As they waited for their procedures, the professor asked Kelly if she also was there because of the immunization issue. Kelly told her no, that she and her boyfriend had decided they were too young to start a family, that they wanted to finish getting their education. In fact, Kelly recalls sitting at the clinic and being worried about the procedure, but also being concerned about missing classes that day. What homework would she miss? In her head she was still a student—still a kid herself. Even though she loved babies, even though she just knew she’d be a good parent, motherhood needed to wait. And she was mature enough to know that as someone just out of her teens, she might not be mature enough to handle all the potential issues she’d face trying to raise a child.
Kelly talked to her parents about her decision. Having been very young parents themselves, they knew how hard it was. “Their feedback made a difference in how having the abortion affected me,” Kelly says now. “I was OK with it, probably because it wasn’t a dark secret. My parents said I shouldn’t get married. They didn’t want me having a child so young. They didn’t want me caught in the same situation they’d found themselves in. They told me to finish college. They knew I wanted to be a career person.” Kelly had weighed input from family and friends, and made a difficult decision that was right for her.
These days, when Kelly thinks about the abortion, she is not regretful. She says she focuses on the fact that she would not have her current three children if that child had been born. “I’d have been this young mother with a child. Maybe I would have had another child a few years later. I might have been overwhelmed by it all, and that would be it. And I love my three children so much. I am so pleased to have my children. So I focus on that. The abortion made it possible for me to have the three of them.”
Kelly has always been able to place her life, and describe it well, in the context of her times. She recognizes that she and the other Ames girls, as the youngest of the baby boomers, reaped the benefits of huge changes that were already under way by the time they hit their formative years. “We are a generation who, through progressive legislation, had opportunities women before us didn’t have,” she wrote in one email to the girls. “We are the generation that had access to birth control. My parents didn’t.”
Researchers say that groups of friends such as the Ames girls—those born in the last sixty years or so—often have a greater appreciation of the possibilities of friendships than their mothers and grandmothers did, and a much more powerful bond than most men. The reason: They reached maturity in the era when feminism was blooming. So they naturally assumed that they could build sisterly bonds with friends that would feel vital and important, mirroring or contributing to the changes in society. Their mothers and grandmothers all had close, loving friends, of course, but those older women didn’t have the revolution of feminism to give their connections purpose and worth.
Kelly is vocal in telling the other Ames girls that women a half generation or so ahead of them “paved the way for us.” The least she can do, she says, is not be ashamed to talk about having an abortion. The other girls admire her willingness to speak out, even if they can’t be as forthright themselves.
Here at this reunion, Kelly doesn’t talk all that much about her decision to leave her husband, or the contentious battle that resulted in her ex’s house being the primary residence of her sons, ages fifteen and fourteen, and her daughter, twelve. She was unable to convince her ex to agree to shared physical custody, and the person who conducted the child study took into account the children’s input; they said they wanted to remain with their father. The kids later told Kelly they made that decision for two reasons. First, they were angry with her for breaking up the family and moving out of the house. Second, they didn’t want to hurt or disappoint their already distraught father by not remaining with him. At the time, Karla had tried to help Kelly retain custody by writing a letter to add to the child study file, explaining Kelly’s great strengths as a mother. Kelly appreciated the gesture, but it wasn’t enough to sway the decision.
Kelly tries not to burden the other girls with details of her child-custody issues. She came close to declaring bankruptcy because of divorce expenses, and spent time feeling humiliated, depressed and ashamed that she was not spending more time with her kids than the custody study allowed.
At the previous reunion, at Diana’s house, Kelly spent many hours talking about the end of her marriage and the issues that followed. The girls listened and weighed in. But this time, with the marriage finally legally finished, Kelly is quieter about it. Were she even to introduce the topic, she says, “everything will come out. They know me so well. They can pull stuff from inside me, and I might not want to go there. They go deep fast.”
In one recent email to the girls, Kelly wrote that she was seeing a kind and caring man, only she didn’t find certain things about him attractive. She made a joke about him, and a couple of the girls wrote back disapprovingly. “They said that joking like that showed that I had issues,” Kelly says. “They were analyzing me, and maybe they were right. I was with him, but I knew I wouldn’t fall in love with him because I wasn’t physically attracted to him.”
Kelly isn’t always up for the psychoanalyzing practiced by her fellow Ames girls. These days, she has been hanging out with a female friend she hasn’t known very long. “She’s a woman who was never married, has no kids, and doesn’t ask a lot of questions. Right now, I like that,” she says.
As for the Ames girls, they’ve come to a realization about Kelly. At one point, when she’s not around, they talk about it. “It’s an interesting thing about Kelly,” says Karen. “She’s always been the rebel. First she was a rebel against her parents. And she still talks like she’s a rebel now, acting like a young single person with wild dating stories.
“But here’s the thing. Years ago, we would have expected Kelly to be the one who took off for California. We figured she’d end up working in Hollywood or writing for some big magazine. But truth is, she chose a traditional life, didn’t she? She got married young. She had kids right away. She’s teaching school in a small town in Minnesota. Except for Sally, she’s the one, out of all of us, who remains closest to Ames. Look how close she’s living to the Iowa border. Think about that.”
The girls find it interesting that when they were young, Kelly was the one always battling with her parents. If the girls had to name who had the most tumultuous relationship with her parents in high school, it likely would be Kelly. But as an adult, she has become extremely close to them, especially since divorcing her husband.
“Actions speak louder than words,” says Cathy. “In my case, I had to go outside my comfort zone and move far away to find myself. I don’t think Kelly has taken the hard look at who she is and who she can be. She has so much to offer—and she has to realize that.”
Everything Cathy is saying she has already told Kelly directly, and she confides in the others that the result has led to some cooled interactions with Kelly. They’re a bit more formal around each other, more guarded. “But I’m really acting out of love for her,” Cathy says. “I’d like to see her meet a man who challenges her on every level—emotionally, physically, sexually. Someone who can step up to the plate for her. But before she can meet a guy like that, she has to step up to the plate herself.”
6
The Things They Remember
Sheila’s death, of course
The role cornfields played in their young lives
Their mothers’ lifelong friendships
The Elks Club
Jenny’s Southern accent
Karla’s getting her own “teen line” phone
The day Jane was shot
Their scrapbook tributes after John Lennon’s murder
The “intervention” in Cathy’s basement
The antipathy of other girls, culminating in the
graduation-cake incident
Ames itself
The list could go on for pages. As the girls remini
sce at the reunion, rattling off all the experiences and embarrassments that bonded them when they were young, they casually articulate what researchers can now prove scientifically: that women who nurture long-term friendships can find profound comfort recounting shared moments, good and bad. It’s OK if some of those moments make them wince or leave them saddened. Whatever the memory, it’s a gift to have other people who were there with them. No one needs to say it, but they all feel it: “On the entire planet, only the rest of you can remember certain things I remember.”
Marilyn, Angela, Karla, Jenny, Karen and Cat hy at Ames High graduation, 1981
Among the memories:
There was the boy at St. Cecilia who had the God-given dexterity to be able to pick his nose and suck his thumb at the same time. For Sally and Cathy, it wasn’t always easy to pay attention to the teacher, because they were so fascinated by his one-handed performances. (Years later, when Sally was visiting her parents, she came upon an Ames Tribune story about an unnamed employee being fired from a Mexican restaurant because he picked his nose. There was no mention of thumb-sucking, but Sally and Cathy felt certain they could identify the perpetrator in a police lineup.)
There was the day in second grade when Cathy got sent home from St. Cecilia’s for wearing culottes. All the female students were required to wear dresses, and Cathy’s split skirt broke the rules. The school couldn’t reach her mom, so Cathy had to walk home alone to get into an appropriate outfit. On her return, she joined Sheila and Sally at recess, where they discussed, with all their second-grade worldliness, how they interpreted the definitions of “dress,” “skirt” and “culottes.”
There was that evening in seventh grade when several of the girls were at Happy Joe’s, an ice cream and pizza parlor. Between them, they had enough money to buy a small pizza. They needed ten more cents to buy a large pizza. Five cute college boys sat at a nearby table, and so the girls, led by Cathy and Kelly, started repeating, loudly and dramatically: “Oh, if we only had a dime . . .” “If we had just another dime, we’d be so happy. . . .” A few minutes later, the college boys finished eating, and before they headed out of the restaurant, each of them stopped at the girls’ table and put a dime on it. The boys smiled and didn’t say a word. Once they were gone, the girls couldn’t stop giggling. There they were, seventh-graders, flirting with college boys! Plus, they could now order that large pizza.
There was the bloody pep rally at Ames High when a football player bit off the head of a live carp to get the crowd into a school-spirited frenzy. Some of the Ames girls recall turning their heads, repulsed, as blood splattered everywhere. Later, the captain of the football team swallowed a live goldfish. It got stuck in his throat and kept moving around. The boy was choking until teachers sent him to the water fountain to wash the fish into his stomach. (Kelly, taking photos for the school paper, followed the boy out of the gym and into the hallway. “It’s still moving,” he said as he tried to wash it down his throat. Kelly felt sorry for him and stopped snapping photos.)
There was that lunch period in the Ames High cafeteria when an all-you-can-eat, do-it-yourself salad bar opened for business, with great fanfare. The cost was 75 cents, and back then, the whole concept was exotic for a Midwestern high school. The Ames girls ate it up.
There was that cloudy, chilly October day in 1979 when the charismatic Pope John Paul II came to Iowa to celebrate a Mass. It was the largest gathering ever in Iowa; more than 300,000 people, including six of the Ames girls, spread across the acreage at a large farm. Just as the pope descended in his helicopter, Angel One, the sun came out. Hundreds of thousands of people remember the pope’s visit, but only the Ames girls recall it for the story of Marilyn’s blanket. Like several of the girls, Marilyn took CPR classes, and she volunteered that day at the Red Cross tent. Marilyn met a boy and sat with him, romantically, on one of the medical blankets. She saved that blanket for many years. For some reason, she couldn’t part with it.
The Ames girls also recall the day in late spring of 1980 when Jane, sunbathing in her backyard, heard a loud popping sound, saw a flash of light and then felt a stabbing pain in her thigh. She screamed as blood poured from her leg. She was able to limp to her house before collapsing. Turned out that neighborhood boys, shooting their BB guns at birds in a nearby yard, had shot her accidentally. Jane was rushed to Marilyn’s dad for treatment. The pellet was embedded so deeply that Dr. McCormack realized he couldn’t remove it without major surgery. (He suggested leaving it be, and the pellet remains in her leg today.) That day, the other Ames girls all signed a card that said simply, “Sorry you got shot.” Jane taped it in her scrapbook. A few weeks earlier, the famous “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of the TV show Dallas had aired. And so the Ames girls had fun inviting other kids at school to answer the question “Who Shot Jane G.?” Was it the mafia? Out-of-town enemies?
In the girls’ adult lives after Ames, they’ve each found newer friends. But these more recent friendships are built mostly around their kids, their jobs or their current neighborhoods. The bonds are limited to the here and now, and memory hardly exists.
Because the Ames girls carry this lengthy index of the long ago, they are often forced to be more genuine in their present interactions with each other. They can’t put on airs or accents. Especially accents. One afternoon at the reunion, the girls laugh at the memory of Jenny coming home from the University of South Carolina for Christmas in her freshman year. She’d been gone from Ames just four months and already had a full-blown Southern accent. “Y’all want to go to Karla’s house, or y’all want to just hang out at my house?” she asked.
“Hey, Jenny, y’all want to tell us why y’all are talking like that?” Cathy replied. In Ames, Jenny wore jeans and looked good in flannel shirts. She came back from South Carolina and wore taffeta to a formal dinner party at her house. And so the other girls were relentless in their eye-rolling over this alien Southern belle. That Christmas, they met up with some boys who’d known Jenny in high school and joked that maybe she’d had an accident and hit her head: “Did something happen to Jenny? Her voice sounds kind of odd.”
Jenny’s defense was that a Southern accent can inhabit any human being who ventures down South for even a few months. The girls didn’t buy it. As Cathy sums it up: “She was so busted!”
Here at the reunion, the girls joke that if one of them tries to describe herself for this book as somebody she’s not, they will offer up a friendly chorus of “Bullshit!” under their breath until the offender reverts back to who she really is.
Turns out, they never have to gang up on anybody, because when they’re together, the girls almost have to be their most authentic selves. After all, the other nine girls know exactly who they started as (and the child inside them), which, in certain ways, is who they really are.
Cathy thinks that’s the crux of their friendship. Or at least that link to girlhood is what she finds most appealing about their relationships. “You can tell people where you’re from and who you were, which is who you are. But no one really knows you unless they were there. With the other girls, there’s an understanding you don’t have to explain.”
Cathy is now living a life unlike any of the others. For one, she’s long been in Los Angeles, where her career as a makeup artist has flourished, and she is friendly with well-known people such as actress Joan Allen. Second, she never married and never had children. So when the Ames girls trade waves of emails about their kids’ attention-deficit issues or the monotony of a long marriage, it doesn’t resonate for her.
At the reunion, the others often relate to each other mother to mother. They talk about being their husbands’ wives. Sure, Cathy wants to know about their families, but after a while, she wants more. As she explains it: “When Karen shows up, to me she’s Karen, not Katie’s mom. I want to know what’s going on with her, not necessarily how her family is doing. I know she’s a mother and a wife, but I also know who she is as a person besides that.”
Who the
girls are, of course, always goes back to Ames.
Cathy’s mom was a Mary Kay and Avon rep in town, a fact Cathy dropped right into the first paragraph of her online bio. For seventeen years, she was represented by the Cloutier Agency, and has now moved to Aim Artists. Both are prestigious agencies that handle many of the most sought-after hairstylists and makeup artists in the entertainment and fashion industries. Some of the bios on agency Web sites can be a bit pretentious, hammering home career highlights and celebrity endorsements. But Cathy’s bio begins simply: “As a kid growing up in Iowa, I loved playing with my mom’s makeup stash. . . .”
The bio serves as an introduction to new clients, and it reveals this about Cathy: Seven words into introducing herself, she wants people to know she’s from Iowa.
Cathy’s L.A. friends are fascinated that she has friends from Ames. They’ll say to her: “It’s amazing you choose to spend so much time with people you knew when you were young. What do you still have in common with them?”
When Cathy considers the question, the answer she has for herself is this: “What keeps me going back to them? What is it I don’t want to sever? I think it’s this: We root each other to the core of who we are, rather than what defines us as adults—by careers or spouses or kids. There’s a young girl in each of us who is still full of life. When we’re together, I try to remember that.”
The Ames girls haven’t tracked all the scientific studies about friendship, the ones showing that having a close group of friends helps people sleep better, improve their immune systems, boost their self-esteem, stave off dementia, and actually live longer. The Ames girls just feel the benefits in their guts.
The research, though, is clear about the positive implications of friendships in women’s lives. There was, for instance, a fourteen-year project at Flinders University in Australia that tracked fifteen hundred women as they aged. The study found that close friendships—even more than close family ties—help prolong women’s lives. Many women in the study had meaningful relationships with children or other relatives; that didn’t appear to improve their survival rates. But those with the most friends outlived those with the least friends by 22 percent. In fact, researchers say a woman who wants to be healthier and more psychologically fit in her old age is better off having one close friend than half-a-dozen grandchildren.
The Girls from Ames Page 11
