The Girls From Ames Part 7

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 friends.h.i.+p-when fabulous best buddies could enjoy their bodily functions without blus.h.i.+ng. 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 embarra.s.sed to be caught pa.s.sing 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 friends.h.i.+ps.

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 s.e.xual 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 embarra.s.sed 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 naive? 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 pa.s.sed 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 wave 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 s.e.xually 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x-education proponent in Ames. He knew s.e.xual 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 s.e.xually 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 s.e.xual 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 rea.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed it fit in the gray area of s.e.xual 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 s.e.x 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 pa.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 sanct.i.ty 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 ever 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 pa.s.sion within her-"gusto," he called it-and that impressed him. They felt natural together. Eventually, a friends.h.i.+p 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. .h.i.tting 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 friends.h.i.+p. "In the end, who is more important in your life, your girlfriends or your men?" Kelly wondered. "I say friends.h.i.+ps last a lifetime. The h.e.l.l 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.

Later that night, as Angela headed off for her honeymoon, the other girls went barhopping. Karla went along, but seemed disconnected. Kelly noticed. "Come on, Karla," she said. "We're here to party. Snap out of it."

Karla was kind of quiet, and as they drove around looking for the next stop, she spoke up. "I'm sorry," she said. "But you've got to get me to a pay phone." They obliged her and waited in the car while Karla leaned against the wall of a convenience store, the pay phone pressed against her ear, checking up on Christie. She just wouldn't get off the phone. It was getting annoying. She had to ask her mother for every detail about Christie's day.

When Karla returned to the car, she had an announcement. "I've got to go back to Ames."

"What happened? Is everything OK?" Diana asked.

"Yeah, yeah, fine," said Karla. "I just miss Christie too much. I want to go back."

The other girls were still feeling young, still in a partying mode. And here was Karla, completely baby-focused. She seemed terribly conflicted.

"OK," said Kelly. "We'll drive back tomorrow. But for now, you're with us, so let's go find a bar."

Karla agreed, and the girls went off to find another nightspot. They got back to their hotel well after midnight, talked for a while, and then fell asleep-but not for long. Karla woke up at 5 A.M., all churned up, and nudged Kelly awake. "We've got to get going," she said. "I want to leave now. I need to get back to Christie."

Kelly would have loved to sleep longer, of course. She hoped to have a leisurely breakfast in Kansas City. Maybe lunch, too.

"We have to say good-bye to the other girls," Kelly said.

"We'll leave them a note," Karla answered. "Come on. Let's go."

Leaving at 5 A.M. was a crazy idea, but Kelly was so impressed by Karla's urges regarding motherhood that she groggily agreed to accommodate her. They got dressed and loaded up Kelly's little red Honda Prelude, and as the sun rose over Kansas City, they headed back to Ames.

Christie was a happy baby, and Karla loved watching her interact with Bruce when they visited each other. He'd spread out all six-foot-five of his body on a blanket on the floor, and he'd hang out there, talking to her and kidding around with her. He was just great at making her laugh, and she made him laugh, too. "Oh my G.o.d," Karla would think to herself. "He absolutely loves her."

"We're pretty good little buddies," Bruce liked to say, holding Christie in his arms.

When Karla's divorce was final in the fall of 1990, she strapped ten-month-old Christie in her car seat, left Arizona and drove to see Bruce in Idaho. She talked to Christie on the entire road trip, and Christie babbled back at her, as if she understood everything.

Karla's father died that December at age sixty-eight, and seeing her mother lose the love of her life made Karla realize that real love needs to be honored and embraced. By February, Karla was ready. She and Bruce decided to get married. Their wedding ceremony was at a bed-and- breakfast in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. They had a three-person honeymoon weekend of skiing in Sandpoint, Idaho, with one-year-old Christie happily wearing her first pair of skis.

After marrying Bruce, Karla told the other Ames girls that it was hard to say who was more content, her or little Christie. Both of them were completely in love with Bruce and in love with Idaho. (Karla's ex-husband, Kurt, eventually signed away all parental rights to Christie, and Bruce formally adopted her.) Karla liked to describe Christie as always smiling, always thinking, always paying close attention to adult conversations. Christie, even at that young age, carried herself with a kind of maturity that was unfamiliar to Karla. When some of the other Ames girls came to visit and met Christie, they were struck by how well mannered and mature she seemed. They'd joke that she couldn't be Karla's child.

Meanwhile, Bruce's career had begun taking off, and he was making a good living, working his way up the management ranks at a computer-network hardware manufacturer. "I don't fully understand all that his company does," Karla told the other Ames girls when they'd ask. "Next time you see him you can feel free to ask him, but you still might not be able to figure it all out."

One night, Karla was on the phone with Kelly and told her: "Christie and I are both deliriously happy. In the last few years, I could never have imagined being as happy as we are." She talked about the little ski boat she and Bruce had bought, and how they were going boating every weekend. She talked about their German shepherd, Luke, who had become Christie's companion and playmate. And she explained how Bruce was so easy to live with and to love. "There's a calmness in my life now that I just appreciate so much," she said.

One day, when Christie was just under two years old, Karla's idyllic life in Idaho took a terrifying turn.

Karla and Christie had gone to Bruce's parents' house on Lake Coeur d'Alene to pick raspberries in their sprawling garden. At one point, while Karla's back was turned, Christie opened the gate and walked off.

Karla called her name, but there was no answer. Where could she be? How far could a twenty-two-month-old go in that short a time? Was it possible someone took her?

Karla felt a panic unlike anything she'd felt before. From her in-laws' house, she could run in two directions-up into the mountains or down toward the lake. She figured that Christie could survive longer alone in the mountains than if, G.o.d forbid, she had wandered into the lake. And so Karla sprinted through an open field down to the lake, screaming, "Christie! Christie!"

There was no response. Karla knew every second mattered.

Karla kept running and came to a two-lane road. There in the distance, she saw their dog Luke walking on the shoulder of the road. A pickup truck was on the side of the road next to the dog. And then Karla saw a woman holding Christie in her arms. Karla ran to them and hugged Christie with all her might, wiping away tears.

"We were driving along, and we saw the dog and your little girl," the woman said. Her husband was still behind the wheel in the pickup. "Anyway, your dog kept pus.h.i.+ng your little girl into the ditch on the side of the road so she wouldn't wander into traffic. We saw what was going on and we stopped to help. You're very lucky. Your dog here saved your little girl's life. That dog is a hero."

The woman said she would have brought Christie inside the pickup, but Luke just kept barking. He knew she was a stranger, and he was being protective of Christie. The woman felt as if Luke was telling her: "Don't put this little girl in your vehicle. Keep her out here, where I can see her."

Karla thanked the woman and her husband, held Christie tighter, and reached out to hug Luke, too.

Later, she would tell the other Ames girls about what happened-about the panic she felt in those awful moments before she found Christie unharmed, and about the relief she felt holding Christie in her tightest embrace. Karla was ahead of the girls on so many fronts-from marriage to motherhood. And in experiences both awful and wonderful, she was a reminder to the rest of them about the most visceral feelings of love that a woman could have.

10."If Not for You"

In the living room at Angela's, the girls are reviewing the boys they had in common back in Ames during their teen years. The photos they're sharing are bringing back memories.

There was sweet Darwin Trickle, of course, who at different times dated Diana, Cathy, Angela and Sheila. As a celebrated jock, he was the guy at school who could pretty much have any girl he wanted. But he never took advantage of that. The girls remember him as a gentleman who wasn't especially full of himself.

There was Jeff Mann, the cornfield keg organizer, who shared his first kiss with Marilyn in sixth grade, had one short moment with Sally at a party in high school and later dated Karen. He was a nice guy, a football player, who one day accidentally cut off his big toe while mowing a neighbor's lawn. On the football field, Jeff became known as "The Nine-Toed Wonder," a moniker preserved forever in the sports-page clippings pasted in Karla's sc.r.a.pbooks.

"He had to go to the hospital and he never finished mowing the lawn, so his neighbor only paid him for half the job," Karen says. "Jeff wasn't too happy about that."

"Well, he could have finished mowing while they were waiting for the toe truck," Cathy says. It's a joke as old as the injury, but everyone still laughs. (Kelly recalls Jeff from their days together in a youth group at their Presbyterian church. Marilyn was also in the group. "Jeff was one of the few guys who could tell me to behave-and I would," Kelly says.) The girls keep naming names-laughing, talking, recalling.

"Remember who took me to the prom?" Cathy asks. Not everyone does, but a few of the girls pull up the memory and then break into smiles. Cathy went to the prom with a boy who had a crush on her starting in junior high. He asked Cathy to be his prom date in October of their senior year-a full seven months in advance. For a high-school kid, that's a lifetime away. "I told my mom it was way too early," Cathy says. "Who asks a girl to the prom in October? What if I fell in love with someone else in all those months?" But her well-meaning mom insisted she accept the invitation, and so she did.

Once the girls' conversation turns to their lives after they left Ames, the male names they have in common dry up. In their college years and in their twenties, they were scattered. So they didn't have the same kind of immediate shorthand they had as kids. Sure, they phoned often, wrote letters, visited each other. But they were mostly on their own, with too many miles between them.

When Marilyn went off to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, a part of her liked living in an environment where she wasn't always being identified as Dr. McCormack's daughter. She could just be Marilyn, even if she wasn't sure just who Marilyn was. At the same time, she desperately missed her family, her dad's daily wisdom, and especially the familiar connections she had with the other girls. Even though she had often felt like a slight outsider when the eleven of them prowled around Ames together, she now appreciated them more than ever. In a way, they were a lifeline for her.

Her college roommate was a girl who loved rainbows so much that she had a rainbow mug, coat, sweater, suspenders . . . everything! An arc of rainbows covered her side of the room. The girl had an upbeat rainbow personality-she was the type who'd happily say, "Have a nice day!" She and Marilyn got along; still, Marilyn never could match the easy and loving rapport she felt with, say, Jane. She'd sit in her dorm room, surrounded by all those rainbows, and she'd try to imagine the humorous comments that Jane and the other Ames girls would likely make about the decor if they ever visited.

Sometimes, Marilyn found herself feeling strangely emotional at unexpected moments. Freshman year, she was invited to someone's house for Thanksgiving, and as soon as she arrived in the living room, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. She walked into the kitchen, and again she was choked up. What was going on? Why was she losing it? And then she realized: The home had the exact floor plan as Jane's house in Ames. She missed Jane.

She wrote a lot of letters to Jane, who had stayed in Iowa to attend Grinnell College. Marilyn's letters were often addressed to "my absolute bestest friend," and some of them were wide-eyed travelogues about the thrills of freshman-year independence. She began one letter: "I'm having a good time, a yabba-dabba-do time!" But Marilyn would also honestly a.s.sess her college experience with a bluntness she couldn't bring herself to share with any of her fellow students at Hamilton. "I want to fall in love," she wrote in one letter to Jane. "I'm physically lonely."