The Girls from Ames (3 page)

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.

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

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

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

One of the archivists of the friendship; close to Sheila; last to have a child. Now she is the assistant dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

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.

T
he 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 space, 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 relationship as powerful and meaningful as the ones you have,” she says to them. “And I will.”