The Girls from Ames (16 page)

The list could go on for pages. As the girls reminisce at the reunion, rattling off all the experiences and embarrassments that bonded them when they were young, they casually articulate what researchers can now prove scientifically: that women who nurture long-term friendships can find profound comfort recounting shared moments, good and bad. It’s OK if some of those moments make them wince or leave them saddened. Whatever the memory, it’s a gift to have other people who were there with them. No one needs to say it, but they all feel it: “On the entire planet, only the rest of you can remember certain things I remember.”

Marilyn, Angela, Karla, Jenny, Karen and Cat hy at Ames High graduation, 1981

Among the memories:

There was the boy at St. Cecilia who had the God-given dexterity to be able to pick his nose and suck his thumb at the same time. For Sally and Cathy, it wasn’t always easy to pay attention to the teacher, because they were so fascinated by his one-handed performances. (Years later, when Sally was visiting her parents, she came upon an
Ames Tribune
story about an unnamed employee being fired from a Mexican restaurant because he picked his nose. There was no mention of thumb-sucking, but Sally and Cathy felt certain they could identify the perpetrator in a police lineup.)

There was the day in second grade when Cathy got sent home from St. Cecilia’s for wearing culottes. All the female students were required to wear dresses, and Cathy’s split skirt broke the rules. The school couldn’t reach her mom, so Cathy had to walk home alone to get into an appropriate outfit. On her return, she joined Sheila and Sally at recess, where they discussed, with all their second-grade worldliness, how they interpreted the definitions of “dress,” “skirt” and “culottes.”

There was that evening in seventh grade when several of the girls were at Happy Joe’s, an ice cream and pizza parlor. Between them, they had enough money to buy a small pizza. They needed ten more cents to buy a large pizza. Five cute college boys sat at a nearby table, and so the girls, led by Cathy and Kelly, started repeating, loudly and dramatically: “Oh, if we only had a dime . . .” “If we had just another dime, we’d be so happy. . . .” A few minutes later, the college boys finished eating, and before they headed out of the restaurant, each of them stopped at the girls’ table and put a dime on it. The boys smiled and didn’t say a word. Once they were gone, the girls couldn’t stop giggling. There they were, seventh-graders, flirting with college boys! Plus, they could now order that large pizza.

There was the bloody pep rally at Ames High when a football player bit off the head of a live carp to get the crowd into a school-spirited frenzy. Some of the Ames girls recall turning their heads, repulsed, as blood splattered everywhere. Later, the captain of the football team swallowed a live goldfish. It got stuck in his throat and kept moving around. The boy was choking until teachers sent him to the water fountain to wash the fish into his stomach. (Kelly, taking photos for the school paper, followed the boy out of the gym and into the hallway. “It’s still moving,” he said as he tried to wash it down his throat. Kelly felt sorry for him and stopped snapping photos.)

There was that lunch period in the Ames High cafeteria when an all-you-can-eat, do-it-yourself salad bar opened for business, with great fanfare. The cost was 75 cents, and back then, the whole concept was exotic for a Midwestern high school. The Ames girls ate it up.

There was that cloudy, chilly October day in 1979 when the charismatic Pope John Paul II came to Iowa to celebrate a Mass. It was the largest gathering ever in Iowa; more than 300,000 people, including six of the Ames girls, spread across the acreage at a large farm. Just as the pope descended in his helicopter, Angel One, the sun came out. Hundreds of thousands of people remember the pope’s visit, but only the Ames girls recall it for the story of Marilyn’s blanket. Like several of the girls, Marilyn took CPR classes, and she volunteered that day at the Red Cross tent. Marilyn met a boy and sat with him, romantically, on one of the medical blankets. She saved that blanket for many years. For some reason, she couldn’t part with it.

The Ames girls also recall the day in late spring of 1980 when Jane, sunbathing in her backyard, heard a loud popping sound, saw a flash of light and then felt a stabbing pain in her thigh. She screamed as blood poured from her leg. She was able to limp to her house before collapsing. Turned out that neighborhood boys, shooting their BB guns at birds in a nearby yard, had shot her accidentally. Jane was rushed to Marilyn’s dad for treatment. The pellet was embedded so deeply that Dr. McCormack realized he couldn’t remove it without major surgery. (He suggested leaving it be, and the pellet remains in her leg today.) That day, the other Ames girls all signed a card that said simply, “Sorry you got shot.” Jane taped it in her scrapbook. A few weeks earlier, the famous “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of the TV show
Dallas
had aired. And so the Ames girls had fun inviting other kids at school to answer the question “Who Shot Jane G.?” Was it the mafia? Out-of-town enemies?

In the girls’ adult lives after Ames, they’ve each found newer friends. But these more recent friendships are built mostly around their kids, their jobs or their current neighborhoods. The bonds are limited to the here and now, and memory hardly exists.

Because the Ames girls carry this lengthy index of the long ago, they are often forced to be more genuine in their present interactions with each other. They can’t put on airs or accents. Especially accents. One afternoon at the reunion, the girls laugh at the memory of Jenny coming home from the University of South Carolina for Christmas in her freshman year. She’d been gone from Ames just four months and already had a full-blown Southern accent. “Y’all want to go to Karla’s house, or y’all want to just hang out at my house?” she asked.

“Hey, Jenny, y’all want to tell us why y’all are talking like that?” Cathy replied. In Ames, Jenny wore jeans and looked good in flannel shirts. She came back from South Carolina and wore taffeta to a formal dinner party at her house. And so the other girls were relentless in their eye-rolling over this alien Southern belle. That Christmas, they met up with some boys who’d known Jenny in high school and joked that maybe she’d had an accident and hit her head: “Did something happen to Jenny? Her voice sounds kind of odd.”

Jenny’s defense was that a Southern accent can inhabit any human being who ventures down South for even a few months. The girls didn’t buy it. As Cathy sums it up: “She was so busted!”

Here at the reunion, the girls joke that if one of them tries to describe herself for this book as somebody she’s not, they will offer up a friendly chorus of “
Bullshit!
” under their breath until the offender reverts back to who she really is.

Turns out, they never have to gang up on anybody, because when they’re together, the girls almost have to be their most authentic selves. After all, the other nine girls know exactly who they started as (and the child inside them), which, in certain ways, is who they really are.

Cathy thinks that’s the crux of their friendship. Or at least that link to girlhood is what she finds most appealing about their relationships. “You can tell people where you’re from and who you were, which is who you are. But no one really knows you unless they were there. With the other girls, there’s an understanding you don’t have to explain.”

Cathy is now living a life unlike any of the others. For one, she’s long been in Los Angeles, where her career as a makeup artist has flourished, and she is friendly with well-known people such as actress Joan Allen. Second, she never married and never had children. So when the Ames girls trade waves of emails about their kids’ attention-deficit issues or the monotony of a long marriage, it doesn’t resonate for her.

At the reunion, the others often relate to each other mother to mother. They talk about being their husbands’ wives. Sure, Cathy wants to know about their families, but after a while, she wants more. As she explains it: “When Karen shows up, to me she’s Karen, not Katie’s mom. I want to know what’s going on with her, not necessarily how her family is doing. I know she’s a mother and a wife, but I also know who she is as a person besides that.”

Who the girls are, of course, always goes back to Ames.

Cathy’s mom was a Mary Kay and Avon rep in town, a fact Cathy dropped right into the first paragraph of her online bio. For seventeen years, she was represented by the Cloutier Agency, and has now moved to Aim Artists. Both are prestigious agencies that handle many of the most sought-after hairstylists and makeup artists in the entertainment and fashion industries. Some of the bios on agency Web sites can be a bit pretentious, hammering home career highlights and celebrity endorsements. But Cathy’s bio begins simply: “As a kid growing up in Iowa, I loved playing with my mom’s makeup stash. . . .”

The bio serves as an introduction to new clients, and it reveals this about Cathy: Seven words into introducing herself, she wants people to know she’s from Iowa.

Cathy’s L.A. friends are fascinated that she has friends from Ames. They’ll say to her: “It’s amazing you choose to spend so much time with people you knew when you were young. What do you still have in common with them?”

When Cathy considers the question, the answer she has for herself is this: “What keeps me going back to them? What is it I don’t want to sever? I think it’s this: We root each other to the core of who we are, rather than what defines us as adults—by careers or spouses or kids. There’s a young girl in each of us who is still full of life. When we’re together, I try to remember that.”

 

 

T
he Ames girls haven’t tracked all the scientific studies about friendship, the ones showing that having a close group of friends helps people sleep better, improve their immune systems, boost their self-esteem, stave off dementia, and actually live longer. The Ames girls just feel the benefits in their guts.

The research, though, is clear about the positive implications of friendships in women’s lives. There was, for instance, a fourteen-year project at Flinders University in Australia that tracked fifteen hundred women as they aged. The study found that close friendships—even more than close family ties—help prolong women’s lives. Many women in the study had meaningful relationships with children or other relatives; that didn’t appear to improve their survival rates. But those with the most friends outlived those with the least friends by 22 percent. In fact, researchers say a woman who wants to be healthier and more psychologically fit in her old age is better off having one close friend than half-a-dozen grandchildren.

All sorts of studies make similar points.

Duke University researchers looked at hundreds of unmarried patients with coronary heart disease and found that, of those with close friends, 85 percent lived at least five years. That was double the survival rate of those lacking in friends. A Stanford University psychiatric study found patients with advanced stages of breast cancer were more likely to survive if they had a network of people with whom they could share their feelings.

Friends such as the Ames girls, who’ve traveled the timeline together, tend to have more empathy for each other’s ailments. They knew one another when they were younger and stronger, and they’ve watched their bodies change. Gerontologists say longtime friends are often more understanding about health issues than family members are. Friends are more apt to acknowledge each other’s ailments without dwelling on them the way a parent or spouse might. A friend might offer a litany of health issues, especially as she ages, but then she might say: “Let’s forget about the pain we’re feeling today and have fun.” The Ames girls do their share of talking about aches, pains and the aging process—and, especially, about issues related to how their parents are aging—but then they move onward to the next conversation. And given how much they laugh, and how laughter is good for anyone’s health, they figure their time together is completely therapeutic.

“There’s this comfort zone,” says Marilyn. “It’s good for my mental health to know there’s a group of people I can turn to at any moment in my life, and they’ll be my safety net.”

The friendship between the Ames girls fits a common profile on other fronts, too.

Now that the girls have reached their forties together, they’re almost certain to remain enmeshed for the rest of their lives. By the time women are middle-aged, most have picked the people and built the friendships that will sustain them. That was the conclusion of a study that began in 1978 at Virginia Tech, when 110 women over age fifty were first asked to name their closest friends. Fourteen years later, when these women were ages sixty-five to eighty-nine, they were asked the same question, and 75 percent of them listed the exact same names. For almost all of them, their major friendships remained precisely in place. Similarly, a Harris Interactive survey conducted in 2004 found that a healthy 39 percent of women between ages twenty-five and fifty-five said they met their current best friends in childhood or high school. Women—and the Ames girls are proof of this—are likely to connect early and then hold tight to each other. This is despite our transient society or, in some cases, even because of it.