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Baby Blues by Kathy Connor Ours was a small town in Iowa where people listened to country music, watched weather reports, bowled on teams, and gossiped at the local cafe. There was just one traffic light. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Baby Blues
Ours was a small town in Iowa where people listened to country music, watched weather reports, bowled on teams, and gossiped at the local cafe. There was just one traffic light. The only traffic: dusty Chevys, Ford pickups, and rattling tractors driven by farmers or their sunburnt children. After chores, farm wives made quilts and pies for church bazaars while their husbands drank cold Budweiser at the local tavern along with bright-eyed youth and ill-reputed women—women like old Schafer’s wife.

Schafer’s Union 76 was on the corner of the first intersection of town, coming in past the fairgrounds and air strip. The station had two gas pumps with room enough for only one car to park between the pumps and the tiny office. Behind the office, the Schafers lived in an equally tiny house. Every time my dad and I pulled in, Schafer’s wife would emerge looking tired, her big, droopy blue eyes made up with thick black eyeliner that seeped into her crow’s feet. She wore hot pants in summer and parkas in winter. Her bleached hair wound around fat rollers the size of juice cans.

Schafer’s wife spent all day pumping gas with those giant curlers tucked under a dark bandanna tied like a scarf. Her bulging breasts flattened up against the window as she reached across to clean it, the squeegee an extension of her arm. As her cleavage pressed on and off the glass, I’d stare straight ahead knowing my father was doing the same, each pretending we didn’t notice.

I wondered why her hair was always in rollers. What was the point? Three-fourths of the town saw her that way and only that way, rain or shine, heat or snow.

Spending all day with her hair wound up meant she never laid her head down once between sunrise and sunset.

There were a few brief years when she stayed home at night. A child bride at fifteen, she played with her babies like they were dolls. She would fix their hair and paint their faces with her Mary Kay makeup. But babies get big and gasoline gets old. Schafer’s wife began finding her peace at the bar downtown. And when her daughters started painting their own faces, her barstool search for solace grew desperate.

One warm summer night Schafer’s wife ran off with the bank president’s son, a college boy, back in town to celebrate his graduation. The local phone wires buzzed with the news: "Local barfly whisks away banker’s son, twelve years younger than she, thirty years younger than her husband, and of a different breeding."

At first I had a lot of sympathy for old Schafer who was left with three teenagers at home and a business to run. After his wife was gone Schafer himself emerged whenever a car pulled into the single space. Where had he been all those years when his wife was the one pumping gas in her big curlers, facing every kind of weather? All that time going through the motions, taking her hair down only at night, making it lie just right so maybe, in the few hours between work and sleep, she might catch a look from someone across the tavern. I realized that her big breasts slapping up against our windshield were a plea: "Look at me. Can you see me?"

While the rest of the town still shook from the scandal, I saved a smile for old Schafer’s wife. Half her life spent wrapped around those rollers paid off in one night when her blonde curls hung just right and the smoke of the tavern softened those tired eyes into dreamy baby blues.

Profile
Kathy Connor is my youngest sister. The other day a girlfriend from our hometown, Waukon, Iowa, called and asked how Kathy was doing. "She isn’t practicing law much lately. My husband and I just flew to Hollywood to see her perform the lead role in Celebrity, a new play at the Actors’ Gang." My friend was impressed, but not really surprised. Kathy seems able to do anything she sets her mind to.

I’ve often wondered why Kathy chooses to live in a place like Los Angeles, but she’s always marched to the beat of a different drummer. Kathy skipped her last two years of high school to attend college, then moved to Malibu at nineteen on scholarship to law school. She spent her twenty-first birthday in Italy, roaming the streets of Venice with a friend and a bottle of Chianti.

I remember when our little town was our world. We performed skits in our neighbor’s garage and charged a nickel a show. Kathy also kept a diary. I remember her calling from her bedroom, "What did I do last Saturday night?" We all had to stop to help her complete an entry. Kathy figured her diary would be famous someday, like Anne Frank’s.

Kathy’s successes are bittersweet to me. It’s exciting to see her on television or to help her edit a play. But the excitement fades when I remember she and her daughter Mara are not available to do everyday things with our other sister and myself—like taking our kids out for ice cream or choosing a shampoo together at Wal-Mart. There are memories for tomorrow that we should be making today. Talking on the telephone just isn’t the same.

—Kealy Connor Lonning

Bio
Kathy Connor
Place of residence: Los Angeles.
Day jobs: Attorney. Acting teacher.
Education: B.A., University of Iowa. J.D., Pepperdine University.
Serial publications: Los Angeles View. The Daily Breeze. Waukon Standard.
Awards: University of Iowa Honor Society Essay Scholarship Award. Winner of London Moot Court Competition. Softball champion.
Current project: Acting; teaching drama to homeless young people.
Favorite book: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Belief: Irish Catholic Democrat.
Favorite person: A little brown-eyed girl named Mara.
Hero: Miep Gies.

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