The other live-in Staffer: South Chelsea, the Heany Facility, stepmothers, and the half-removed tiger

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING (background identity through the Nov YDAU stretch; the tattoo-removal count is current as of the residency window).
• What: Johnette Marie Foltz is the "Current female live-in Staffer" — "the other live-in Staffer" opposite Gately, and per the House's word to a stranger, one of its "two living staff, alums of the house." She comes from South Chelsea and then "the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton" — in her own scene's phrasing, a whole planet of privilege away from upscale kids with all their teeth. Her childhood ran through serial stepmothers: the narration reaches at least "the fourth Mrs. Foltz" (source of her idiom "green around the gills"), and her "very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer," which conditioned her in early childhood to say 'police' or 'the Law,' never 'the Finest.' Her look: missing front teeth, a generic diaper-pin worn transpercé in one nostril, a ring of a different type on every finger, and on her left forearm the remains of a snarling orange-and-blue tiger tattoo — two of the six painful removal procedures done, so the tiger is now minus a head and one front leg, "the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool." In sobriety she is NA to the bone: "ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA," plus "a somehow damaged NA fiancé she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker wheelchair" — so much outside activity that she is around Ennet House less and less, with rumblings about a possible replacement, which Gately and the heterosexual male residents pray daily will be the leggy alumna and part-time counselor Danielle Steenbok. She is nonetheless Gately's peer-confessor: it is to Johnette that he confides he'd drive Pat's Aventura "if the driver's seat was just a sharp pointy spike."