Every so often, the other girls find some geographically undesirable Midwesterner to suggest to her. She almost always passes, but appreciates the efforts.
In the end, Cathy, living in glamorous Beverly Hills, offers the girls a perspective that took decades to completely get their arms around.
When Karla thinks back to that day in Idaho, she says, “Life felt so ordinary—home with Christie and Ben, changing the umpteenth diaper. And here was Cathy; her life was so special. She was hanging out with celebrities and flying all over the world with Michael Jackson.”
For those at home with kids, it was easier to take their lives for granted.
12
Their First Child
From the moment she received it in a Christmas card, Jane has loved a certain black-and-white sepia-toned photo of Karla and her family. It was taken in a studio near their home—they had moved to Edina, Minnesota—in the fall of 2001. Karla, Bruce and their three children are sitting on the floor, their arms nonchalantly on each other’s shoulders or knees. They seem so comfortable pressed together, all of them barefoot, in jeans and casual shirts.
Karla looks like an absolute beauty. If the photo were in a clothing catalogue, she’d be the idealized vision of the modern wife and mother. Her legs are tucked sideways as she leans into Bruce, who is cradling the family dog between his arms.
Eight-year-old Jackie, a perky smile on her face, pokes her head between Bruce and Karla. Ben, age nine, is petting the dog with his left hand, and resting his head on Bruce’s shoulder. And then there’s Christie, age eleven, who is just beaming in her sleeveless shirt, her hand nestled at the edge of Karla’s hair. Christie is just starting to lose her little-girl looks. In her pretty face, it’s easy to see the teenager to come.
Mom, Dad, the three kids, the dog. “This is what people think about when they picture the all-American family,” Jane thought to herself the first time she looked at it.
Here in North Carolina, Jane is telling some of the other girls how she decided to use that photo in a psychological study she recently conducted at Stonehill College. The research project, which involved 140 participants, investigated the effects of family values on sexual prejudice and homophobia. Karla’s family was used to get participants thinking about a traditional family structure.
When Jane asked Karla for permission to use the family photo, Karla was very touched. She tells the other girls she feels honored that Jane would want to use her family in her work. “I really love that photo, too,” Karla says softly.
It was a snapshot in time, an image of her family at a serene and very happy moment.
The Ames girls find a lot of admirable traits in each other’s children. They’ve loved watching all twenty-one of the kids grow, and seeing all the personalities develop. When the girls hang out together as families, it’s as if they’re stepping into the future and back into the past all at once. Being with each other’s kids sometimes gives them a feeling of being in a time machine, because when they look at all of their daughters’ faces—from certain angles, or when the children grin or giggle—they can again see Kelly, Marilyn, Karen, Sally or Diana as young girls back in Ames. So many of the children’s faces feel familiar to them; it’s both disorienting and comforting.
The girls first had that feeling when Karla’s daughter, Christie, was born. They’ve always had a very special place in their hearts for Christie. Part of their affection was rooted in the fact that Christie was the first child born to any of them. But there was also something incredibly endearing about Christie herself. She had this life-loving glow about her. Some kids you can just tell are special, and Christie was one of them.
As an infant, she got passed around by the other Ames girls as almost a trial child. The girls held her in their arms, looked in her eyes, cooed to her, and thought about the mothers they hoped to be.
Once they all started having children of their own, the girls often turned to Karla to learn what Christie was up to developmentally—walking, talking, potty training, everything—so they’d have a sense of what was ahead for their own children.
From just about the moment she was born on January 9, 1990, Christie had been an easy baby with a contagious smile. She grew into a happy kid, extremely close to both Karla and Bruce. Karla loved observing how comfortable Christie felt in Bruce’s strong arms.
As Christie got older, she developed this fun-loving devilish side. She’d get a kick out of manipulating kids, especially her two siblings, Ben and Jackie, who were two and three years younger. In Christie’s mind, younger kids lived to serve her. And she was so pleasant and engaging that other kids always fell for whatever she was asking of them.
“You know what would be fun? If you each took turns giving me backrubs,” a ten-year-old Christie would say to Jackie and her little friends. “Go ahead. Give it a try. You’ll love it.”
And so the younger girls would line up and do just that. And they did love it. Being in Christie’s presence was a blast.
“There’s a deviant side to her,” Karla joked in conversations with the other Ames girls. “She’s so smart and manipulative. And she never gets caught at it.”
Sometimes, Karla would sit nearby and marvel at Christie’s audacity.
“Hey, Ben! Hey, Jackie!” Christie would say. “Let’s play servant.”
Servant?
“I’ll sit here and you guys will be my servants.”
Karla tried to explain to the other Ames girls why Christie could be such an operator and, at the same time, be so lovable. “Maybe it’s because she has the cutest, sweetest giggle. Maybe that’s why she gets away with everything. We all just love that giggle.”
Christie had Ben and Jackie fetch things and do her bidding. “OK, servants,” she’d say. “After you get me a glass of water, go over there and get me all the Barbies with blond hair.”
Given Christie’s Barbie collection, the blondes alone were a whole army. But her little servants complied.
Christie loved playing with Barbies, even as a preteen, well after her friends had outgrown them. She had bins of Barbies. She had the Barbie moving van and the deluxe Barbie Town. She had plenty of Kens, too, of course.
“Christie is so mature in so many ways,” Karla explained one day to Kelly. “She’s got a self-confidence that comes from being wise beyond her years. So her Barbies don’t embarrass her.”
Karla was secretly pleased that Christie was such a die-hard Barbie lover. “Kids grow up way too fast. I’m glad she’s still playing with her Barbies. It’s better than doing who-knows-what.”
Christie may have held on to her dolls longer than most girls do, but in other ways, she was far ahead of her peers. The Ames girls found Christie to be a thoughtful observer of the world. She was the sort of kid with whom you could have a very adult conversation. She listened intently to what adults were saying. She questioned. She commented. Sometimes Karla felt obliged to tell her to go away; maybe other adults didn’t want her horning in on their conversations.
When the Ames girls’ families got together, Christie reveled in being mature. She would look after the younger kids like a doting mother hen. She’d enter a room where the adults had gathered, and the other children would tag along behind her. She was like a Pied Piper, rising from the basement with her own entourage.
Christie had taken babysitting courses at age eleven and had become a very popular neighborhood sitter. Parents liked that she was sweet, confident and responsible. Younger girls loved her because she’d go right to the floor with them to play Barbies until bedtime. And she loved turning household objects into playthings. She’d pretend that laundry baskets were boats; she’d have her servants push her around in them. Sometimes she’d push them, too.
Especially when she was young, some of the Ames girls and their kids thought Christie looked just like the Olsen twins from Full House. Christie was completely flattered by that. Karla loved watching her get excited about things. She loved playing soccer, but she also l
oved being what Karla called “a girly-girl.” “She runs like a girl—arms flying,” Karla said to Kelly. “When she runs for the school bus, those arms of hers are just everywhere.”
Even though none of the Ames girls’ children lived in Ames, Christie sensed the importance of carrying on the girls’ bonds to this new generation. Once, when the girls’ families were gathered together, Christie made friendship bracelets for all the kids to take back to wherever they lived. She saw what her mothers’ friends from Ames meant to her, and she wanted to build her own connections with the other “Ames” kids.
“Now you’re my friend!” she told the children of the other Ames girls as she handed each one of them a bracelet. “And now I’m your friend.”
During the summer of 2002, Christie just wasn’t feeling well, and on September 16, after several doctors visits and a lot of tests, Karla and Bruce learned why. Christie was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. It was a devastating moment for Karla and Bruce—Bruce would later call it one of the saddest days of his life—but they quickly went about figuring out their options.
The other Ames girls were alarmed and worried, of course. They called or emailed Karla, each expressing her love, her promise of prayers, her offer of help. Karla appreciated it all, but was overwhelmed with doctors’ visits and decisions. She couldn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. Within days, however, there was a way for the girls to channel their concern—to remain in Christie’s life, and in Karla’s.
Christie learned about an organization called Caring Bridge, which allows the families of ill children to post messages and updates on a Web site. Friends and loved ones can visit the site to keep track of a patient’s progress and to post messages of their own.
In many cases, the parents write the entries. Christie, then twelve, wanted to write the online diary herself. Her first entry was written from her room at a children’s hospital in Minneapolis on September 27, 2002, at 5:19 P.M.: “Hey, thank you everyone for caring about me. I am doing fine now. On Sunday I go to chemo again. I still have my hair!!!” The next day she wrote another short note: “My friend Meggan is here and she has Krispy Kremes!”
In those early entries, Christie certainly sounded like a kid. But over the months that followed, her voice matured as she did. Her writing became philosophical and achingly honest, revealing a courageousness that the Ames girls found remarkable.
She wrote clearly about every detail of her experience. At times, for instance, she had trouble keeping food down. “The doctor said my body is eating itself. So they decided to give me a naso-gastric tube. It goes into my nose and all the way down to the small intestines. The doctor put it there, rather than in the stomach, because it is far enough down so I can’t throw up the food. It is pretty much baby formula in a bag. I am already putting the weight on. I will get up to ‘fighting weight’ in no time.” She was concentrating on the bright side. “I really don’t like the tube, but I am getting used to it. It’s nice to have some of the pressure taken off of me to eat.”
Some of the girls thought Christie’s diary was reminiscent of Anne Frank’s. Day after day, she described a world that had been terribly unfair to her, and yet Christie’s sense of hope and optimism rarely wavered. Of course, unlike the diary of Anne Frank, read well after she had died, Christie’s diary was read in real time by friends and loved ones. She’d post an entry, and minutes or hours later it was being read by her thirteen-year-old friends and by the Ames girls spread across the country.
As she described her friendships in the online diary, the Ames girls were transported back to their earliest days with each other. Some of them checked the Caring Bridge Web site every few hours, waiting for Christie’s latest entry, hoping for good news.
In suburban Philadelphia, Karen felt she was becoming obsessed with Christie’s site. She found herself reading and rereading it ten times a day. She’d come home with groceries, and before she even put them away, she would head for the computer to see if there were any postings from Christie or from other Ames girls giving Christie encouragement.
All the Ames girls thought back to their interactions with Christie over the years. Kelly found herself focused on how inquisitive Christie could be. Once, when Christie was almost two years old, she and Kelly were walking together, and Christie kept looking over her shoulder. She seemed to be very frustrated. “What’s the problem?” Kelly asked. Christie had found her shadow, it turned out, and each time she tried to step away from it, there it was. “It’s stuck to me,” she told Kelly.
Whenever the Ames girls had gotten together, Christie had a habit of sidling up to Karla and eavesdropping on the women—trying to figure out the world of adult friendships, eager to chime in. Karla would shoo her away, sending her off to watch the other kids, which seemed appropriate at the time. But Kelly, for one, was now feeling regretful that they had been so dismissive. Her kids had begun doing the same sort of eavesdropping, and Kelly found herself hesitant to send them away. She wished she could go back in time and welcome Christie into the circle of Ames women.
Now all they could do was read Christie’s diary, feeling helpless as she described her nausea, fevers and vomiting spells. The Ames girls would read the entries, teary-eyed, wondering how much more her little body could take. But Christie had a way of couching bad news with humor. In one entry she wrote: “My faith in ‘everything happening for a reason’ is slowly slipping. Just kidding! But I’m sure ready to be done with puking and pain.” She’d give regular updates about other ill kids at the hospital, asking her readers to keep them in their hearts, too.
In their postings to Christie, the Ames girls’ messages matched their personalities. Jane always found the most positive news and commented on it: “Glad to hear you had a good day, Christie. Your great attitude is so inspiring for all of us, young and old. Continue to stay strong.” Jane could be playful, too: “We loved the new pictures of you with your friends! How many rules did you have to break to get all those lovely friends of yours in your hospital room?”
Cathy, usually reluctant to boast of her celebrity connections, made an exception for Christie: “I’m going to be traveling to London with Pink for ten days. Are you a fan? Would you like some ‘swag’?” Another time, Cathy was working as Courteney Cox’s makeup artist. She knew Christie was a huge Friends fan, so she had the show send her mugs, a hat, a T-shirt.
Meanwhile, Kelly took on the persona of the fun aunt, making funky suggestions. “Does your school celebrate homecoming, Christie?” she asked in one posting. “To get you in the fall spirit, your mom should TP your hospital room. Have the nurses catch her in the act and chase her down the halls. ☺” After the East Coast blackout in the summer of 2003, Kelly wrote to Christie: “We had no idea that the cord we tripped over and disconnected from the wall while touring Niagara Falls would trigger the blackout. . . .”
Still, at times, Kelly’s postings had a more reflective tone: “Thanks for being such a wonderful teacher through your Web site, Christie. Many people look forward to your words and we have all learned so much from you.”
Christie often wrote about her feelings for Ben and Jackie, wishing they could have a more normal life, despite the abnormal effect her illness was having on the family. In the middle of everything, Jackie had a far-less-serious medical issue; she needed to have her tonsils taken out. Still, Christie didn’t dismiss it as trivial. She described her kid sister’s recovery and wished her well.
One day, Karla cooked homemade chicken soup for Christie, and Jackie held the container on her lap as they drove it to the hospital. While they were driving, the lid came off and the soup spilled. Jackie ended up with second-degree burns and had to be taken to the hospital’s emergency room. The Ames girls couldn’t imagine how Karla could cope with all of this—having two daughters on opposite ends of the same hospital.
Jane found herself thinking: “We all love our kids. But Karla loves her kids with a capital bold-faced L. She’s so devoted. It seems absolutel
y cruel for her to be the one going through this.”
The Ames girls pooled money to pay for a cleaning service to clean Karla’s home and to have catered meals sent in. Karla actually was living at the hospital, in Christie’s room. Even though their home was just a few minutes away, Karla didn’t go back to the house for a month or six weeks at a time. She didn’t want to be away from Christie. One night, because her other two children missed her, she went to the house and Bruce spent the night at the hospital. It didn’t feel right.
The Ames girls sent email after email to Karla, letting her know they were thinking about her. Karla rarely responded. When they called, she wouldn’t call back or she’d speak only briefly. “I have to get back to Christie,” she’d say. The girls found it all very frustrating and painful. Kelly thought to herself: “We’re locked out of Karla’s life just when she needs us the most.”
Karla and Christie in Minneapolis
As Karla saw it, she had to cast her friends to the side. On the day Christie was diagnosed, a doctor told Karla that Christie could die. Given that, Karla wanted to be with her daughter every possible minute. The Ames girls would have to understand. For the most part, they did.
For a while, Kelly, living in Minnesota, was visiting the hospital every Wednesday, and reporting back to the other girls. “Karla is in good spirits—very positive and upbeat, which fills the room. Christie looked good and was in good spirits,” she wrote in one email. “She has the power to transform the air around her.”
The Girls from Ames Page 19
