Ruffly Speaking (10 page)

“You did not! You thought he was boring.”

“How can you say that? His mother is a priest with a hearing dog. That’s the last kind of person I’m going to find boring. Maybe he, uh, talks more when adults aren’t around.”

“You shouldn’t have said anything about being near home.”

“What was wrong with that?”

“Matthew wanted to go to Stanford, and he got in, but when he got into Harvard, too, his mother made him turn down Stanford, and
then
she moved here, so...”

“Leah,
I
didn’t know that.”

“And Matthew is shy,” said Leah, softening. “But isn’t he
gorgeous?
Didn’t you think he was gorgeous?”

A
more ordinary-looking human being has never crossed my gaze,
I wanted to say. Fortunately, I was leaning over gathering up the collection of toys that Rowdy had vainly offered Matthew, so Leah couldn’t see my face. “Yes,” I said. “And I’d love to meet his mother.”

“So you can write about her,” said Leah, obviously accusing me of something.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Among other things.”

“For
Dog’s Life.”

“Probably.”

“With a pun in the title.”

“Hey, let me tell you something,” I said, staring Leah in the eye. “I have a mortgage to pay, two big dogs to feed, and an old car to replace one of these years, and if my editors want cute, then cute is what they get, okay? This may come as a big surprise to you, but the fact is that we can’t all teach conversational Latin.”

Leah looked genuinely abashed. “Holly, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, yes, you did.” I waited a second. Sometimes I forget how young she is. “But it’s okay. Leah? I’m sorry, too.”

She brightened up, smirked a little, and said, “Urn...”

“Yes?”

She mumbled.

“What?”

“I was thinking... But maybe you’ll, uh, be of-fended.”

“No I won’t. What?”

“It’s kind of corny.”

“Say it!”

The title she came up with was pretty sappy, I’ll admit, not to mention obvious, but she was, after all, an amateur. For an article about a priest with a canine acolyte? Not bad.

“Say Your Prayers.”

We were friends again.

11

 My determination to meet the rector, whose name was Stephanie Benson, had as much to do with Rita as it did with mortgages, kibble, and cars.

Rita’s initial agitation about the hearing aids lasted only a few days. What followed was a shift that I found alarming. I saw less of Rita than ever before. She quit dropping in and never felt like hanging out. After a couple of rebuffs, I asked directly whether I’d done anything to offend her, and what happened made me regret raising the issue. Tears spilled out of her eyes. She threw her arms around me and sobbed. But she refused to talk about her hearing loss or the aids, except to insist that she was adapting. She wouldn’t even talk about her analysis, and if you know Rita, you’ll realize that that was the worst sign of all. Her face and body took on the tight, steely look of grim determination. She kept her teeth locked together and her lips immobile, like someone waiting for novocaine to wear off. Her eyes were huge with raw feeling.

What Rita lacked, it seemed to me, was a positive vision of the possible, in other words, if you’ll pardon the expression, a positive role model. Yuck. But I’m serious. Try to name a single attractive or appealing character in anything—book, movie, TV show—who’s anywhere near Rita’s age who wears hearing aids. Name a celebrity who does. The few who’ve come out are a million times better than no one at all, but can you imagine going to Rita and telling her that the aids were no big deal because, gee whiz, look at Ronald Reagan? So I hoped that Matthew’s mother was brilliant, charming, and gorgeous. I hoped her dog was, too.

I didn’t have a chance to learn anything about Stephanie Benson until Rowdy and I returned from Thursday night services at the religious institution of our choice, the Cambridge Dog Training Club, to which, like Hasidic Jews on
Shabbat,
we’d made our way on foot. We arrived home to find a note from Leah that read, “Kimi with me. Back soon.
Lava
you. L.” Leah actually can spell
love.
“I lava you” was the punch line of a joke she’d learned from one of her students at Avon Hill, a nine-year-old boy named Ivan—pronounced EE-vahn, Cambridge being Cambridge—who was the terror of the group led by Leah and Matthew. Cambridge being Cambridge, this group, a sort of summer-camp version of homeroom, was called a “core cluster,” but, just to prove that they were human, Leah and Matthew both referred to EE
-vahn
as Ivan the Terrible.

The students had started the program the previous day, and Leah had arrived home with the joke and had repeated it nonstop all the previous evening and throughout breakfast. I was hoping that the terrible Ivan had supplied her with a replacement today, but soon after Rowdy and I got home from dog training, when Leah and Kimi burst into the kitchen, the first thing Leah did was sink her fingers into Rowdy’s thick ruff, stare into his eyes, and ask for the millionth time, “Hey, Rowdy, what did the mommy volcano say to the baby volcano?” He dropped to the floor, and while Leah administered a vigorous tummy scratching, she gleefully delivered the inevitable “I lava you!”

“He
lavas
you, too,” I said sourly. “So does Kimi, who also
lavas
to go to dog training, where you were supposed to take her tonight. Where were you?”

“Roz is away,” my cousin said dismissively.

“Funny,” I said, “that if Roz happens to be away and there’s no advanced class, then Rowdy and I go right ahead and—”

“Bernie Brown says—”

“Bernie Brown says that if you’re training a malamute, you need all the help you can get.” Principally in the form of a golden retriever.

By then, Kimi had joined Rowdy on the floor, and despite the masses of undercoat that were rapidly turning Leah’s black spandex tights and miscellaneous layers of funereal tops a woolly white, the three of them made a beautiful if somewhat sentimental girl-and-her-dogs portrait. Leah’s contribution to the charming scene was, it seemed to me, entirely contrived. I’d been successfully set up. Instead of taking Leah to task for failing to do what she’d promised, and instead of getting her to answer my initial question about where she’d been, here I was enjoying the picture of my lovely cousin cozily at home with my beautiful dogs.

As if to confirm my sense of being shamelessly manipulated, Leah changed the subject. It’s even possible that Bernie Brown recommends the tactic. “Matthew’s mother says she’ll be glad to talk to you,” Leah announced, “and her dog is so cute. His name is Ruffly. He’s a little mixed-breed, and he has great big ears, and he’s really adorable, and you should see him work. He’s amazing-”

Another thing about the Bernie Brown method: It’s very effective. Leah had my attention. “So what’s she like?”

“The rector?” Leah gave a wry grin.

“Stephanie Benson.”

“This is totally unlike you.”

“What is?”

“I start telling you about Ruffly, and you’re asking about the rector? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “But Rita isn’t.”

While I outlined what Rita herself would probably have called my “treatment plan,” Leah rummaged around in the cupboards, which were no longer a sort of dog lover’s twist on Old Mother Hubbard’s. On Tuesday night, Leah and I had gone to the Mount Auburn Star Market, where she’d filled our cart with hardtack rye crackers, edible seaweed, canned beans, balsamic vinegar, red cabbage, fruit-flavored water, and enough packages of ramen noodle soup to provide the first course at a banquet for the entire population of Greater Tokyo. The package she selected that night was pink. Pink is shrimp.

By the time two cups of water had come to a boil, I was saying, “So what Rita needs is an encounter with a possibility that’s become a reality, because this whole thing is totally alien to her. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, because if you grow up the way most of us grew up, the whole thing is strictly theoretical. Like creatures from outer space, okay? Maybe in theory you might agree that there could exist intelligent life on other planets, and maybe all along you would’ve agreed that there could exist a successful, attractive professional woman your age who wears hearing aids, but you’re about as likely to meet someone like that as you are to run into a space woman. Only what’s really happened, I think, is that Rita feels as if, all of a sudden, she’s
become
one of these aliens, and, before, she wasn’t even sure they existed.”

“With the rector, it’s no big deal.” Leah peered at the pan and poked a fork into what looked like a rectangle of freeze-dried curly white worms. “She wears her hair pulled back; you can see her hearing aids. Besides, Ruffly’s leash has ‘hearing dog’ printed in big letters, and his tag says he’s a hearing dog, which is how she gets to take him to restaurants and stuff, where dogs aren’t allowed.”

I caught the glint in her eye. “Don’t even think about it,” I ordered her.

Leah indignantly plopped a bowl of noodles on the table in front of me.

“So what is Stephanie like?” I asked. “Or, really, would Rita...?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“Great,” I said. “And is she going to come to your course?”

Leah nodded. “But not next week. Maybe the week after. Ruffly’s having problems. He isn’t used to the new house yet. But the rector said to tell you to call her.” Ramen noodles taste better than you might imagine, kind of like spaghetti in oversalted bouillon. “This isn’t bad,” I said. “She said to
call
her?”

“So you can—”

“I know why.” I drank some broth. “I just...”

“Holly, is something bothering you?”

“Can she hear enough to... It’s okay to call?”

“They have an amplifying phone. Matthew hates it because his mother always forgets to turn down the volume, so when he answers the phone, it blasts in his ear. But it rings really softly, because they don’t need to hear it, because no matter how soft it is, Ruffly does. You should see, when the phone rings? That’s one of Ruffly’s sounds, and he goes berserk.”

“And, uh... Stephanie. You can, uh, have a conversation with her?”

Leah looked disgusted with me. “How could she be a rector if you couldn’t talk to her? And she sounds just like everyone else. Actually, she sounds like Rita. She’s from New York.”

Having finally put it all together, I addressed Leah sternly. “You were there tonight, weren’t you! At the Bensons’? You
knew
there was a hearing dog there, and you took Kimi with you? Leah, I’m not positive, but I don’t think—”

“They got along great,” Leah assured me. “Ruffly even let Kimi eat out of his dish.”

“And if Kimi had gone for his food, and he’d tried to defend it?”

The Alaskan malamute has jaws that can crush the muzzles and backbones of canine adversaries, but if Ruffly had decided to defend his food and Kimi had accepted his challenge, she probably wouldn’t have left a mark on him. With one quick shake, she’d have broken his neck. “They liked each other,” Leah said defiantly.

“Even so, Leah. A hearing dog isn’t a pet. Or isn’t just a pet. Those dogs have work to do.”

“Kimi didn’t stop him. I told you. When the phone rang, Ruffly went crazy.”

“And what did Kimi do?”

“She helped,” Leah bragged. “She ran right after him.”

“Leah, at a minimum, you should’ve asked first, or better yet, why didn’t you leave Kimi here?”

“I didn’t even know Ruffly would
be
there. How was I supposed to know the rector was home?” Leah leaves few pauses in a conversation, but a heavy silence fell. “I didn’t know if anyone would be there,” she added. Her expression was serious and practical. “You want me going all alone to empty rectories with guys I just met?”