The Girls From Ames Part 1

The Girls from Ames.

A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friends.h.i.+p.

by Jeffrey Zaslow.

Introduction.

At first, they were just names to me.

Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny.

Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana.

Sheila.

They arrived, unheralded, in my email inbox one morning in June 2003. The email came from Jenny, who offered three understated paragraphs about her relations.h.i.+p with these women. She explained that they grew up together in Ames, Iowa, where as little girls their friends.h.i.+p flourished. Though all have since moved away-to Minnesota, California, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ma.s.sachusetts, Montana-they remain a powerful, loving presence in each other's lives. Now entering their forties, Jenny wrote, they're bonded by a lifetime of shared laughs, and by more than a few heart-breaking memories.

After I read Jenny's email, I sent her a quick reply, thanking her for writing. Then I printed out her message to me, bundled it up with a couple of hundred other emails I received that day, and put it in the bottom of a filing cabinet, where it remained untouched for three years.

Jenny had contacted me because I write a column for The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal called "Moving On." The column focuses on life transitions, everything from a child's first crush to a dying husband's last words to his wife. Though the called "Moving On." The column focuses on life transitions, everything from a child's first crush to a dying husband's last words to his wife. Though the Journal Journal covers the heart of the financial world, my editors have embraced the idea that we must also tend to the hearts of our readers. And so they've given me freedom to do just that. There are a thousand emotionally charged transitions that we all face in our lives, and most come without a road map. That's the territory of my column. covers the heart of the financial world, my editors have embraced the idea that we must also tend to the hearts of our readers. And so they've given me freedom to do just that. There are a thousand emotionally charged transitions that we all face in our lives, and most come without a road map. That's the territory of my column.

Jenny decided to tell me about the girls from Ames (and yes, they still call themselves "girls") after reading a column I'd written about the turning points in women's friends.h.i.+ps. The column focused on why women, more than men, have great urges to hold on tightly to old friends. Sociologists now have data showing that women who can maintain friends.h.i.+ps through the decades are healthier and happier, with stronger marriages. Not all women are able to sustain those friends.h.i.+ps, however. It's true that countless grade-school girls arrange themselves in pairs, duos, threesomes and foursomes, vowing to be best friends forever. But as they reach adulthood, everything gets harder. When women are between the ages of twenty-five and forty, their friends.h.i.+ps are most at risk, because those are the years when women are often consumed with marrying, raising children and establis.h.i.+ng careers.

For that column, I spoke to women who had nurtured decades-long friends.h.i.+ps. They said they felt like traveling companions, sharing the same point on the timeline, hitting the same milestones together-thirty, forty, fifty, eighty. They believed their friends.h.i.+ps thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others. They had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from each other, but not constant attention. If a friend didn't return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn't mean she was angry or backing away from the friends.h.i.+p; she was likely just exhausted from her day. Researchers who study friends.h.i.+p say that if women are still friends at age forty, there's a strong likelihood they'll be lifelong friends. "Female friends show us a mirror of ourselves," one researcher told me.

That column ran in The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal on a Thursday, and by 5 A.M. that morning, emails from readers had begun filling my inbox. Every few minutes, well into the weekend, I'd get an email from yet another woman proudly telling me about her group of friends: on a Thursday, and by 5 A.M. that morning, emails from readers had begun filling my inbox. Every few minutes, well into the weekend, I'd get an email from yet another woman proudly telling me about her group of friends: "We've gotten together twice a year ever since we graduated high school in 1939 . . ."

"We met in Phoenix and call ourselves Phriends Ph.o.r.ever . . ."

"We've had lunch together every Wednesday since 1973 . . ."

"My girlfriends and I joke that when the time comes, we'll all just check into the same nursing home . . ."

"I'm only 23, but your article gives me hope that I will hold on to my friends for life . . ."

One reader told me about her grandmother's eight friends, all from the cla.s.s of '89-that's 1889! They stayed remarkably close for sixty-five years, and even when they reached their eighties, they still called themselves "The Girls."

And then there was the letter from Jennifer Benson Litchman, an a.s.sistant dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Jenny from Ames.

In some ways, Jenny's story was like so many of the others. She shared a few details about how the eleven Ames girls met, some as early as infanthood in the church nursery, and how they feel bonded forever. But her short, tossed-off note didn't fully reveal how extraordinary those bonds have become-I'd learn all that later-and she didn't even tell any of her friends she had written to me. Jenny ended her email by saying that she appreciated my take on female friends.h.i.+p. She also paid me a compliment: "You really seem to understand women. Your wife is very lucky indeed."

My wife would have to speak to how lucky she is or isn't, but I can say this: I do feel an almost urgent need to understand women. That's mostly because I am the father of three teenagers, all daughters.

I have seen my girls pout and fret and cry over friends.h.i.+ps in turmoil, and I have seen how their friends have buoyed them at their lowest moments. At times, their sweetest friends have turned into stereotypical mean girls. At other times, former mean girls turn into friends. As a parent witnessing it all, I often feel helpless and exasperated.

Having observed how my mother, sister and wife built lovely friends.h.i.+ps over the years, I naturally hope that my daughters can be as fortunate. When I think about their futures, I want them to feel enveloped by people who love them, and I know they'll need close, loving friends at their sides. (I'm also aware that men's friends.h.i.+ps are completely different. I've been playing poker with a group of friends every Thursday night for many years. About 80 percent of our conversations are focused specifically on the cards, the betting, the bluffing. Most of the rest of the chatter is about sports, or sometimes our jobs. For weeks on end, our personal lives-or our feelings about anything-never even come up.) There have been many self-help books designed to help women find and navigate friends.h.i.+ps. Scholarly books have been written, too. And of course bestselling novels have won huge audiences by focusing on the sisterhood among fictional women.

But as a journalist, I know there's great power in honest stories about real people. So, over time, I found myself intrigued by the idea of asking one articulate group of long-standing friends to open their hearts and sc.r.a.pbooks, to tell the complete inside story of their friends.h.i.+p. I had a real sense that a nonfiction narrative-the biography of a friends.h.i.+p, meticulously reported-could be a meaningful doc.u.ment for female readers. Perhaps it would also help me understand my daughters, my wife and the other women in my life.

And so in the summer of 2006, I returned to that filing cabinet, and went through all the emails from women describing their friends.h.i.+ps. I read them again, building a short stack of possibilities. I contacted many of the letter writers, and they were all very eager to share their thoughts.

They told me that when women think about their friends, they find themselves pondering every part of their lives: their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their dependence on other women, their need for validation, their relations.h.i.+ps with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters . . . everything.

Many of these women shared beautiful anecdotes with me. They all said their friends could certainly fill a book. But once I called Jenny and spoke to her for a while, I had a sense that she and the ten other girls from Ames had a sweeping and very moving story to tell. That was confirmed when I eventually met each of them. They were born at the end of the baby boom and their memories are evocative of their times. Born in the middle of the country, they now live everywhere else, but carry Ames with them. Their story is universal, even common, and on that level it can't help but resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. And yet some of their experiences together are so completely one-of-a-kind-haunting and touching and exhilarating-that I found myself feeling spellbound as they talked to me.

The Ames girls were intrigued by the idea of a book about them, but understandably, several were hesitant at first. It is not an easy decision to reveal your life to a journalist (and eventually to the world), and I tried to move slowly and respectfully with them. Turning their lives into an open book, I said, would be a journey for them and for me. I wanted to know vital details of their interactions, the good and the bad. I'd ask them about the times they showed each other great care and compa.s.sion. But I also wanted them to reflect on the times they disappointed each other or were purposely unkind. How did they overcome those moments and remain so close for so long?

A few of them feared that my reporting for the book might bring up old ghosts or highlight long-ago misdeeds or challenge their a.s.sumptions about themselves. I asked them to take that risk with me. Yes, I hoped that the finished book would honor and strengthen their friends.h.i.+ps. But I couldn't guarantee that everything would go smoothly and that no one would get hurt.

We began with tentative steps. One by one, often in long phone conversations after they tucked their kids into bed, they talked to me about their loving feelings for each other, the rougher times between them, and about how their story, if told well, could benefit other women of all ages. I decided to take a year-long leave from my job at the Journal Journal, so I could travel around the country spending time with them. I immersed myself in their lives, asking them to think back, to think hard, to force themselves to remember everything as clearly and honestly as they could. Why did they choose each other? Who were they then, and who are they now? They all turned out to be so articulate, so able to find perspective and broader truths. Because of that, compiling their story became a remarkable experience for me as a journalist.

As we got to know each other, the Ames girls became more comfortable with me. In time, they let me read hundreds of pages of secrets locked in their old diaries. They shared stacks of letters and emails they had exchanged. They introduced me to their parents, children, siblings, husbands and old boyfriends. They even pointed me toward women outside their group who saw them as a clique and didn't much like them.

Born in 1962 and 1963, they spoke vividly about what it was like to be girls in the sixties and seventies, young women in the eighties and new mothers in the nineties. They offered up countless examples of how close female friends.h.i.+ps can shape every aspect of women's lives.

Almost all of the Ames girls are scrupulous savers, chronicling their lives together in sc.r.a.pbooks and photo alb.u.ms, holding on to whatever memorabilia marked their friends.h.i.+p. That was a huge help in piecing together their story. Because I had their diaries, letters, concert ticket stubs and notes pa.s.sed in homeroom, I was able to track many of their interactions to the exact day and even the exact hour. I felt like an archaeologist, sifting through crumbling prom corsages, looking for meaning.

Of course, there were plenty of challenges. When I'd tell people about this project, some wondered whether it was an appropriate task for a man. Could a man ever really understand women's friends.h.i.+ps? It was a fair point. And I admit that I sometimes asked the Ames girls questions that were silly, obvious or naive. I'd catch them trading glances, and I knew that they were thinking: "This guy doesn't get it, does he?" And yet I also think that being a man gave me a wider canvas. I was often inquisitive in ways a female interviewer would not have been. I made no a.s.sumptions. I asked. I rephrased. I tried to comprehend. On some fronts, my outsider's curiosity helped enrich the story you're about to read.

In the end, the girls and I agreed that to make the project work, it had to be based on a great deal of trust between all of us. We worked to build that trust, interview by interview, recollection by recollection, sometimes with tears, sometimes with great laughter.

Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana, Sheila.

Theirs is the story of eleven little girls and the women they became. I feel privileged to have this opportunity to tell it.

A Guide to the Ames Girls (Childhood photos on left, high school graduation photos in center, current on right) Marilyn

The doctor's daughter; earnest, risk-averse, a bit of an outsider in the group; closest to Jane. Now she is a stay-at-home mom in Minnesota.

Karla

Adopted at birth; lively and lovable, but as a girl, not always sure of herself; first to have a child (her daughter Christie). Now she's a stay-at-home mom.

Sheila

The dentist's daughter; considered the sweetest of the girls growing up; an incorrigible flirt. She left Ames for Chicago to help families with ill children. Never married.

Kelly

Free spirit of the group and the most likely to surprise them with her words and actions. Now divorced, she is a high school teacher in Minnesota.

Jane

Smart, studious, bonded with Marilyn, and the only Jewish member of the group. Now she is a psychology professor outside of Boston.

Diana

Known as the beauty of the group. Now married with three daughters. Certifed public accountant by profession, she now works at a Starbucks in Arizona by choice.

Cathy

Last of seven siblings, which made her more worldly as a girl. Never married. Now she works as a makeup artist in Los Angeles.

Sally

Smart, funny, but at the periphery of the group in early years; brought into the friends.h.i.+p by Cathy. Now she is a teacher and the only one remaining in Iowa.

Karen

The auto dealer's daughter. Longtime nickname: "Woman." Now she is a stay-at-home mom near Philadelphia.

Jenny

One of the archivists of the friends.h.i.+p; close to Sheila; last to have a child. Now she is the a.s.sistant dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Angela

Newest member of the group; arrived in town in ninth grade, when her father came to manage a hotel in Ames. Now she runs a PR firm in North Carolina.

1.

The Girls in the Photos.

The old photos are spread all over the kitchen table, and in so many of them, going back so many years, the eleven girls are completely mashed together. This is how they loved posing. Arms all intertwined. Or giving each other the tightest group hug. Or they'd line up, chest-to-back-chest-to-back, all scrunched up, KarlaSallyKarenDianaJennySheilaJaneAngelaMarilynCathyKelly, as if they were one living, breathing organism with eleven separate smiles.

There's a photo of them in their school lunchroom, spent milk cartons in front of them, and they're laughing and leaning into each other, arms draped over every available shoulder. In another photo from their teen years, taken from overhead, the girls are lying flat on their backs on a carpeted floor. Their heads are pressed together in a circle, with each body pointed outward, like rays from the sun. It wasn't enough for them to be head-to-head-to-head, all of them beaming; some decided to hold hands, too.

They were just as tactile as they got older. In a photo taken when they were in their twenties, Kelly is pregnant, and the other girls have their palms on her belly. In another photo, from their thirties, they're all squished on a bed at Karla's house, their legs overlapping.

The "girls" are forty-four years old now, and these images of their younger selves are a reminder that in certain crucial ways, nothing has changed. The pictures are laid out tonight on this kitchen table at Angela's home in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and as the girls look through them, there is an ease with which they touch each other. A hand will nonchalantly rest on someone else's arm. Over on the sofa, a head will drop casually onto someone else's shoulder. They're comfortable sitting close together, four of them on a couch meant for three, almost on each other's lap.

This summer visit to Angela's is the latest Ames girls reunion, and ten of the eleven girls are here. That's everyone except Sheila, though as far as the ten of them are concerned, she's here, too. For one thing, Sheila is in photos all over the table, looking up at them with that full-on smile of hers. For another thing, as they explain it-well, they can't quite explain it. She's just here with them, that's all.

They've been gathering like this all their adult lives. Every year or so, they fly or drive somewhere to be together, and once they arrive, it's as if they've stepped into a time machine. Being in each other's company, they feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see themselves through thousands of shared memories.

Yes, they're all forty-four. But in their heads and hearts, they are also twelve and fifteen and seventeen and back in Ames.

As twelve-year-olds, they'd sit in a circle, combing each other's hair.

As fifteen-year-olds, they knew what it was like to kiss the same cute boy. Kelly knew and Karen knew and Marilyn knew, but didn't tell anyone.

As seventeen-year-olds, they were slightly wild and unwittingly cliquey, and every weekend, the eleven of them would squeeze into two cars, and off they'd drive, in search of eleven boys.

Growing up in the corn-and-college town of Ames, home to Iowa State University, they were exposed to so many of the same influences-the rural values of family and hard work, the focus on higher education, the constant presence of alcohol among their peers. Day after day, they shared the not-always-appreciated joys and often-exaggerated complaints about small-town life. But no matter what, the girls loved the place then and love it more now. It's a town of just 53,000-about half of whom are transient Iowa State students-and it can be traveled end to end in fifteen minutes. That's a small s.p.a.ce, yet it offered the girls a microcosm of how the wider world worked. All around Ames sit cornfields, with a farmhouse here or there, and not much else off into the horizon. But in the town itself there was an energy, with adults falling in love and doing meaningful work, or making mistakes and paying the price, or taking the time to teach the girls life lessons they've never forgotten. For the girls, who often say they feel like sisters, Ames was their shared womb.

As friends there, they certainly weathered disagreements and disappointments. They traded harsh words and cold shoulders. They annoyed and angered each other. But they always vowed to remain that group of eleven, even after they left Ames and built new lives. What they could never have predicted in Ames were the exact numbers to come: They ended up moving in or out of seventeen different states. Between them, they found nine first husbands and two second husbands, and brought twenty-one children into the world. They have buried five parents.

They've come together for this four-day weekend at Angela's not just to reminisce and review all that ground; they've also come to share tentative predictions and yearnings about what's ahead in each of their lives. Sometimes two or three of them will disappear into a corner of Angela's house for a private connection. Other times, all ten will sit and talk as a group. A few of the girls are facing serious moments of transition. It is a relief, they say, to have these hands to hold, these ears to hear them, before they embark on their uncertain futures.

Karla's change is imminent. She has decided to move with her husband and kids from their home in Edina, Minnesota, to a new home they are building in Bozeman, Montana. Moving day is later this summer. To an outsider's eyes, this may seem like no big deal; families move from one place to another all the time. But the Ames girls know that in Karla's case, this is a move accompanied by painfully raw emotions, and their hearts ache for her. Karla's decision to go is actually a way of attempting a new life after the life she and her family had together was forever altered. "Come sit with me. Let's talk," Jane says to Karla. And they do, well into the night.

After this weekend, Kelly's life will also take a different path. Her divorce is just now final, after two years of struggling that left her without primary custody of her kids. She talks freely of how she envies some of the other Ames girls and their marriages. "I want to find a relations.h.i.+p as powerful and meaningful as the ones you have," she says to them. "And I will."

Marilyn has come to the reunion with a copy of a letter she wrote and mailed out just a week ago. It's a letter to a truck driver she spoke to just once on the phone, in a conversation that lasted only a few minutes. She has never met him, and knows almost nothing about him, except for a flash of memory from long ago, and a few things she has since learned through a Google search. She has the letter in her purse but hasn't yet shown it around. Maybe later in the weekend, she'll take it out. "When the time is right," she tells a few of the girls, "I have something I'd like you to read."

Cathy, meanwhile, is at her own turning point, because she's on the cusp of changing her career. For many years, she has been a successful Los Angeles-based makeup artist, touring the world with Janet Jackson or working with the casts on sitcoms such as Frasier Frasier. Lately, however, the thrill of being what she calls "a face-painter" to the stars has pa.s.sed, and she has decided to use other gifts-her dry sense of humor, her insights into people, her grasp of words. She plans to try to make it as a screenwriter.

Over the next four days, the Ames girls will pay little attention to the outside world, leaving their cell phones in their suitcases and their kids in the care of their husbands. They will spend time laughing so hard that they'll have to make emergency trips to the bathroom. They'll also cry over the deepest sorrows imaginable-matters they never contemplated back when they were girls.

"That couch out on the porch, for some reason, that has become the crying couch," Cathy says at one point. "You sit down there, you start talking, you start crying."