The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow

Author:Jeffrey Zaslow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Autobiography, Women, Social conditions, Iowa, Social Science, Friendship, Female friendship, General, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Women In The U.S., Women - Iowa - Social conditions, Social History, Biography & Autobiography, Female friendship - Iowa - Ames, Ames, Regional Subjects - Midwest, Women's Studies, Women - Iowa - Ames, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781592404452
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2009-04-21T10:52:59.922000+00:00

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.

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