The Girls from Ames (24 page)

“The thing is, he’s Catholic,” she later told Marilyn. “That’s fine. We can just be friends.”

Jane and Justin got close pretty fast, having long talks over regular lunches and evening phone conversations. Jane was impressed by what a great listener Justin could be. He was so emotionally intuitive. At least to her, it felt platonic.

But early in October, in a surprise four-hour conversation over the phone, Justin confessed to Jane that he felt far more than a friendship with her. It took Jane a few more weeks to admit to Justin that yes, perhaps she had feelings for him, too. But even at that point, the two of them had never had a romantic moment. They had never touched each other. They’d never kissed.

Jane went back to Ames for Christmas break and told the whole story to Karen and her mom. “I think this could be it,” she told them. “He’s the greatest guy I’ve ever met, but I’m scared. I don’t know if I can marry a guy who isn’t Jewish.”

Karen’s mom listened to all she had to say and then responded simply: “Honey, you have to go with your heart. If you do that, and your heart says this is the man, then you can work out the religious issues.”

When Jane talked to Marilyn by phone, Marilyn offered the same advice. “You’ve got to go for it. Period.”

After New Year’s, Jane flew into Columbus, Ohio, on the same day Justin flew in from his home in Rhode Island. He was standing waiting for her at her gate when her plane arrived. It was a seventy-mile drive to Athens in a rental car, and as Jane later explained to Marilyn, they both felt a heightened sense of things. “We were talking and talking. The whole conversation was just, ‘Oh my God, will this even work?’ ”

Justin drove Jane to her apartment and parked the car, and she invited him in. It didn’t take long before they shared their first kiss.

By the time Jane got married in 1989, with Marilyn by her side, the other Ames girls had decided that Justin reminded them of a Kennedy. He was this bright guy with a New England accent and this terrific smile. “I feel like I’m talking to JFK when I’m with him,” Karla liked to say. “He just has this East Coast charisma.”

Jane and Marilyn at Jane’s wedding

Justin and Jane would eventually settle in New England as academics—Justin at Brown and Miriam Hospital, Jane at Stonehill—and the girls were unanimous in deciding: There might not be enough quality guys out there, but Jane had found one.

 

 

A
year later, in the fall of 1990, Marilyn’s time finally came. She had joined the Jaycees board as a way to do volunteer work and to meet new people. At a Jaycees social event, she met an attractive fellow board member named Chris Johnson. He was on his way to a career as a business consultant, and he just seemed at ease with himself. The conversation had an effortless feel about it.

Marilyn threw the bait in the water first, casually saying, “I don’t have anything going on this weekend.”

Chris got the message. “Me, either.”

He’d later say it was love at first sight. He was taken with Marilyn’s eyes and with her straightforward personality. He’d been in relationships that felt tedious, because there was such game-playing. But Marilyn just seemed so natural and honest, with a gee-whiz sense of life.

For their first date, they went on a picnic together at Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. Marilyn packed a lunch for both of them, and they walked around the lake together. Eventually, they stopped to buy ice cream, and later, they went to Chris’s condo to listen to the Broadway original cast album of
Phantom of the Opera
.

On the second date, Marilyn got bold. She asked Chris, “So how many children do you want to have?”

He answered: “As many as I can put through college.”

Marilyn smiled at that. She thought it was a perfectly reasonable answer. Maybe he’d end up a billionaire and they’d have 750 kids.

Chris was a practicing Lutheran, and he told her that his faith guided his life. As he and Marilyn got more seriously involved, he encouraged her to find her way closer to her own faith. Her dad had been a questioning Christian, and that had influenced Marilyn over the years. As Chris got to know Dr. McCormack, he suspected that the 1960 auto accident had been a turning point for him. “Having lost a child in a tragedy like that, he couldn’t help but curse God,” Chris told Marilyn. “And your dad was a doctor, unable to find a way to save his son. That had to add to the pain. Anyway, that’s my hypothesis on his feelings about God.” Chris helped Marilyn better understand her father, and at the same time, he held her hand as she came to embrace a life more centered around faith.

Within a year, Marilyn was on the phone with Jane. “I’ve got a question,” she said. “Would you be my matron of honor?”

Jane thought of the thousands of hours she and Marilyn had spent talking about love, wondering about the possibility of marriage, doubting whether they (or any of the girls) would find their ultimate soul mate.

“Would I be your matron of honor?” Jane asked, and paused before answering.

If you’ve spent your entire life knowing you were the most qualified person in the world for a certain job, and then the offer finally comes, well, it’s beyond meaningful.

“You know what?” Jane said. “I just happen to be free that day. I’ll be there.”

T
he girls have piled into two cars, and they’re headed to a restaurant in downtown Raleigh for the reunion’s only night out. In Angela’s car, Cathy is answering questions and the mood is giddy.

As is often the case when they get together, the girls have been pumping Cathy for the latest trends from California. Over the years, Cathy has told them about enema-loving Hollywood stars who, while in her makeup chair, would gush to her about the therapeutic value of colonics. At other times, Cathy has told the girls about the good karma and positive energy to be found in crystals. And once, when Karla, Kelly and Diana visited Cathy in L.A., Cathy was in a soy phase. (Karla kept saying, “Look, I’m from the Midwest. I want dairy. I want cheese and a glass of milk. All you have in this refrigerator is soy!”)

Now, here in Angela’s car, no one can stop laughing as Cathy reports on yet another trend she’s been hearing about on the West Coast: “the Aussie makeover.” Cathy has no personal interest in this, so-called down under cosmetic procedure. But she has learned the details about vaginal procedures that allegedly improve a woman’s self-image by correcting what Aussie makeover specialists call “asymmetrical” issues brought on by age and childbirth.

From there, the discussion turns to anal bleaching, a new cosmetic procedure to bleach the pigmentation of the most private circle of skin on a person’s body.

As the girls laugh and cringe about this, Angela comes up with a marketing plan. “A company could offer a service where they bleach a gerbil,” she says, “and then they send the gerbil right up there. They could call it ‘The Herbal Gerbil.’ ” Everyone roars at that.

Eventually, the conversation morphs into a discussion about body image, dieting and the new horizons of healthful eating. “Mark my words,” Cathy says. “In two years, you’ll all be cooking with coconut oil.”

“Or bleaching with it!” Angela says.

 

 

T
he girls always have been each other’s pop-culture monitor and barometer. They’ve spent their lives trading stories of fads worth emulating, singers worth appreciating and their own celebrity sightings.

In elementary school and junior high, Sally and Cathy shared crushes on teen idol David Cassidy. Sally was also partial to Bobby Sherman. Diana, meanwhile, had a “Donny Osmond Kissing Poster,” which was very useful when the other girls visited and had an urge to kiss Donny Osmond.

The girls watched
The Partridge Family, The Cosby Show, M*A*S*H,
and, in reruns,
Gilligan’s Island
. In their preteen years, they thrilled to the PG sexuality of
Love American Style
. Each week, the show offered a few unrelated episodes about love, romance and sexual urges, and it seemed so risqué at the time. The girls didn’t really notice that parts of the show were politically incorrect—the leering men, the women as playthings. It just seemed like a cool vision of adulthood, with the same large brass bed playing a role in so many of the episodes.

In those days of just a handful of channels, the girls often would watch programming with their parents. Cathy liked to come home from school in the afternoon and sit on the couch with her mom to watch Merv Griffin. Her friends also watched talk shows with their parents: Dinah Shore’s
Dinah’s Place
or
The Mike Douglas Show
. It was so unlike TV viewing today. The Ames girls’ children are more apt to be on the computer in the afternoon, or they have all sorts of youth-focused channels to choose from—the Disney Channel, MTV, Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network—with programming designed specifically for them. As kids, many of the Ames girls liked watching stars from their parents’ and grandparents’ eras; it was kind of cool when Jimmy Stewart or Fred Astaire showed up on Merv or Dinah or Mike, offering a window into this older world. These shows helped young and old get to know each other’s icons.

For those living in Iowa, the forces of pop culture emanating from the East and West Coasts could seem very far away. But sometimes there would be reminders that Iowa, too, was on the map. On
Star Trek
, the character of Captain James T. Kirk proudly hailed from Iowa. There was even a line in the 1986 movie
Star Trek IV
in which a woman from twentieth-century Earth comes upon Kirk and asks him if he’s from outer space. “No, I’m from Iowa,” he tells her. “I only work in outer space.”

Nice line. For Iowans, it offered a reminder that even the sky wasn’t the limit.

Though TV and movie stars rarely or never made it to Ames, musicians did. They passed through on concert tours or, at the least, came as close as Des Moines. And whether they came to town or not, the Ames girls’ connections to their favorite singers and groups were often as close as their bedside tables. Cathy considered it a big deal that Sally had a record player in her room. They’d sit in her room in the afternoons, playing records by the Osmond Brothers and the Jackson 5. Then, as they got older, their tastes ran to groups such as Styx and Journey. Over at Jane’s house, she and Marilyn were often listening to Fleetwood Mac: “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow . . .” Diana and Kelly obsessed over a certain Andy Gibb video.

Sheila, Cathy and Sally attended their first concert, a performance by Bread, with Sheila’s dad as chaperone. Later, when the girls started driving, they’d head south to Des Moines for shows by Foreigner, Little River Band and, at the Iowa Jam outdoor rock concert, Ted Nugent.

Several of the girls stood in long lines to get Bruce Springsteen tickets when he came to Ames in 1981. (Bruce’s posters and back-stage passes actually featured an illustration of a large ear of corn; he knew where he was performing.) At one point toward the end of the concert, Bruce pulled the young daughter of one of the Ames High teachers, Mr. Daddow, out of the audience to join him onstage! As Mr. Daddow’s daughter danced along with Bruce, and some of the Ames girls danced in the audience, it was an absolute vicarious thrill, as if Bruce had invited all of them on stage.

The girls sometimes rewrote lyrics to their favorite songs. As senior prom approached, Marilyn wrote in her diary about how she and her friends had recast the words to the Carpenters’ song “Close to You”: “Why do tears suddenly appear / Every time, prom is near? / Just like me, girls long to be, at the prom . . .”

Diana, Jane and Rod Stewart, then and now

By high school, most of the girls agreed that though Rick Spring-field was cute, Rod Stewart was just about the sexiest thing going. There was something about the gravel in his voice, his unbuttoned shirts and that sly smile of his. As the girls got older, and so did he, they still felt that Mod Rod had a certain magnetism. As Cathy puts it one night at the reunion: “Now he’s ugly sexy.” Her words make perfect sense to everyone else. There’s just something about an ugly sexy guy that’s even more viscerally tantalizing than a handsome sexy guy.