Ruffly Speaking (26 page)

That got to her. “Selfish! I don’t believe it! Holly, have you ever wondered why I am wearing these hearing aids? Is this really something I’m doing exclusively for
me?
Well, you know what? It damned well is not, because the fact is, I don’t really enjoy hearing. And you know why? Because the world is a screaming mess! I’m used to a nice, quiet world, and that’s how I like it, and the main so-called benefit I get from these things is that everything is clattering and banging all the time, and I hate it! Turn on the faucet, and instead of a nice, peaceful nothing, I get snap, crackle, and pop, like breakfast cereal, for God’s sake, and—”

“Rita, why you are wearing the aids, if I might remind you, is so that you don’t keep going to the wrong funeral. Remember Morris Lamb?”

Strangely enough, Rita and I had drifted toward our usual seats at my kitchen table, but instead of actually sitting down, we’d stationed ourselves behind the chairs almost as if we intended to use them as shields or as weapons against each other.

“Well, let me remind you, Miss Know-It-All,” Rita said, tightening her grip on the chair, “that there happen to be a hell of a lot of people who don’t hear a damned thing, for all practical purposes, and who manage just fine, thank you, by signing instead of—”

“Absolutely right,” I interrupted. “But
you
aren’t one of them, and why you aren’t one of them is that you don’t know a thing about deaf culture, and you’re probably not going to learn anything about it, either, because, for a start, not only do you not sign, but you aren’t actually deaf, either. All you are is—”

“Don’t say it! Hard of hearing. Politically correct stance: Being deaf is not an illness, so it’s not something that needs to be
cured.
Hearing loss is no loss at all.” Rita spat out the words. “But just having a hard time hearing? Walking around with these hideous fake-flesh radios jammed in my ears so nobody has to bother to speak up? Well, that’s a whole other matter.”

“Poor little Rita,” I said brusquely, “caught between two worlds, rejected by the truly deaf—”

“Oh, shut up! You simply do not understand—”

“What I understand perfectly is that my second-floor tenant has carefully trained her dog to become a nuisance barker, and I, for God’s sake, am a
dog writer,
but that much atmosphere I really don’t need.”

“Fine,” Rita said. “Fair enough. But how about coming to me directly and—”

“Because I have already done it! And meanwhile Willie’s gotten steadily worse, and you haven’t made the slightest move to do a thing about it, that’s why, and yesterday, I finally ran out of patience—”

“And took it upon yourself, knowing full well how I feel about people intruding in my private space and also knowing full well exactly how I feel about
imprisoning
dogs in
cages
—”

“Damn it, Rita, I did not imprison Willie. All I did was crate him temporarily with not just one but two very attractive chew toys so that he’d learn a socially acceptable way to entertain himself when you’re not home.” I broke off. “Speaking of which, since you disapprove so strongly of my vicious methods, and since you’re so busy returning my instruments of torture, where’s the rawhide?”

Rita shifted her feet and pursed her lips, but she said nothing.

“You tried to get it away from him, didn’t you?” I said vindictively. “But Willie wouldn’t give it up, would he?” Although I knew I was right, gloating was entirely unnecessary and unsporting, and I am thoroughly ashamed of it. But I was right. If Willie had rejected the rawhide or if she’d simply forgotten it, she wouldn’t have been half so furious at me.

Instead of yelling, Rita took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly. I had the impression that she wasn’t merely respirating, but was performing some kind of mind-body or, worse yet, mindbody—one word—exercise she’d learned in the eight-session stress-reduction workshop she’d taken the previous winter. Eight sessions. Sound familiar? Basic beginners’ dog training. Eight sessions. World’s most effective stress reduction. And Rita’s silly, pointless breathe-your-way-to-inner-peace beginners’ human soul training had even met on Thursday nights. But not at the armory. Not where my friends and I are training our dogs. Those charlatan gurus are smart enough to shield their clients from a clear view of the genuine secret of cosmic harmony.

“Rita, look. I probably shouldn’t have used my key,” I conceded, “but what choice did I have? I have tried to talk to you about the barking, and you have not done a damn thing about it, and the reason is, I think, because you don’t get how big the problem is. Look. Willie is suffering from bored dog syndrome. And when you’re home, he isn’t bored, so he doesn’t do it, so you don’t hear how bad it is. But you
do
know that the Donovans aren’t complainers, and it isn’t too hard to guess that if Willie keeps it up, what they’re going to do is just nicely and politely find another apartment. And what am
I
sup-posed to do? And what about Kevin? And Mrs. Dennehy? And the other—”

“All right! Did I say there wasn’t a problem? There’s a problem.”

"And all I did, Rita, was to do exactly what any other reasonable, contemporary dog trainer would’ve done. Modern methods. No pain, no discomfort, no force. Lock him up in a safe place for a short time, and—”

“Holly, at the risk of repeating myself, I do
not
like to see dogs in cages, and, furthermore, this high-handed—”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll have it your way, then. You don’t like positive methods? Great. There are plenty of others, and Willie’s your dog.” I switched to my most obsequious salesperson voice. “Now what would you prefer, madam? I don’t happen to have any shock collars in stock right now, but I can certainly order one for you, or... Let’s check what’s on hand. I’ll be right back.”

I dashed to my study, rummaged around in the boxes Beryl had sent, and hustled back to the kitchen with a dog-silencing device in each hand. In my absence, Rita had taken her usual seat at the table. At first glance, I was tempted to hope that the move signaled the beginning of a return to the comfort of our friendship. Then I realized that I had caught Rita’s habit of overpsychologizing everything. Rita sat down only because her feet hurt. Moral: If you intend to stand your ground, don’t wear high heels.

“Here,” I announced, raising my left hand, “is your simple old low-tech no-bark, no-bite Velcro-fastened muzzle. Just clamp Willie’s jaws together, slap it on, and there you go! No noise. Or not much, anyway. Of course, he won’t be able to eat or drink anything while he’s got it on, and he’ll probably manage to claw it off before long, and it won’t
teach
him a thing, but, hey, no cage!” I tossed the muzzle on the table, then held up the little red plastic box in my right hand. “So now we move on to high tech, namely, the automatic bark-activated Yap Zapper with optional manual operation at a simple touch of this button.” I pointed the device straight at Rita and pressed. The Yap Zapper made an almost inaudible click, and its tiny red light flashed off and on. “And there you go! You can’t hear it, I can’t hear it, but any dog within—”

Rita sat straight up, grabbed for her ears, and exclaimed, “What was that?”

As I’ve said, from the human standpoint, or at least from my human standpoint, the Yap Zapper had done practically nothing. The click was as soft as the tap of a fingernail, and you had to look at the gadget to notice the little light that showed that the device was working.

“Ultrasound,” I said. “It’s called a Yap Zapper. It gives a one-second burst of sound that’s—”

“Do it again,” said Rita, all curiosity, her anger and defensiveness suddenly gone. “Or wait... The dogs...?”

“They’re too far away,” I told her. “The range is ten °r twelve feet. It’s—”

“This is so weird,” Rita said. “Press it again.”

Once again, I aimed the Yap Zapper and pushed the button. Rita jerked her head as if she’d just climbed out of a swimming pool and was trying to shake the water out of her ears.

“Rita, are you hearing it? Because, supposedly, it's… It’s supposed to be out of the range of human hearing. We—people—only hear up to whatever it is, but dogs can hear sounds way, way above what we can. Rita can you
hear
this thing?”

“Not exactly,” Rita said. “That’s what’s so freakish. What I
hear
is total silence.”

26

 Maybe you’re quicker than we were; maybe you got it right away. Rita and I, however, had to hit the books. Back in graduate school, Rita had taken a course that touched briefly on human hearing, and sometime thereafter she’d refreshed her knowledge by cramming for the psychology licensing exam, but she’d soon forgotten everything except some psychoanalytic gobbledygook about the erotic significance of orifices, and in her recent reading about hearing loss and hearing aids, she’d ignored the technicalities and concentrated on what she called the socioaffective aspects of—believe it or not
—dialoguing
and their implications for—I swear to God—
languaging.
Therapists!

I wasn’t much help, either. I knew that dogs could hear sounds pitched too high for human ears. To illustrate the point, I immediately produced the example of the so-called silent dog whistle inaudible to people but audible to dogs. My knowledge of the details, however, was as scanty as Rita’s.

Before long, though, we’d strewn my kitchen table with what was, even for Cambridge, an oddly assorted collection of reference materials, and, soon thereafter, we understood almost everything, which is to say, everything except the trivial matter of
who.

But the
how
? Rita’s deceitful no-hearing-dogs self-help guide informed us that human beings don’t hear sounds above 20,000 cycles per second. According to the canine authorities, dogs are vastly superior to people in this regard. (So what else is new?) Just how vastly superior? A couple of my books said that dogs hear sounds up to about 40,000 cycles per second, but Rita came across the suggestion that dogs may even hear some sounds within the range of 70,000 to 100,000 cycles per second. Are you with me? Cycles per second is frequency—pitch —as opposed to volume in decibels, which brings us to the hearing aids and the Yap Zapper. The operating instructions for Rita’s aids assured us that since an aid with a maximum sound pressure level greater than 132 decibels may impair hearing, this model safeguarded the user by cutting off sounds louder than 113 decibels. And the Yap Zapper promotion material? The bursts of sound were, as I’d known, high-pitched, and, as I hadn’t known, 120 decibels loud. In other words, the bursts were too high-pitched for a person to hear, but, nonetheless, loud enough to make Rita’s hearing aids momentarily and automatically quit working.

Just like Stephanie’s. Rita and I reasoned that, far from malfunctioning, Stephanie’s aids were cutting out, as she described it, by responding to high volume, regardless of pitch. And Ruffly’s episodes? I hadn’t been too far off. “Sound shyness,” I said to Rita, shying away from painful slaps of loud sound pitched too high for human ears but not too high for Ruffly’s.

Not that I get off on diagnosing a veterinary problem that’s baffled Steve Delaney, D.V.M., but by the time Rita and I had worked it out, I was wired. Also, our friendship restored, we were drinking coffee, and although Rita had insisted on decaf, I was fine-tuning my nervous system with genuine Puerto Rican formula three-tablespoons-per-cup Bustelo, so I was eager to zip over to Stephanie Benson’s, where I’d modestly announce my diagnostic triumph and gracefully accept the eternal gratitude not only of the rector but of her Principal Employer, too, I assumed. I could see and hear it all. That Companion Dog Excellent title? Rowdy’s C.D.X.? Fair and square, no cheating, of course, and, yes, I know it by heart. Chapter 2, Section 7 of the Good Book, the ban on “any assistance, interference, or attempts to control a dog from outside the ring.” But if God is
inside
the ring? Preferably with a good grip on Rowdy’s collar and on his soul, too. Well, according to my reading of the regulations, divine intervention does not count as double handling. C.D.X., here we come!

Rita interrupted this beatific vision. “Holly? Holly, there’s a hitch.”