The Girls from Ames

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Kelly considered Kurt to be braver, brasher and more confrontational than almost anyone she’d ever met, and she believed that’s what made him a good athlete. But she couldn’t figure him out. “He’ll try or do anything. He’s afraid of no one,” she’d say to the other girls. “Where does that come from?”

  Karla had promised Kelly that after high school, they’d go together to the University of Iowa. They dreamed of establishing residency in California after that and finishing school together out there. Instead, at the last minute, without consulting the other girls, Karla decided to follow Kurt to the University of Dubuque, where he’d be playing football.

  Kelly felt betrayed. She was also upset that her friend seemed to be choosing a boy over a chance for the best possible education. Just before leaving for the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Kelly went to an all-night party and, afterward, stopped in front of Karla’s house.

  She sat in her car, scribbling a long, angry note. It was 6 A.M. when she finally placed it on Karla’s doorstep. Her basic message, as she recalls it, was this: “You’re giving up everything for a guy. You’ve bailed out on me. And you’ve bailed out on yourself. It’s a big mistake. You’re going to regret this decision.”

  Kelly was right. Karla would go on to marry Kurt, and they would have a daughter, Christie, born in 1990. But Kurt wasn’t ready to be a parent or a loyal husband. Karla ended up leaving him when Christie was three months old.

  Twenty-seven years later, at the reunion at Angela’s, Karla isn’t thrilled that Kelly is psychoanalyzing her crankiness. When Karla says she isn’t feeling well—she has slight flu symptoms—Kelly’s diagnosis is that she’s homesick. “She’s really conflicted about being here,” Kelly insists. “She cannot bear to be away from her family. She hates it. And the minute she starts thinking about it, she wants to go home. She gets crabbier and crabbier.”

  “Kelly is full of it!” Karla later complains to Jane. “She says I’m sick because I’m homesick.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Jane advises.

  And yet Kelly and Karla, despite this surface friction, have opted to be roommates. As the conversation between all the girls reaches deeper into the night, Karla can no longer keep her eyes open. She’d rather not be alone in the back bedroom. She wants her friend to join her. “Come on, Kelly,” she says, taking her by the hand. “It’s time to get some sleep.”

  4

  Sheila

  On the second morning of the reunion, Jenny opens her suitcase and pulls out a shopping bag filled with old photos and letters, neatly tied in ribbons to differentiate each decade. There’s one photo in particular that she can’t wait to show the other girls.

  She came upon it a few nights earlier in a closet at her home in Maryland, and at first, she was completely confused. It’s a five-by-seven portrait of her and a handsome football player named Dan, taken at the 1980 Ames High Christmas formal. The photo was still in the flimsy brown cardboard frame provided by that night’s photographer, who posed every couple in the exact same position.

  Jenny had an unrequited crush on Dan for two full years. He’d never shown much interest in her, yet here he was, standing tightly against her in his white tuxedo and ruffled lime-green shirt, his hands in hers, smiling like she was his girl. “Wait a second,” Jenny thought. “I never went to any dance with Dan. What is this?”

  When she looked more closely at the photo, she figured it out: Dan’s full body had been cut out of another formal photo and had been perfectly attached over the head and body of the boy who was Jenny’s actual date at that Christmas dance. To the naked eye, it was all incredibly seamless, as good as any mouse-clicking Photoshop user could produce today. Jenny held the photo in her hands for a couple of minutes, trying to do some mental detective work. And then she remembered.

  “Sheila,” she said to herself, and couldn’t resist smiling.

  One day back in 1980, Sheila had somehow gotten her hands on the photo of Dan and his real date, sliced Dan out of the picture, snuck into Jenny’s room at her house, found her Christmas formal photo, and done some fantasy editing. It wasn’t anything malicious; she wasn’t making fun of Jenny. As Jenny now recalls: “It was an act of love. It was just her way of saying, ‘Here you go. Here’s that picture of the two of you that you always wanted.’ ”

  At the reunion, the other girls pass around the photo, laughing about Jenny’s oversized corsage and Dan’s oversized bow tie. They peek underneath to get a look at Jenny’s actual date in his gray suit. And they think about sweet, scheming Sheila with those scissors in her hand.

  All the girls wish Sheila was here with them. It would be so fantastic to hear her recollections of how she doctored that photo. They’d have so much to ask her: What would she remember about the early years of their friendship that the rest of them don’t? What would be her take on all of their middle-aged issues?

  “Remember how she laughed?” asks Cathy. “It was so great. It was never a put-on, either. When she found something funny, I mean, her laugh was just unaudited.”

  The girls remember her childhood smile, too. “Sheila always smiled like she had a secret,” says Jenny.

  Angela and Sheila

  In their heads, all the girls hold on to an image of Sheila, smiling away. The old photos help. But that laugh of hers, that’s harder to summon up, and they long to hear it again. It’s funny, they say, what you miss most about a person.

  In the summer of 1979, Jenny and Karla went on vacation together to California, and Sheila sent them a letter. Almost all of it was devoted to bringing them up-to-date on her boy situation back in Iowa.

  First, Sheila wrote, she went for a drive with their classmate Darwin, and though she was really excited to be with him, “we said absolutely nothing to each other.” Later she went to Doug’s house with Sally, Cathy and Angela. Darwin was there. “He was being weird and so was I (I was nervous),” so that ended up without much conversation, too. The next day, she talked to “Beeb, Joe and Wally,” a three-some whom she described, in order and very precisely, as “new, not cute, and sweet.”

  The next night, Sheila went to a disco where she “tried to get rid of Steve.” Once he was out of the way, she danced with Joe, Dave, Randy and then Charlie. It was a fun night at the disco until one of the guys “got pissed at another guy”—over a girl, of course—and started pounding his fists into a wall until they were bleeding. “It was terrible,” Sheila wrote, before jumping to a new topic in her next sentence: “Oh, I found someone else to be in love with. His name is Jeff, but he’s only gonna be here a few more days.”

  Sheila apologized that she wasn’t able to flesh out all the details of her adventures in this particular letter. To do that, she explained, “I’d have to write a book. Maybe I’ll do that when I’m old and lonely, but now I’m young and happy, so I’ll just write a chapter.”

  When Jenny came upon Sheila’s letter in her closet, those last sentences jumped out at her because, of course, Sheila never got to live the full book. She was the Ames girl who never became a woman. When her friends think of her and speak of her, she’s always age seven or fifteen or nineteen—never more than twenty-two, the age she was when she died mysteriously. In their minds, she remains the carefree, boy-crazy teen they were.

  “As we get older, I find myself thinking more and more about how much she missed out on,” says Angela. “What sort of man would she have married? What would she be telling us about her kids? Would she have worked? How would she look in her forties?”

  The girls recall Sheila Walsh as vivacious, flirty, bubbly and busty. She had curly reddish-brown hair and got a kick out of experimenting with it; at one point she had this impossible-to-manage afro-like permanent. “Sheila was a little tiny thing, and just adorable,” says Sally. “She had these big brown eyes. And her family, they were the ‘Wow’ family—five kids, each of them gorgeous.”

  The oldest child, Susan, was taller than Sheila, with long blond hair and blue eyes. She had an
ethereal, graceful sort of beauty, in contrast to Sheila’s attractiveness, so rooted in her perkiness. Their three younger brothers were strikingly handsome; everyone thought they belonged in clothing catalogues or in movies. In fact, years later, when Princess Diana’s son Prince William hit his teen years, several of the Ames girls had the same thought: “He looks exactly like a Walsh boy.” One of Sheila’s brothers did end up becoming a model in adulthood.

  Sheila’s mom and dad were also extremely good-looking; everyone in town said so. Her mom, a former flight attendant, was a classic beauty who dressed elegantly. Her dad, the dentist, was so handsome that the girls almost blushed when he entered the room. They looked forward to the days he’d come to class and give oral-care presentations. He liked to hand out these red dissolving tablets, which would temporarily stain kids’ teeth to show them where they needed to brush better. Sure, it was embarrassing for the girls when every tooth turned reddish-pink. But Sheila’s dad just didn’t seem judgmental about it. And his oral-care plan seemed to work. The girls agreed that the Walsh kids had the whitest teeth in Iowa; word was that none of them had ever had a cavity.

  Several of the girls had Dr. Walsh as their dentist, and photos of his smiling family were all over his office. Every year there was a new family photo to add to the collection. “You sat in his chair, just looking at Sheila everywhere,” says Kelly.

  Sheila’s dad made a good living as a dentist, and so, like Marilyn, the doctor’s daughter, she grew up a bit more privileged than some of the other Ames girls. The Walsh family belonged to a country club and had a finished basement with a big sofa, a pinball machine and a foosball table. They spent summers at a spacious house on Iowa’s Lake Okoboji.

  Dr. Walsh, who hadn’t grown up with much, wanted his kids to work hard. And so he’d have all five of them at his office on Saturday mornings, mowing and tidying the lawn out front. The other girls would drive by with their parents, and there was Sheila, pushing a lawn mower, while her kid brothers picked up stray sticks.

  One day in the mid-seventies, Sheila told the girls that something exciting was happening at her house. Better Homes and Gardens magazine had arrived to take photos of the Walsh family’s spacious new addition, a mudroom/laundry room. Mrs. Walsh’s decorator had let the magazine know about how creatively she had remodeled it. She’d taken bright green laminated dental cabinets from Dr. Walsh’s office and installed them in the laundry room, a creative way to alleviate storage issues with five kids. There was a place for mittens, a place for boots. The decorator would even bring out-of-towners to come visit!

  When the magazine came out, Sheila proudly waved it around and acted like a celebrity. She was so cute about it, who could be jealous? And who knew? Maybe the photos would start a national surge of dental furniture in laundry rooms.

  The Ames girls found Mrs. Walsh to be more formal than most of the other mothers. There was a fancy white living room in the Walsh’s house and no one was allowed to go in it. And Mrs. Walsh carried herself with a definite maturity. She wasn’t the type to gossip with her daughter’s friends or laugh it up with them. “Other girls’ moms would come up and hug you, but Mrs. Walsh was always a little distant,” Sally recalls.

  Teenaged girls almost always have issues with their mothers, and Sheila and her mom had their share. Her dad, on the other hand, was more laid back, and in Sheila’s mind, he was her champion. One Christmas, Jenny got her brother a puppy. She didn’t want to give it to him until Christmas Day, so Sheila offered to keep the puppy at her house Christmas Eve. She asked her mother if that was OK, but her mom said no. Then her dad gave her a wink and said not to worry. He and Sheila conspired to hide the puppy somewhere in the house overnight, until Jenny came by in the morning.

  In sixth grade, Sheila went to summer camp with Sally, and one night, the girls were sitting around talking about being homesick. Sheila kept saying how much she missed her father.

  The girls got the sense that her mom got along better with Sheila’s sister, Susan. It wasn’t always easy for Sheila to live in the shadow of Susan, who was both glamorous and a quintessential good girl, always saying and doing the right things. Susan was calm, smart, popular—and Mrs. Walsh was close to her and proud of her.

  “Then you had Sheila, who was more rebellious,” says Jenny. The girls suspected that Sheila sometimes wondered if she disrupted the image of the perfect family. In their observations, Sheila didn’t think she measured up to her family on a lot of fronts—in looks, in behavior, maybe in smarts.

  Among the girls, she wasn’t as centered and introspective as Marilyn was, or as book smart as Jane and Sally. But she had an ability to connect with people that the other girls found not just impressive but inspiring. Starting in grade school, several of the girls volunteered together at a local nursing home, passing out cookies or reading aloud to residents with poor eyesight.

  For most of the girls, the natural impulse was to gravitate toward the youngest, healthiest residents. Not Sheila. She’d head straight for the oldest and the sickest. She’d hold hands with the most wrinkled, the most senile, the most medicated old folks she could find. Oxygen tanks didn’t scare her off. She’d just sit there, smiling and chatting.

  “People had hoses up their noses, and it would freak some of us out,” says Cathy. “But Sheila, she was so comfortable.” It was like she connected right to people’s hearts.

  She’d been extremely close to her own grandmother, and in fact, she could get close to anyone’s grandparent. Later, in high school, Sheila got a job in an assisted-living facility, passing out and collecting food trays. Jenny’s widowed grandfather lived there, and every day, even if Sheila wasn’t on the schedule to service his room, she’d stop in to keep him company. “He thought she was adorable. He just loved her,” says Jenny. “He’d always flirt with her, and she’d flirt with him right back.”

  Sheila started turning boys’ heads at a very early age. When she was in first grade, Duffy Madden had a mad crush on her. His dad was one of Iowa State’s football coaches. As Duffy remembers it: “Sheila’s face just glowed when she smiled, and there was something in her eyes that made me stare at her all the time. I’d call her every night at dinnertime until her mother called mine and told me to knock it off.”

  For Christmas, Duffy stole a half-empty bottle of his mother’s perfume, filled it to the top with water, and gave it to Sheila as a present. She wasn’t so taken with the perfume or with him, so he tried a new tactic: feigning dislike for her. Once, at the end of the school day, he chased her out of the front door of St. Cecilia’s—she was literally running away from him—and he slipped on ice at the entrance. He fell hard on his chin, as Sheila turned to giggle his way and then stepped into her mother’s car. “I was more stunned and hurt by that than the six stitches I got that day,” says Duffy, who was just the first in a long line of boys smitten with Sheila.

  In the summertime, when Sheila was up at Lake Okoboji with her family, her letters to the other girls back in Ames chronicled her life precisely—“I have 31 mosquito bites. It’s so disgusting!”—and served as a travelogue of her interactions with boys. “I danced with these three creeps who just totally grossed me out!” she wrote to Sally in junior high. “But then I danced with Joe for three songs (slow!) and I was so happy! Now I like this other guy. His name is Ted Stoner and he is soooooo neat. I get butterflies in my stomach. (He is definitely 2320123!)”

  Even though young Ted Stoner’s name made him seem like some bong-obsessed character in a seventies teen movie, Sheila’s description of him resonated with the girls. After all, if he was definitely “two-three-two-oh-one-two-three,” that meant Sheila considered him worthy of getting her phone number. In the Ames girls’ numeric code, he added up to a dreamboat.

  Sheila loved coming up with her own words. She went to horse-riding camp with Jenny the summer before ninth grade and wrote to Sally: “The guys here are really duddy, but nice.” In other words, they were duds on the heart-palpitation scale,
but she liked them. She called the sexier boys “naabs” (nice ass and body).

  Sheila was a playful storyteller. In a long letter to Jenny when they were fifteen, she announced that she was in love with a boy named George. “I’ve slept with him,” she wrote, hoping to get a gasp out of Jenny. “I mean, I slept with his picture under my pillow. Fooled ya, didn’t I?”

  Sheila wasn’t afraid to take charge when it came to boys. She and Darwin Trickle were longtime friends, but in eleventh grade, they’d go out driving and talking, and both started to feel something more. One day they drove to Brookside Park in Ames, pulled into a space and sat there talking. “I was very shy,” Darwin recalls. “I didn’t want to be aggressive. I always tried to be a gentleman. But all of a sudden, she says to me, ‘Well, if you’re not going to do it, then I will!’ ”

  She leaned over and they shared their first kiss. And then she pulled back and just smiled at him, before leaning in for more.

  Young girls today can forward a come-on email or instant message from a boy to all their girlfriends. In one click, everyone can judge his ability to woo with words, or they can weigh in on the photos of him attached to his email. But back when Sheila was young, she didn’t even have access to a photocopy machine at her parents’ lake house, so she’d mail Jenny the actual original notes she received from boys. “No one has turned me on as much as you,” scribbled a boy named Tom. “I guess it’s a combination of things did it. You’re super looking. You’ve got an excellent body!!!! And the best part is your personality!” His two-page letter was littered with compliments, but Sheila never asked for it back from Jenny; for three decades, it has remained tied in a ribbon in Jenny’s stack of “Sheila letters.”