Fishing With RayAnne (9 page)

She’d had her share of marriage proposals too—one she eventually accepted. Nico had been a classmate. At first, ‘Dortee’ believed herself to be in love with the young man, when actually she was in love with the way his neck sat on his shoulders. She also adored the quaint
trattoria
his family ran and his little dog, Eduardo. Dot and Nico eloped and were married all of eight weeks, during which time Nico’s parents, sisters, aunts and uncles, family priest, neighbors, and landlord all railed relentlessly against the union. It was unthinkable that Nico, an only son, would marry a non-Catholic—and elope, at that. More unthinkable was that Dot was a foreigner—no matter that Americans were generally embraced after the war. What gleam the marriage had launched with quickly dulled under the family pressure, until the young couple almost gladly agreed to an annulment, freeing Nico to honor his prior engagement and marry his childhood sweetheart and cousin, Teresina. By the time Dot’s own parents had time to react to the jolt of news that their nineteen-year-old daughter had married an Italian cook, it was time to send word home with,
Disregard previous telegram. Stop.

Dot was embarrassed, but not crushed. “Nico . . .” she had confided to RayAnne, “wasn’t much of a lover—all jutting chin and piercing eyes, but not much else.” Which suggested there might have been a size issue, though all Dot would ever offer was “Put it this way, RayBee, I was practically a virgin on my
second
wedding night.”

Dot considers her two years in Italy her one real adventure. “When I was so young, thinking I could do anything, live every moment. It was probably the last time I was truly brave.”

RayAnne doubts that very much. Dot went on to marry Ted, and must have roused plenty of bravery to get through the loss of their little daughter Betsy, who drowned in the pool of a country club where Dot was briefly the chef. Perhaps after that, Dot lived with less abandon, but she never wavered in her passion for feeding people. She’d worked decades in the restaurant business, opening a string of popular but short-lived establishments. While Dot was loved by her patrons and staff, she was admittedly a terrible businesswoman, rarely writing things down or keeping up on the tedious aspects like inventory and bookkeeping. She’d open a restaurant, fail, start over, and fail again. Finally, Dead Ted gave up his job managing a horse track and devoted his time to the business end of Dot’s next venture. Together they finally nailed it, and for twenty years ran a supper club near the track, Dorthea’s. Dot always described the place as “swank” with a glimmer of pride.

RayAnne remembers Dorthea’s deep tufted booths, low lights, and lounge walls covered with framed photos of celebrities scrawled with accolades to Dot. Mr. Rondo, the maître d’, was a former jockey, as were many of the waiters. The matchbooks were embossed with “Short on waiters, long on service.” Bar drinks were named for horses, and the dining room featured framed silks worn in winning races. After Ted died, Dot lost heart for the business and sold, but never stopped cooking, usually as a volunteer at shelters, claiming it got her through her first years as a widow better than therapy ever could have.

RayAnne might not understand how cooking could be therapeutic, but having been on the receiving end of Dot’s talents, would argue that there isn’t much Dot’s cabbage and spring onion dumplings in chicken consommé cannot cure.

She dusts the frame of the Morandi with the sweaty sock she’s peeled off. The painting may represent a wedge of her grandmother’s history, but surely not the defining one. And as much as she’s tried to take Dot’s advice about her own direction, she’s mostly just reminded of regrets and false starts. Working for Big Rick on the pro circuit began as a way to pay for college, but after getting lucky and taking a few trophies herself, she lost focus, and the circuit became a place to idle. “Fishing is a whole lot easier than deciding on a future,” Dot would hound her—how could she be so clever yet be unable to find something to pursue beyond pro sport fishing? Simply, RayAnne could not imagine what she might be good at. The journalism degree had proved utterly useless—she graduated the precise moment print media began its slide. The idea of working behind the scenes in television news seemed appealing, but networks like Fox were demeaning the whole profession, and even good journalists were caving and going along with the song and dance. When RayAnne had realized the closest thing to fair and balanced on television was
The Daily Show
, she gave up on the whole thing entirely.

Of course she
wants
to do something fulfilling, contribute something—like Dot has, like Bernadette does. She hopes
Fishing
might succeed, but doesn’t dare invest much hope in case she jinxes it.

Looking at the Morandi, RayAnne wonders if the act of creating the little painting made the artist happy, or if shy old Giorgio couldn’t be happy until it was finished. Two very different things.

After changing clothes, she steps outside and squints, unaccustomed to the Florida sun, to walk the beach to Sunset Shore Motel where Kyle and the twins are staying. Looking at her bare feet, she’s reminded of a story she’d read on the plane, in which a woman’s sandaled heel was described as looking like a chunk of Parmesan.

She supposes it’s too late to become a writer.

Next to a stomped sand castle, her brother lies on a towel facedown, as if felled in his tracks. Before she can spot the twins, they tackle her from behind, each targeting a knee, so that she is first airborne, then tumbling backward over them. In an instant they are gone and she’s splayed on the sand with the air knocked from her lungs.

Gasping for breath, she waits for the pain to subside. Kyle crawls over on hands and knees, his face looming into frame above her. “Welcome to my world.”

When she tries to speak, only a wheeze comes out.

“That your best hello?” Kyle sniffs. “You’re finally here and I
still
have no one to talk to.” He rises to his knees and hollers over his shoulder, “Wilt Chamberlain Dahl! Michael Jordan Dahl! Get over here
now
and apologize to your Auntie Ray!”

Ky’s wife, Ingrid, in a postoperative stupor after her cesarean, had left the naming of the twins to Kyle: “Call ’em what you want, Ky. Just lemme sleep.” Kyle, a sports historian and statistician, took her permission quite literally, so that Ingrid awoke to find her sons named for two philandering NBA All-Stars.

The boys shuffle near, each pushing the other forward. They mumble a tandem apology in their language and prepare to launch.

“Whoa!” Ky grabs waistbands before they can flee. “Sorry
what
?

“Sorree for knocking you down?” Their words emit in stereo.

“And . . . ?”

“Hurting you?”

“That’s better.” Kyle sits back on his heels and they bound away. RayAnne takes painful little gulps of air while he explains, “New strategy—make them at least
acknowledge
what they’ve done. Never stops them from doing it again, but at least I can tell Ingrid I’ve tried.” He topples to the sand next to her. “Don’t have children . . . better yet, take one of these and raise it in captivity.”

RayAnne is able to prop onto her elbows. “I think I’m okay. Don’t kill yourself helping me up.”

They spread out a blanket and drink the two warm beers RayAnne found in Dot’s pantry, watching from afar as the boys tear up the beach.

Kyle scratches his chin. “This trip, their goal is to see which of them can get Trinket’s entire head in his mouth.”

“Nice. Hey, does Gran seem okay to you?”

“Why?”

“I dunno. I mean I’ve only been here a few hours, but . . .”

“She’s maybe a little slower,” Kyle says. “She is eighty.” He nods to where the twins are crouched and digging like terriers, sand spewing in bursts from between their legs. “Hey, would you mind watching them for a half hour? I’d kill for a run.”

“Go ahead.” She’s barely answered before he’s up and jogging away.

The twins are ginger-blond, lanky miniatures of Ky. RayAnne edges closer, trying to tell which is which. They construct an elaborate maze of sand trenches and driftwood trestles, a labyrinth where their plastic muscle-bound action figures stalk and kill each other in a game with convoluted rules impossible to keep straight. Unless they want something, they are mostly oblivious to her, which she supposes is the way of twins—she would ignore her too if she had a second self to play with. Aside from slathering them with sunscreen and reminding them to drink from their squidgy water bottles, she doesn’t do much besides ask if either has to pee. Both look to the surf, then back to her, shrugging.

RayAnne needs to go herself; of course she hadn’t thought of that before Ky left. She takes each boy by the hand and steers them to the public toilet, but outside the door marked “Women” they both halt, digging their heels in like spades. “We’re not
women
.”

“No. You are not,” RayAnne concedes, and starts looking around, almost as if there might be some enclosure or pen or something she might tie them to, thinking Dot’s suggestion of leashes not so far-fetched. What do parents do? She covers the
w
and
o
on the sign with her hand. “See? It says
men
.” But they don’t fall for it. She tries nudging them closer to the door as a mom with a little boy joins the queue.

RayAnne really has to pee. “C’mon guys, please.”

The woman with the boy taps her arm. “I can watch yours, if you’ll watch mine?”

“Thank you.” RayAnne takes a step.

“Stranger danger!” Wilt (maybe Michael) yells, crossing his arms. Three teenage girls and another mother step into line.

“Fine, then you two stay here and watch each other.” She winks at the mother with the little boy. “I’ll be right out.” She’s practically hopping. They are at the front of the line now and the door will open after the next flush.

“Dad wouldn’t like it if you left us alone.”

“We’d have to tell him . . .”

“. . . unless you bought us ice cream.”

RayAnne blinks at them, speechless. Just then the door yawns opens and a girl edges past, revealing the empty bathroom. Before the boys have a chance to resist she scoops them both up, surprised at her strength, and lugs them in while they holler as if she’s dragging them through flames. Before the door bumps shut she hears the woman in line tsk, “Nannies.”

After three riotous minutes in the bathroom there is a ten-minute negotiation at the concession stand. Back on the beach, RayAnne waits for the twins to finish their ice cream sandwiches so she can lick the wrappers. Far down the horizon, Kyle appears as a far bobbing speck, growing closer. She squints to blur his image until he reaches the blanket.

Huffing, he peels off his T-shirt and wipes his face with it. “Anybody bleeding?”

“Not yet. That’s quite a half hour you took there.”

“I owe you one.” Ky falls to the blanket.

“They’re so cute. But so rotten.”

“And are cute
precisely
because they are rotten, Ray. They have to be, because—”

“This one of your theories?”

“—because if they weren’t cute, you’d leave them right there on the floor of Walmart when they have surround-sound tantrums because you won’t buy them fucking Skittles. They’re cute so that you don’t hurl them from the car window after they’ve dug shit from their Pampers and mashed it into each other’s ears and every nook and cranny of their car seats.”

“C’mon. It’s not that bad?”

“They are
cute
for the same reasons teenage boys have constant boners and women your age go batshit racing the baby clock. They are absolute proof of evolution—biology tricks us into having sex to make the little bastards, then nature makes them cute to trick us into raising them until they aren’t so cute and can fend for themselves.”

RayAnne does her best Alistair Cooke: “And that, according to Kyle Edward Dahl, is how our species perpetuates.”

“Laugh now. See?” He points to a couple of old guys strutting near where a pair of women sit basting themselves with suntan oil. “Even those old farts are still trying to get some.”

“Eew. You’re right, they’re
cruising
. And so tan! Like . . .”

“Bacon?” Kyle offers.

“Hey, isn’t that Mr. Delmonico?”

“Mr. D? Nah, they all look alike. But I’m pretty sure the old toad’s been doing Gran.”

“
Doing?
Ky, that’s too gross.”

“I swear. He was at her place when we got there, looking all cat-who-got-the-canary. Did you know these geezers get their Levitra prescriptions paid for by Medicare?” Ky nods toward the old men. “They’re probably getting more than I am.”

“Hey. Don’t expect much sympathy from me.”

“Right. Lemme guess, no Frankenmen are knocking down your door so they can get their dirty shorts aired on public television?” Kyle ducks to deflect her swat.

The boys are within earshot, so RayAnne only signs a speedy “fuck off” in American Sign Language. ASL was how she and Ky used to communicate over the dinner table or in the car with their quarreling parents. The ASL drove Bernadette mental, even though she’d been the one to insist they attend the Waldorf School. Big Rick assumed they only pretend-signed, so would cast his own hand gestures at their “chats.”