Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  “For once?” I demanded.

  “If dogs were the panacea you think they are...” To display the aid in her right ear, Rita lifted the hair that had grown almost long enough to give her a choice about whether to go public about her hearing loss. That’s how she explained it, anyway. It seemed to me that what really gave her a choice were the aids, not her hair. If she couldn’t hear whispered conversations or the turn signals on her car or a million other everyday sounds, it was perfectly obvious that she had a hearing loss, wasn’t it? How could she possibly keep it a secret? Only one way, right? Hearing aids.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, thumping Rita’s coffee mug onto the table in front of her, “Willie would make a not-bad hearing dog.” As such, he’d have to accompany

  Rita everywhere, thus ridding me and my third-floor tenants of those damned home-alone barking fits, but I didn’t say so. “Willie is very sound-oriented, and he could hardly be any more alert. And Rita, they do that, you know. Sometimes you really can have your own dog trained to assist you. And if Willie doesn’t shape up—”

  “Do me a favor,” Rita said sharply. “For once, for once, Holly, please do not rationalize. I know it works for you. Boom! Your hearing goes to hell, and what’s the first thing you say? ‘Hallelujah! The perfect excuse to get another dog! And now if I’d only go blind....’ Or that’s what you’d like to think. But the fact is that just like everyone else—”

  “Could I remind you of something?” I took my place at the table and sipped some coffee. It wasn’t bad—not show quality like Bustelo, but good pet quality and altered, of course: no caffeine. “Rita, this is something you’re always saying, okay? Try assuming that we’re all doing the best we can. I am trying, and maybe I’m not succeeding, but I am trying, all right? So go easy.”

  “I’m sorry.” She held the coffee mug in both hands as if she were about to offer it to me as an apologetic libation. “Holly, look. Sometimes it just doesn’t help to have you take things so... so lightly. Maybe eventually I’ll be ready for that, but I’m not now. It’s like... You remember that thing I got through the mail? That, uh, pamphlet on alien abduction. And all you thought...”

  A month or two earlier, Rita had received a booklet designed to inform mental health professionals that zillions of people who might appear simply to have lost their minds had actually been abducted by beings from outer space. The booklet explains how I happened to become a repository of esoteric bits of information on the topic of alien abduction. Before reading it, for example, I’d always assumed that little green men were green, but they aren’t—they’re gray—and I would have sworn that dreams about UFOs were just that, dreams, whereas, according to the experts, alien abduction dreams, in marked contrast to all other dreams ever dreamt by human beings since the first time Adam fell asleep, aren’t really dreams at all, but accurate memories of real events. And while we’re on the topic of that report, let me warn you that if anyone ever asks whether you’ve heard or seen the word trondant and whether you know that it has a special meaning for you, just say no! It’s a trick question. Answer yes, and you’ll be dismissed as some joker who’s trying to claim credit for a UFO abduction, but who’s never actually gone farther from home than the suburbs of Cleveland, okay?

  “So I didn’t take it seriously,” I admitted to Rita. “But neither did you! That’s why you showed it to me in the first place, because—”

  “Because, if you really want to know, because it roused a lot of anxiety, and the reason it did was—”

  “I know! You’ve told me a million times. Because the introduction was written by some famous professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, so you showed it to me so I could make some kind of crack about it, and I did, right on cue! And I said that what that proved was that if you were looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe, Harvard probably wasn’t the place to start, and I also said that if people were being kidnapped, all that proved was that the alien beings weren’t too bright, be-cause—” As perhaps you’ve surmised, at precisely four o’clock that afternoon, I’d consumed one large cup of Bustelo.

  “Enough!” Rita jerked her manicured right hand up and then sharply down in unintended imitation of beginning dog trainers who’ve read about the drop signal in a book but haven’t yet figured out exactly what it’s supposed to look like. “But the other part is that those people's suffering is real. You don’t believe—and I don’t believe—that they’ve been abducted by aliens, but these people have had terrible experiences, right here on earth, way too close to home, in most cases, and to make fun of—”

  “Rita, I made fun of the pamphlet, the report. I thought it was stupid. So did you. But I never said the people were stupid, any more than you did. Look, feeling as if you’ve been in contact with any kind of Other, capital O, is horrible. Even just the ordinary sense of not really being yourself... Rita? Are you still not...?”

  “More than I was,” she said quietly.

  My own voice matched hers, soft, low-pitched. “Have you talked to Stephanie Benson?”

  Rita nodded stiffly. “She’s an interesting woman. Among other things... Anyway, Stephanie said this obvious thing, and it’s so... What she picked up on was actually this same theme, and she pointed out... I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. Alienist. It’s British, and it’s out of date, but it’s not a bad word for therapist, and I never made the connection. For that matter, neither did Lang.” Rita’s analyst, of course, Norris Lang, who also, I might add, either hadn’t noticed her hearing loss or hadn’t insisted that she do something about it. If I were a shrink, first of all, I’d make all my patients have their vision and hearing tested, and I’d make sure they had jobs they liked, and I’d refer them all to purebred rescue groups to adopt wonderful dogs, and I’d enroll them in dog training classes. And before long, the handful who weren’t promptly cured would be too busy with dogs and clubs and shows to worry about their sanity, and I’d have no patients left, all of which explains why psychotherapy concentrates on dreams, impulses, memories, and wishes instead of on the primary life force we can control, namely, the dog. And if you don’t believe me, just try bringing your dreams to heel or teaching your memories to drop on recall. And even after years of therapy, what have you really got, at best, but a slightly improved version of your same old self? No matter how wonderful you’ve become, don’t you need someone else to love? Someone who’ll love you more than you could ever love yourself, someone with an undeniable reality infinitely more powerful than all the shadowy chimeras of mere mental life? Even after all those years of fifty-minute hours, don’t you still need a dog?

  "Alienist,” I said. “I like that. And I’m glad you met Stephanie. I just wrote an article about her.” Ruffly played a considerably more prominent role in my prose than Stephanie did, but I didn’t want to disappoint Rita, who’s a mother hen about my career. In particular, she persists in trying to incubate the infertile hope that one of these days I’ll transfer my membership in the Dog Writers’ Association of America to the People Writers’ Association, and I haven’t yet broken the news to her that whereas the former crows and cackles in merry unison, the latter consists of dozens of broken eggs.

  “Did I thank you?” Rita asked. “I didn’t even thank you. And I’m sorry I snapped at you. And, really, Ruffly is remarkable.”

  “All hearing dogs are.” They’re merely a special case in point, but when I say things like that, Rita worries about me. Unnecessarily, of course, but she does. “Did Stephanie say anything to you about this problem with Ruffly?”

  “She mentioned something about all the transitions.”

  “Maybe she’s decided that’s all it is.”

  “What did you...?”

  “Seizures, maybe.Some kind of neurological thing. He’s having weird attacks, she says. Maybe he’s hearing something. I didn’t see a thing.”

  While I was warming the coffee to refill our mugs, Leah and Matthew showed up with two quarts of Toscanini’
s ice cream, a frozen confection so vastly superior to all others that it practically deserves an entirely different name. They also had a video they’d just rented, the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matthew’s selection, no doubt. The title, I was certain, represented the precise nature of his intentions toward Leah, who, on her own, would have been content to re-view The No-Force Method of Dog Training or would have chosen an undubbed French film and stuck a strip of masking tape over the bottom of the TV screen to blot out the subtitles.

  “Leah,” I said as she dished out ice cream, “what do you know about Ivan’s mother?”

  “She’s nice,” Leah said unhelpfully.

  I clarified my request. “Would she let him have a dog?”

  Leah and Matthew exchanged glances. Leah suppressed a grin.

  “What’s that about?” I asked. “Is there something wrong with...?”

  Leah interpreted. “There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s just that she might not even notice. She’s really nice. She’s just kind of oblivious.” Leah fished spoons out of the drawer and stuck them in the ice cream. She and Matthew distributed the bowls.

  “How oblivious can she be?” I said. “She’s a professor of something, isn’t she? And she’s raising Ivan. If she manages to work and—”

  “I don’t know.” Leah shrugged. “You just always have the sense that her mind is somewhere else. On the rain forests or something. But with Ivan, she really tries. She just doesn’t understand much about kids, and she never really expected... The thing is that she and Ivan’s father had a prenuptial agreement that he was supposed to be responsible for, like, seventy-five percent of the child-rearing, and then—”

  “When did his father die?” I asked.

  Leah looked toward Matthew. “When was it? A while ago.”

  “Two years ago,” Matthew said confidently.

  “In Cameroon,” I said. “What did he die of?” Matthew answered. “Septicemia. He was there doing research, and by the time they decided to evacuate him, it was too late.”

  I wondered exactly how Ivan’s father had managed to abide by the prenuptial agreement to do most of the child care while simultaneously conducting research on the other side of the globe. Then a possibility occurred to me. “Was Ivan there? Was Ivan with him in Cameroon?” Matthew shook his head.

  “No,” Leah said, “I know he wasn’t. Ivan’s been at Avon Hill since kindergarten.”

  “So Ivan never got a chance to say good-bye to his father,” said Rita, who’d accepted one small scoop of vanilla and was slowly feeding herself minute lumps of it.

  Matthew nodded politely—he really did have meticulously correct manners—but his face looked blank.

  “Does that matter a lot?” Leah asked. Before Rita could respond, she added, “I wondered, because Ivan... He’ll tell you his father died—he’ll kind of drop it like a bomb, especially with people he doesn’t know—but other than that, he doesn’t talk about it at all, and it’s kind of hard just to go up to him and say, ‘Hey, Ivan, how do you feel about...?’ because, obviously, you know how he must feel, more or less.”

  “But does Ivan know?” Rita asked.

  “How could he not?” Leah said.

  “What I’m asking,” said Rita, sounding like her old self, “is whether this little boy had any help in dealing with this profound loss. Did anyone help him to articulate his feelings? Was anyone there for him? Is anyone?”

  “His mother spends time with him, if that’s what you mean.” Leah helped herself to more ice cream and generously added another scoop to Matthew’s bowl. “She gets books for him, and they read together all the time. Ivan reads... Well, he probably reads as well as I do, but they read aloud together. Plays and things.”

  “That’s, uh, a mixed blessing,” Matthew commented.

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Leah, smiling.

  “How is that—?” I started to ask.

  “Ivan identifies with Puck,” Leah told me.

  Matthew elaborated. “In the Avon Hill play, it’s... It’s their own play. They write it, they produce it, they do everything, and the idea is that they write their own parts, and we’re there strictly as advisors, backup—”

  “ ‘Not censors,’ ” Leah said censoriously. She was obviously quoting someone.

  “So Ivan is creating some kind of dilemma?” I asked.

  “The feeling is,” Leah said, “that he ought to be encouraged to be more creative, because what he’s doing now is basically just copying Shakespeare.”

  “Robin Badfellow,” Matthew added.

  “He must say it a hundred times a day,” Leah said. “What he says is, ‘Robin B-a-d Badfellow is my name.’ And the director—the director of AHSP, not the director of the play—-she’s a kid—anyway, the director tried to have this sort of tactful talk with Ivan, because he’s also borrowed a lot of the dialogue and stuff, but she didn’t get anywhere.”

  “Because,” Matthew explained, “Ivan told her that if it was all right for Shakespeare to borrow plots from other people, then it was all right for him to borrow from Shakespeare.”

  “That’s hard to argue with,” I said.

  “Ivan is always hard to argue with,” said Leah, “which is one reason this leave-him-free-to-express-him-self method—”

  “That’s not—” Matthew began.

  “Oh, yes, it is,” Leah said. “And what’s wrong with it is, you give Ivan a choice, and he’ll always screw things up, and then what are you supposed to tell him? ‘Great job, Ivan!’ How could you? I keep telling you, what we need to do is to set him up so he has no choice. Like with that woman next door to you, Matthew.”

  “Alice Savery?” I asked.

  Leah ignored me. She went on lecturing Matthew. “You know what’s going to happen? In fact, it’s happening now. First of all, someone ought to drive Ivan home from the program or walk him home or whatever, because, now, he’s like a dog running loose; he’s just invited to get into trouble. And then when she shows up at the program and tells us we have to tell Ivan to quit sneaking into her carriage house, all that’s really happening is that we’re not just giving him a choice, but we’re showing him what the wrong choice is. And, you know, Matthew, it’s really dangerous, because—”

  “The carriage house is a firetrap,” Matthew agreed, “and he does go in there. I saw him there the other day. But that story about the kids sneaking in there to smoke, that’s... if they did it, they would’ve burned it down by now, and—”

  “Why doesn’t she just have it tom down?” Leah demanded.

  “Leah,” Matthew said firmly, “the point is that you can’t safety-proof the whole world.”

  “You don’t have to,” Leah said, “because not all of it’s relevant.”

  “Leah, you’re not being rational. Here’s... Take my mother, for instance.” Matthew spoke with unusual animation. “In theory, one could redesign the environment so that deaf people receive the sensory input they need exclusively through visual channels—no more telephones, just TTYs; every film has subtitles; and so forth and so on—but in practice—”

  “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Leah said.

  “It’s cost-ineffective,” Matthew told her sourly. “And no one could reasonably suggest depriving most people of telephones because—”

  “But everyone could have a TTY,” said Leah. Turning to Rita and me, she added, “You type instead of talking, and instead of hearing, you—”

  “We know,” I said.

  “Stephanie has one,” Leah said. “And, Matthew, you know what? Why doesn’t she just quit answering the phone and use the TTY instead?”

  Matthew was exasperated. “Because most people don’t, and the reason they don’t is that they don’t need them, and it makes more sense for the small number of deaf people there are to use hearing aids and amplifiers than it does for everyone else to change everything just for them. And that’s the point about Ivan. You can’t reshape the world so that he can’
t get in trouble, because, even if you changed everything, he’d just discover something new.”

  While Matthew and Leah scrapped about whether the world should be changed to accommodate people who couldn’t hear, I kept a protective eye on Rita, but I couldn’t tell how she was responding. Then she suddenly addressed Matthew: “One in ten,” she told him defiantly. “That’s the incidence of hearing loss in this country. One person in ten. That’s not a small number.”

  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.