Fishing With RayAnne (4 page)

“So, you signed a contra—”

“No, Dad, no contract.”

“I
told
you to go cable, Ray.”

Big Rick fished the pro circuit for years and still refers to RayAnne as a “faux-pro,” though she’d taken more trophies in ten years than he had in twenty. Oddly, he’s more enthusiastic about the program even though his own fishing show,
Big Rick’s Bass Bonanza
, lasted only six episodes. He’s hopeful when he predicts his little girl will hit it big and be able to take care of her old man, buy him a new double-wide to park in his “yard,” a square of concrete painted grass green on the outskirts of Scottsdale.

“It’s just so frustrating, Dad.”

“Listen, Ray. You’re better off on television—even
public
television—than you ever could be out on the circuit.”

“But I placed second in the Heineken Tourney last year!”

“Ex-
actly
, you were smart to get out while you were on top.”

“Dad, I’m not sure I’ll be here through another whole season. I mean, what if this bombs?”

“You couldn’t bomb if you tried! You got a face for TV, and if you’re not gonna use it to get a husband, you might try to snag a fu—freaking contract with it.”

RayAnne remembers that the current wife is trying to wean her father off bad language. She doesn’t respond, just chews a cuticle while he takes a breath—she can tell he’s been smoking by the rattle.

“Fish or cut bait, Ray. Stand your ground with those dykes; stick to your guns.”

She holds the phone away and blinks at it before replying, “How do you know . . . ?” There are only two for-sure lesbians, and they happen to be the most reasonable of the lot. Still.

A vehicle pulls into one of the reserved spots a few cars away—an old Jeep Wagoneer with wood-grained doors. Like Cassi’s car, it is so misplaced among the Volvos and Priuses that RayAnne unconsciously thrums the
Sesame Street
tune over her steering wheel:
one of these things is not like the others.
She leans to get a better look at the driver to see if it’s someone to avoid but doesn’t recognize him. Hardly the public television type anyway. She’s about to turn away when he pushes his sunglasses up into shaggy dark hair to lean over and lock the passenger side door.

Manual locks? She absently wonders how old a car would have to be. He’s good looking enough. Eyes the color of . . . what’s the color, not corn-fed blue . . . “Oh. Corn
flower
.”

“Corn-what?” Big Rick asks.

“Nothing.”

“Cuz if you’re thinking corn-holer, that’s a
male
gay, not a lezbo.”

“Dad!” When she yelps, the guy looks up again and RayAnne finds herself suddenly eye-to-eye with him, albeit six car windows removed. While she might normally look away, she only blinks in response (like a cow, she later thinks), taking in the creases that sidle his mouth like charming parentheses. He has the tousled appearance of someone who gets out of bed at noon—like a musician. She sighs, Big Rick’s voice bringing her around. “. . . Cuz they’re all the same when you flip ’em upside down anyway.”

“
Jeezus
, Dad. I gotta go. Say hello to Rah . . . Ri—”

“Rita.”

“Well, you can’t expect me to keep them straight after five.”

“
Six.
It’s easy. Just remember B-A-D-G-E-R. Bernadette, Anne, Delia, Grace, Ellen,
Rita
.”

“Nice. Hey, you called me, did you want something?”

The guy is out of the Wagoneer now, headed her way. He’s wearing low-heeled boots and well-fitting jeans.

“Nah, just thought you could use some advice.”

“You bet. If I do, Dad, you’ll be the first person I ask.”

He is approaching now and will pass her windshield in a second. His jaw is solid but not jutty like Leno’s, more a modified Dudley Do-Right with a shallower divot. What her brother Kyle calls “ass-chin.”

“I’m good. Listen, I gotta go.”

“Right. Keep your knockers up, Ray-Ban.”

“Sure thing, Big Rick.” As her father hangs up she actually does adjust her posture, straightening as if thwacked by a nun.

Approaching, the guy slows ever so minutely in front of her car. When he looks straight at her, she realizes the phone’s still glued to her cheek. As he passes, the parentheses of his dimples deepen as if he might be fighting a grin. If he
really
smiled, those dimples would crease into the most alluring ditches—the sort a girl might gladly fall into. Knowing such a smile might liquefy her, RayAnne sighs because it hardly matters, since he’s
too
good looking. Plus he carries some sort of instrument case, so of course he is a musician. In her experience, the only bigger pains than sponsors are musicians. As he passes, she whispers, “Buh bye . . .”

The second he’s out of sight, RayAnne pulls down the visor to look in the mirror. She loathes,
loathes
her coloring, always pinking up at the slightest thing, like now, as if a glass of Malbec has been hurled at her. She can thank her mother for her Irish skin and her father for the boxer’s jaw, and right now is doubly annoyed at Big Rick for planting the mnemonic seed that will doubtless make her think of her mother Bernadette as the B in his BADGER.

RayAnne frowns, scrutinizing. She has distinct traits from both parents—not a melding but independent bits of each, her face a prime example of how they could never quite agree on anything. She has Big Rick’s thick hair and crooked widow’s peak, Bernadette’s nose and the same slight gap between her front teeth. People tell her she’s pretty, but she’s rarely convinced no matter what the mirror shines back. Though her face is better now than it was in her twenties, she thinks, more formed, more her own.

RayAnne at thirty-four is a late bloomer, as Gran would say.

Very late.

T
WO

Her shoulder bag thuds to the stack of moving boxes that has doubled as a hallway table since she moved in. It’s been eighteen months, but to completely unpack seems like tempting fate—despite the ratings and Big Rick’s predictions, the show
could
bomb and she’d just end up going back out on the circuit and having to sell the place. In the past year, two units in her brownstone row were foreclosed on, enough to make her and fellow neighbors twitchy about their investments, so there’s that. No help that her brother Kyle thinks she’s made a grave mistake by buying in this “transitioning” Minneapolis neighborhood, particularly in such an old building. But it’s only a few blocks to the river, and the Realtor had lured her with endless references to character and charm, assuring RayAnne that young professionals and hipsters were snapping up whatever came on the market, that there was even a rumor of a Whole Foods opening two streets over. Truth be told, she was given a mortgage she’d been unqualified for, considering her freelance status.

Her grandmother had balked at the neighborhood, naturally, having never seen it. So, RayAnne promised Dot she would definitely get a dog, repeating, “Yes, Gran, big enough to ward off a linebacker”—pointedly omitting Dot’s descriptor, “black.” She did make good on her promise to install a security system—the real thing and not just the fake control panels and yard sign. There’s a deadbolt on the basement door and another on the back porch. As an obsessive lock-checker and listener to noises, RayAnne knows every complaint of the old house—the yowl of each radiator, the scuttle of squirrels along gutters, which pipes sing in what key, whether it is an east wind or a west wind huffing down the chimneys. Dot’s worry gene skipped a generation—leapfrogging over Big Rick, who practices all the caution of an oversugared toddler—to land smack on RayAnne’s head. When would she have time to even look for a dog, let alone train one?

The row house is her very own. She is a homeowner. The thought makes her smile. The day after moving in, when she sat on the bare living room floor and realized that after years of motels and seldom slept-in apartments and two brief and ill-advised cohabitations, she could paint the walls absolutely any color and hang
any
picture she wanted to, she wept with joy. Even after a year, stepping into the foyer lit by little rainbows from the leaded glass fanlight gives her a thrill.
Mine? Really?
There are two fireplaces—one in the narrow living room and another in the narrow front bedroom above, so naturally she’d overlooked the scary cellar, the dearth of closets, and the attached wooden sun porch with its skirting half off like Courtney Love. Since she doesn’t cook, RayAnne is unfazed by the Truman-era kitchen with its aqua linoleum countertops and cabinets barely deep enough to hold dinner plates. The floors aren’t really a problem—at least when something spills or rolls she knows which direction to chase it.

The house has history—
real
history that dances forth across eras even when she’s performing such mundane actions as hooking her bra: imagining a corset being laced or petticoats being flounced (or whatever one did with a petticoat). Opening the old medicine chest, she wonders what the women of the house used for birth control, and shudders over what being female might have entailed at the turn of the century with no Tylenol or tampons or twenty-eight-day pill. She wonders what sorts of headache powders and tinctures they took. When aiming her blow dryer at the crazed mirror to clear the condensation, she puzzles over how they ever coaxed their hair into those fat chignons, the odd sausage-bangs of World War II, or the mod helmets of the sixties. Did the previous occupants speak in old-country accents? Were their heads full of recipes for soap and
lefse
? Had they flirted with the iceman; had they had back-street abortions? Were they obedient wives and harried mothers? Did they want more? For all she knows she sleeps in a room that once housed a suffragette, a flapper from some Iowa farm, a war widow, a beleaguered Catholic mother with too many kids and a secret crush on JFK, maybe a pot-smoking Vietnam protester.

The women of this house could have been anyone.

Dashing to the basement to pull clothes fluffy and warm from the dryer, she cannot imagine spending hours laboring over a ringer washer or blotting a brow with a shirtwaist sleeve while working a mangle, a contraption she’s read about but cannot picture. Living in the row house is a little like living between the worn covers of a book, each room a story, making her utterly grateful for her Dyson, her icemaker, her microwave. Such technologies free up hours—hours that are then sucked from RayAnne into the glowing tractor beams of her iPhone, laptop, or flat screen. Now that she finally has a home, there’s hardly time to just
be
in it.

When a tinny squeal sounds from the sun porch, RayAnne calls out, “Keep your pants on!” Rummaging through cupboards, she finds a small saucepan with the label still on and fills it with water. Once on the porch, she pours water onto a drooping ficus—a plant you actually can kill, contrary to the greenhouse clerk’s claim. More water goes into the trough of the hamster house as she chirps, “Here I am, Danny Boy, home.” The rest she drinks herself, standing.

Later, she leans on the counter with Danny on her shoulder, watching her Amy’s Asian Veggie Stir Fry pirouette as it heats, drinking boxed Pinot from a juice glass, and wondering if she’ll be able to stay awake long enough to read more than a page of Penelope Lively, who awaits her upstairs.

Negotiating the waist-high tangle of front yard her mother claims is “restored prairie” to keep the city off her back about mowing, RayAnne approaches Bernadette’s front door. When she sneezes, the neighbor looks over the hedge of calendula and reedy grasses from where he’s scraping something from the bumper of his SUV. As RayAnne hurries along, she feels him glaring. On the porch she hastily hangs her jacket on the outside railing and brings the knocker down. The heavy door swings on its hinges and she’s pulled into the house by her trapped index finger.

“Ow.
Ow.
”

“Is that you, RayAnne?”

“Mom! This door’s unlocked again.”

Bernadette appears in a billow of caftan. “Hello to you too, dear. Bring that jacket inside.”

“No. Last time I was here I smelled like patchouli for the rest of the day—a janitor at the station and some slacker at Cinnabon both made peace fingers at me. You should at least ask who’s knocking.”

“You do realize that’s not even
food
, RayAnne. Besides, I like to be surprised.”

“And you will be someday. By some axe-murdering, dismembering mother-raper.”

Bernadette laughs. “I’ve survived carjackers in Caracas and armed bandits in Algeria, sweetie. I think I can handle Bloomington.” This attitude of
safety last
seems to be the sole trait her parents share.

“Mother, did you sticker Mr. Martin’s SUV?”

Bernadette pretends not to have heard. “You going to stand there? I’m making chai.”

“He was eyeing daggers at me.” RayAnne plucks a bumper sticker from a stack on the hall table. “You did! You can’t just alienate every . . . at least not the neighbors. Jeez, Mom, ‘I’m a Gasshole’!?”

Bernadette nearly claps. “I know! And he
is
, and the man deserves what he gets. You tell me how a healthy adult male—who
runs
several miles a day, mind you—can justify driving an Escalade three blocks to buy a quart of milk.”

“You’re gonna get in trouble. Please, just stick to your causes.”

“Skim, by the way. And outing carbon-footstompers
is
a cause. For a bright girl, RayAnne, you really are out of touch.”

Following as Bernadette sails to the kitchen, RayAnne ducks under hanging bouquets of herbs, which her mother pronounces with the
h
. While soy milk heats, RayAnne sinks to the breakfast nook, plucking lavender buds from her hair. The little gnarls of roots and twigs spread over newspaper will no doubt be for making teas or poultices or whatever else is being brewed up for the women on Bernadette’s Blood-Tide Quests. Her mother is a new-age aging coach—“Life-Passages Doula,” according to her website—and each month guides a different gaggle of pre-, peri-, and postmenopausal women to spiritual locations in Sedona, Burma, and remote Scottish islands, where she leads them through ritual cleansings and farewell-to-fertility rites for which they pay outrageous sums.

“Watch your elbows, RayAnne. Peony root isn’t easy to come by.”

“Good grief. Why don’t they just take hormones and sweat it out in Palm Springs or Lake Forest or wherever like everyone else?”

Bernadette bestows RayAnne her Look of Ultimate Patience. “And where would they get support, RayAnne? Do you suppose their husbands are going to repeat the goddess chants with them, or help them out of the
Viparita Karani
pose when they get stuck?”

“You got me there.” On the windowsill is an array of brochures touting natural remedies. RayAnne opens
The Maturing Lily
to a paragraph on personal lubricants derived from cactus plants. Disconcerted by the proximity of “cactus” and “vagina” in the same sentence, she slides the brochure away.

“Take that, Ray. There’s good information there.”

“Mom. I know how to take care of my own . . . stuff.”

“Vagina, honey. Can’t you just say ‘vagina’? You sound like your grandmother.”

“Vah-jiiy-nahh. And Gran calls hers ‘Jinny.’ Anyway, I prefer ‘kipper-mitt.’”

“Go ahead, make fun now.” Bernadette sets down the chai. “You’ll dry up yourself one day and then you’ll be grateful for things like yucca lube.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’m thirty-four.”

“Yes, a long way from old.”

“Yeah? The Irish matchmaker we had on last month didn’t seem to think so.”

Bernadette chirps, “Oh, I thought she was charming!”

“You saw the show?”

“Quite a few people saw it, RayAnne. It was on television.”

“But I thought you were in Timbuk-somewhere.”

“Oh, but I have TiVo! And I meant to tell you, after that show I got a call from that lovely boy you used to date, Richard—the one with the nice manners? He was a little upset—asking for your phone number.”

“You didn’t give it to him, though. Did you? Mother?”

“Richard? Why not? He was in touch with his latent female, wasn’t he? But really, RayAnne, you never have been able to not . . .
blurt
things. You should learn to restrain yourself, at least on television.”

Of course she should. It tops her list of self-improvement projects. She blurts. She’s a blurter. The chai is too hot, and she dribbles a searing mouthful out onto her saucer.

“Awgh!”

“See? Impulsive.” Bernadette picks up the remote, and before RayAnne can protest, she zaps the huge widescreen to life and cues up the show. “I do love my TiVo.”

“And I do loathe this episode.”

“Frankenman,” as it has come to be known at the station, is the episode that most makes her want to grab the nearest anchor and jump. Her frozen profile blossoms hugely onto the screen, mouth half-open, one eye half-closed, each nostril as deep as a sleeve and each tooth the size of a wallet.

“What, a little fumbling? It was funny.” Bernadette presses “Play” and RayAnne’s megaphone-sized mouth erupts:

“Maeve O’Donnell is descended from a long line of matchmakers back in County Clare, but these days her Irish dating service has gone online. Today is the American debut of RiverDate.”

RayAnne turns back to the brochure and an illustrated page of manual methods to reduce discomfort during postmenopausal intercourse.

The program started well enough with a discussion of Internet dating protocol, Maeve suggesting the word “date” not be used until a first meeting leads to a second. RayAnne asked all the pertinent questions about online safety and keeping identities private. They discussed tactics for gracefully cutting short a nonstarter “meeting” and how to assure a promising “first contact” led to a “date.” Maeve cautioned viewers, “Employ sincerity and modesty when creating a profile. Portray yourself
as is
.”

RayAnne was unable to suppress a snort. Maeve eyed her before leaning to the camera. “RayAnne, for instance, wouldn’t claim to be busty.”

Maeve warned of using Photoshopped or out-of-date photos. “Face it, ladies, if you’re pushing forty and posting a picture of yourself at twenty-nine, the jig, as you say here in America, is up.” As RayAnne quelled the urge to cross her arms over her chest, they moved on to ideas for public places to meet.

RayAnne offered, “A zoo?”

Maeve sighed, “Too . . .
animal
.” To RayAnne’s look of puzzlement, she explained, “Suggestive. We’ve all seen the back end of a baboon. Would that make a nice backdrop for a first meeting?”

RayAnne swiveled a look to the camera and back to Maeve. “The farmers’ market?”

Maeve nearly tittered. “Oh, dear. And smell like a sheep? Or a
cow
?”

“Actually, farmers’ markets here don’t sell—”

“A public garden or busy park, yes.” Maeve was still chuckling. “A museum, certainly . . .”