Fishing With RayAnne

by Ava Finch

  RayAnne understands that if life were fair, marijuana would be legal and her mother would have had her folk singer.

  Instead, after several months of waiting for Rupert, Bernadette’s patience momentarily flagged. She had an ill-advised, unlikely fling with Big Rick, whom she barely knew. Shortly thereafter she discovered she was pregnant, and somehow Big Rick caught wind of it. He hounded and wooed and charmed her into marrying him. She realized her mistake almost immediately, and saw her future dissolve like so much smoke from the chimney of the three-bedroom Colonial in the leafy Minneapolis neighborhood she inexplicably found herself living in. Branded with the Scandinavian ethic of lying in the bed one has made, Bernadette put her shoulder to the tasks of housewifery, child-rearing, and suppression of her free spirit while Big Rick spent two hundred days a year drinking and screwing his way across the pro-fishing circuit.

  Bernadette had risen to standing (a feat, considering) to address those gathered: “I was a moth knocked off course by the glare of a bare bulb, when I was supposed to be navigating by starlight.” Big Rick being the bulb—even RayAnne’s then-nine-year-old brother Ky got that. Bernadette pulled the carving fork from the carcass, a little flag of limp skin still attached, and pointed it at Big Rick, working to enunciate. “If I could have raised enough money to get Rupert a decent lawyer, I would not be sitting here now, you bastard.” She steadied the fork in Big Rick’s direction. “He let me think he was for Humphrey because I belonged to Young Democrats. I didn’t even know until after we were married that he’d voted for Nixon.” She spat the name, then wobbled and changed some mental track. “This . . .” Like a conductor, she gestured to the wallpaper and either the drapes or the yard outside the window, or the driveway with Big Rick’s Lincoln parked there, or the mod beveled glass chandelier, her sweeping hands seemingly including her family. “This is not the life I was meant to lead.” She then sat down hard and passed out, her forehead thudding next to the bowl of Dot’s cranberry-tangerine compote.

  That was the last holiday the Dahl family spent together. On countless occasions afterward, Bernadette found opportunities to reassure RayAnne she was not included in that not. Still, the barb was lodged—she had been the cause of her mother’s misery, her own teeny fetal existence the only reason her parents had married in the first place.

  Why do people marry, again?

  “I gotta pee.” She edges out from the breakfast nook and is halfway down the hall before hearing her mother call, “Kegel!”

  Returning to the kitchen, she leans against the doorframe. “Okay,” she says, “okay” being her mantra when worn-down or annoyed. She nods toward the fridge. “Okay, Mom, where’s your stash?”

  “Stash?” Bernadette is so lousy at feigning innocence.

  “The Ben & Jerry’s. I know you’ve got Chunky Monkey around here somewhere.”

  Bernadette caves. “Rec room fridge. Under the goji sherbet and behind the miso pops.” RayAnne is already on her way.

  As RayAnne reaches the bottom of the basement stairs, her mother shouts, “Grab the Carnal Mudslide too!”

  She crosses the rec room, skirting the massage table where the pool table used to be, swinging behind the tiki bar to the old pink Norge. She finds the ice pick and chips at the frost around the freezer door, working it like a bank robber for three minutes before liberating the cartons within, time enough to forget she is annoyed.

  Ice cream in hand, she pauses at the base of the stairs and scans the wall of family photos, drawn to a new addition—a shot of Bernadette in full life-passages doula mode, wearing a llama cape and embroidered cap, posed with half a dozen aging mavens outside a Nepalese monastery. Next to them is a mountain of matched sets of luggage with a troop of Sherpas standing by. Her mother looks very happy in the photo. And probably is, in her plinky, feel-good world that is so easy for RayAnne to scoff at. Maybe that’s why Bernadette is so maddening lately. She’s so unflappable, so . . . assured.

  RayAnne spies the latest portrait of her brother and his family and smiles. Kyle and Ingrid wear teeth-gritting grins while pinning their identical twins in WWE holds as if casually hugging them. Wilt and Michael are darling and indiscernible—Kyle calls them Thing One and Thing Two, not quite joking. To her grandmother, who can’t be bothered keeping her great-grandsons straight, they are That Pair of Springs.

  There’s a glamorous black-and-white of Dot at a linen-covered table leaning against Dead Ted (so called to distinguish him from RayAnne’s grandfather on her mother’s side, also a Ted, also dead, referred to as Other Ted) in the dining room of their restaurant, Dot looking very Jackie O in her spangled sheath and teased hair. Very glam. Another restaurant shot shows her on the other side of the swinging doors, wearing her chef togs, posing with her kitchen staff, and wielding a whisk the length of her arm. RayAnne is glad that her mother and Dot have stayed close over the years, never having allowed Big Rick or any of the ensuing wives to wedge them apart. Dot still calls Bernadette once a week.

  In another picture, RayAnne’s grainy seven-year-old face is framed in a Dutch-boy haircut. She’s raccoon-eyed in the bright sun, having collared her grandmother from behind with dimpled arms. Dot’s in her lawn chair with Snicker, the ratty lap dog that RayAnne sometimes bit when no one was looking. The dog is baring its little needle teeth up at RayAnne, but Dot seems oblivious, looking slightly blank and holding fast to RayAnne’s wrists, still freshly grieving for Dead Ted.

  There’s only one family photo that includes Big Rick, a yellowing Sears portrait. RayAnne is pudgy and Kyle twig-thin. Their mother is unconvincingly dressed like a suburban housewife in a pastel blouse with shoulder pads and poodle hair, looking brittle and reluctant, nothing like the tanned, open-faced woman two frames away in Nepal.

  When stepping back from the wall, seeing the photos all together as a history, RayAnne wonders why she bothers to worry as much as she does. Here, decades of her family gaze out at her—lives lived and survived (or not, in the case of Dead Ted, toppled by an aneurism on the seventh hole) that make her current worries seem trivial. It’s the important things she needs to focus on. She should see more of her brother and his family. She must see Dot soon, and not just on Skype.

  Bernadette calls down, “You dawdle, it’ll melt.”

  Her hands numb with cold, RayAnne takes the stairs in twos.

  Sitting with her mother in the jungle of the backyard, digging directly from the carton of ice cream, she muses that as long as she and Bernadette don’t look at each other it could be any year at all, any one of their backyard-ice-cream afternoons—she could be fifteen, or twenty-five, but at the moment, licking her spoon, she feels five again, which is good, because lately she’s been feeling fifty.

  As if reading her mind, Bernadette aims a spoonful at RayAnne and makes an airplane noise.

  “Open the hangar, RayBean.”

  Wind sends a heavy lilac branch bobbing into a birdbath she can remember sitting in as a toddler. She opens her mouth, then clamps hard, trapping the spoon so that Bernadette must wrestle it back.

  It’s better when they both can laugh.

  THREE

  It’s an insane hour, teetering toward four a.m. Shivering and sitting on her roller bag at the curb, RayAnne clutches a steaming travel mug. The row house windows are mostly dark save those belonging to the resident widows, their lights ablaze.

  Don’t old ladies ever sleep?

  The two widows have bookended the row house for decades, one on either end. Their porches are framed by peeling columns, and their front windows are crowded with colossal geraniums and violets shouldering the glass as if trying to break out. Their end units are the most enviable, with bay windows on the gable ends and narrow side gardens. Both still use the original pulley clotheslines, where their underpants and house dresses flap in the breeze to announce their figures: Stout is from Kraków and barely speaks English, despite living in Minneapolis for
sixty years. Winter or summer, she wears headscarves knotted deep somewhere under her jowls. Scrawny is sweet natured, half-blind, and smiles awkwardly as if with someone else’s dentures. RayAnne has been told local Realtors are wild for them both to expire. One of these days she’s going to knock on their doors with bakery cookies and ask what the neighborhood was like once upon a time, ask about the women that had lived in her slice of the building.

  RayAnne’s other neighbors, sensibly dead to the world, are nearer her own age—a few young families, a polite set of Pakistani brothers, and a friendly gay couple who have bravely opened a bistro on the next block in anticipation of gentrification. The only other single female besides RayAnne seems to be around about as much as she is. Her young neighbors are all pleasant enough and seem terribly busy with their work: one teaches film at the U, the brothers work in IT, the single has some start-up clothing-design firm. When they ask RayAnne what she does, her mumbled answer doesn’t include “fishing,” only “public” and “television,” which gets approving nods every time.

  Though she’s expecting it, when the new motor home rounds the corner, RayAnne’s jaw drops. Long as a Greyhound bus, it spans the width of two of the row houses. Rolling to a stop, it gives a great hydraulic sigh and settles onto its chassis. One look at the graphics wrapping the side and RayAnne is grateful for the ungodly hour and deserted street. A behemoth trout arches along the length of the vehicle, ready to gobble up a lure the size of a muskie. The entire back end of the RV is taken up by a woman’s image—not a real woman, but an ideal everywoman, were everywoman an even-featured blond with blue eyes, perfect teeth, and flawless skin. The tire-sized O of her mouth looks ready to fellate the bottle of Mermaid Pilsner she’s raising to her mouth while one colossal eye winks seductively. The dual exhaust pipes poke from the front of her fishing vest in perfectly regrettable positions.

  This must be who they have in mind for a host? A Big Rick–ism escapes RayAnne’s lips: “Kee-rist on a bike.”

  The door huffs opens and Cassi hops to the pavement. It turns out she has a class-A driver’s license, which is somehow not surprising. She clomps over with a greeting far too loud for the hour. “Nice barrels, huh?”

  “She’s like . . . a whatsit?” RayAnne scrabbles.

  “Fembot? I think we should name her.”

  RayAnne ponders the face. “Well. If Betty Crocker had a beer-guzzling, tramp-stamped granddaughter that lived to give blowjobs, this would be her.” RayAnne sucks her sippy thermos while considering a name. “Tiffany?”

  “Tiffany Crocker.” Cassi nods. “Sounds about right.”

  RayAnne is eager to get the RV moving—her neighbors probably don’t know about the show and don’t need to. Here, in her neighborhood, RayAnne’s just one of the regulars at Tough Beans, staring into her laptop like everyone else, insulated against interaction by clunky headphones, chewing hoodie strings while tabbing between open tabs of work, various websites, or Facebook, or browsing (ironically, of course) the personals on City Pages, snorting over such ad banners as Must Love Knots or Ugly but Insatiable Seeking Same.

  Along with other neighborhood singles, she does her grocery shopping late, loitering at the freezer section uncertainly as if waiting for pizza to be declared a superfood. At the yoga studio she downward-dogs and wrestles back farts with the rest of them, dodging arms and legs while attempting to be nothing but breath and movement. On the river path she delays her jogging with exaggerated hamstring-stretching before setting out to bob among the others, propelled by a loathing for her thighs. RayAnne bears no resemblance to the idealized Tiffany plastered over the back end of the gaudy RV.

  Cassi nudges her. “Look at it this way, they wouldn’t have bothered with all this if they weren’t considering a third season. She’s job security.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” RayAnne hadn’t minded the old RV with its warped wallboard and Barbie-sized stove and propane smell. She’s seen rigs like this at the sports shows, has seen the price tags—more than she paid for her house. “I thought there were budget constraints?”

  “It’s leased courtesy of Tiffany’s pimp, Mermaid Pilsner.” Cassi’s tone shifts to a sleazy voiceover drawl. “One of the most craptacular artisanal beers ever brewed.” She grandly motions to the RV. “You gotta see the kitchen, and those pop-out sections expand the back end like Kirstie Alley’s hips. All the windows work and you can touch anything without getting a shock. And there’s an icemaker.”

  Now that she’s found a spot for one, RayAnne regrets not taking one of Bernadette’s “I’m a Gasshole!” bumper stickers. Sticking her head in, she sees the RV is better appointed than her house, certainly cleaner, with chrome and leather everywhere and a master electrical console with color-coded switches and a remote. She instantly dislikes it, all of it: the halogen lights, the beige-on-beige decor, and the upholstery with paper runners like at the women’s clinic. “We allowed to sit?”

  They strap themselves into swiveling bucket seats and Cassi revs the engine, rubbing her hands together. “Hot for some Rod & Gun action?”

  Having never been to such an expo, Cassi is actually excited. With no desire to rain on the girl’s parade, RayAnne only smiles. “You betcha.”

  Hours later she wakes from the sort of dreams one can only have when barreling along in a living room at seventy miles an hour. She sort-of remembers the stops for gas and is shocked to see they’ve nearly reached Chicago. “Was I drooling?” she asks.

  Cassi rips off a section of paper runner from under her knee and hands it over. “Some.”

  At a massive underground garage at the convention center, the RV is taken over by a union driver, who hands it over to a teamster to wash and polish before parking it in the convention hall, where an IBEW electrician will plug it in and hang the monitors, and another union somebody will unfurl its canopy. Cassi and RayAnne are not allowed to do so much as open the legs of folding tables, so they take a shuttle downtown to have lunch and check into their rooms.

  After stowing their bags, they walk to the pier, where Cassi eats mini donuts and RayAnne takes the empty bag to breathe in the sugary warm air. They roam aimlessly up Michigan Avenue and enter a store only because their feet ache. It sells nothing but cashmere, the entire store, and they shuffle from display to display of sweaters and scarves and throws, making little noises at every price tag until a clerk gives them a withering look and they move on.

  The FAO Schwartz store is hosting an American Girl Doll event, awash in mothers with daughters who all seem to be competing for the title of most slap-worthy. The mothers keep one cool eye on Cassi while RayAnne shops for Lego kits for her nephews. When her head begins throbbing from the lights and noise, RayAnne concludes that if she ever has a child, it will need to be a boy because the banshee pitch only little girls can achieve cuts right through her. Even after they leave the store, her ears ring with the tune of the constantly looping “It’s a Small World,” wondering how the clerks bear eight-hour shifts of it.

  It’s still light when they stagger into the hotel lobby, but RayAnne is ready for her room-service chicken Caesar (dressing on the side), an hour of cable, and bed. Some might think being on the road is exciting, but after ten years on the circuit, RayAnne would give her thumbs for the sort of nine-to-five routine that sounds like purgatory to most, but joyously predictable to her. As she drifts off, the toy-store tune wedges into her brain and she hums herself to sleep, wishing the lyrics were true, that it was a small world, after all.

  In the morning they arrive at the expo late, everything at the convention center already lit up and going full bore. They hang back in the broad entrance hall, which is rounded like an omnitheater, marveling at the projections of Planet Earth–like schools of game fish maniacally charging and gnawing so that it seems they are trying to eat anyone passing by. Some people actually duck and dodge in amusing reversals of predator and prey.

  “Im
agine standing here stoned,” Cassi observes.

  “No thanks.” RayAnne laughs. She wouldn’t dare these days, clearly remembering the twenty pounds she gained in college, prone to the sort of munchies that always landed her cross-legged in front of the open fridge eating straight from the condiment shelves like the scene in 9½ Weeks. No Mickey Rourke, just olives and Cheez Whiz.

  “Interesting getup, by the way.” She cocks an eye at Cassi.

  Cassi is dressed in one of her ironic outfits: Wellington rubber boots, blaze-orange leggings, an extra-long red thermal shirt that doubles as a minidress, snugged at the waist by a kiddie plastic ammo belt. Every garment and each boot is plastered with dozens of bullet-hole decals that look remarkably real. It’s all topped with the sort of quilted vest old men wear, though Cassi’s has been fashionably cropped like a bolero jacket. In a nod to fishing, treble hooks hang from her earlobes like lethal little candelabras. RayAnne hopes Cassi has thought to file the barbs.

  Conversely, RayAnne is head to toe in Filson khaki with numerous zip-off options: putty-colored chamois shirt, fawn-hued cargo pants, lightweight beige utility vest, and olive green billed cap with the show’s logo. She feels anonymous and nearly androgynous here in the odd world she was once part of.

  Cassi enlists RayAnne to take video on her cell phone as a steelhead opens its jaws over her head. “C’mon,” RayAnne urges, handing the phone back after a minute. “Let’s get this over with.”