Ruffly Speaking (7 page)

I began. As usual, Rita perked up right away. I continued. “When I saw the woman marching up with her flat of delphiniums, I had this fantasy that she was going to offer me some. I was going to tell her about how my mother grew them, and she was going to be really impressed that someone even knew what they were.”

“Someone?”

“Me. She was going to be impressed with me. And she was going to insist on giving me a tour of her garden. And then she was going to sort of press this flat of delphinium seedlings on me, with complete instructions.” My sense of minor humiliation returned. “It didn’t quite work out like that.”

“The resurrection fantasy is your own,” Rita said, “but the reality is that it was
her
loss.” She sounded like herself again, at least to me, but as soon as she’d finished speaking, her eyes refilled with tears.

“Her name is Alice Savery,” I went on, still trying to distract Rita. “S-a-v-e-r-y, Savery, only she isn’t. Very.”

“Introductions followed the indirect tongue-lashing?”

“Definitely not. I ran into Doug Winer on my way home. He was just turning onto Highland, and he pulled over. Doug was Morris Lamb’s partner—Winer and Lamb —and also... Anyway, Morris lived on Highland, and Doug has inherited Morris’s house, and he was on his way over there to check on something. Doug isn’t living there. He lives with his parents. Someone’s renting Morris’s house. Anyway, Doug told me who this woman was. Alice Savery. He says she’s sort of obsessed with the

fence. Also, apparently I got off easy. She hates dogs, or she’s afraid of them or something. She thinks they come in and ruin her garden, and she’s paranoid about rabies.” Rita was nibbling pizza as if searching for some way to masticate without moving her jaw. The return of appetite is a sign of health, or it is in dogs, anyway. She stopped chewing. “Phobic,” she said. “Paranoid is—”

“Okay. Phobic. Anyway, her brother was some kind of famous professor.”

“Savery,” Rita said, as if the name should mean something to me. “She’s Savery’s sister?”

“Whoever he was.”

“Alfred Savery was a Harvard professor who was an expert on Pope. Alexander Pope translated Homer. The
Iliad
and—”

“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 points 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
.