After they were finished ruining the cake, they stapled shut the lid to the box a couple dozen times, so whoever came to pick it up wouldn’t bother to open it at the store. Sure enough, it remained unopened until Cathy’s dad got the box home.
Nancy and her friend were long gone from the supermarket by the time Cathy’s dad and the girls showed up to complain. But the manager soon figured out that Nancy and her friend were likely suspects and he called them in. He told them that if they didn’t confess, he’d hire a handwriting analyst to determine who wrote “SHIT SISTERS SUCK!” in frosting. He worried that Cathy’s father could sue for defamation of character. He told Nancy he had called the cops, and that she needed to go down to the police station to confess before things got even worse for her.
Nancy did as she was told, and the police officer seemed intrigued by the whole escapade. It was the first cake caper of his career, and he said he appreciated that she had owned up to it. “Could you really have done a handwriting analysis on the frosting?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “You wrote in block letters. So we couldn’t have analyzed it. That’s why we’re glad you confessed.”
Nancy was charged with criminal mischief, had to pay a $50 fine, and was fired from her job at the supermarket, which she had held for three years. The manager fired her over the phone. Her friend, however, was fired in person, and the manager yelled so loudly that every shopper in the store heard him. (That helped news of the defiled cake to spread around Ames.)
When Sally’s mother learned about the defaced cake, she assumed the Ames girls had been unkind to the culprits. Given what had happened to Sally that night in Cathy’s basement, she thought to herself: “People wouldn’t just write something like that on a cake unless they’d been hurt in some way.”
But actually, Nancy Derks says, the girls hadn’t been mean to her or to anyone else she knew. It was just that some girls at Ames High were put off by their friendship, by the sometimes haughty way they carried themselves, by the way they interacted—by their whole mini-sorority-like sisterhood. In truth, of course, some girls just envied the bonds between them.
Through the years, Nancy has told friends the story about the cake, the frosting/handwriting analysis threat, and her confession to the police. People find it amusing. She has no regrets about her decision to find that brown frosting and squish it into globs on that graduation cake. “I’d do it again,” she says.
Almost thirty years later, the girls can now look at the photo of that graduation cake in Karla’s scrapbook and see it as a kind of badge of honor—proof that they didn’t go unnoticed in Ames. But they also know that the “Shit Sisters” cake photo is a reminder of how others sometimes perceived them and how they weren’t always their best selves, whether to the wider world or to each other.
8
FBB and Other Secrets
FBB.
What was FBB, anyway?
Here at the North Carolina reunion, Jenny has brought letters from Sheila and Karla, written decades ago, and FBB is scrawled on more than a few of them.
“Fabulous Best Buddies. That’s what it meant,” says Jenny.
“You’re so polished now,” Karla says. “Maybe that’s what we’d like it to be. That’s not what it was.”
FBB?
“It was farts, burps and boobs,” says Karla.
Of course. It was like a secret code for the Sisterhood of Unladylike Behavior. If the girls were in only each other’s company, with no boys around, it was no big deal to release the F, to summon up the first B, and to obsess about the second B.
When some of the girls reached their twenties, FBB became their shorthand reference. Scribbled in the margin of a letter, it was a nod to the good old days when immaturity was one of the bonds of their friendship—when fabulous best buddies could enjoy their bodily functions without blushing. In their memories, FBB suggested that very little was off-limits between them.
Karen, Karla, Angela, Diana and Marilyn
Looking back, though, the girls realize something about all this. It’s true that they weren’t especially embarrassed to be caught passing gas. It’s true that they felt comfortable talking openly to each other about their full bladders, the hair on their legs or the size of their breasts. But when it came to their hearts, especially their broken hearts, it could be far harder for them to open up. There were boys and then men who hurt them in ways they couldn’t always bring themselves to articulate to the other girls. There were times when they felt humiliated or ashamed and kept it to themselves. Their silence stood as a reminder that there are uncertain parameters in even the closest friendships.
FBB suggested a certain kind of intimacy. But not everything was out in the open.
All of the girls knew boys (and then men) who disappointed them or behaved badly. But talking about these experiences with each other often made them too uncomfortable. Sometimes, a guy who acted in ungentlemanly ways with one of them would be just fine with the others. Given their insecurities and the uncertainties surrounding some of their romantic interactions, it was hard to completely calibrate a guy on the male behavior scale. Maybe he was OK. Maybe he wasn’t.
Marilyn endured two incidents in high school that, for years, she never fully discussed with any of the girls besides Jane, her closest confidant.
One incident in Marilyn’s sexual education occurred on New Year’s Eve 1980. All the girls were at a party, and after midnight, a handsome college guy offered to drive Marilyn home. She knew him from his days at Ames High; he’d graduated two years earlier and was enrolled at Iowa State.
After they got in the car, he said he didn’t want to drive her home just yet. “Let’s just go to my fraternity house for a little while,” he said. Marilyn knew it was getting late and her parents would be waiting for her, but she agreed to go. After all, a college fraternity house is an exciting place for a high school girl, especially on New Year’s Eve.
Marilyn and the boy ended up in a room together, and he began kissing her. That was fine by her, she was kissing him right back, but then he reached into her pants.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Yes you do,” he said. “You know you do.”
“Absolutely not,” she told him. “That’s not who I am.” He persisted for a moment until she said, “I want to go home. Please take me home.”
He just shook his head in mock disgust and walked away from her. He had no intention of driving her home after she’d pushed him away like that.
It was a cold winter night. Marilyn got her coat, left the frat house and, with tears streaming down her face, began walking the two miles to her house. It was almost too frigid to walk, and Jane’s house was closer, so she stopped there and knocked on the door.
“Marilyn, what are you doing here?” Jane’s mother asked. “Where’s Jane? What happened?”
Jane was still at the original party, and Marilyn, her voice quivering, told Jane’s mother the whole story. “How did I get myself in that situation?” she asked. “What did I do wrong?”
Jane’s mom did her best to be understanding as she drove Marilyn home. Marilyn later told the whole story to Jane, but was too embarrassed to tell the others. Yes, they knew this guy, and he might have later put the same pressure on them. But Marilyn blamed herself for what happened. Had she led him on? Was she too naïve? It wouldn’t be easy for her to discuss these things with anyone besides Jane.
A more serious incident happened after the homecoming dance that year. Marilyn had been drinking and ended up in the backseat of a boy’s car. She was making out with him and then, because of all the liquor she had consumed, she passed out.
She wasn’t sure how long she was out of it, but when she woke up, the boy’s pants were undone, she felt disheveled, and she had a clear and spooky sense that something had happened against her will. She was instantly panicked. “What are you doing?” she asked the boy, almost shrieking, feeling both the alcohol and a huge wa
ve of terror.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
He wasn’t going to tell her what had transpired. She left the car, found her way home, and spent the night groggy and petrified that she had lost her virginity. In all her dreams, she’d never expected this would be the way it would happen. The next morning, she talked to her sister. “I think I was raped.”
Her sister told her that she could have a sexually transmitted disease or she could be pregnant, and so she’d better tell their father. Marilyn found the courage to call Dr. McCormack at his office. He could sense in her voice that something was very wrong and told her to come see him.
He had patients in various examining rooms, but he took Marilyn aside and listened to her. “I think I might have had sex last night,” she told him.
He was calm; that was always his way. His words were measured. He asked her to explain what she meant by that.
She told him the story. “Dad, I saw blood.”
Dr. McCormack, of course, was the biggest sex-education proponent in Ames. He knew sexual issues had to be dealt with directly and honestly. And so he got right to the point. “Yes, the fact that there was blood could be an issue. When the hymen is broken, sometimes there’s blood.”
Her dad was straightforward. “We don’t know how sexually active this boy might be, so venereal disease could be an issue.” He gave her a shot of penicillin. At the time, penicillin was considered the best treatment for gonorrhea and syphilis; now there are resistant strains of gonorrhea, so other antibiotics are used.
Dr. McCormack also gave Marilyn a gentle lecture about how she should try not to put herself in a position that could lead to this sort of trouble. He decided not to call the boy or his parents. He knew there were often gray areas of sexual behavior and that his efforts were best spent making Marilyn aware of them.
When Dr. McCormack got home from work that night, he took Marilyn aside again. Four years earlier, in 1975, the Food and Drug Administration had ruled that postcoital contraceptives—morning-after pills—would be permitted for cases of rape or incest. Dr. McCormack had decided to give the pills to Marilyn.
There were five little red pills. She took them, and they made her sick. She spent the next day throwing up.
It was not easy for Marilyn to talk to the other girls about exactly what had happened. She mentioned it in broad strokes: She drank too much, a boy took liberties, she learned a lesson, etc.
Marilyn told Jane the boy’s name. Kelly found out much later. “He was probably confused about what he could and couldn’t do with a girl,” Kelly said when she heard the story, giving the boy the benefit of the doubt. “He thought what he was doing was OK.” Kelly had had her own encounters with this very guy, and though he had been frisky, she thought to herself, “He’s not a bad guy.” Word was that the boy was well endowed, and so Kelly tried to reassure Marilyn that he hadn’t penetrated her. “If he tried anything, you’d have known,” Kelly said. “A guy that big, you definitely would have known.”
But, truth was, Marilyn had to live with the fact that she would never know. The boy would never say. And she would never be able to remember what happened while she was passed out in the backseat of that car.
The unshared secrets carried by the Ames girls could last for years. That very boy, the one from the backseat of the car, would happen upon Kelly a year or so after college. Kelly was back in Ames for Thanksgiving—she was soon to be married—and she was drinking at a bar with Diana. The guy was there with them, drinking, reminiscing about high school, as they all kicked peanuts around the barroom floor.
Kelly drove Diana home, and after she dropped her off, this guy was still in the car with her. They started making out, then went further. A few weeks later, she got married. She wouldn’t tell any of the other girls about this impulsive fling until much later, after her marriage had failed. At the time, she didn’t even think to discuss with them what this event might have signified regarding her feelings for her husband-to-be. (Also, she hadn’t known Marilyn’s story at the time. If she had, she doesn’t think it would have mattered much to her anyway. She’d also have assumed it fit in the gray area of sexual encounters. She believed that the boy was basically a decent person.)
Despite how close they were, that’s the way it seemed to go. Marilyn couldn’t reveal that she likely had been date-raped. And Kelly, who viewed love and sex differently than the other girls, felt it best to keep her own set of secrets.
9
Defining Love
Kelly is on a roll. “I think we’re meant to love many times in our lives, in many different ways, and probably more than a few different men,” she says to some of the other girls sitting on the porch at the North Carolina reunion. “We’re supposed to have a young love. And then maybe another love, like a middle-aged love. And then perhaps we have an old love. That might be the way we should all be going through life. But our society doesn’t really allow for that.”
Karla has heard it all before. “You’ve been saying that all your life,” she says to Kelly. “And I think you’ve got it wrong. I think we’re meant to truly love one person, to have a life partner.”
Karla says she has a soul mate, someone who was chosen for her, perhaps divinely. Certainly, he was meant for her. “I just didn’t find him right away,” she says.
Kelly shrugs. “There are many levels of love, that’s all I’m saying. There’s the way we love our children; maybe that’s the strongest love. And there’s the way we love men, which is different and not necessarily forever.”
Diana, Kelly, Karen, Cathy
In the summer of 1990, Angela and Karen got married a few days apart. Karen’s wedding was in Ames, and Angela’s was two hundred miles away, in Kansas City. So the Ames girls planned to come home for Karen’s wedding, then take a road trip together down to Kansas City for Angela’s. (Karen was marrying a sharp guy she’d met at Iowa State; he’d gotten a job as a software developer for the Department of Energy in Chicago. Angela had been working as a bartender at Chi Chi’s, and met her husband through his stepmom, a waitress there.)
Karla, then living in Arizona, brought her five-month-old daughter, Christie, to Karen’s wedding, and the other girls fell in love immediately. Christie was like a little doll in a pink dress, sitting at the reception with them, a thin white headband with pink ruffles around her head, an angelic smile on her face. The girls passed her back and forth, like doting aunts. It was as if Christie belonged to all of them.
The other girls saw that Karla was completely entranced by motherhood. Christie was a perfect little baby, and Karla felt so comfortable holding her and showing her off. The girls watched her snuggle with her baby, partly envying her and partly wondering about the ways in which loving feelings would swell inside them when their time came to be mothers.
Earlier, Karen had told Karla that she wanted to honor their friendship by having her do an inspirational reading during the wedding ceremony. Karla declined, saying her presence on the altar wouldn’t feel right. She and Kurt were in the process of getting divorced; she had filed just weeks after Christie’s birth. “It would be hypocritical for me to do a reading about the sanctity of marriage,” she told Karen.
A few days after Karen’s wedding, Karla left Christie with her parents in Ames and drove down to Angela’s wedding in Kansas City with Kelly and Diana. It was the first time Karla had been away from Christie for more than a few hours, and it was hard for her to say good-bye. Still, it was a necessary trip, being with the girls again, because it was on that car ride that she told the others about a wonderful man she had met.
Karla had been working in property management, and one day a man walked into her office. His name was Bruce, and he arrived with his brother to sign a new apartment lease. Bruce was six-foot-five and strikingly handsome. He had a mustache, this perfect smile, and the bluest eyes Karla had ev
er seen. He told Karla a little about himself. He had grown up on a wheat farm in Montana and got his degree in business marketing at the University of Idaho. He was in Arizona working in construction with his brother.
He had a Tom-Selleck-in-the-eighties look about him, but with a mullet haircut. (Given the times, that haircut looked just right on him.) Karla had immediate feelings for him. Bruce couldn’t help but notice Karla, too, and thought she was beautiful and vivacious.
Bruce carried himself with a gentleness that Karla found striking. He was “kind”—that’s the word that came into Karla’s head. It was a form of kindness she hadn’t experienced from a man before. For his part, Bruce told Karla that she had this passion within her—“gusto,” he called it—and that impressed him. They felt natural together. Eventually, a friendship turned into romance.
Karla told the girls that Bruce had moved back to Idaho, where he had gone to college. They were staying in close touch, and the realization was hitting both of them that they wanted to spend their lives together, raising Christie.
At the reception after the ceremony, Cathy, Diana, Kelly and Karla sat at the same table, and the discussion turned to love and friendship. “In the end, who is more important in your life, your girlfriends or your men?” Kelly wondered. “I say friendships last a lifetime. The hell with men.”
Karla listened to her and then answered quietly. “I want to be completely devoted to a man and to have a man completely devoted to me. That’s what I dream of.”
The other girls were taken with her optimism. She still had this utopian ideal.
“You can’t count on men,” Kelly said. “I believe that if we had an ideal society, we’d fall in love a few times.”
This wasn’t exactly appropriate talk for a wedding reception. And in any case, Karla remained firm. “There’s a soul mate for everyone,” she said. “I believe that.” In her heart, she was sensing that Bruce would be hers.
The Girls from Ames Page 15
