Fancy Pants (43 page)
Chapter
30
Six weeks later, Teddy got off the elevator and walked down the hallway30
to
his apartment, dragging his backpack the whole way. He hated school.
All his life he'd loved it, but now he hated it. Today Miss Pearson had
told the class that they would have to do a social studies project at
the end of the year, and Teddy already knew he would probably flunk it.
Miss Pearson didn't like him. She said she was going to kick him out of
gifted class if his attitude didn't improve.
It was just— Ever since he'd gone to Wynette, nothing seemed to be fun
anymore. He felt confused all the time, like there was a monster hiding
in his closet ready to jump out at him. And now he might get kicked out
of gifted class.
Teddy knew he somehow had to think up a really great social studies
project, especially since he'd messed up so bad on his science bug
project. This project had to be better than everybody else's—even dorky
old Milton Grossman who was going to write Mayor Ed Koch and ask if he
could spend part of
the day with him. Miss Pearson had loved that idea.
She said Milton's initiative should be an inspiration
to the entire
class. Teddy didn't see how anybody who picked his nose and smelled
like mothballs could be an inspiration.
As he walked in the door, Consuelo came out from the kitchen and told
him, "A package came for you today. It's in your bedroom."
"A package?" Teddy peeled off his jacket as he walked down the hallway.
Christmas had come and
gone, his birthday wasn't until July, and
Valentine's Day was still two weeks away. Why was he getting
a package?
As he entered his bedroom, he spotted an enormous cardboard carton with
the return address of Wynette, Texas, sitting in the middle of the
floor. He dropped his jacket, pushed his glasses back up on the bridge
of his nose, and chewed on his thumbnail. Part of him wanted the box to
be from Dallie, but the other part of him didn't even like to think
about Dallie. Whenever he did, he felt like the monster in the closet
was standing right behind him.
Slitting open the packing tape with his sharpest scissors, he pulled
apart the box flaps and looked around for a note. All he saw was a pile
of smaller boxes, and one by one, he began to open them. When he was
done, he sat dazed, looking at the bounty that surrounded him, an array
of presents so admirably suited
to a nine-year-old boy that it was as
if someone had read his mind.
On one side of him rested a small stack of wonderfully gross stuff,
like a whoopee cushion, hot pepper gum, and a phony plastic ice cube
with a dead fly in the middle. Some of the presents appealed to his
intellect—a programmable calculator and the complete set of
The
Chronicles of Narnia
. Another box
held objects representing a whole
world of masculinity: a real Swiss Army knife, a flashlight with a
black rubber handle, a set of grown-up Black & Decker screwdrivers.
But his favorite present was at the bottom of the box. Unwrapping the
tissue paper, he let out a cry of pleasure as he took in the best, the
neatest, the most awesome sweat shirt he had ever seen.
Gracing the navy blue front was a cartoon of a bearded, leering
motorcycle rider with popping eyeballs and drool coming from his mouth.
Beneath the biker was Teddy's name in Day-Glo orange letters and
the
inscription "Born to Raise Hell." Teddy hugged the sweat shirt to his
chest. For a fraction of a moment he let himself believe that Dallie
had sent him all this, but then he understood that these weren't the
kinds of things you sent to a kid you thought was a wimp, and since he
knew how Dallie felt about him, he also knew the gifts had to have come
from Skeet. He squeezed the sweat shirt
tighter and told himself he was lucky to have a friend like Skeet
Cooper, somebody who could see past his glasses and stuff all the way
to the real kid.
Theodore Day—Bom to Raise Hell! He loved the sound of those words, the
feel of them, the grit and
spit of them, the whole idea that an
undersize kid like himself, who was a jerk at sports and might even get
kicked out of gifted class, was Born to Raise Hell!
* * *
While Teddy was admiring his sweat shirt, Francesca was winding up thetaping of her show. As the red light went off on the camera, Nathan
Hurd came over to congratulate her. Her producer was balding and
chubby, physically unimpressive but mentally a dynamo. In some ways he
reminded her of Clare Padgett, who was currently driving the news
department at a Houston television station to contemplate suicide. Both
were maddening perfectionists, and both of them knew exactly what
worked for her.
"I love it when they walk off the show like that," Nathan said, his
double chin quivering with pleasure. "We'll run the program as is—the
ratings will go right through the ceiling."
She had just finished doing a program on electronic evangelism in which
the guest of honor, the Reverend Johnny T. Platt, had walked off in a
huff after she'd charmed him into revealing more than he wished to
about several failed marriages and his Neanderthal attitude toward
women.
"Thank goodness I only had a few minutes left to fill or we would have
had to retape," she said as she undipped her microphone from the
paisley scarf draped around the neck of her dress.
Nathan fell into step beside her and they walked from the studio
together. Now that the taping was finished and Francesca didn't have to
focus all of her concentration on what she was doing, the familiar
heaviness settled over her. Six weeks had passed since she'd returned
from Wynette. She hadn't seen Dallie since he stormed out of his house.
So much for all her worries about how she was going to accommodate
having him back in Teddy's life. She felt as confused as one of her
teenage runaways.
Why had something that was so
wrong for her felt so very right? And then she realized that Nathan was
talking to her.
". . . so the press release went out today about the Statue of Liberty
ceremony. We'll schedule a show
on immigration for May—the rich and the
poor, that sort of thing. What do you think?"
She nodded her agreement. She had passed her citizenship exam early in
January, and not long afterward, she had received a letter from the
White House inviting her to participate in a special ceremony to be
held that May at the Statue of Liberty. A number of well-known public
figures, all of whom had recently applied for American citizenship,
would be sworn in together. In addition to Francesca, the group
included several Hispanic athletes, a Korean fashion designer, a
Russian ballet dancer, and two widely respected scientists. Inspired by
the success of the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty, the
White House planned for the President to make a welcoming speech,
generating a little patriotic fervor as well as strengthening his
position with ethnic voters.
Nathan stopped walking as they reached his office. "I've got some great
plans for next season, Francesca. More political stuff. You have the
damnedest way of cutting through—"
"Nathan." She hesitated for a moment and then, knowing she'd already
put it off too long, made up her mind. "We need to talk."
He gave her a wary look before he gestured her inside. She greeted his
secretary and then walked into his private office. He closed the door
and perched one chubby hip on the corner of his desk, straining the
already overtaxed seams of his chinos.
Francesca took a deep breath and told him of the decision she'd reached
after months of deliberation. "I know you're going to be less than
delighted about this, Nathan, but when my contract with the network
comes up for renewal in the spring, I've told my agent to renegotiate."
"Of course you'll renegotiate," Nathan said cautiously. "I'm sure the
network will come up with a few extra dollars to sweeten the pot. Not
too many, mind you."
Money wasn't the problem and she shook her head. "I'm not going to do a
weekly show any longer, Nathan. I want to cut back to twelve specials a
year—one show a month." A feeling of relief came over her as she
finally spoke the words aloud.
Nathan shot up from the corner of the desk. "I don't believe you. The
network will never go along
with it. You'll be committing professional
suicide."
"I'm going to take that chance. I won't live like this anymore, Nathan.
I'm tired of being tired all the time. I'm tired of watching other
people raise my child."
Nathan, who saw his own daughters only on weekends and left the
business of child rearing to his wife, didn't seem to have the vaguest
idea what she was talking about. "Women look at you as a role model,"
he said, apparently deciding to attack her political conscience. "Some
of them will say you sold out."
"Maybe . . . I'm not sure." She pushed aside a stack of magazines and
sat down on his couch. "I think women are realizing that they want to
be more than burned-out carbon copies of men. For nine years I've done
everything the male way. I've turned the raising of my child over to
other people, I've scheduled myself so tightly that when I wake up in a
hotel room I have to pull a piece of stationery out of the drawer to
remember what city I'm in, I go to bed with a knot in my stomach
thinking about everything I have to do the next day. I'm tired of it,
Nathan. I love my job, but I'm tired of loving it twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week. I love Teddy, and I've only got nine years left
before he'll be off to college. I want to be with him more. This is the
only life I've been given, and to tell you the truth, I haven't been
all that happy with the way I'm living it."
He frowned. "Assuming the network goes along with this, which I
seriously doubt, you'll lose a lot of money."
"Right," Francesca scoffed. "I'll have to cut my yearly clothing budget
down from twenty thousand dollars to ten thousand. I can just see a
million burned-out working mothers losing sleep over that while they
try to figure out how to buy their kids new shoes for school." How much
money did a woman need? she wondered. How much power? Was she the only
woman in the world who was tired of buying into
all those male yardsticks of success?
"What do you really want, Francesca?" Nathan asked, switching his
tactics from confrontation to pacification. "Maybe we can work out some
sort of compromise."
"I want time," Francesca replied wearily. "I want to be able to read a
book just because I want to read it, not because the author is going to
be on my show the next day. I want to be able to go through an entire
week without anyone sticking a single hot roller in my hair. I want to
chaperon one of Teddy's class trips, for God's sake." And then she gave
voice to an idea that had been gradually growing inside her. "I want
to
take some of the energy that's gone into my job and give serious
thought to doing something significant for all those fourteen-year-old
girls who are selling their bodies on the streets of this country
because they don't have anyplace to go."
"We'll do more shows on runaways," he said quickly. "I'll work
something out so you can take a little more vacation time. I know we've
been working you hard, but—"
"No sale, Nathan," she said, getting up from the couch. "This
merry-go-round is slowing down for a while."
"But, Francesca—"
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and then left his office before
he could say any more. She knew her popularity wasn't any guarantee
that the network wouldn't fire her if they felt she was being
unreasonable, but she had to take that chance. The events of the past
six weeks had shown her where her priorities lay, and they had also
taught her something important about herself—she no longer had anything
to prove.
* * *
Once she arrived at her own office, Francesca found a pile of telephonemessages waiting for her. She picked up the first one, then set it
aside without looking at it. Her gaze drifted to the file on her desk,
which held a detailed summary of the professional golfing career of
Dallas Beaudine. At the same time she had been trying to put Dallie out
of her mind, she had been gathering the material. Although she
toyed
thoughtfully with the pages, she didn't bother to reread what she'd
already studied so thoroughly. Every article, every phone call she'd
made, every piece of information she had been able to gather
pointed in the same direction.
Dallas Beaudine had all the talent it took to be a champion; he just
didn't seem to want it badly enough. She thought about what Skeet had
said and wondered what all this had to do with Teddy, but the answer
continued to elude her.
Stefan was in town and she had promised to go with him to a private
party at La Cote Basque that night. For the rest of the afternoon, she
considered canceling, but she knew that would be the coward's way
out.
Stefan wanted something from her that she now understood she couldn't
give, and it wasn't fair to postpone talking to him about it any longer.
Stefan had been in New York twice since she'd gotten back from Wynette,
and she had seen him both times. He had known about Teddy's kidnapping,
of course, so she had been forced to tell him something about what had
happened in Wynette, although she had omitted giving him any details
about Dallie.
She studied the photograph of Teddy on her desk. It showed him floating
in a Flintstones inner tube, his small, skinny legs glistening with
water. If Dallie hadn't wanted to contact her again, he should at least
have made some attempt to get in touch with Teddy. She felt sad and
disillusioned. She had thought that Dallie was a better person than he
had turned out to be. As she headed home that evening, she told herself
she had to accept the fact that she had made a gigantic mistake and
then forget about it.
Before she got dressed for her date with Stefan, she sat with Teddy
while he ate his dinner and thought about how carefree she had been
only two months before. Now she felt as if she were carrying the
troubles of the world on her shoulders. She should never have had that
ridiculous one-night stand with Dallie, she was getting ready to hurt
Stefan, and the network might very well fire her. She was too miserable
to cheer up Holly Grace, and she was terribly worried about Teddy. He
was so withdrawn and so obviously unhappy. He wouldn't talk about what
had happened in Wynette, and he resisted all of her efforts to draw him
out about the trouble he was having in school.
"How did things go with you and Miss Pearson today?"
she asked casually, as she watched him sneak a forkful of peas
underneath his baked potato.
"Okay, 1 guess."
"Just okay?"
He pushed his chair back from the table and cleared his plate. "I've
got some homework to do. I'm not too hungry."
She frowned as he left the kitchen. She wished Teddy's teacher weren't
so rigid and punitive. Unlike Teddy's former teachers, Miss Pearson
seemed more concerned with grades than with learning, a quality that
Francesca believed was disastrous when working with gifted children.
Teddy had never worried about his marks until this year, but now that
seemed to be all he thought about. As Francesca slipped into a beaded
Armani gown for her evening with Stefan, she decided to schedule
another appointment with the school administrator.
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