Ruffly Speaking Read online

  “I know who wrote the Iliad. So her brother was sort of, uh, third-hand?”

  “No, he wasn’t... Okay. Look, Holly, I’m sorry. These damn things. I’m just— Shit! This is like some kind of sensory bombardment experiment! And why the hell did I have my hair cut so short? Take one look at me, and what do you see? Handicapped. Poor handicapped person.”

  “You aren’t—”

  “Aurally challenged. Shit! You know what? The CIA probably makes listening devices that’ll fit inside the head of a pin—”

  “Look, I am very sorry that you have small ear canals.” She was supposed to get those tiny Ronald Reagan gadgets that go right in the canal, but she’d had to settle for aids that were infinitesimally more visible than those. “But, Rita, the fact is, they practically don’t show.”

  “The fact is, they are this disgusting prosthetic pink!” She brushed back her hair and turned her head to display her left ear.

  “Well, what do you want? Purple?” Not tactful.

  Rita’s lips quivered, and she burst into tears, but crying evidently didn’t help. “Holly, nothing sounds normal! It isn’t just that it’s noisy; it’s noisy and horrible. The whole world sounds like a cheap radio.”

  “Rita, people do get used to them.”

  “I don’t want to get used to them.”

  “Maybe you have them turned up too loud,” I suggested. “Or... Rita, do you have to wear both of them?”

  She sighed and grimaced. “There’s this whole thing about binaural hearing. You’re supposed to—”

  “Let me try them.” I stretched out my hand. “I want to hear what it sounds like.”

  Rita looked as if I’d asked to borrow her toothbrush. “They won’t fit you right. They’re made—”

  “Just take them out! It’s no different from trying on earrings, okay?”

  She conceded. Rita found the aids disgusting. They weren’t, really, except for the color, which I’ll admit was a little repulsive, like the rubber fake-flesh on a Halloween mask. With Rita’s help, I fitted them into my ears. Boom! The refrigerator roared like a diesel engine. My head filled with cracking, snapping, buzzing, shrieking, and screaming.

  When Rita spoke, her voice sliced through my eardrums. “Well?”

  “This is... These things are really weird.” Imagine trying to talk while your voice is being bounced off the moon and piped back into your own ears. I sounded loud and hollow, like an eerie stranger.

  Without actually saying that she’d told me so, Rita nodded in satisfaction. “You thought it was just vanity, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. How do you get these things out?” The impulse to rip them from my ears was almost irresistible, but Rita had paid a fortune for them, and I was afraid of breaking them.

  Rita let me keep suffering. “Now we both know why so many people who get hearing aids end up leaving them in a drawer somewhere.”

  The whirring and humming or maybe just the unnatural quality of sound made it hard to pay attention to her words.

  The stranger’s voice that was mine spoke again. “Rita, this can’t be right.” I stuck my thumbs in my ears and pried the aids out. The world returned to normal. “Leave them out for a while, okay? I didn’t get it before. I do now. Give yourself a break.”

  While Rita carefully stowed the aids in a little gray pouch that she tucked in her purse, I began to clear the table. Every dog in the house must have been listening for the telltale scrape of chairs on the linoleum, the clatter of plates, and the flow of water at the sink. From the yard, Rowdy and Kimi yelped and woo-wooed. Overhead, Willie’s sharp Scottie yaps echoed the smooth malamute pleas. When I let my dogs in, they barreled ahead, slammed into each other, and leaped and pranced in what I took to be a ritual dance aimed at appeasing the great god of pizza crust, who occupies a high place in their pantheon, right up there with Harbinger. And who is this doughy deity? I am, of course. Play it right, and you’re everything to your own dogs.

  Deity or not, I never neglect a training opportunity. Stand!” I told them. They froze on all fours. I was tempted to ask Rita to play judge and run her hands over them, but she wasn’t exactly in a playful mood, so I Praised the dogs, doled out the crust, and released them.

  Then I rejoined Rita at the table. “Rita, I was just thinking. When the dogs bark like that?” Tact. Rowdy and Kimi’s extraordinarily varied and fascinating vocalizations range from woos to yelps to whines to growls to howls. Universal truth: Your own dogs communicate. It’s other people’s dogs that just plain bark. Willie, for example, barks. “Isn’t that going to... I was wondering. If the hearing aids amplify all that, isn’t it going to damage your hearing? You know, noise-induced hearing loss?”

  Rita shook her head. “They cut off. Otherwise it could happen, but there’s a built-in device.”

  It seemed to me that built-in cutoff was exactly what Willie’s vocal cords needed. I didn’t say so. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t believe in surgical debarking.

  “And if they’re not turned on,” Rita continued, “they’re just like earplugs.” She stood up. “Holly?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve had it for today. I’m going to leave these things out and go and take a hot bath. You know, what you did helped a lot. Thank you.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Trying them. It helped a lot.”

  I shrugged.

  Rita rested both hands on the back of the chair, straightened her elbows, and leaned forward. “I’ve been thinking. You know what it’s like? This, uh, sensory bombardment? It’s exactly like what William James wrote.” She paused. “About what the world is like to a newborn. He wrote that it was ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion.’ Maybe that’s how I need to construe it.” Construe. Now she was really herself again. “As a rebirth,” she added. “Learning to wear these things is like being reborn. So if it feels traumatic, maybe it’s because it is traumatic, because, in terms of sensory input, it is a kind of birth trauma.”

  “I like the phrase,” I said.

  “Birth trauma?”

  “Uh-uh. ‘A great blooming, buzzing confusion.’ That’s beautiful.”

  Rita waited.

  I smiled at her. “I love it. It’s perfect. ‘A great blooming, buzzing confusion.’ ”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re pleased,” Rita said.

  I was, too. “One great blooming, buzzing confusion.” The perfect description of a dog show. Birth and rebirth.Life itself. I like it all.

  8

  Leah and I are first cousins on the human maternal side; our mothers were sisters. But superficial human kinship means little to either of us. What really makes us blood relatives is that Leah handles Kimi in obedience. Until the previous summer, Leah’s parents, Arthur and Cassie, had kept Leah in strict quarantine from the highly contagious world of purebred dog fancy, but it took Rowdy and Kimi about five minutes to infect her, and after three months with us, she was a hopeless case. When her parents first sent Leah to us, she called all sled dogs huskies, thought of heel as something on the rear of her foot, and imagined that a camelback had something to do with mountains. By the end of August, all she talked about were paddling gaits, snap tails, standoff coats, Dudley noses, clean lips, deep briskets, CHD, PRA, HITs, BISs, and bitches that didn’t take; and when she liked something a whole lot, she produced the ultimate doggy compliment: typey. By then, Leah’s supposedly educated parents could no longer understand a single word she said, and I’m convinced that they began to feel inferior, but the last straw, so to speak, came when Leah mentioned the possibility that she and Kimi might one day become OTCH fodder, and Arthur and Cassie decided that since the phrase sounded dangerously reminiscent of cannon fodder, it must be communist and that she’d better get out of their house and begin to outgrow her socialist youth as soon as possible.

  (What is OTCH fodder, you ask? Well, okay, here we go. A dog that continues to compete after he earns his U.D.—Utility Dog title—accumulates championship poi
nts for each first or second place in Open or Utility, Open B, of course, and Utility B, if it’s divided. When the dog has 100 points, he becomes an OTCH dog, Obedience Trial Champion, and, having done so, keeps on competing for OTCH points against dogs that aren’t earning any because, of course, he is. Those dogs, the ones that make it possible for him to get the points, are— you guessed it—OTCH fodder. And while we’re on the topic, let me add that far from being socialist, communist, or even vaguely communal, OTCH competition is the ultimate in capitalism. It’s survival of the fittest, socio-canine Darwinism, and the only thing even remotely pinko about it is nature’s tooth and claw red, in other words, the sharp teeth and well-filed claws of the top handlers.

  Where were we?... Oh, so Arthur and Cassie would probably have been glad to have Leah leave Maine for Cambridge in mid-June so they wouldn’t have to listen to her talk above their heads all summer, but with intelligent malamute opportunism more characteristic of Kimi and Rowdy than of me, Leah had taken triple advantage of Harvard’s ungodly tuition, her parents’ tightwad tendencies, and their academic snobbery to get a paying job at what I innocently called a day camp, but what Leah patiently explained was not a mere camp but the Avon Hill Summer Program. Once Leah spelled out the difference, it made sense. Privileged Cambridge children do not squander their summers rallying round the flagpole; they take courses. They don’t go to camp; they attend programs. Camps, of course, have counselors. Schools have teachers. Summer programs? Leah’s official job title was, I swear to God, mentor.

  Leah was due to arrive here on Friday, June 12, and to begin work on Monday, the first of two days of intensive staff training that would prepare the mentors for the arrival of the children—mentees?—on Wednesday. Although Leah wanted Arthur to drop her at the bus station in Portland, he insisted on driving her here, why, I can’t imagine—on the rare occasions we’ve met, Arthur has acted even more afraid of me than of my dogs—but he won out, and at five o’clock on Friday, into my driveway pulled his dented old blue Volvo wagon with one window half-full of the brightly colored campus parking permits that Arthur collects the way I collect show trophies, or did back when I had golden retrievers, anyway; and not a single bumper sticker anywhere expressing anything that might be misread as enthusiasm about anyone or any cause. Good old Arthur. Fortunately, Leah takes after our side of the family—my mother’s red-gold hair—and as for her personality, well, for a start, in sharp contrast to Arthur, she has one.

  Anyway, when Leah and Arthur arrived, Rowdy and Kimi were indoors, the driveway-side door of the fenced yard was open, and I was making the rounds with the pooper-scooper. Yes, it was another thrilling episode in the romantic saga of My Life and Adventures with the Legendary Wild Dogs of the North. But back to Arthur. He used to remind me of a wooden spoon, but when he half-opened the Volvo door, I realized that what Arthur actually resembled was a rudimentary sketch of a chromosome, the long, slim outline devoid of genes, nothing but

  slimy, blank protoplasm, a true recessive type. He peered nervously around, and rightly so, of course. Alaskan malamutes are friendly to people, but they’ll happily devour garbage, sticks, plastic, anything at all. Song birds caught on the wing. Wooden spoons. Chromosomes.

  Before her father had finished easing open the car door, Leah had sprung from the Volvo, dashed around it, hurtled toward me, knocked the pooper-scooper from my hand, and practically bowled me over on top of it. In the two seconds before I returned her embrace, I caught a glimpse of flamboyant red curls and had a vague impression of something different about Leah. Make that some things, and I was right. The first difference to hit me was the perfume, Calvin Klein’s Obsession, as I later learned, and if you’ll pardon an aside, let me remark that the next time your dog gets sprayed by a skunk, go ahead and try the tomato juice, the vinegar, the New Dawn detergent, the Skunk-Off, and all the rest, but, after exposure to Leah, I’d pit only one fragrance on earth against a skunk’s, and that’s that damned Obsession.

  “You look wonderful!” I told Leah. “You’re so, uh, sophisticated!”

  Last summer’s multiple layers of sport-specific clothing—running shoes, tennis shorts, hiking anoraks, biking shirts with pockets in the back, footless dance tights, and all the rest, each specific to a sport in which Leah did not participate—had given way to solid black, as if Leah had gone into unwitting mourning for the child she had so recently been. Her hand clutched a tattered paperback copy of a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre, one I’d tried to read at her age, but only in English: Nausea. Leah’s, though, was in French: La nausée.

  Leah smelled and looked new, but sounded like her old self: “I am so glad to be here!”

  I grinned at her, but when my eyes caught her ears, I almost gasped. She’d pierced the right lobe in five places, the left in three. One more hole, and she’d have had half a golf course. And eight different earrings, one gold stud, one small gold hoop, one huge silver hoop... Well, you get the idea—ritual scarification, the symbols of a rite of passage.

  The rear of the Volvo held an even larger collection of Leah’s possessions than it had last year—suitcases, a backpack, a duffel bag, an assortment of cardboard boxes, a boom box, and a CD player. Real dog person, are you? Compact disc. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a Companion Dog player, but if there is, do let me know; Dog’s Life is always interested in new and unusual canine products. Regardless of what Leah’s stuff was, Arthur offered to carry it in. I declined. I offered him a cup of coffee. He declined.

  Leah seconded his refusal. “It’s a long drive back. He doesn’t have time.” I frowned at her, but her father looked more relieved than hurt.

  Fifteen minutes later, when Arthur must have been fighting the Friday traffic north, Leah was unpacking, and Rowdy and Kimi were still in a state of paralyzed bliss. At their first sight of Leah, they’d wagged all over, fallen to the floor at her feet, bounded up, and again hurled them-selves to the linoleum. After they recovered, they merely collapsed on their backs, tucked in their paws, and let their tongues loll out while she scratched their tummies. Then she smacked her lips and said, “Gimme kiss!” Rowdy and Kimi will do anything she asks. They scoured her face. She was home.

  When Leah saw the guest room, her room, she looked genuinely surprised and made a big effort to sound happy. “You redid it!” I had: fresh white paint, white miniblinds picked up for virtually nothing at Grossman’s Bargain Outlet, paisley Laura Ashley comforter discovered at Marshall’s at one-third the original price, all chosen for the person Leah had been last year. If only I’d known, I’d have replaced the bed with a bohemian pallet on the floor. French novels would have barricaded the windows. Candles tucked in Chianti bottles would have provided the only light.

  Fortunately, though, Leah has a sunny disposition. Also, she hadn’t yet realized that black is the color created by God to display the undercoat and guard hairs of Her chosen breed, the Alaskan malamute. Beryl’s packages had contained a couple of defurring gadgets. While I prayed that they worked, Leah merrily unpacked a tremendous number of black garments and tried to reassure me that the redone room was very pretty.

  “It’s a little, uh, unsophisticated for you,” I said, looking around. “But it’s also my guest room, when you’re not here.” I tried to imagine my father curling up on a pallet, blowing out a Chianti-bottle candle, and resting his head on a stack of existentialist novels. After five insomniac minutes, he’d end up in a red-blooded American L.L. Bean sleeping bag outside in the yard, and in the morning, he’d have a serious talk with me about moving back to Owls Head, Maine.

  “Really, I like it a lot,” Leah said for the tenth time.

  Within a few days, however, Leah’s room was so shrouded in black clothing, so thick with dog hair, and so stacked with unreadable books that my misguided redecoration didn’t show. Let me point out that I did not nag her to clean up her room. I train dogs; I knew better. As any sane dog person realizes— Sane dog person. Oxymoron. As any wise dog person realizes, nag
ging gets you nowhere. If you don’t like it when your neutered male mounts your bitch? Don’t watch. So that’s what I did with Leah: I kept the guest room door shut.

  Besides, Leah and I had better things to do than clean and nag. We talked. We trained the dogs. Last summer, I’d been the expert. Over the winter, I’d merely been living with dogs, working my dogs, attending obedience classes, going to shows and trials, and writing for Dog’s Life. Leah, however, had undergone a religious conversion experience, seen the light, and opened her heart to Bernie Brown, proponent of the “no-force method” of dog training, the only trainer ever to earn more than 5,000 OTCH points—1,472 points last year alone—revered instructor, lively dog writer, and altogether a guy worth taking into your dog-loving heart.

  On Saturday night, when Steve and I went out to dinner, I got a break from the unrelenting “Bernie Brown says...” but when we got back, Leah and her last summer’s boyfriend, Jeff Cohen, were on the sidewalk on Appleton Street, and the first words I heard when I opened the car door were, “Jeff, Bernie Brown says…”

  Jeff is absolutely everything you could ask for in your cousin’s boyfriend—lovely kid, great sense of humor, blond curls like a Renaissance angel’s, Celtics fan—and, as if all that weren’t enough, he’d just put a C.D.X.— obedience title, Companion Dog Excellent—on his Border collie, Lance, brilliant breed, splendid dog. (Border collie. Not Lassie. Smaller. Black and white, tough and wiry, world’s best herding breed, top agility breed, Frisbee genius, obedience natural.)

  “The underlying philosophy,” Leah was saying, “is that you don’t give the dog a chance to screw up. You structure everything so that the only thing the dog can do is what you want.”

  As Leah droned on, Kimi was pulling on her leash and using her front paws to excavate a giant hole at the base of a Norway maple. Meanwhile, Lance, the object of Leah’s pontification, sat in flawless heel position at Jeff’s left side, black and white body perfectly straight, head turned to take in Jeff’s face. If a flock of sheep had turned onto Appleton Street, Kimi would have torn the leash from Leah’s hands and murdered them all. Lance, C.D.X., born with sheep on the brain, wouldn’t have let his eerie