Ruffly Speaking (19 page)

Matthew’s beautiful manners and his disbelief did battle on his face. I felt so sorry for him that I said, “Rita, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s more common than all other disabilities combined.”

“Damn it, I wish I’d known. I would’ve put it in the article about Stephanie and Ruffly.”

In an effort to lighten the tone of the conversation, I spoke a little frivolously and must’ve ended up sounding outright delighted that there were a whole lot more deaf people around than I’d ever imagined.

And, in a strange way, I was. I was delighted. In case you don’t have malamutes, maybe I’d better explain that the apparent callousness of my response was Rowdy and Kimi’s fault. Back when I had golden retrievers, I was a nice, normal person with conventional thoughts and feelings. In those days, for instance, when my friends got promoted or won the lottery or inherited substantial legacies, I experienced heartfelt pleasure for them and did not concoct silent schemes to divert the money into the treasury of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. A simple creature of the here and now, I saw things merely as they were. Now I’ve been taught always to envision possibilities. Simply to survive, I’ve had to learn to view the world from the malamute angle as well as from my own. Sometimes I fear that my two once-radically-divergent points of view may eventually merge into one; even now, I find myself regarding road kill less and less as senseless highway slaughter and more and more as potential dinner. When squashed animals on the roadside actually make me salivate, I’ll know that the dogs and I have finally become one.

But my transformation from decent human being to shameless opportunist was as yet incomplete. Although I knew all the statistics on the millions of abandoned dogs killed by needle and gas all over the United States each year—millions of wonderful would-be hearing dogs—I wouldn’t actually have deafened anyone to save them. But one in ten? One person in ten
already
hearing-impaired? A beautiful prospect arose. During the previous year, the Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care of the City of Houston, Texas
—one
city—had euthanized 1,909 dogs, which, in case you wondered, meant thirty-one tons of canine carcass dumped in the Houston landfill. So call me callous if you want, but, while we’re at it, what about all those other people with special needs? If you’re in a wheelchair, it’s hard to reach light switches high on the wall, but it’s easy for your dog; and it’s a lot of work to wheel that chair, but pulling it along is your dog’s idea of fun. So in Houston alone, it seemed to me, there must be at least 1,909 people with special needs that those thirty -one tons of dog could have met beautifully. Not just people who had trouble hearing and seeing and walking, either, but solitary people who simply needed a friend. Loneliness, too, might be much more prevalent than I’d ever dared to hope.

Elation.Jubilation.

19

 What taints the pure capitalism of my investment in my house is not only the color I painted it—red—but the ideologically sus-pect planning I’ve devoted to it. Like the old Soviet five-year plans and ten-year plans, my short-term projects always require revision or renewal. Take the one-year plan to build a window seat in my bedroom, which had its target date postponed a couple of times and then got totally fouled up when Rowdy began sleeping in the spot where the window seat is supposed to go. Now, if I had the cash to implement the ten-year plan to replace the leaky old storm windows with tight-fitting new ones, Rowdy would relocate to colder turf in the winter, and the immediate success of the five-year plan to scrap the rattly old air-conditioner and have a new model set in the wall would dislodge him in the summer, but, as it is, the grain harvest has been a little disappointing, and even if I could afford the window seat, I’d have to stage a forcible invasion of Rowdy’s little satellite republic to grab it from the dogs and reclaim it for the people. So much for Soviet communism.

In contrast, consider the benefits of Japanese industrial long-term, think-big capitalism with its fifty-year plans, hundred-year plans, two-hundred-year plans perfectly designed to achieve a desirable arrangement of affairs in the distant future and to avoid disappointments and embarrassing failures in the near future as well. Take my fifty-year plan to buy the little, long, supernarrow spite building, as it’s called, that occupies the comer of my lot at the intersection of Appleton and Concord.
Spice
? Two people had a property dispute. One got even. Or so I assume. Anyway, one of the long brick sides of the spite building runs along my yard and helps to fence it in, but—here comes the plan—it would be no trouble at all to knock a door in that wall, get my plumber-friend Ron to install a tub, move in a few odds and ends, put up some sturdy partitions, and presto! The cold-weather grooming area I need, and kennel space for Malamute Rescue. I could use both now, of course; I wish that the spite building would come up for sale and that I had the money to buy and renovate it. But do I actively
covet
it? No. Why? It’s a fifty-year plan, that’s why. I have lots of time left.

But back to the immediate future, the plans for which had originally included, in addition to the installation of the long-deferred window seat, the purchase of two comfortable chairs to flank the fireplace in the living room and the acquisition of a microwave oven that was supposed to pay for itself in no time by enabling me to produce almost-no-cost-as-if-freeze-dried liver treats that the dogs wouldn’t be able to tell from Redi-Liver. Then Leah got into Harvard, and my plans... Well, not that I expected her to
live
here, of course. If the dogs had known, they might have. I did not. What I did expect was that she’d spend some time here, and I wanted to make it comfortable for her. My misguidedly girlish redecoration of the guest room and the installation of the extension phone hadn’t cost much. The real money had gone into the TV, the VCR, and the cabinet that hid them from view when they weren’t in use.

At that moment, however, they were. How anyone could even think about watching
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
on a full stomach was beyond me, but as soon as Matthew and Leah had finished their ice cream, Leah brought the dogs in from the yard, and she and Matthew took the video to the living room and started watching it. Then the phone rang. It’s not just my plans that get changed; it’s everyone’s. I answered. The caller was Stephanie Benson. She startled me by almost shouting: “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Perfectly!” I yelled. “Can you hear me?” To Rita, I mouthed: “Stephanie Benson.”

After Stephanie and I had exchanged another couple of bellows and concluded that each could hear the other just fine, Stephanie apologized for bothering me. I felt alarmed. Had one of Ruffly’s episodes culminated in coma? Had he injured himself? I was relieved when Stephanie explained that she’d thought there might be something wrong with her phone. Then she paused and said that maybe the trouble was with her hearing aids. They’d been malfunctioning lately, she thought. She wasn’t sure what the problem was. That was why she’d called. Could she speak to Matthew?

When I summoned her son to the kitchen phone, he showed no sign of being irked at the interruption. He just took the receiver and said, “Mom?” Then he listened and said, “It’s probably a wrong number.” He asked Stephanie some questions and gave her some instructions. Had she put new batteries in her aids? Was she positive they were fresh? She should check to make sure that the phone connections were tight. Was the volume control working? He made her experiment with it. Then, evidently at her suggestion, he hung up and, after politely requesting my permission, called her back. She must have answered on the first ring.

Although Rita and I made a pretense of chatting while Matthew used the phone, we couldn’t help overhearing, of course, but then Steve arrived, and I actually missed the rest of what Matthew said to his mother. By then, Leah had stopped the video, and she and Rowdy and Kimi had come into the kitchen to find out what was going on and to greet Steve. By the time Matthew’s call ended, he had a small audience for his explanation, the gist of which was that he couldn’t tell what was going on —probably nothing—but—with a glance toward Leah— would it be all right to watch the rest of the video at his house? His mother had insisted that there was no need for him to return home, but he couldn’t diagnose the problem from a distance. Besides, he suspected that his mother might be getting crank calls. If so, she’d feel better if he were there.

Everyone agreed that, of course, Matthew should go home.

“Leah,” I said, “you’re welcome to go watch the video at Matthew’s, but this is definitely not a good time to take Kimi there. If something is going on and—”

“It’s kind of late, anyway,” said Leah, who, I might add, could listen to music, read, and talk on the phone until one A.M. or maybe even later, for all I knew, and then arise at seven and get to AHSP on time looking and acting as if she’d had ten hours’ sleep. I wasn’t sure whether she actually enjoyed staying up late or whether she simply wanted to be someone who did enjoy it. “I think I’ll go to bed early,” she added. To Matthew she said, “We can watch the rest tomorrow. Or another time.”

With apologies and thanks to Leah and me, and mannerly departure noises to Steve and Rita—but not a word to Rowdy and Kimi—Matthew departed. Then Steve— Have you actually met Steve? My God, maybe I’m starting to take him for granted. Well, in case you haven’t been introduced, he’s tall and lean, and when his brown hair is long enough to wave,’ it does; and if you don’t view him from the rear, his eyes are his best feature. They change from green to blue depending, in part, on what color he’s wearing. A vet with chameleon eyes. And he doesn’t even specialize in reptiles.

Steve had arrived with a six-pack of Geary’s pale ale, which I happen to hate, but drink anyway out of loyalty to my home state, where it’s brewed and bottled. Rita loathes Geary’s even more than I do and has no reason to consume it, so I fixed her a gin and tonic. Meanwhile, Steve poured ale into two pewter mugs presented by the Cambridge Dog Training Club to Rowdy and Kimi in honor of their official AKC Canine Good Citizenship. Then he filled a glass tumbler that Vinnie, my glorious last golden retriever, had won years before at a fun match. (Short on drinking vessels? Show your dogs.) He handed one mug to me and, despite my intense glare, gave the other to Leah, who’d taken a seat at the kitchen table. A true gentleman, Steve reserved the mere fun-match trophy for himself.

With a shrug toward the door through which Matthew had departed, Steve asked, “So what’s going on?”

I told him about Stephanie’s call. Then Leah took over. As I hadn’t realized until Leah spelled it out, Stephanie had more difficulty with phones than she usually let people know about, especially when callers used speaker phones or, worse yet, those cordless contraptions acquired as bonuses for subscribing to cheap magazines.

To my surprise, Rita spoke up vehemently. “Those things! And you know who always uses them? Mumblers.” If the word had been
murderers,
Rita’s tone wouldn’t have been any more damning than it already was.

Leah was cradling the mug of ale in her hands. It seemed to me that she disliked the taste of alcohol. What she enjoyed was holding adulthood in her hands. “So,” she said, “if someone calls and Stephanie can’t hear right, she gets sort of upset, because she can’t tell whether it’s someone she knows, so she doesn’t want to just hang up, or whether it’s a wrong number or the person’s already hung up. Also she doesn’t totally trust the phone lines in their house because she found out that the phone company didn’t do the wiring.”

“M
orris
did?” I tried to envision Morris Lamb crawling along baseboards, running lines through walls, and installing jacks. What came to me was an image of the two Bedlingtons in a tangled heap of telephone paraphernalia and Morris wired to his dogs and laughing gleefully at himself. “Are you sure?” I added. “Morris wasn’t exactly a home-repair type.”

“Doug Winer put in the phones,” Leah said, “and he was just there, and he checked everything. And Matthew says there’s nothing wrong with the phone system, but—” Leah eyed me.

You don’t have to be very handy to put in an extension, and I
am
a home-repair type, but we’d ended up with a trivial problem. Either the phone in my kitchen or the one in Leah’s room worked fine alone, but when we tried to use both at once, the line went dead.

“I’ll fix it,” I assured her. “I just haven’t had time.”