
Boys in Ames couldn’t quite explain their feelings for Kurt or their need to impress him. “For some reason, we all just cared about him,” says Sturdivant, who ended up becoming an orthodontist in West Des Moines. “I guess it was because we loved him. That’s what it was. Even though I never saw him again after high school, as an adult I’d sometimes feel like I was reaching out to him, still trying to get his attention in some way. That’s a funny thing, but it’s the truth.”
As Karla became more involved with Kurt, she began spending all her time with him, which caused tension with the other Ames girls. It’s an old story, of course. A girl finally gets a boyfriend and puts him first. In Karla’s case, she still wanted to be with her friends, but she wanted Kurt there, too. So the Ames girls found themselves spending more time with him than they otherwise would have liked.
The Girls from Ames Page 7
