Fishing With RayAnne

by Ava Finch

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Ava Finch

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503947689

  ISBN-10: 1503947688

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Jon, my musician

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  When the conference room lights dim unexpectedly, RayAnne blinks in mild alarm, thinking of the scene in Dark Victory when Bette Davis goes so enchantingly blind. But it’s only someone fiddling with the dimmer—she’s forgotten the meeting agenda includes a screening of the new intro for the show. The rear screen projector descends and strains of accordion and steel guitar swell from nowhere. Under the table, she dribbles an orange Croc back and forth between bare feet until Cassi’s studded leather boot gently pins her instep. Of course she’s nervous—who wants to watch their own flawed self fumble around on-screen in high-def digital?

  The opening scroll of credits has been cleverly redesigned for the second season, the words appearing as monofilament cast from a fishing rod onto the surface of watery ripples. The station’s call letters, WYOY, land then dissolve. Then, serenaded by the soundtrack of ironic punk-polka, the name “RayAnne Dahl” is cast, making her grateful for the darkness of the conference room that hides the sudden blush toasting across her face. Her name floats for what feels like eternity before the camera lens slowly lifts its gaze from the water and a speeding boat shimmers from the distance. The POV zooms along the bow of a vintage AquaCraft, the Penelope. One of her conditions for agreeing to fill in as host was that the show be taped in her own comfort zone, in RayAnne’s own boat. Built for speed and flash, Penelope looks much younger than her fifty years and has charted many waters in her day. RayAnne can only muse over what stories her boat would tell if she could talk. She’s well aware that her attachment verges on irrational, because her entire family and her assistant, Cassi, often remind her, pointing out that Penelope is, after all, only a speedboat. When guests or camera crew are aboard, RayAnne simply does not speak aloud to Penelope, only pats her gunnels and caresses her chrome with a chamois as if casually polishing. Besides being almost completely rebuilt from the carburetor up, Penelope’s cosmetic work included new teak decking, shining cleats, and jewel-like ruby and amber running lights. Her fish-scale patterned fiberglass has been restored to its original silky pale salmon—a vadge color if ever there was, claims Cassi.

  Afloat somewhere in RayAnne’s subconscious is the notion that she and her boat share equal billing on the show, half supposing viewers might tune in just to see Penelope because she would. The camera certainly loves Penelope—its point of view now above the speedboat with the Masterpiece Theatre–pace of a bloated mosquito. It skims her bowsprit, a six-inch stainless steel mermaid with little jutting breasts digitally edited to Barbie smoothness for the public television–viewing audience. RayAnne imagines miniscule chrome nipples on some virtual cutting room floor.

  The mosquito-cam passes magically through the windshield and over the birchwood steering console to trawl over the contents of RayAnne’s open tackle box, where compartments separate spoon lures from Rapalas and spinners from rubbery, rainbow-colored worms that look disturbingly edible despite the hooks. Jointed lures with names like Red Leopards, Jiggle-Jims, and Little Toadies are laid end to end. In another compartment, bottles of nail polish gleam and catch the light. RayAnne occasionally does her toenails during the boring waits between takes.

  Cassi whispers in the dark, “Maybe MAC could be an underwriter?”

  “The ratings aren’t that good.” RayAnne frowns. “Are they?”

  The camera pans across spare leaders and spools of fifty-pound test, then swoops up from the tackle box to skim the depth-finder display with the station’s logo moving across the screen like a stoned Pac-Man. Action nearly stops over an open cooler with product-placement items nestled on plastic ice cubes misted to look real: Estra-Boost smoothies, YoGirl acai yogurt cups, and sweating bottles of IceCap designer water siphoned from an actual glacier that the underwriter insists is melting anyway. Diet soda cans are partially obscured. Pepsi is an underwriter, but Cassi wagers that if ratings continue to climb, they could totally be a Coke show. There’s a bag of dark chocolate Promises, half hidden by the ice cubes, though marketing reports their targeted demographic can identify even a partial “Dove” logo upside down or even backwards. RayAnne cringes at the product-peddling, but National Public Television is just doing what it must to stay afloat. Funding is always a battle, but right now, the sort of politicians her father votes for would love nothing more than to see Big Bird plucked and roasted in the smoldering ruins of Downton Abbey.

  Moving on, the view hovers above the hand-embroidered bench cushions, one posing the question Got Fish? Another features His and Hers rulers—His short by six inches. RayAnne’s favorite cushion has a cross-stitched portrait of Mae West wearing an orange Mae West.

  The boat rocks lightly as a pair of canvas Keds step into frame, introducing RayAnne’s bare ankles, one sporting the thinnest of silver chains, the other covered with enough makeup to obscure a regrettable tattoo from spring break in the midnineties—a gecko circling to bite its own tail. The camera climbs RayAnne’s pedal pushers to pause at belt-level to show her elbow poking from its rolled sleeve, then across her tanned forearm to her wrist. Despite pressure from producers, she refuses to wear a product-placement watch, because not wearing a watch is half the point of fishing, isn’t it? A pan to her hand and ringless fingers turning the ignition announces single! The POV climbs her shirt buttons and the engine engages to add its low rumble to the soundtrack, taunting, wait for it . . . wait for it.

  Come on already. RayAnne sinks a bit in the conference room chair.

  And there, finally, she is, turning to the camera, almost convincingly surprised.

  “Hey, there. Welcome aboard!”

  Like the boat, RayAnne is professionally lit, which she has learned is no easy task outdoors. On cue, she winds her hair—whole wheat, if a color must be named—into a twist and cocks her head into a tartan golf tam, her lucky fishing hat, a souvenir from her first big trout derby in New Brunswick. The original pom-pom is long gone, replaced with a tiny red-and-white bobber. The sequence required ten choreographed takes.

  Tam secured, she faces the camera. “I’m RayAnne Dahl.” With a slight shrug she invites the viewer along as if it’s just occurred to her: “Let’s go fishing!” Before donning cat-eye sunglasses, she nods once with a look that says, Well, are you coming or aren’t you?

  Given the choice, you would go—even RayAnne has to admit the scene is that invi
ting: the sleek boat, the soft (filtered) sun, the waves lapping, and the breeze lifting stray tendrils of hair from the nape of her neck. Set dressers and lighting techs have imbued Penelope with the ambiance of a boudoir, as if more than fish might be landed here; as if personal contentment itself might be schooling in the waters just below. And everyone knows there’s chocolate on board.

  As the soundtrack swells, RayAnne gets down to business and expertly backs the boat away from the dock. She turns back to wave to viewers before taking off, and once up to speed, she steers a sway so that Penelope’s back end jauntily skirts her own wake. Together, they zoom off into the endless expanse of a lake that glints like shattered windshield glass.

  The scene and music fade to nothingness—to the black pocket where the show is to be inserted—then the pocket reopens to the scroll of postshow credits. This is the until next week visual, the boat continuing its course into the horizon until it is the size of a water beetle, a final note on the accordion.

  The screen goes black a final time as the two new staffers clap until the lights come up and they see the director has caught them in the crosshairs of her gaze.

  “Those were the best takes we got.”

  RayAnne lets out the breath she’s been holding. It wasn’t bad, actually. Cassi’s bicolored eyebrows hitch in silent agreement.

  Someone says, “It’ll do. Let’s move on to issues.”

  They have three weeks to deal with “issues” before taping commences for the second season. Laptops yawn and iPads blink to life. RayAnne opens her own laptop, more as a shield than anything. She’s the only person with an actual notebook, with pen hand poised over it, ready to scribble in the event anything notable gets said. After a ten-minute report from marketing about thirty-day ratings and encore and multiplatform viewership, RayAnne’s inner clock is growling, the doodle on her page beginning to resemble lasagna.

  “It’s not Antiques Roadshow,” says one of the producers.

  A coproducer chimes in, “But with decent ratings to usher in season two . . .”

  The producers have high hopes. A few could even kick themselves for not thinking of it sooner, because in hindsight, an all-women fishing talk show is a no-brainer. According to Nielsen’s, increasing numbers of females between thirty and eighty are tuning in to see guests squirm like the leeches on their lines and cringe as they hook a chub through its eye. Perhaps viewers enjoy the quiet transitions between the action and the interview segments, when Penelope’s bow quietly hammocks in the waves or a line is cast from RayAnne’s reel like a thread of spun sugar. She wonders if viewers are simply lulled by the hypnotic cadence of other women’s voices, or the purr of her 2.5 horsepower trolling motor—no louder than a vibrator.

  In any case, they aren’t changing channels. When ratings or demographics data crop up on RayAnne’s screen, she herds them directly into the recycle bin, borrowing Gran Dot’s gravelly voice: “Numbers, schmumbers.” In her mind’s eye, the audience is the size of a large book club or a small studio audience, not a sea of faces but a pond—a smiling, indulgent pond bobbing with women like her mother, her gran, her sister-in-law, Ingrid, or the sort of women in her yoga-sculpt class she might ask to coffee if she weren’t so shy. If she paid any attention to how many women (and men) were actually watching, she would likely pee her capris. RayAnne assumes her pond tunes in for the more interesting guests, the ones they must fight for, and for the conversation, because it is a talk show after all. And don’t women crave the voices of their own tribe? Whether laughing or crying, rejoicing or lamenting—even shrieking.

  Women want to know they’re not in it alone.

  Truth be told, it hadn’t started well. Everyone would like to forget the scrapped pilot of Fishin’ Chicks with its original host, Mandy Cox. As for the guest roster, producers had insisted on featuring women successful in male-dominated fields, making selections that were admittedly not brilliant—or even vetted. Like the director of environmental films who hurled a wet blanket over the front third of the pilot by pulling a dead, oil-soaked seagull from her bag while predicting another BP-sized spill, citing a certain oil company that happens to be a major underwriter of the station’s parent network. The next guest, a physicist from a particle accelerator lab, was pink and perspiring and unintentionally hilarious while sing-songing facts about quarks and gluons forming protons and neutrons like some menopausal rapper. A final pall was cast during a diatribe complete with pixeled-out photos by the organizer of a campaign to abolish third-world clitoridectomies.

  To understate, Mandy had not handled any of these guests with much aplomb, and after stomping off the set, went straight to legal, citing hazardous working conditions—forget that she never once actually drove the boat; that was RayAnne wearing a wig and Mandy’s jacket zipped over two warm bags of microwaved popcorn. The tension around the pilot episode had been palpable to begin with, but then came the call announcing Mandy had indeed wormed out of her contract. Ironically, she was injured on her next gig—a film in which she clung to Matthew McConaughey in a glacial cleft for the duration of the two-star bomb, ClingHorn, after she’d slipped on a mustard packet on the catering yurt floor. Once the pins were removed, Mandy went right back to where she’d been discovered, hosting the cable reality show Tomboy Trucker Wives.

  The pilot of Fishin’ Chicks was dashed, and the decision to lighten up on topics had been swift. There are days RayAnne cannot believe that she’s on television, although the chain of events landing her there was rather mundane. She’d only been contracted as the pro-fishing consultant—winding up in the host’s seat was sheer happenstance. She is the temp, the stunt double, the bridesmaid, the buddy in the romantic comedy—the sub, which is what producers call her still.

  The morning Mandy jumped ship, reactions around the conference table had been varied; RayAnne’s had been to softly bang her forehead on the mahogany, moaning, “I just bought a house!”

  Cassi, who had been Mandy’s assistant then, had only grinned. “So, no more Fishin’ Chicks?”

  “Oh,” sighed the producer. “If only it were that simple.”

  “We’ll get a new Mandy?” RayAnne brightened. Having coached Mandy for eight weeks, she had opinions. “How about somebody less . . . enhanced?” Mandy’s double-D implants had proven not only a distraction to the crew but a physical hindrance when casting a line or even climbing in and out of the boat. She was forever mislaying the custom life vest fitted specially for her.

  Yes, there would be a new Mandy. Yes, less bombshell. An unknown this time.

  Auditions were scheduled. RayAnne took a dozen hopefuls out onto the lake and coached them through the fishing-while-talking bits of their audition tapes. Half of them couldn’t remember the plot with their arms hanging akimbo let alone while casting a lure—one had blinked at the reel in her hand and asked RayAnne how to turn it on.

  In private, she and Cassi grumbled that the producers must be idiots not to realize the hour could be entertaining and politically correct, though the quota for either seemed to change weekly at WYOY. Why not book guests with compelling stories, not just unusual careers—women who with luck might have some personality. Not quite misfits, but near-fits, like RayAnne. And wouldn’t it be nice if they found a host older than twenty-five, because really, who wants to go face to face with some poreless anchor-bot younger by a decade or three? Cassi, with her Svengali-like gift of persuasion, had slyly planted seeds, dropped suggestions, elbowed in with subliminal nudges until producers and the director convinced themselves the idea to change the entire premise had been their own. While she was doing that, RayAnne was more vocal and blunt about how absurd the name Fishin’ Chicks was, but since she hadn’t thought much about alternatives, she’d only shrugged when asked and said, “Fishing?” which was thought brilliant for its simplicity.

  But RayAnne knew a few hints and a name change alone weren’t going to cut it. To raise the show from the
ashes, they needed a host who would be a diamond-in-the-rough discovery. She scheduled another meeting to run tapes, and while producers and staff were all on the edges of their seats, she already knew, having been in the boat with the “talent,” that they hadn’t even come close to finding a viable replacement for Mandy. RayAnne’s mind had been elsewhere, thinking ahead to job possibilities. Settled for the first time in a dozen years, living in one place and finally always knowing where her favorite bra was, the last thing she wanted was to go back out on the pro-fishing circuit. While the others watched the auditions, she was concentrating on her résumé, knitting together a mental list of accomplishments that might impress somebody at sporting goods giants like Cabela’s or LunkerLand, hoping at best to land some spokespersonship or PR gig, maybe a sales rep position, or, scraping bottom, demo work at the expos and shows.

  She barely looked at the screen as her on-camera-self prompted yet another Nordic delight: “Okay, Kelsey, that was a little better, but try speaking to the camera, like this.” RayAnne squared herself to improvise, recalling shards of sound bites heard on the radio during her drive in. “Today we have a North Dakota grandmother of three on board. Ida Lott survived four days in a prairie blizzard while buried in her Camry, keeping a journal on grocery bags and drinking melted snow. You might know of those scribblings on Roundy’s bags as the runaway bestseller, Five Days on a Chiclet, soon to be a film starring Dame Judi Dench.”

  One of the staffers had looked curiously from the screen to RayAnne.

  Sighing, RayAnne had leaned to Cassi. “They say they don’t want another Mandy, yet look who they send me.”

  In the next screen test, RayAnne coached a gormless blond indistinguishable from any of the Megans on Fox, pleading, “Try more voice.” Physically turning the young woman to the lens and speaking over her shoulder, RayAnne sounded chipper and engaging: “On board with us this morning is Italian meter maid Parmesana Cannelloni. You may remember her from the recent YouTube viral video wherein Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took time out from his busy schedule of presidente-ing to dry-hump Ms. Cannelloni near his motorcade in Bologna. Mama mia!”