Fishing With RayAnne (5 page)

When RayAnne began twisting a hank of hair, Cassi’s voice squeaked interference. She dropped it as if it were ignited and listened to the next directive: “Announce an underwriter slot in fifteen seconds.” Which she did, cheerfully.

“All good advice, Maeve,” RayAnne said, turning to camera two, “and I’m sure we’ll hear plenty more of it after we drop anchor!”

RayAnne took the wheel, at first easing Penelope away, then suddenly opening the throttle, pasting Maeve back in her seat. The shot faded as the boat sped out of frame with Maeve clutching her hat.

Bernadette fast-forwards to the section where they are settled in and actually fishing, Maeve holding forth with a bit she’d obviously rehearsed about how catch-and-release principles might apply to dating, then asking RayAnne who her dream dates might be, if she could pick anyone in the world, like George Clooney.

RayAnne chewed her lip—her list wasn’t that predictable. “Um, some of my dream dates are dead.”

“Dead?”

“Uh-huh, like Ed Ricketts.”

Maeve cocked her head. “And he is, or
was
. . . ?”

“Steinbeck’s marine biologist? Ed Ricketts. Dead. Hot, but dead. Nikola Tesla for sure. Maybe Orson Welles before he ballooned. Dylan Thomas without the bottle . . .” She shrugged at the camera.

“Right. Let’s stick to the living for now. What traits would make a keeper? For you?”

RayAnne’s technique for stalling is to simply rehash the question: “What would make a keeper . . . for me? Traits? You mean like the ‘best-of’ from failed relationships?”

“Let’s avoid words like ‘failed,’ shall we? How about . . . ‘previous’ or ‘prior.’ Just start with bits of one fellow’s this and another’s that to construct a sort of ideal mate.”

“Con
struct
. Oh, like Mary Shelley?” Before she knew it, RayAnne was revealing the best and worst of her priors on national television. First names only, but still, their real first names. She led with the talent of Lyle, the guitar player with too many substance habits for her comfort. “Talented, and so . . . out of it.”

She tacked on the torso of Paul, the cyclist she never tired of watching undress. “Very rude—but ripped.”

“And . . .” Maeve urged. “Personality?”

“Um, Richard. He was so charming and sweet, except I kept expecting him to come out of the closet wearing something of mine.” She tapped her lip. “But my Frankenman would have to be a bit smarter . . .”

There’d been Zack, the smart one who was going to do great things, had a bunch of PhDs. Sex with him had been above average,
that
she remembers. “This one guy, Zack? He spoke maybe five languages.” As RayAnne recalled him, she frowned. “So you’d think he’d know better words for breasts than ‘titties.’ So ‘smarter’ isn’t exactly the wor—” She looked straight at camera one, which fed directly to Cassi’s monitor. “Wait, can I say ‘titties’ on air?”

From the breakfast nook, watching her own dunderheadedness courtesy of TiVo, RayAnne groans. Postproduction had promised to cut that and didn’t, yet they would edit out the removal of a barbless hook.

Bernadette chortles, then recovers. “Oh, wait, did I tell you that Zack called too?”

“No! Tell me you didn’t give him—”

“Your number? Why not?”

“Mom, you can’t just do that!”

“Wasn’t he going to be a doctor?”

RayAnne pivots her attention back to a drawing in the brochure, turning it this way and that until realizing it is a tutorial for perineal self-massage. On-screen, she’s busy topping off her woman-made man with the perfect face of Larry, who’d been “about as lively as the marble his jaw was chiseled from.” When the camera drew nearer to RayAnne, the slow realization of what she’d just done on national television appeared like a rash. If that hadn’t been bad enough, Maeve then pulled out a dating profile she’d written for RayAnne and proceeded to read the teaser to the camera in her lovely lilt.

“Successful
. . .
”

RayAnne frowns across the kitchen toward the television, piping up with her own commentary, countering,
“For the moment . . .”

“. . . and dynamic,”

“Caffeinated.”

“. . . thirty-something,”

“Clock-ticking.”

“. . . independent professional,”

“Loner.”

“. . . loves the outdoors,”

“Claustrophobic.”

“. . . fishing in particular.”

“Dweeb.”

“Height and weight more or less balanced,”

“Diet Sprite and laxatives.”

“. . . is open to life’s possibilities,”

“Indecisive.”

“An incredible catch!”

“Ha!”

Bernadette turns. “Really, you should hear yourself. And
laxatives
? You never did use that gift certificate for the colonic, did you?”

The camera panned to RayAnne’s plastered smile, but just as she opened her massive on-screen mouth to sputter a response, she was saved by a tug on her line. Though the fish was a runt, she made a great show of struggling and reeling as if a muskie had her hook. When she held up the skinny pike, the cameraman had trouble focusing on it, slender as it was, so RayAnne leaned out over the gunnel and held it to the lens, making it loom large. “Okay! Now that we’ve caught something, ladies, here’s one to ponder while we break for a word from Lefty’s Bait. Does size matter?”

RayAnne makes a horsey snort as the screen goes black.

“
I
thought it was funny.” Bernadette breezes past, bustles around the kitchen, and returns with a bowl of chips. “It was cute, aside from the tattling parts.”

“Mom.”

Bernadette squeezes RayAnne’s shoulder. “Oh, honey. Would it kill you to lighten up? It’s just a
show
.”

“Just my
career
.”

So, Zack called? She’d wondered where he might end up. What was it again about their split? She’d chalked it up to the usual—being out on the circuit three weeks each month hadn’t been great for maintaining any relationship. She absently chews a handful of chips, then spits the gummy mess into her palm. “Gah! Mom! These taste like cheesy seaweed!”

“Well, I should hope so.”

In spite of the “Frankenman” episode being perhaps her most embarrassing performance yet, responses had been overwhelmingly positive. Still, television is hardly the place to practice. She simply has to do better—she talks too much when nervous, compulsively digs in the product-placement packages of Gummy Trout and Choco-Fish. She chews her nails, slumps, squints, and the only time she’s truly at ease is when the guest is actually interesting.

She often wonders why the director doesn’t coach her, give more direction.

Her mother narrows an eye in her direction. “You look pale, RayAnne; you getting enough sleep? Bags. Under your eyes.” Bernadette bustles again and pulls something from the fridge that looks like sod and plugs in her Vitamix. Just as RayAnne is about to protest, the machine roars. She won’t bother arguing because the more she resists, the more Bernadette will push, so she merely sits with her eyes shut until her mother floats back to the table with a glass of neon-green liquid.

“Here. Wheatgrass. Neutralizes toxins.”

“Now I’m toxic.” RayAnne frowns at the acid green, but knocks it back, cringing at the taste, like licking the blades of a lawn mower. Bernadette hands over a glass of water to wash it down.

“Good?” Bernadette takes the glass.

“Perfect pairing with these underpants chips.”

“Pish. Oh, I forgot.” Bernadette pulls a tightly tied bundle of twiggy herbs from somewhere in her caftan. “Sage to smudge your trailer with.”

On location, RayAnne will be staying in a newly leased motor home, one assigned just to her, after having shared with Cassi last season, which was a little like bunking with Casper, her white face lit all hours by the glow of her iPad until RayAnne took to wearing a sleep mask. She tries handing back the sage. “It’s a brand-
new
RV.”

“Take it. Bad juju can come factory direct. How long will they keep you up there?”

“We’ve got twelve shows to tape, so probably two sessions. I can be home on the weekends in between.”

“You know, I met this woman you should consider, an intimacy yogini.”

“Yo-
what
?”

“Yog
ini
, female yogi. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.” Bernadette paws around in a Guatemalan patchwork duffel the size of a body bag and pulls out a business card.

Gumani Bali, PhD, Ayurverotic Yogini.

The card has a photograph of a diminutive, dark woman with a crooked grin. “Dr. Ruth in a sari?” RayAnne slides the card back.

Her mother sips her own wheatgrass juice as if it is Bordeaux. “Gumani is amazing. She’s enlightened
me
to a few things . . .”

“Please.” RayAnne holds up a hand.

All too often, Bernadette offers up intimate minutiae of her own sex life, most of them dalliances, flings that require no more commitment than a drop-in Zumba class. Most recently she’d hooked up with a raw-foods chef half her age, sharing details as if RayAnne might
want
to know what anyone might have tattooed across their scrotum. She breathes the image away. Bernadette claims to be completely free in her own body, using a tone that suggests RayAnne might be a hostage in hers.

“Thanks, Mom, but I don’t really have that much say in what guests are chosen. Besides, it’s a family show.”

“Not for the
show
, honey, for
you
.” Bernadette leans close as if they are not alone. “I’ve made an appointment for you. For your birthday!”

“You are kidding me.” RayAnne unfolds, slowly rising. “
Say
you are kidding me.”

“Oh, the look on your face! Of course I’m kidding.”

When Bernadette laughs hard,
this
hard, it’s easy to imagine her young. She’d been born a literal flower child, having grown up on a sunflower farm in Iowa and headed for a life of hippiedom until sidetracked by marriage to Big Rick—her one great mistake and possibly the driving impetus that now compels her to help other women over their own rough pasts and steer them toward happier lives, her own happiness having been derailed by a man.

When RayAnne was twelve, during one of the defining moments of Dahl family history, Bernadette asserted herself over the carcass of a roast turkey on Thanksgiving afternoon. There was Before The Turkey, The Turkey, and
Après
The Turkey.

Sometime during The Turkey, the valve subduing Bernadette’s true nature simply blew under the pressures of the holiday when the strain of domesticity, the demands of motherhood, and an unhappy union played out on a midwestern suburban stage proved too much. Emboldened by a number of gin gimlets, Bernadette loudly revealed to all gathered that before she had met Big Rick, she’d been engaged to a mostly forgotten folk singer named Rupert Rutherford, with whom she planned to live on an Oregon commune and raise weed and naked babies. Alas, Rupert was arrested for dealing and sentenced just a week before they were to be married on a beach by a barefoot Rastafarian.

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.