by Ava Finch
The furthest thing from her mind would have been to make a stink about it. So what if Sweaty Eddie got her the consultant gig with WYOW? Thinking of him sends a shudder up her spine that goes on extra long until she realizes it’s the iPhone vibrating in her pocket.
She may never get used to the phone’s raw buzz, reminiscent of her sixteenth birthday gift from Gran, an electric Lady Schick that left her with such razor rash she couldn’t lower her arms for days. She fishes for the phone, sees her father’s number glow for a beat, then powers it off and deposits it in another pocket.
By taking the stairs, RayAnne and Cassi avoid riding the elevator with the others. They thump down the two flights and make their way out of the building without slowing until halfway across the sunny parking lot.
RayAnne stops. “Size six?”
Cassi holds up a finger. “No problem. The really expensive clothes lie; they’re always labeled a size or two smaller than they really are. Rinata has a list of brands we could never afford on our pay.” Cassi shades her pale eyes. “Don’t let them get to you.”
“I don’t really. It’s more the attitude, you know? That default I work for public television so I am better than you.”
“You work for public television.”
“Not like they do.”
“True.” Cassi squints. “But you fished the pro circuit, right? I hear those guys can be brutal.”
RayAnne shrugs. “Some. Most were just horny good ol’ boys. At least I had methods of dealing with them.”
“What? Like mace?” Cassi kicks the air at crotch height. “Karate?”
“You know the trick of imagining the person who’s intimidating you is naked when you’re not?” RayAnne holds up a curled pinky. “I just imagined a lot of erectile dysfunction.”
Cassi nods toward the upper windows. “Too bad that won’t work on them.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d swear that redhead is a man.”
“Dawn?”
“Or is it Don?”
“Anyway.” Cassi inhales. “It looks like we’re on again. Whew, huh?”
“Sure, but why couldn’t anyone just—”
“Say something? Maybe ask if you want to keep hosting? Listen, if they say it, they will have to offer you a contract. As it is, with you being freelance, they’re saving assloads on you, Ray. You cost a fraction of what Mandy did. And right now finance is having one eppie after another.”
“Still?”
“Same old. Teabaggers wanna slash any federal funding again, what with shows like NOVA spewing scientific fact and Bert and Ernie being so gay.”
“Right.” RayAnne has no clear idea of what goes on in finance or any of the other administrative offices above the third floor, never actually having been invited. She aims her key-fob at the nondescript silver hatchback in front of her. “This is me.” When it doesn’t bleep she frowns and walks two cars ahead. “Or this.” When she opens the hatch, a number of books fall to the pavement. She dips to grab them, mumbling, “Damn, I’m gonna have fines again.”
Cassi stoops to help. “Who goes to the library anymore?”
“I do.” She glances at the book Cassi’s picked up. “Oh, that’s a favorite. I wouldn’t mind actually owning that one.”
Cassi watches her stack it atop the rest. “So, why not buy it?”
RayAnne shrugs. “Well, then I’d buy another, and before you know it I’d need a bookcase.”
“To own a copy of The Wayward Bus?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Not really. Just get a Kindle.”
RayAnne hugs the books to her chest. “Not there yet.”
Cassi scans the book titles. “You were like, something else once? Before fishing?”
“Almost. I majored in journalism, then worked at a crummy weekly, but . . .”
“But what?”
“I was kind of terrible at it. I’d be assigned these human interest stories and wind up sort of . . . enhancing.”
“What, like fabricating? Like that New Republic guy?”
“More like what my gran calls spit-shining. Giving people’s stories slightly better spins and angles.”
“But in journalism?” Cassi squints.
“I know. It wasn’t for me. Facts aren’t nearly as compelling as people, and people have so few facts.”
“Maybe you should have considered fiction.”
“Tell me. Hey, should you even be out here?”
“I’m wearing SPF 90. Wait’ll you see my getup for Location—like a beekeeper. You know they make sunproof fabric?” Cassi slings her bag and heads toward a red Ford Fiesta that looks as though it might have been painted with a brush. RayAnne opens her mouth to ask if it has air bags, thinks better of it, and waves her off, saying, “Drive safe.” Which she hopes is heeded as don’t text.
Once in her own car, she juggles her phone uncertainly, then, assuming he won’t be answering, since he rarely does, speed dials Big Rick. She expects to leave a message, but is startled when he picks up on the first ring.
“Hey, Baby Ray.”
“Dad. You knew it was me?”
“I got this caller ID gizmo. Gotta love that—now I only talk to your grandmother when I feel like a lecture.”
“C’mon, Dad, she only nags when you . . . never mind. I should call her myself.”
“How’s it going up there in TV land?”
“It’s okay. Mostly.” She can hear the glug of liquid over ice and looks at her watch. It isn’t even eleven a.m. yet in Arizona where Big Rick has recently retired with his latest wife.
“What’s that noise?”
“Ice. For lemonade.”
“Only asking.” Unable to keep the names straight, she asks, “How’s the bride?”
“She’s working out okay. At her golf lesson right now. So, you get another season?”
“I’m on again, it seems—with a few conditions. Let’s see—they want a pink cancer ribbon on my trolling motor, forget that they’re already embroidered on every life vest. I get to ride a fiberglass trout in some parade, and they want me to call guests ‘girlfriend’ like Oprah does. Oh, and I have to stand around at the Rod & Gun Expo for two days doing promo.”
“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 ar
e 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. Cornflower.”
“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.
TWO
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 man
y 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.
