The Girls from Ames Read Online Free PDF

old then, living in southern Iowa, and that day, Jenny’s grandfather was out driving and came upon a car accident. There had been a police chase, and the officer’s car ended up attached to the mangled bumper of the car driven by a robber on the run. When Jenny’s grandfather stopped to help, the policeman asked him to lend a hand lifting one car’s bumper off the other. He obliged and immediately felt something snap in his neck. From that instant of exertion, he suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, or bleeding onto the surface of his brain. By the next day, he was in a coma—barely living proof that no good deed goes unpunished. He was forty-three years old, and doctors gave him a one in ten thousand chance of surviving a year.
    He lived, however, remaining in a coma until 1947. Without his income as a county agent for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, his family struggled. “We only ate what friends, neighbors and farmers brought to us,” Jenny’s father would tell her. “I know what it’s like to have a can of beans for seven people.”
    Even after Jenny’s grandfather came out of the coma, he was blind and couldn’t speak, so Jenny’s grandmother had to support the family. She ventured to Ames in 1949 with her incapacitated husband, taking a job as social director at Iowa State, with tasks such as overseeing sorority rush and selecting party chaperones. She ended up holding the job for decades. Jenny’s father went to Ames High, where he befriended Sheila’s dad. Jenny’s grandfather eventually recovered his sight and speech, and lived until 1976.
    That’s the story of how Jenny ended up calling Ames home, but few of the girls were aware of that. When they were young, they were most apt to ask her dad, “Can Jenny come out to play?” They wouldn’t have thought to ask him, “So what brought you to Ames?” Only in adulthood have the girls come to recognize and appreciate the thousands of different destinies and decisions, going back generations in their families, that brought them all together.
     
     
    I n junior high, the most thrilling weekend activity in Ames, at least for thirteen-year-olds, was the basement make-out party. Most homes in town didn’t have finished basements like middle-class homes have today. The basements then were cinder-block dungeons with bugs and dusty storage boxes. But in those damp basements, back in the early 1970s, the Ames girls got lessons about a changing world.
    At a party on the last day of seventh grade, the boys and girls played spin the bottle, and the little pecks being issued weren’t enough of a sexual charge for some of the faster kids. So a suggestion was made. All the boys would put their names in a hat. Each girl would pick a name. Then the matched couples would go off to some quiet or dark corner to make out more heavily in private. All of the girls knew, going in, that one of them would end up getting a certain boy’s name. When they agreed to the game, they implicitly agreed to making out with him. Or did they?
    Kelly and the other girls looked across the room at the boy—the only African-American in attendance. He was a nice kid and sort of a friend, but what if they got his name? Would they kiss him? Would they let him slip his hand under their shirts to touch their breasts? Ames was a town with hardly any black people, and Kelly recalls feeling frightened by the possibility and, at the same time, excited by it.
    The hat was passed around and Kelly picked a name. She opened her slip of paper, and it was like winning the jackpot; she had gotten Scott, one of the cutest, most popular boys in school, a kid with dark hair set off by sweet blue eyes. The girl who ended up getting the black boy’s name was not one of the eleven Ames girls. That girl opened up her slip of paper, her eyes met the boy’s, and with hardly a pause for a breath, off she went with him. The two ended up pawing and kissing in their corner, just like everyone else.
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