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 ja
ck-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 cl
oud 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, arid 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 come out and acknowledge their shortcomings in public the way she did. You had to admire someone like that.
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