"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.