Ruffly Speaking (8 page)

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, nagging 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

Border collie stare wander from his master’s eyes until Jeff had released him. And
Leah
was the one playing instructor.

Jeff was going away for the summer, but what if Leah bored him senseless and drove him permanently off? Well, I just hated the thought. We’d lucked out once: a perfect Border collie. But twice? Two
perfect
Border collies? Forget it. If fortune favored us, though? An Airedale. Possibly a Norwegian elkhound. A Keeshond, wonderful breed, long life span, more energetic at age ten than most breeds are at three.

And if heaven frowned? A skulker, a carpet soiler, a submissive urinator, or, worse, a fear-biter or even a fight-starter! I mean, you try to educate kids, teach them the difference between right and wrong, but when they’re caught in the throes of adolescence? When the hormones are raging and their judgment’s shot? Well, it’s not easy. In fact, it’s nerve-wracking. You can absolutely never tell what they might bring home next.

9

 Rita’s old dachshund, Groucho, was a sweet, cooperative little guy who provided her with a myriad of seasonal excuses to avoid dog walking. Summer was too hot for Groucho. Winter was too cold. Spring was wet. Autumn was unpredictable. Toward the end of Groucho’s life, he actually became too feeble to enjoy an outing and thus offered Rita her first legitimate reason never to take him for more than a one-block bathroom trip.

Her present dog, Willie, however, is an energetic young Scottie who needs vigorous daily exercise. More to the point, Willie is simply not the kind of individual who would passively and cooperatively submit to being used as an excuse. After all, he’s a Scottie. He’s also himself. Double whammy. If Rita showed any sign of enjoying their walks, he’d probably fall flat on the sidewalk and refuse to budge as soon as his paws hit concrete. As it is, the more ardently Rita tries to avoid dog walking, the more intensely Willie revels in it. In fact, what Willie loves isn’t so much walking as winning.
Willie:
short for Willful.

What’s going to save Rita from ruining Willie’s walks by learning to love them is her irrational insistence on dressing up whenever she leaves the house. When you walk a beautiful dog, what you wear doesn’t matter be-cause anyone worth meeting is going to look at your dog, not at you. Rita disagrees and refuses to compromise even in the small matter of shoes. This is Cambridge, postfeminist
now,
not China a hundred years ago, but at siy-thirty or so on Monday evening when Rita and Willie rounded the corner from Concord and trotted down Appleton, she wore a white linen suit and a pair of what she tells me are called
spectator
pumps. To walk a dog. But Rita looked great, and so did the recently trimmed Willie.

Grooming, though, is an entirely superficial process that has no impact on character, especially what’s called “real terrier character.” Willie’s bushy eyebrows, correctly combed forward, failed to hide the fire in his blackhearted eyes. Am I getting the message across? Let me warn you: Willie doesn’t just bark. Well, I’ll hedge. Willie ponders biting. He mulls it over. He imagines it. He savors the prospect. He plans. To the best of my knowledge, however, he has not translated his impulses into action since he’s lived with Rita. What he does is eye people’s ankles and, given the opportunity, fly at them, too. For some reason or another, perhaps the scent of Rowdy or maybe even the scent of my own nonspectating soul, Willie really goes for mine.