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“When you scrub the floor, make certain you get into the corners, Francesca. I hate sloppy work.”
Francesca gritted her teeth and nodded. Her stomach did a small flip-flop as she prepared to attack the mess on the underside of the seat. Unbidden, she thought of Hedda, her old housekeeper. Hedda, with her rolled stockings and bad back, who'd spent her life on her knees cleaning up after Chloe and Francesca.
Clare sucked on her cigarette and then deliberately tossed it down next to Francesca's foot. “You'd better hustle, chicky. We're getting ready to close down for the day.” Francesca heard a malevolent chuckle as the woman moved away.
A little later, the announcer who'd been on the air when Francesca arrived stuck his head in the bathroom and told her he had to lock up. Her heart lurched. She had no place to go, no bed to sleep in. ?
??Has everybody left?”
He nodded and ran his eyes over her, obviously liking what he saw. “You need a lift into town?”
She stood and wiped her hair out of her eyes with her forearm, trying to seem casual. “No. Somebody's picking me up.” She inclined her head toward the mess, her resolution not to begin her new life with lies already abandoned. “Miss Padgett told me I had to finish this tonight before I left. She said I could lock up.” Did she sound too offhand? Not offhand enough? What would she do if he refused?
“Suit yourself.” He gave her an appreciative smile. A few minutes later she let out a slow, relieved breath as she heard the front door close.
Francesca spent the night on the black and gold office sofa with Beast curled against her stomach, both of them poorly fed on sandwiches she had made from stale bread and a jar of peanut butter she found in the kitchenette. Exhaustion had seeped into the very marrow of her bones, but still she couldn't fall asleep. Instead, she lay with her eyes open, Beast's fur pushed into the V's between her fingers, thinking about how many more obstacles lay in her way.
The next morning she awakened before five and promptly threw up into the toilet she had so painstakingly cleaned the night before. For the rest of the day, she tried to tell herself it was only a reaction to the peanut butter.
“Francesca! Dammit, where is she?” Clare stormed from her office as Francesca flew out of the newsroom where she'd just finished delivering a batch of afternoon papers to the news director.
“I'm here, Clare,” she said wearily. “What's the problem?”
It had been six weeks since she'd started work at KDSC, and her relationship with the station manager hadn't improved. According to the gossip she'd picked up from members of the small KDSC staff, Clare's radio career had been launched at a time when few women could get jobs in broadcasting. Station managers hired her because she was intelligent and aggressive, and then fired her for the same reason. She finally made it to television, where she fought bitter battles for the right to report hard news instead of the softer stories considered appropriate for women reporters.
Ironically, she was defeated by Equal Opportunity. In the early seventies when employers were forced to hire women, they bypassed battle-scarred veterans like Clare, with their sharp tongues and cynical outlooks, for newer, fresher faces straight off college campuses—pretty, malleable sorority girls with degrees in communication arts. Women like Clare had to take what was left—jobs for which they were overqualified, like running backwater radio stations. As a result, they smoked too much, grew increasingly bitter, and made life miserable for any females they suspected of trying to get by on nothing more than a pretty face.
“I just got a call from that fool at the Sulphur City bank,” Clare snapped at Francesca. “He wants the Christmas promotions today instead of tomorrow.” She pointed toward a box of bell-shaped tree ornaments printed with the name of the radio station on one side and the name of the bank on the other. “Get over there right away with them, and don't take all day like you did last time.”
Francesca refrained from pointing out that she wouldn't have taken so long last time if four staff members hadn't dumped additional errands on her—everything from delivering overdue bills for air time to having a new water pump put in the station's battered Dodge Dart. She pulled on the red and black plaid car coat she'd bought at a Goodwill store for five dollars and then grabbed the key to the Dart from a cup hook next to the studio window. Inside, Tony March, the afternoon deejay, was cuing up a record. Although he hadn't been with KDSC very long, everyone knew he would be quitting soon. He had a good voice and a distinct personality. For announcers like Tony, KDSC, with its unimpressive 500-watt signal, was merely a stepping stone to better things. Francesca had already discovered that the only people who stayed at KDSC for very long were people like her who didn't have any other choice.
The car started after only three attempts, which was nearly a record. She backed around and headed out of the parking lot. A glance at the rearview mirror showed pale skin, dull hair snared at the back of her neck with a rubber band, and a red-rimmed nose from the latest in a series of head colds. Her car coat was too big for her, and she had neither the money nor the energy to improve her appearance. At least she didn't have to fend off many advances from the male staff members.
There had been few successes for her these past six weeks, but many disasters. One of the worst had occurred the day before Thanksgiving when Clare had discovered she was sleeping on the station couch and screamed at her in front of everyone until Francesca's cheeks burned with humiliation. Now she and Beast lived in a bedroom-kitchen combination over a garage in Sulphur City. It was drafty and badly furnished with discarded furniture and a lumpy twin bed, but the rent was cheap and she could pay it by the week, so she tried to feel grateful for every ugly inch of it. She had also gained the use of the station's Dodge Dart, although Clare made her pay for gas even when someone else took the car. It was an exhausting, hand-to-mouth existence, with no room for financial emergencies, no room for personal emergencies, and no—absolutely no—room for an unwanted pregnancy.
Her fists tightened on the steering wheel. By doing without almost everything, she had managed to save the one hundred and fifty dollars the San Antonio abortion clinic would charge her to get rid of Dallie Beaudine's baby. She refused to let herself think of the ramifications of her decision; she was simply too poor and too desperate to consider the morality of the act. After her appointment on Saturday, she would have averted one more disaster. That was all the introspection she allowed herself.
She finished running her errands in little more than an hour and returned to the station, only to have Clare yell at her for having gone off without washing her office windows first.
The following Saturday she got up at dawn and made the two-hour drive to San Antonio. The waiting room of the abortion clinic was sparsely furnished but clean. She sat down on a molded plastic chair, her hands clutching her black canvas shoulder bag, her legs pressed tightly together as if they were unconsciously trying to protect the small piece of protoplasm that would soon be taken from her body. The room held three other women. Two were Mexican and one was a worn-out blonde with an acned face and hopeless eyes. All of them were poor.
A middle-aged, Spanish-looking woman in a neat white blouse and dark skirt appeared at the door and called her name. “Francesca, I'm Mrs. Garcia,” she said in lightly accented English. “Would you come with me, please?”
Francesca numbly followed her into a small office paneled in fake mahogany. Mrs. Garcia took a seat behind her desk and invited Francesca to sit in another molded plastic chair, differing only in color from the one in the waiting room.
The woman was friendly and efficient as she went over the forms for Francesca to sign. Then she explained the procedure that would take place in one of the surgical rooms down the hall. Francesca bit down on the inside of her lip and tried not to listen too closely. Mrs. Garcia spoke slowly and calmly, always using the word “tissue,” never “fetus.” Francesca felt a detached sense of gratitude. Ever since she had realized she was pregnant, she had refused to personify the unwelcome visitor lodged in her womb. She refused to connect it in her mind to that night in a Louisiana swamp. Her life had been pared down to the bone—to the marrow —and there was no room for sentiment, no room to build falsely romantic pictures of chubby pink cheeks and soft curly hair, no need ever to use the word “baby,” not even in her thoughts. Mrs. Garcia began to speak of “vacuum aspiration,” and Francesca thought of the old Hoover she pushed around the radio station carpet every evening.
“Do you have any questions?”
She shook her head. The faces of the three sad women in the waiting room seemed implanted in her mind—women with no future, no hope. Mrs. Garcia slid a booklet across the metal desktop. “This pamphlet contains information on birth control that you should read before you have intercourse again.”
Again? The memory of Dallie's deep, hot kisses rushed back to her, but the intimate caresses that had once set her senses aflame now seemed to have happened to someone else. She couldn't imagine ever feeling that good again.
“I can't have this—this tissue,” Francesca said abruptly, interrupting the woman in midsentence as she showed her a diagram of the female reproductive organs.
Mrs. Garcia stopped what she was saying and inclined her head to listen, obviously accustomed to hearing the most private revelations pass across her desk.
Francesca knew she had no need to justify her actions, but she couldn't seem to stop the flow of words. “Don't you see that it's impossible?” Her fists clenched into knots in her lap. “I'm not a horrible person. I'm not unfeeling. But I can barely take care of myself and a walleyed cat.”
