Yes, that’s how she came to the station, young and pretty.
“Probably how she left it too,” would have been Ellen’s aside, had she found a place to use it or cared less about Debbie.
She thought about it now. Was that how Debbie left, all innocent and hopeful and wondering at the relentless heat. Did she simply step out and float away?
The reason it was a sick joke, that thing about her being pretty and young, was that Carter made damn sure all of the male reporters he hired were married. And, he wanted them more than married. He wanted kids, lots of kids. Like he told Ellen, a good Mormon boy was his idea of a reporter.
It had to do with keeping them and scaring them. Men with kids were scared, hungry and scared. Carter knew that. He had no children. If he ever had a wife, no one knew about it, not even Ellen Peters, and he always told her more than he should.
“I can’t stand those good-looking blond guys,” he once blurted at her.
“What?”
“You know, guys like Adkins. I can’t stand them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I never liked blonds. Too many sissy boys are blond.”
He hesitated, turning his salt and pepper head of hair away from her and looking toward the bookcase with its folders and piles of tapes and résumés. A row of award plaques and citations hung on the wall above them.
“Shit, they got everything going for them. I don’t know. Maybe I’m jealous.”
It was the kind of thing that threw Ellen about Carter. Right when she had lived through weeks of good reasons to despise the man, enough reasons to shoot him, he’d say something like that, flat and sad. She’d wait though, for that glint of meanness to return to his eyes. And, it would.
Carter picked Debbie Hanson from those piles of tapes and résumés and she came to them ready to start on the next set of steps on the path of television news.
Of course, Maypin was watching from somewhere. She wouldn’t miss any tall blond under her own age of twenty-eight or was it thirty. Ellen thought and said often enough that Jean Ann Maypin had been twenty-eight for the last five years at least.
Jean Ann and the weekend anchor Scott Reynolds shared their own windowed office. Unlike Tom Carter, they had no dark blinds that could be dropped down and tightened shut. They could be seen by anyone going in or out of the newsroom.
Ellen could see them from her cubicle, at least a corner of their glass room, enough to see the purple sheen of fluorescent light on Jean Ann’s black hair.
1
She was born a blond, dishwater blond which turned darker with the years but never, of course, black. That came later. Blonds were a dime a dozen in television news or would be. She was smart enough to figure that out. They were white blonds or golden blonds or soft blonds like Debbie Hanson. Soft and fluffy and gentle blonds or they were hard blonds like that weekend anchorwoman Across the Street.
That’s what they called the competition, Across the Street, which it was, about a half a mile down. It held the number one slot in the ratings. The other network affiliate was so low they never bothered talking about it. As for the public television station, they might as well be off the air. Across the Street was number one but not, they reminded themselves, a strong number one. Slick, they were slick, but The Best was better. The Best gave the viewers basic, solid news. The Best won the awards. The Best was there when you needed them and with a black-haired anchorwoman. Now, that was unusual.
She started as a brunette at the station in Virginia. The color went well with her dark eyes. That too was unusual. Anchorwomen, the few there were, and reporters, men and women, had blue eyes or light-brown eyes.
You did have to be careful with blue eyes. Sometimes they were too piercing, too snapping and, for some reason, the audience didn’t like them. Oh, they’d take them at six-thirty in the morning or at noon but not for the big newscasts, not for the six or the ten. That’s when they wanted, they needed something gentler, blue but not too blue.
Jean Ann’s eyes were dark brown and not that deep endless brown that makes you want to fall into them. Hers were a dull dark brown. However, the right makeup and lighting gave them a sort of luster that made them almost perfect with black hair. And, so unusual.
She was born Virginia Susan Maypin. Like the hair, the name would have to be changed. At the beginning though, at the first station, she made it an asset.
“Please, let me try,” she begged the producer. “I think it would be good. Don’t you think so? Couldn’t it be good?”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Go ahead.” He didn’t care. He wanted to get the newscast on the air and grab a couple of beers before going home.
That night, as she ended her report on-set with anchorman Jackson Hale, she said with a chirp in her voice and a girlish smile, “And so for Virginia, this is Virginia, Virginia Sue Maypin.”
“What the hell was that?” Jackson Hale yelled when they went to commercial. “Virginia for Virginia? What the hell?” Then, he laughed.
“Oh well,” she sighed sweetly.
She did real well, real well indeed.
She went to that station armed with a degree in English from a state college so she could work and a few months of sex with a journalism professor so she could get a job. He made the call
