Fancy Pants

Chapter 20

Francesca discovered something rather wonderful about herself in the next few months. With her back pressed to the wall, a gun pointed to her forehead, a time bomb ticking in her womb, she learned that she was quite intelligent. She grasped new ideas easily, retained what she learned, and having had so few academic prejudices imposed upon her by teachers, never let preconceived notions limit her thinking. With her first months of pregnancy behind her, she also discovered a seemingly endless capacity for

hard work, which she began taking advantage of by laboring far into the night, reading newspapers and broadcasting magazines, listening to tapes, and getting ready to take a small step up in the world.

"Do you have a minute, Clare?" she asked, sticking her head into the record library, a small tape cassette pressed into the damp palm of her hand. Clare was leafing through one of the Billboard reference books and didn't bother to look up.

The record library was actually nothing more than a large closet with albums lining the shelves, strips of colored tape affixed to their spines to indicate whether they fell into the category of male vocalists, female vocalists, or groups. Francesca had intentionally chosen the location because it was neutral territory, and she didn't want to give Clare the added advantage of being able to sit like God behind her desk while she decided the fate of the supplicant in the budget seat opposite her.

"I have all day," Clare replied sarcastically, as she continued to flip through the book. "As a matter of fact, I've been sitting in here for hours just twiddling my thumbs and waiting for someone to interrupt me."

It wasn't the most auspicious beginning, but Francesca ignored Clare's sarcasm and positioned herself in the center of the doorway. She was wearing the newest item in her wardrobe: a man's gray sweat shirt that hung in baggy folds past her hips. Out of sight beneath it, her jeans were unfastened and unzipped, held together with a piece of cord crudely sewn across the placket. Francesca looked Clare squarely in the eyes. "I'd like a shot at Tony's announcing job when he leaves."

Clare's eyebrows rose halfway up her forehead. "You are kidding."

"Actually, I'm not." Francesca lifted her chin and went on as if she had all the confidence in the world. "I've spent a lot of time practicing, and Jerry helped me make an audition tape." She held out the cartridge. "I think I can do the job."

A cruel, amused smile curled at the corners of Clare's mouth. "An interesting ambition, considering the fact that you have a noticeable British accent and you've never been in front of a microphone in your

life. Of course, the little cheerleader who replaced me in Chicago hadn't ever been on the air either, and she sounded like Betty Boop, so maybe I should watch out."

Francesca kept a tight rein on her temper. "I'd like a chance anyway. My British accent will give me a different sound from everyone else."

"You clean toilets," Clare scoffed, lighting a cigarette. "That's the job you were hired for."

Francesca refused to flinch. "And I've been good at it, haven't I? Cleaning toilets and doing every other bloody job you've thrown at me. Now give me a shot at this one."

"Forget it."

Francesca couldn't play it safe any longer. She had her baby to think about, her future. "You know, I'm actually starting to sympathize with you, Clare."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You've heard the old proverb about not understanding another person until you've walked a mile in his shoes. I understand you, Clare. I know exactly what it's like to be discriminated against because of who you are, no matter how hard you work. I know what it's like to be denied a shot at a job-not from a

lack of ability, but because of the personal prejudice of your employer."

"Prejudice!" A cloud of smoke emerged like dragon fire from Clare's mouth. "I've never been prejudiced in my life. I've been a victim of prejudice."

This was no time for retreat, and Francesca pressed harder. "You won't even take fifteen minutes to

listen to an audition tape. I'd call that prejudice, wouldn't you?"

Clare's jaw snapped into a rigid line. "All right, Francesca, I'll give you your fifteen minutes." She snatched the cassette from her hand. "But don't hold your breath."

For the rest of the day, Francesca's insides felt like a quivering mass of aspic. She had to get this job.

Not only did she desperately need the money but she absolutely had to succeed at something. Radio was a medium that functioned without pictures, a medium in which sage green eyes and a perfect profile held no significance. Radio was her testing ground, her chance to prove to herself that she would never again have to depend on her looks to get by.

At one-thirty, Clare stuck her head through the door of her office and beckoned to Francesca, who set down the fliers she'd been stacking in a carton and tried to walk into the office confidently. She couldn't quite pull it off.

"The tape isn't terrible," Clare said, settling into her chair, "but it's not much good either." She pushed

the cartridge across the desktop.

Francesca stared down at it, trying to hide the crushing disappointment she felt.

"Your voice is too breathy," Clare went on, her tone brisk and impersonal. "You talk much too fast and you emphasize the strangest words. Your British accent is the only thing you have going for you. Otherwise, you sound like a bad imitation of every mediocre male disc jockey we've had at this station."

Francesca strained to hear some trace of personal animosity in her voice, some sense that Clare was being vindictive. But all she heard was the dispassionate assessment of a seasoned professional. "Let me do another tape," she pleaded. "Let me try again."

The chair squeaked as Clare leaned back. "1 don't want to hear another tape; it won't be any different. AM radio is about people. If listeners want music, they tune into an FM station. AM radio has to be personality radio, even at a rat-shit station like this. If you want to make it in AM, you have to remember you're talking to people, not to a microphone. Otherwise you're just another Twinkie."

Francesca snatched up the tape and turned toward the door, the threads of her self-control nearly unraveling. How had she ever imagined she could break into radio without any training? One more delusion. One more sand castle she had built too near the water's edge.

"The best I can do is use you as a relief announcer on weekends if somebody can't make it."

Francesca spun around. "A relief announcer! You'll use me as a relief announcer?"

"Christ, Francesca. Don't act like I'm doing you any big favor. All it means is you'll end up working an afternoon shift on Easter Sunday when nobody's listening."

But Francesca refused to let Clare's testiness deflate her, and she let out a whoop of happiness.

That night she pulled a can of cat food from her only kitchen cupboard and began her nightly conversation with Beast.

"I'm going to make something of myself," she told him. "I don't care how hard I have to work or what I have to do. I'm going to be the best announcer KDSC has ever had." Beast lifted his hind leg and began grooming himself. Francesca glowered at him. "That is absolutely the most disgusting habit you have, and if you think you're going to do that around my daughter, you can think again."

Beast ignored her. She reached for a rusty can opener and fastened it over the rim of the can, but she didn't begin turning it at once. Instead, she stared dreamily ahead. She knew intuitively that she was going to have a daughter-a little star-spangled American baby girl who would be taught from the very beginning to rely on something more than the physical beauty she was predestined to inherit from her parents. Her daughter would be the fourth generation of Serritella females-and the best. Francesca vowed to teach her child all the things she had been forced to learn on her own, all the things a little girl needed to know so that she would never end up lying in the middle of a dirt road and wondering how she'd gotten there.

Beast disturbed her daydreams by batting her sneaker with his paw, reminding her of his dinner. She resumed opening the can. "I've absolutely made up my mind to call her Natalie. It's such a pretty name-feminine but strong. What do you think?"

Beast stared at the bowl of food that was being lowered toward him much too slowly, all his attention focused on his dinner. A small lump formed in Francesca's throat as she set it on the floor. Women shouldn't have babies when they had only a cat with whom to share their daydreams about the future. And then she shook off her self-pity. Nobody had forced her to have this baby. She had made the decision herself, and she wasn't going to start whining about it now. Lowering herself to the old linoleum floor, she sat cross-legged by the cat's bowl and reached out to stroke him.

"Guess what happened today, Beast? It was the most wonderful thing." Her fingers slipped through the animal's soft fur. "I felt my baby move…"

Within three weeks of her interview with Clare, a flu epidemic hit three of the KDSC announcers and Clare was forced to let Francesca take over a Wednesday morning shift. "Try to remember you're

talking to people," she barked as Francesca headed for the studio with her heart beating so rapidly she

felt as if the blades of a helicopter were chopping away at her chest.

The studio was small and overheated. A control board lined the wall perpendicular to the studio window, while the opposite side housed cubbyholes filled with the records that were to be played that week. The room also contained a spinning wooden rack for tape cartridges, a large gray file box for live commercial copy, and, taped to every flat surface, an assortment of announcements and warnings.

Francesca seated herself before the control board and clumsily settled the headset over her ears. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. At small stations like KDSC, there were no engineers to operate the control board; announcers had to do it for themselves. Francesca had spent hours learning how to cue records, operate microphone switches, set voice levels, and use the three tape cartridge-or cart- decks, only

two of which she was tall enough to reach from the stool in front of the mike.

As the AP news came to an end, she looked at the row of dials on her control board. In her nervousness, they seemed to be changing shape in front of her, melting like Dali watches until she couldn't remember what any of them were for. She forced herself to concentrate. Her hand flicked to the AP selector switch. She pushed the lever that opened her microphone and potted up the sound on the dial beneath. A trickle of perspiration slid between her breasts. She had to do well. If she messed up today, Clare would never give her a second chance.

As she opened her mouth to speak, her tongue seemed to stick to the roof of her mouth. "Hello," she croaked. "This is Francesca Day coming to you on KDSC with music for a Wednesday morning."

She was talking too fast, running all her words together, and she couldn't think of another thing to say even though she had rehearsed this moment in her mind a hundred times. In a panic, she released the record she was holding on the first turntable and potted up the sound, but she had cued it too close to the beginning of the song and it wowed as she let it go. She moaned audibly, and then realized she hadn't turned off her mike switch so that the moan had carried out over the air. She fumbled with the lever.

In the reception area, Clare watched her through the studio window and shook her head in disgust. Francesca imagined she could hear the word "Twinkie" coming through the soundproof walls.

Her nerves eventually steadied and she did better, but she had listened to enough tapes of good announcers over the past few months to know just how mediocre she was. Her back began to ache from the tension. When her stretch was finally up and she emerged from the studio limp with exhaustion, Katie gave her a sympathetic smile and muttered something about first-time jitters. Clare slammed out of her office and announced that the flu epidemic had spread to Paul Maynard, and she would have to put Francesca on the air again the following afternoon. She spoke so scathingly that Francesca wasn't left

with any doubt about how she felt concerning the situation.

That night, as she used one of her four bent kitchen forks to push a clump of overcooked scrambled eggs around her plate, she tried for the thousandth time to figure out what she was doing wrong. Why couldn't she talk into a microphone the way she talked to people?

People. She set down her fork as she was struck by a sudden thought. Clare kept talking about people, but where were they? Impulsively, she jumped up from the table and began leafing through the magazines she had lifted from the station. Eventually, she cut out four photographs of people who looked like the sort who might listen to her show the next day-a young mother, a white-haired old lady, a beautician, and an overweight truck driver like the ones who traveled across the county on the state highway and picked up the KDSC signal for about forty miles. She stared at them for the rest of the evening, making up imaginary life histories and personal foibles. They would be her audience for tomorrow's show. Only these four.

The next afternoon she taped the pictures to the edge of the control board, dropping the old lady twice because her fingers were so clumsy. The morning disc jockey flicked on the AP news, and she sat down to adjust the headset. No more imitation deejay. She was going to do this her own way. She looked at

the photographs in front of her-the young mother, the old woman, the beautician, and the truck driver. Talk to them, dammit. Be yourself, and forget about everything else.

The AP news ended. She stared into the friendly brown eyes of the young mother, flicked the switch on her microphone, and took a deep breath.

"Hello, everyone, it's Francesca here with music and chit-chat for a Thursday afternoon. Are you having an absolutely wonderful day? I hope so. If not, maybe we can do something about it." God, she sounded like Mary Poppins. "I'll be with you all afternoon, for better or for worse, depending on whether or not I can find the right microphone switch." That was better. She could feel herself relaxing a bit. "Let's begin our afternoon together with music." She looked over at her truck driver. He seemed like the sort of man Dallie would like, a beer drinker who enjoyed football and dirty jokes. She gave him a private smile. "Here's an absolutely dreary song I'm going to play for you from Debby Boone. I promise the tunes will get better as we go on."

She potted up the first turntable, turned down her mike, and as Debby Boone's sweet voice came over the monitor, glanced toward the studio window. Three startled faces had popped up like jack-in-the-boxes-Katie's, Clare's, and the news director's. Francesca bit her lip, got her first taped commercial ready, and began to count. She hadn't reached ten before Clare slammed through the studio door.

"Are you out of your mind? What do you mean, a dreary song?"

"Personality radio," Francesca said, giving Clare an innocent look and a carefree wave of her hand, as if the whole thing were nothing more than a lark.

Katie stuck her head in the door. "The phone lines are starting to light up, Clare. What do you want me

to do?"

Clare thought for a moment and then rounded on Francesca. "All right, Miss Personality. Take the calls on the air. And keep your finger on the two-second delay switch, because listeners don't always watch their language."

"On the air? You can't be serious!"

"You're the one who decided to get cute. Don't sleep with sailors if you're afraid of a little VD." Clare stalked out of the studio and took a post by the window where she smoked and listened.

Debby Boone sang the final notes of "You Light Up My Life," and Francesca played a thirty-second commercial for a local lumberyard. When it was done, she hit the mike switch. People, she told herself. You 're talking to people.

"The phone lines are open. Francesca, here. What's on your mind?"

"I think you're a devil worshiper," a crotchety woman's voice said from the other end. "Don't you know that Debby Boone wrote that song about the Lord?"

Francesca stared at the picture of the white-haired lady taped to the control board. How could that sweet old lady have turned on her like this? She bristled. "Did Debby tell you that personally?"

"Don't you sass me," the voice retorted. "We have to listen to all these songs about sex, sex, sex, and

then something nice comes along and you make fun of it. Anybody who doesn't like that song doesn't love the Lord."

Francesca glared at her old lady. "That's an awfully narrow-minded attitude, don't you think?"

The woman hung up on her, the slam of the receiver sounding like a bullet passing through her headset. Belatedly, Francesca remembered that these were her listeners and she was supposed to be nice to them. She grimaced at the photograph of her young mother. "I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have said that, but she sounded like a perfectly dreadful person, didn't she?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Clare drop her head and clasp her forehead in the palm of her hand. She made a hasty amendment. "Of course, I've been awfully narrow-minded, myself in the past,

so I probably shouldn't cast stones." She hit the phone switch. "Francesca, here. What's on your mind?"

"Yeah… uh. This is Sam. I'm calling from the Diamond Truck Stop out on U.S. ninety? Listen… uh… I'm glad you said that about that song."

"You don't like it either, Sam?"

"Naw. As far as I'm concerned, that's about the biggest piece of faggot horseshit music-"

Francesca hit the two-second delay switch just in time. She spoke breathlessly, "You've got a rude mouth, Sam, and I'm cutting you off."

The incident unnerved her, and she knocked her carefully arranged pile of public service announcements to the floor just as the next caller identified herself as Sylvia. "If you think 'Light Up My Life' is so bad, why do you play it?" Sylvia asked.

Francesca decided that the only way she could be a success at this was to be herself-for better or for worse. She looked at her beautician. "Actually, Sylvia, I liked the song at first, but I've gotten tired of it because we play it so many times every day. It's part of our programming policy. If I don't play it once during my show, I could lose my job, and to be perfectly honest with you, my boss doesn't like me all that much anyway."

Clare's mouth opened in a silent scream from the other side of the window.

"I know exactly what you mean," her caller replied. And then to Francesca's surprise, Sylvia confessed that her last boss had made life miserable for her, too. Francesca asked a few sympathetic questions, and Sylvia, who was obviously the chatty sort, replied candidly. An idea began to form. Francesca realized that she had unwittingly hit a common nerve, and she quickly asked other listeners to phone in to talk about their experiences with their employers.

The lines remained lit for a good portion of the next two hours.

When her stretch was up, Francesca emerged from the studio with her sweat shirt sticking to her body and adrenaline still pumping through her veins. Katie, her expression slightly bemused, tilted her head toward the station manager's office.

Francesca resolutely squared her shoulders and walked in to find Clare talking on the telephone. "Of course, I understand your position. Absolutely. And thank you for calling… Oh, yes, I certainly will

talk to her." She put the receiver back in the cradle and glared at Francesca, whose feeling of elation had begun to dissolve. "That was the last gentleman you put on the air," Clare said. "The one you told your listeners sounded like 'the sort of baseborn chap who beats his wife and then sends her out to buy beer.'" Clare leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her flat bosom. "That 'baseborn chap' happens to be one of our biggest sponsors. At least he used to be one of our biggest sponsors."

Francesca felt sick. She'd gone too far. She'd gotten so carried away being herself and talking to her photographs that she'd forgotten to watch her tongue. Hadn't she learned anything these past few

months? Was she predestined to go on like this forever, reckless and irresponsible, charging forward without ever once considering the consequences? She thought of the small piece of life nestled inside

her. One of her hands instinctively closed over her waist. "I'm sorry, Clare. I didn't mean to let you

down. I'm afraid I got carried away." She turned to the door, trying to get away so she could lick her wounds, but she didn't move quickly enough.

"Just where do you think you're going?"

"To the-the bathroom."

"Gawd. The Twinkie is melting at the first sign of trouble."

Francesca spun around. "Dammit, Clare!"

"Dammit, yourself! I told you after I listened to your audition tape that you were talking too fast. Now,

I goddamn well want you to slow down before tomorrow."

"Talking too fast?" Francesca couldn't believe it. She had just lost KDSC a sponsor and Clare was

yelling at her for talking too fast? And then the rest of what Clare had said registered. "Tomorrow?"

"You bet your sweet ass."

Francesca stared at her. "But what about the sponsor, the man who just called you?"

"Screw him. Sit down, chicky. We're going to make ourselves a radio show."

Within two months, Francesca's ninety-minute talk and interview program had been firmly established as the closest thing KDSC had ever had to a hit, and Clare's hostility toward Francesca had gradually settled into the same casual cynicism she adopted with the rest of the announcers. She continued to berate Francesca for practically everything- talking too fast, mispronouncing words, playing two public service spots back to back-but no matter how outrageous Francesca's comments were on the air, Clare never once censured her. Even though Francesca's spontaneity sometimes got them into trouble, Clare knew good radio when she heard it. She had no intention of killing the goose that was so unexpectedly laying a small golden egg for her backwater radio station. Sponsors began demanding air time on her show, and Francesca's salary quickly rose to one hundred thirty-five dollars a week.

For the first time in her life, Francesca discovered the satisfaction that came from doing a good job, and she received enormous pleasure from the realization that the other staff members genuinely liked her.

The Girl Scouts asked her to speak at their annual mother-daughter banquet, and she talked about the importance of hard work. She adopted another stray cat and spent most of one weekend writing a series of public service announcements for the Sulphur City Animal Shelter. The more she opened up her life

to other people, the better she felt about herself.

The only cloud on her horizon centered on her worry that Dallie might hear her radio show while he was traveling on U.S. 90 and decide to track her down. Just thinking about what an idiot she'd made of herself with him made her skin crawl. He had laughed at her, patronized her, treated her like a mildly retarded adult, and she had responded by jumping into bed with him and telling herself she was in love. What a spineless little fool she'd been! But she told herself she wasn't spineless any longer, and if Dallie Beaudine had the nerve to stick his nose back into her business, he would regret it. This was her life, her baby, and anybody who got in her way was in for a fight.

Acting on a hunch, Clare began to set up remote broadcasts for Francesca's show from such diverse locales as the local hardware store and the police station. At the hardware store, Francesca learned the correct use of a power drill. At the police station, she endured a mock jailing. Both broadcasts were runaway successes, primarily because Francesca made no secret of how much she hated each experience. She was terrified that the power drill would slip and bite through her hand. And the jail cell where they'd set up the remote was filled with the most hideous bugs she had ever seen.

"Oh, God, that one has pincers!" she moaned to her listeners as she raised her feet off the cracked linoleum floor. "I hate this place-I really do. It's no wonder criminals act so barbaric."

The local sheriff, who was sitting on the other side of the microphone gazing at her like a lovesick calf, squashed the offender with his boot. "Shoot, Miss Francesca, bugs like that don't hardly count. It's centipedes you got to watch out for."

The KDSC listeners heard something that sounded like a cross between a groan and a squeal, and they chuckled to themselves. Francesca had a funny way of reflecting their own human weaknesses. She said what was on her mind and, with surprising frequency, what was on theirs, too, although most of them didn't have the nerve to cne out and acknowledge their shortcomings in public th‹i way she did. You

had to admire someone like that.

The ratings continued to rise, and Clare Padgett mentally rubbed her hands together with glee.

Using a part of the increase in her salary, Francesca bought an electric fan to try to dispel the stifling afternoon heat in her garage apartment, purchased a Cezanne museum poster to replace the string guitar, and made a down payment on a six-year-old Ford Falcon with body rust. The rest she tucked away in

her very first savings account.

Although she knew her looks had improved now that she was eating better and worrying less, she paid little attention to the fact that a healthy glow had returned to her skin and a sheen to her hair. She had neither the time nor the interest to linger in front of a mirror, a pastime that had proved so completely useless to her survival.

The Sulphur City airport advertised a skydiving club, and Clare's normally testy temper took a turn for the worse. She knew a good programming idea when she saw one, but even she couldn't order a woman who was eight months pregnant to jump out of an airplane. Francesca's pregnancy greatly inconvenienced Clare, and as a result she made only the smallest concessions to it.

"We'll schedule the jump two months after your kid is born. That'll give you plenty of time to recover. We'll use a wireless mike so the listeners can hear you scream all the way down."

"I'm not jumping from an airplane!" Francesca exclaimed.

Clare fingered the pile of forms on her desk, part of her attempt to straighten out Francesca's affairs with the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization and Immigration. "If you want these forms filled out, you will."

"That's blackmail."

Clare shrugged. "I'm a realist. You probably won't be around for long, chicky, but while you are, I'm going to suck out every last drop of your blood."

This wasn't the first time Clare had alluded to her future, and each time she did, Francesca felt a surge

of anticipation pass through her. She knew the rule as well as anyone: people who were good didn't stay at KDSC for very long; they moved on to bigger markets.

She waddled out of Clare's office that day feeling pleased with herself. Her show had gone well, she had almost five hundred dollars tucked away in the bank, and a bright future seemed to be waiting for her on the not-so-distant horizon. She smiled to herself. All it took to succeed in life was a small bit of talent and a lot of hard work. And then she saw a familiar figure walking toward her from the front door, and the light went out of her day.

"Aw, hell," Holly Grace Beaudine drawled as she came to a stop in the center of the reception area.

"That stupid son of a bitch knocked you up."