The Girls from Ames (21 page)

Karen, Karla, Angela, Diana and Marilyn

Looking back, though, the girls realize something about all this. It’s true that they weren’t especially embarrassed to be caught passing 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 breasts. 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 friendships.

FBB suggested a certain kind of intimacy. But not everything was out in the open.

 

 

A
ll 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 sexual 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 embarrassed 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 naïve? 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 passed 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 sexually 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 sex 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 sex-education proponent in Ames. He knew sexual 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 sexually 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 sexual 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 reassure 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 passed 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 assumed it fit in the gray area of sexual 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 sex differently than the other girls, felt it best to keep her own set of secrets.

K
elly 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 passed 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 friendship 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 sanctity 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.