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?"