Given the ambivalent feelings a few of the girls had for Sally, Cathy felt a responsibility to look after her welfare in the group. When all the Ames girls went to a movie, she sat next to Sally. If they were all heading out for fast food, she’d ride there with Sally. If plans were being made for a Saturday night, she’d remind everyone, “Don’t forget to pick up Sally.” At least once, a few of them promised to pick up Sally and never showed up to get her. To this day, her mother still remembers Sally waiting by the door for that promised ride.
Sally and Cathy, then and now
Sally could be fun and likeable, but she also resisted growing up as fast as some of the others, and they were irritated by that. During high school, there was a Halloween costume party, and most of the girls chose to dress in flattering, even provocative, ways. Sally came dressed as a nun, which led to a bit of eye-rolling by some of the other girls.
Then came the school-sponsored East Coast Trip in eleventh grade, which most of the girls signed up for. This was a sightseeing tour of New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and from the time the bus left Iowa, Sally sensed that she was being left out. When all the students went together to see Annie, some of the girls weren’t especially friendly to her. She had trouble connecting with Sheila and Karen. She roomed with Jenny, but Jenny was a bit cool at times. Karla, Diana and Kelly were sometimes off on their own. (The three of them got a restaurant to serve them wine and bought themselves a Playgirl magazine. The school had advised all the students to bring raincoats, and so all three bought matching trench coats and walked around New York like teenaged spies. One highlight: ringing the doorbell to get into a “naughty lingerie” shop.)
As all the other girls buddied up, Sally felt alone. In New York one night, some of the girls made plans to go to a restaurant, and Sally overheard someone saying, “Why does Sally have to come with us?” To her face, someone else said, “Oh, you’re coming, too?” That night at dinner, Sally was ordering her meal, and one of the girls—who it was, she can’t recall—actually interrupted her and said, “We don’t care what you want!” There was a bit of snickering around the table.
Sally saw clearly that she was being excluded, but she couldn’t figure out why. She fell asleep saying to herself, “I wonder what I did to them. Why don’t they want to be with me?” She took the hint, though. For the rest of the trip, she palled around mostly with a girl from outside the group, as she counted the hours until the bus would return her to Iowa.
Cathy, her closest friend, hadn’t been on that East Coast adventure. And when everyone returned, a few of the girls took Cathy aside and complained that Sally wasn’t fitting in.
Cathy talked to her mother about the problem. “I should have gone on the East Coast trip,” she said. “If I had been there with Sally, none of this would have happened. Now they’re ganging up on her and I don’t know what to do.” The girls saw her as Sally’s keeper and held her responsible. At the same time, she felt completely protective of Sally, her oldest and sweetest friend.
Her mother listened and then weighed in. “If the girls have a problem with Sally, rather than being mean to her behind her back, they ought to get together to discuss things maturely. Invite them over to our house. You can all hash things out here.” It was well-meaning advice. Cathy’s mother assumed the girls would talk, hug and move on.
A slumber party was planned, and the girls arrived at Cathy’s house with their sleeping bags. They first made small talk with Cathy’s mom, then headed down to the basement, where they sat in a circle on the carpeted floor. Some of the girls were busy elsewhere and didn’t make it over that night. Still, enough of them showed up to make a full circle.
Cathy was going to serve as a sort of moderator, but she had only to introduce the issue and the other girls immediately started running with it. At first, there were nitpicking comments. The girls said they were bugged by the way Sally dressed, talked and ate. They talked about her lack of skills at Friday night parties. “You just kind of stand there,” someone said. “You don’t participate in the party.”
Another of the girls chimed in with “You’ve got to be more fun. Participate more! Talk to the boys. You’re like a wallflower. And when one of us stands up to go to the next room, you don’t have to stand up and follow us. You’re too much of a tag-along.”
It went on like that for a while, with the girls telling Sally everything they found wrong with her. And there seemed no clear sense that the piling on would ever end, since no one had anywhere to go. This was, after all, a sleepover.
Cathy sat next to Sally through all of it, as if proximity could protect her friend from some of the verbal pummeling. Cathy knew this “intervention” was not what her mother had anticipated, but she couldn’t find the words, or maybe the courage, to defend her friend forcefully enough. Even though Cathy wasn’t agreeing with the other girls, just by being in the room she felt like a co-conspirator.
As the girls listed her alleged shortcomings, Sally felt stunned. She thought to herself, “I still don’t get it. What did I do?” But she couldn’t muster up those words to deliver them. She just sat there, feeling her heart beating in her chest, barely defending herself. And then, finally, someone said it: “We’re not sure you should be hanging out with us anymore. You’re too different from us.”
Sally looked over at Cathy, who had tears welling up in her eyes. Everyone was silent, looking down in their laps, until Sally finally spoke. “OK. . . . OK. . . . If that’s how you feel . . . OK.”
For Sally, there would be no slumber party. In her head she was thinking, “Well, screw all of you!” But she couldn’t bring herself to say that. She gathered up her stuff, said good-bye, and quietly left. Only after she was out the door did she allow herself to cry.
When she got to her house, Sally went into her mother’s bedroom. By then, she was really bawling. She felt devastated. After hearing the whole story, her mother told her: “You know, they aren’t necessarily the nicest group of girls.” Her mom encouraged Sally to strengthen her relationships with other, less catty girls at school. “You’re a great person. You have other girls in your life. They’ll be nicer friends for you.”
Sally’s mother didn’t consider getting on the phone with other parents to complain about what their daughters had said and done. That might be how such matters play out these days, when parents seem so overprotective, but back then parents tended to be more hands-off. Besides, Sally’s mother knew any meddling by her wouldn’t make the other girls embrace Sally. If they didn’t want her daughter in their clique, then good riddance.
Looking back decades later, Sally says the intervention was truly a defining moment for her, devastating and painful, but at the same time liberating and life-changing. “Some of what was said had been true,” she says. “I wasn’t always comfortable around the guys they were hanging out with. Some of them even scared me a little.
“After feeling beat up by my friends and going home and telling my mom, she said exactly what I needed to hear. She did not go to the other moms to try to fix everything. Instead, she reminded me that I was a smart, funny, kind person who had a lot to offer and I had plenty of other friends.
“This was a great lesson in parenting for me. It is not our job, as parents, to go to coaches, teachers and other parents and try to make everything run smoothly for our kids. A lot of parents try talking to the teacher to get something special for their children. They talk to coaches to get their kids more playing time. They’re trying to make everything just right for their kids. They want a perfect world for them. But I’ve come to see that our job is to help our kids become people who are capable and believe in themselves enough to deal with the world. Our job is to help our kids function in the world. And that’s why my mother’s response was such an ‘aha!’ moment for me. I watched her do that.”
In the days after the intervention, Sally says she felt the need to take an honest look at who she was. That soul-searching process turned out to be a gift she gav
e to herself. “It was a moment of self-definition for me, and it was good because it made me more assertive,” she says. “I realized that although I sometimes made mistakes, I was pretty happy with the person I had become and didn’t feel the need to change for anyone. It was wonderful and comfortable and a huge relief to come to that realization. It helped me gain confidence.”
Just sixteen years old, Sally was able to look maturely at some underlying reasons for the other girls’ behavior. She thought through why some of the other girls had turned on her and decided that perhaps they envied her relationship with Cathy, because they wanted to be closer to Cathy themselves. She concluded: “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not going to question myself. I’m going to try to be resilient. I have other friends, and I can fit in with a lot of people, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
As an adult, she looks back with appreciation. “The intervention allowed me to get to know a lot of other girls I never would have spent time with if that had not happened. And I was able to go off to college with a pretty good sense of who I was.”
There are some old photos being passed around here at the reunion that do not include Sally. They are physical reminders of the period when she was out of the group.
By the time high school was over, however, the girls all found themselves concluding that they wanted Sally around. She had remained close with Cathy, of course, and she inched her way back toward the others after they invited her along to parties or got together with her to do homework. She’d also see Karla, Karen, Cathy and Jenny on the days she worked at Boyd’s, scooping ice cream, so that kept them connected.
Some of the photos the girls brought to the reunion show the other ten girls sitting together at the Ames High graduation, or embracing each other after the ceremony, all smiles. Sally isn’t in any of these photos. The girls did invite Sally to sit with them at the ceremony. She considered joining them—it would have felt good to be with them—but in the end she chose to sit with her other friends that day. “Maybe I went with my other friends because I felt they had always been loyal to me,” Sally says now. “Maybe it was payback for the intervention.”
Because the girls could never bring themselves to discuss what happened that night at Cathy’s, it remained an unresolved regret. Even after Jenny was in her forties, it weighed on her that she thought she had never adequately apologized to Sally. So she sent her an email asking for forgiveness. “What we did was rude and cruel and petty and high-schoolish,” she wrote. “I feel really horrible about it.” She said she liked to think that they were not mean girls back then, but she acknowledged that what they’d done that night was mean and awful.
“Your apology is accepted,” Sally wrote back. “I haven’t forgotten about it. But I forgave you all a long time ago. It was a painful time for me, but I learned a lot from that. And I think it has made me a better mother and a better teacher.”
(Recently, Jenny was surprised to come upon notes of apology that she had written to Sally back in high school. She hadn’t remembered these attempts to say how sorry she was after the intervention, and was glad to discover that her younger self had recognized her mistakes and taken the initiative.)
Now that the girls have begun talking about the intervention as adults, Sally says, “I’ve received some beautiful apologies from some of the others, too. They are nice, but not necessary. All of us behaved badly or said things we shouldn’t have at one time or another, but we all seem to be forgiving people. That’s probably one reason our friendship has survived for so many years.”
Looking back, the girls want to believe that they weren’t as hard-hearted as it seemed. They really did have Sally’s interests at heart, they say, and in their own clueless teenaged way, they were just trying to offer Sally tips for overcoming her shyness and being cooler around boys. “I’d like to think that if anyone else had said these things about Sally, that we would have gone to her defense in a heartbeat,” says Karen. It was like the dynamics within a family; family members can criticize one another, but no one else can.
Cathy says the incident was character-building for some of the girls. “In my case, it helped me learn that I have to let people take care of themselves.” Now, as an adult living in California, Cathy has noticed that she continues to follow a pattern in which she becomes a protector and supporter of certain friends. “I used to always have a friend who I’d bring along with me, and there were people who didn’t warm up to her right away. I would have to convince them how great she was.” She says the Ames girls remained that group of eleven after high school because of Sally’s maturity: “We’re all still together because of the kind of person Sally is. She was able to see what happened for what it was: stupid-girl nitpicking.”
Sally has clear memories of who said what in Cathy’s basement—“when people say nasty things to you, you always remember,” she says—but she’s now grateful for it on other fronts, too.
Memories of the incident have led her to strive to instill self-confidence in her two daughters. She’s proud that both of them aren’t clingy with their friends. Meanwhile, as a teacher, she is hyperaware of mean-girl tendencies. In her fifth-grade classes over the years, there have been “cool” cliques—girls who pay more attention to how they dress or girls who have a more sophisticated sense of how to flirt with the boys. These groups have sometimes excluded other girls in the class, who are a bit slower socially. Sally sometimes thinks it’s just that the slower groups aren’t yet ready to be preteens; they want to be children for a while longer.
Sally once saw a girl get booted from a clique in the wake of an argument. Sally was impressed with how the ostracized girl responded: She had enough self-awareness and self-esteem not to fall apart over what happened. And eventually, she found her way back into the group. Sally was proud of her. “She reminded me of me.”
Back in Ames, Sally’s mother knows that the Ames girls are all middle-aged women now, and she appreciates that they have supported and loved Sally for decades. But she has never forgotten that night Sally came home from Cathy’s house in tears, and how her heart ached for her daughter. “I think the girls now recognize that what they did, well, they shouldn’t have done it. That’s all. They shouldn’t have done it.”
There was another episode in the girls’ pre-adult lives that offered insights into how they carried themselves, and how others perceived them. It was the infamous graduation-cake incident.
The night they graduated from high school, the girls gathered for a sleepover party at Cathy’s house. Her mom had ordered a cake from the local supermarket’s bakery, and the frosting on it was supposed to read “Congratulations S Sisters!” The “S,” of course, was an inside joke, because kids in school called them “The Shit Sisters.”
Cathy’s dad picked up the cake, brought it home, opened the box, and no one could believe what was inside. Someone at the supermarket bakery had written “SHIT SISTERS SUCK!” in large letters on the cake. Even worse, all over the cake were giant gobs of brown frosting. With its base of white icing, the cake resembled a snow-covered field after a pack of dogs had stopped by to leave their droppings everywhere. There were pretty flowers made of pink and green icing all over the cake, but each flower was topped with a gross brown glob. It was a cake you wouldn’t want to eat.
The girls were more amused than upset—Karla immediately took a photo of the cake for her scrapbook—but Cathy’s father was livid. The girls had never seen him so mad. This purposely disfigured expletive cake just set him off. “Let’s go, girls!” he said, and Karla, Kelly, Cathy and a few of the others piled into his Ford LTD and sped with him back to the supermarket. He confronted the store manager, who was stunned and apologetic. The manager vowed to mount a full investigation of his entire bakery staff. If there were fingerprints on the brown frosting container, he’d find them.
The girls knew, of course, that some people didn’t like their little clique. Several times, Jenny’s car wouldn’t start because other kids ha
d put sugar in her gas tank. Some of the girls’ houses got egged by male classmates angry at them for dating those boys from nearby Marshalltown. And once “Shit Sisters” was spray-painted on the steps leading into Cathy’s house.
But who at that supermarket would want to ruin their cake?
Suspicion immediately fell on deli employee Nancy Derks, a fellow graduating Ames High senior. Nancy, who hung out with the female jocks at the school, considered the “Shits” as a group to be prissy, looks-focused, boy-teasing conformists. At the same time, however, she was neutral about most of the girls individually. In fact, she admired some of them. Now living on a farm in Stanhope, Iowa, and working in marketing at a meat-processing plant, she hasn’t seen any of the girls since high school. But she says she had no issues with Marilyn (“She was really smart and had her own mind”) or Sheila (“very bubbly”) or Sally (“I remember her as Cathy’s sidekick, and she was nice”). She was friends with Kelly in junior high and recalls her as a good athlete. In fact, she was OK with most of the girls. It was just that as a clique, they completely annoyed her.
At the supermarket, the deli section was adjacent to the bakery section, and Nancy had a friend from Ames High who worked in the bakery. This girl also was no fan of the S Sisters, and when she arrived at work on the afternoon of graduation, she saw that the cake had been baked and frosted earlier in the day. She called Nancy over from the deli section. From the moment they saw that cake, they knew they had to defile it. “It was just too tempting,” Nancy now says. They took out the frosting and turned “Congratulations S Sisters” into “SHIT SISTERS SUCK.” Once that was accomplished, adding the brown globs seemed like adding appropriate punctuation points.
The Girls from Ames Page 14
