Evil Breeding

insistently that Rowdy and Kimi felt compelled to answer back. Their chorus was utterly beautiful: eerie, chilling, and heartwarming, all at the same time. Dedicated dog trainer that I am, I leaped out of bed, grabbed a clicker and dog treats from the pockets of my jeans, which lay on the floor by the bed, and dashed naked into the kitchen to reinforce like mad now that I finally had the opportunity. And let me tell you, clicker training really works. You know those dolphins at Sea World? That’s how they’re trained, not with clickers and dog treats, of course, but with whistles and fish. Still, the method is the same. And the results are just as spectacular as those I was getting right in my own kitchen at two o’clock in the morning— Ah-wooooooooo! Ah-wooooooooo! Click! Treat!—until Steve staggered in and, after a few efforts drowned out by the dogs, managed to convey his displeasure at having been awakened.
    I was surprised. “You can always sleep through anything,” I reminded him. Steve never looks better than when he’s just reaching consciousness. His brown hair was curling all over his head. His eyes were especially green, probably, it occurred to me, with envy. After all, my brilliant dogs were learning a trick that his dogs hadn’t mastered. He was unselfconsciously naked. My desire to clicker-train the dogs subsided, replaced by a new and more compelling longing.
    The green in his eyes was apparently not caused by envy after all. “You have neighbors,” he said sternly. His tone silenced the dogs, who eyed him with puzzled disappointment.
    “Rita takes out her hearing aids before she goes to bed,” I replied. “Otherwise, she gets ear infections.” Rita is my second-floor tenant. She is also a close friend. She is young to wear hearing aids, and she uses those tiny ones that don’t show, so people tend to forget that she has a hearing loss.
    “Holly, for Christ’s sake! Helen Keller couldn’t have slept through that racket.”
    “Steve, the sirens were not my fault. I didn’t call the fire department. And I didn’t tell the dogs to start howling. All that would’ve happened anyway, even if I’d stayed in bed.”
    Steve had wandered to the refrigerator and was swigging directly out of a milk bottle. “In this situation,” he said slowly and patiently, “a normal human being tells her dogs to shut up. She does not jump out of bed in the middle of the night to pretend she’s Karen Pryor and that her dogs are porpoises.” Karen Pryor is one of the principal proponents of clicker training. She was a founder of Sea Life Park and Oceanic Institute in Hawaii.
    “I was not pretending I was Karen Pryor,” I said huffily.
    “But you were pretending that the dogs were porpoises.”
    “Dolphins,” I admitted.
    “In the morning,” said Steve, returning the germy milk bottle to the refrigerator, “you owe this entire neighborhood an apology.”
    As it turned out, the sirens had awakened all my neighbors anyway, and everyone, with one exception, was wonderfully understanding and, in a few cases, complimentary about the dogs’ howling. The exception was Rita. She was also the one person to whom I admitted that I’d inconsiderately prolonged the howling by seizing an unparalleled opportunity to apply a new and fashionable method of dog training.
    This was over a late breakfast. To buy forgiveness, I’d arisen early and driven all the way to Brookline for Kupel’s bagels with cream cheese and nova lox. When I returned, Steve refused the bagels and fried himself two eggs. Then he left for his clinic. After that, I apologized to my third-floor tenants and to the people in the nearby houses, including Kevin Dennehy and his mother. Kevin is a Cambridge cop. He really can sleep through anything. He swore he had. Mrs. Dennehy said that the dogs had put her in mind of the voice of the turtle—she’s very religious—and that she had gone right back to sleep. Rita said that I did indeed owe her an apology, but that in place of groveling she would accept Kupel’s bagels, provided that I had bought cream cheese and lox as well. Once Rita settled herself in my kitchen, however, she fell victim to one of the many occupational hazards of being a psychotherapist—that’s what she is—by trying to persuade me to examine the meaning of what I’d done.
    She spread a thin layer of cream cheese on what she refers to as a goyische bagel: plain, and especially not garlic or onion. Rita is a New