Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  I grabbed some stationery and scrawled the only honest answer: “Any dog you don’t love.”

  Truthful, yes.Helpful, no. I tore up my letter. How could one of my readers possibly ask such a question? Like every other member of my profession, I’d already answered it hundreds of times: The free-Rover makes so many enemies that when he’s finally hit by a car, the neighbors want to dance in the streets. As if to confirm my sense that any further dispensing of advice would be useless, noise broke out overhead: Willie began yet one more of the prolonged fits of senseless barking that I’d repeatedly told Rita how to cure. Until that afternoon, I’d limited myself to lecturing Rita. Now I took action— and, no, not with one of those damned no-bark shock collars and not with ultrasound, either. The radical remedy? My landlady key admitted me to Rita’s apartment, where I set up a portable crate, into which I locked the protesting Scottie, one pressed-rawhide bone, and one Gumabone Plaque Attacker, its hollow middle filled with freshly melted cheese. Then I stomped downstairs and muffled the yapping with the cotton I use to clean the dogs’ ears. Instant magic? No. Willie wasn’t a tough case. It took twenty minutes for him to fall silent.

  My sense of professional competence restored, I

  made a big cup of Bustelo and whipped off a column that began with the letter I’d just received, moved to phony expressions of regret that the days of the free-range neighborhood dog were over, and ended with an analysis of the anthropomorphism inherent in the romantic idealization of the loose dog as a symbol of spiritual freedom, which, by the way, is just what the roaming dog symbolizes. So does death.

  By the time I’d finished, I was drenched in caffeine sweat, and Rowdy and Kimi were pleading for their overdue dinner, so I fed them, put them in the yard, took a shower, and, of all things, got so dressed up that when Steve arrived, he decided that I must have forgotten that we were going out to dinner. Whenever he sees me wearing anything fancier than kennel clothes, he assumes that I’m on my way to or from a show.

  We ate at a little Indian restaurant on Beacon Street in Brookline. My main course was a mild spinach concoction, palak paneer (evidently meaning baby food, not bad), but Steve ordered three kinds of bread, a dish of fiery citrus pickles, a salad that tasted like glowing embers, and a curry that would’ve done as the penultimate test in the Bombay licensing exam for flame swallowers. After a few bites, he started mopping his head and face, and all through the meal, he kept pouring down beer and exclaiming about how great everything tasted. Even so, I drove us home along a circuitous route that happened to lead us to Toscanini’s in Central Square, where we stocked up on mouth-bum remedies to take back to Appleton Street.

  When we arrived, Leah and Matthew were at the kitchen table consuming ramen noodles, Leah with evident satisfaction, Matthew with the expression of a dog given a half-cup of low-cal chunks in place of his usual bowlful of Joy Demand laced with safflower oil to make his coat shine. I decided that with a person as inexpressive as Matthew, any show of anything resembling emotion was preferable to the usual watered-down, no-cal, no-taste, invalid-bland affective diet that he seemed to self-prescribe as a preventive antidote for human feelings.

  But, of course, Leah’s friends are always welcome in my house.

  In even sharper than usual contrast to Matthew, Leah was radiant with excitement tonight. She couldn’t wait for Matthew to conclude his rise-when-a-lady-enters jack-in-the-box trick to begin spilling out her news, which, in characteristic Leah fashion, wasn’t even her own, but Matthew’s, except, I suppose, to the extent that it concerned a dog. Despite the sticky city heat of a gusty July evening doomed to end in a night of thunder, Leah wore black tights topped by swathes of black jersey. She’d tried to subdue the unsophisticated exuberance of her red-gold curls, too, but the humidity had betrayed her. On the crown of her head, an elasticized black velvet ribbon was losing the struggle to retain its grip on a thick mass of hair. A cloudlike halo of escaped bronze tendrils framed her flushed, eager face. (Cloudlike. You noticed? Indeed, the ad copy for Wonder Fluff dog shampoo. There’s an off-chance that Leah had actually used it.)

  “Ruffly saved Matthew’s mother!” she exclaimed. “You have to hear all about it!”

  Most of the time, I manage to ignore Leah’s resemblance to my own mother—the voice, the astonishing hair, the remarkable way with dogs—but once in a while, when Leah catches me off-guard, I feel as if I’ve encountered Marissa’s ghost. With my mother, too, no one ever bad much choice about hearing all about everything. On this occasion I really was eager to hear all about Ruffly. The piece about him had turned out pretty well, but, after mailing it, I’d realized that something was missing: a good rescue story. If it hadn’t been Friday night, I might even have dashed to the phone to tell my editor to put the article on hold. Monday morning would be soon enough. I’ll also confess something: As a person, I genuinely hoped that Leah’s news was about some trivial incident that hadn’t even alarmed Stephanie. As a dog writer? Well, I prayed that little Ruffly hadn’t merely nudged Stephanie away from a slow-moving vehicle or warned her about a minor grease fire, but had heroically dragged his large-framed and bosomy mistress from the brink of some major, eminently publishable, and preferably ecclesiastical disaster.

  “Oh,” I said, disguising these warring emotions. “What happened?”

  By now, Steve had dished up and distributed the ice cream, and Matthew seemed more intent on working away at his bowl of vanilla than on enriching my forthcoming contribution to canine, ahem, literature, but maybe he simply accepted the inevitable. When Leah is bent on holding the floor, it’s useless to compete.

  “It just happened! Right after Stephanie got home, she went out to the deck, and you know how there’s a big gas grill there?” The question was one in intonation only; Leah didn’t pause long enough for me to nod, but went breathlessly on. “There’s one of those built-in grills, and she’d been out to dinner, and after she got home, she made some coffee and went out to the deck because Matthew won’t let her smoke in the house.”

  Stephanie had mentioned the ban. I remember how surprised I’d been to learn that she smoked at all. I still was. I glanced at Matthew, who was almost frowning. It occurred to me that I might be misjudging him. Maybe he was just hard to read, like a tailless shaggy dog with a curtain of hair permanently drawn over his face.

  Leah was gesturing enthusiastically with a spoonful of ice cream. “And Stephanie sat down, and there was... You know how windy it is? And she sat where the wind was blowing away from the grill, and she was just about to light her cigarette, but Ruffly bumped her arm, and then he just stood there staring at the grill, practically like a statue, and then Stephanie got up, and when she got really close to the grill, she could smell the gas. The valve wasn’t all the way off, and if it hadn’t been for Ruffly, especially if the wind had changed, she’d have been blown up!”

  “How did Ruffly know?” I asked.

  “You can hear it,” Matthew answered. “My mother can’t hear it, but the gas hisses a little. And if she’d been paying any attention, she would’ve smelled it.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Leah said firmly. “Not with the wind blowing away, would she?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t make much difference,” I said. “What she should’ve noticed wouldn’t really matter. Steve, would Ruffly have responded to the gas? To the smell?”

  He shrugged. “More likely the sound. Those dogs are all ears.” He asked Matthew how the gas happened to have been left on, but Matthew said he didn’t know— maybe the valve was faulty. His mother had used the grill a couple of times. He’d had to turn it off and on for her; she didn’t understand how it worked, and it made her nervous.

  It seemed to me that any woman capable of getting herself ordained should be able to overcome a sense of female helplessness about gas grills. If the Church gives you the power to look God more or less in the eye and yank souls from the flames of hell, why go all fluttery in the face of a backyard barbecue? But I didn’t s
ay so; I didn’t know much about priests. Or gas grills. What Leah and I both said was the obvious: how fortunate that Ruffly had been there.

  But Matthew wasn’t impressed; he didn’t give Ruffly much credit at all. If there’d been a serious accident? A fire? An explosion? If his mother had been injured? Well, rationally speaking, it would have been her own fault. After all, he said, Stephanie knew she shouldn’t smoke.

  24

  What stands between me and a darling black-and-white malamute puppy named Bernadette is a biological impossibility that’s entirely the fault of a woman once secularly known as Susan Cloer who joined the Holy Order of Breed Rescue; started combing the streets and animal shelters of Houston, Texas; encountered temptation; resisted it; and thus earned the only half-facetious title of Mother Teresa of the Malamute. The Temptation? Bernard. Starved down to fifty-nine pounds, the black of his coat bleached auburn by the Texas sun, Bernard was nonetheless recognizable as a better-looking Alaskan malamute than many of those seen in the ring. Equally evident—temptation, temptation—was this beautiful dog’s potential to sire the would-have-been Bernadette, to whom Bernard would doubtless have passed along not just the white tip on the end of his tail, but the incredibly striking diamond-shaped black markings on his white face, too—if only it hadn’t been for that damned Susan Cloer, as she was then. Texas. Tough. Stood right up to Satan. “Satan,” Susan announced, “haven’t you heard? All rescue dogs get spayed or neutered. All."

  And there went Bernadette, which turned out, by chance or by cosmic design, depending on your faith, to be the name of Ivan’s mother. Bernadette Flynn-Isaacson lacked black diamonds on her cheeks, of course, but she had a highly distinctive feature nonetheless, namely, the * saucer-shaped blue-violet eyes she’d obviously bequeathed to her son, who was currently seated at the I Flynn-Isaacson kitchen table surrounded by library books about dog care and mail-order kennel-supply catalogs— Cherrybrook, R.C. Steele, and a couple of others—that Leah must have given him. While studying This Is the Alaskan Malamute, Ivan was eating the kind of lunch that: educated Cambridge parents feed their offspring, a nutritionally balanced and ethnically diverse combination plate consisting of fried squid, a slice of leftover pizza, and three marinated artichoke hearts spread with peanut butter and decorated with little mounds of raisins, an inventive twist on ants on a log, I decided. But was I disgusted? No. Curious. Interested. See what dogs will do for you?

  B.D., Before Dogs, you witness a little boy digging his oversize, still-ridged grown-up teeth into a marinated artichoke heart topped with peanut butter and raisins, and you’re gripped by nausea or repulsion, but A.D., After Dogs, postconversion, the negative made positive, your soul drool-scoured and restored to perfect acceptance of Nature in all her once loathsome guises, you greet life eagerly and harmoniously as a fascinating series of equally informative encounters with the Divine. I came close to asking Ivan for a sample to take home. Marinated artichoke hearts plus peanut butter and raisins? Discovered by Holly Winter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, July 4: the only food the Alaskan malamute has ever been known to refuse. Glory, hallelujah!

  “Would you like something?” Bernadette asked. “Shall I fix you a plate, too?”

  Is there one clean? I wanted to reply. And, if so, how could you possibly find it? The mess was incredible—discarded pieces of clothing, half-empty jelly glasses, a bowl of rotting fruit, food-encrusted bowls, used tea bags, and, even by local standards, an extraordinary amount of printed material. On two long unfinished boards tenuously supported by wall brackets, I spotted two one-volume editions of the complete works of Shakespeare; a Danish-English dictionary; The, Chicago Manual of Style; Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family; a collection of Simenon mysteries not in translation, either (around here, escapism goes just so far); and, in what I suspected was a vestige of some abandoned cataloging scheme, a few dozen biographies of people who didn’t have much in common. Alice James, Joe DiMaggio, and Virginia Woolf rubbed spines with Roger Tory Peterson, George Sand, Wagner, and Billie Burke. Imagine the pillow talk. Kitchen or no kitchen, the battered copy of The Joy of Cooking looked out of place. The books were the least of it. Edging one wall in what looked like a primitive effort at insulation were high stacks of The New York Times (Sunday in one pile, daily in another) and what must have been a complete five-year collection of The New York Review of Books. Magazines? On the countertops. Nature, Science, Harvard Magazine, Bird Watcher’s Digest, and, inexplicably, Gourmet.

  “Sit down! Tea?” Bernadette withdrew her hands from a salad spinner full of water and greens, made a token swipe at a rust-stained dish towel, and began to clear a space at the table, which served mainly as a repository for Xeroxed articles with notes scrawled in the margins and a few dozen yellow pads that looked as if they’d been used in some foolish attempt to take the toe prints of a couple of million chickens.

  I’m no stranger here; I knew the signs. Bernadette’s pale brown hair had been cut short about four months earlier, probably the last time she’d noticed it. She wore jeans, a red T-shirt, and old running shoes. I was willing to bet that if she’d been forced to close her eyes and guess what she had on, she’d have had no idea whatsoever. Although she probably told herself that the kitchen was untidy, I was positive that she didn’t care. Why do housework? She was happy already. It also occurred to me that since Bernadette was—what was it?—a socioecologist, maybe some of what struck me as junk was material saved for recycling. In Cambridge, you always have to remind yourself that absolutely anything—the height of the stacks of old newspapers in the kitchen, the length of the hair on any given body part—may well represent a carefully thought-out political decision.

  I accepted the offer of tea and stated the Cantabrigian obvious: “You’re writing a book.”

  “Two!” As if to remind herself of the reality, she repeated, “Two! But I’m on sabbatical this fall.”

  Since moving to Cambridge, I’ve concluded that all professors are permanently on sabbatical or about to go on sabbatical, and I’d previously felt outraged that all those academics were getting paid to loll around recuperating from the rigors of teaching four hours a week, if that, while I was pursuing my no-work-no-check occupation. This time, however, I was delighted. On sabbatical? Writing two books? Here in this cheerful mess? Although Malamute Rescue doesn’t require applicants to develop instant agoraphobia, the presence of someone at home doesn’t exactly prejudice us against a prospective adopter, either.

  Having failed to locate a teakettle, Bernadette managed to find a saucepan that she filled with bottled water. The gas stove was one of those practically antique white enamel models you still find in Cambridge apartments, the kind with a built-in space heater as well as burners and an oven. After she’d twiste a knob a few times and tried blowing on the pilot light, Ivan finally stopped reading, went to the stove, and somehow persuaded the burner to produce a thin blue circle of blame. His mother set the pan on to heat. Then she dragged a chair to the sink, climbed on it, and began to rummage in a cupboard.

  Ivan returned to his seat and said, “Really, she is writing two books, but they’re about the same thing, only one of them is popular, and maybe she’s going to publish it under another name so her department doesn’t find out.” So young yet so jaded.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Because if a lot of people buy the book, the other people in her department might get jealous and not give her tenure.”

  Bernadette’s laugh was a beautiful, prolonged peal of glee. “Well spoken, Ivan! Straight to the point. Holly, would coffee do?”

  “Fine.Anything.”

  “Coffee appears to be what we have,” she said, “and I know we have milk.”

  Ivan evidently felt the need to explain his mother’s unexpected knowledge of the contents of her own kitchen. “We have a milkman.”

  “I do, too,” I said. “In fact, we have the same milkman, I think. Jim, right? I saw the box on your porch. Pleasant Valley Farms.�
��

  “He’s your milkman?”

  “You know, Ivan,” Bernadette said, “women can deliver milk, too.”

  Ivan corrected himself. “Milk person.” He scowled. “That sounds stupid. It sounds like somebody nursing a baby.” Ivan licked some peanut butter off his fingers, wiped them on his Avon Hill shirt, and said, “Creamery... creamery... creamery representative!”

  “Excellent,” his mother told him, climbing down from the chair.

  Ivan lost interest in the word game. With a look of impatience, he demanded, “Could we talk about the dog now?”

  Bernadette laughed and ran her hands through her shaggy hair.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Ivan was eager. “Do you want to see the yard? The fence is five feet, eleven and three-quarters inches high.”

  “He measured it,” Bernadette told me.

  “Uh, we need to slow down a little,” I said reluctantly. “You know, Ivan, it’s important to make sure that this is a good time for you to get a dog at all, a good time for both of you, you and your mother.”

  “We had a dog before,” Ivan said.

  “Oh, you did?” In case you’re not involved in rescue, I should explain that if a prospective adopter’s last dog lived to fifteen, I’m impressed. But if the last dog got hit by car? Or died of heartworm because the people were too stingy to pay for preventive medication? Sobbing means nothing, by the way. People will go out their way to guarantee that Rover gets run over or dies of parvo or lepto, and then, once he’s not going to cost them anything, they get choked up and teary-eyed while telling you how much they loved the dog they murdered.

  “Oh,” I said. “What was your dog’s name?” Ivan was dry-eyed, but I wasn’t about to ask a kid who’d lost his father to talk about the death of his dog.

  “Ivan—” Bernadette began.