Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

tried to look as if I were completely absorbed in the Q & A session.
    “So that they are both the parent and the child in this scenario, indulging and being indulged, the way we may be all the characters in our dreams.” She turned to Rick, finally giving him a chance to respond. But it was too late. He looked shell-shocked. Beryl had just given him a powerful demonstration of the effectiveness of negative reinforcement as well as the principle of alpha.
    Beryl shrugged and pointed to a young woman whose hand had been waving frantically in the air all the while Beryl had been speaking.
    “Is there any breed that’s truly hypoallergenic?” she asked.
    As Rick began to respond, Martyn gathered up his things and quietly headed for the door. He looked lost in thought and didn’t seem to notice me.
    “I’ve been reading about drive training,” a man in the middle of the group was saying. There was something pinched and tight about him. Looking at the back of his head, I imagined his lips would be pursed. Perhaps it was the perfect little voice that put me off, the way he enunciated every syllable so carefully. As he continued, I realized he was speaking too slowly, even for a mid-westerner.
    “Could each of you explain how a dog’s drives can be used when obedience-training a client’s pet dog?” he said, reminding me that Ida once said that talking very slowly can be a passive-aggressive act, a way to hold someone’s attention without earning that right The result, she’d said, made the listener intensely irritated. It worked for me. I felt like slapping him.
    “How using the dog’s desire to fetch,” he droned on, “could be a pathway to training, for example, or—”
    “Clever trainers have always motivated dogs by capitalizing on what the animal finds exciting, dear,” Beryl interrupted. “Do you have a dog with you?”
    He was slim and narrow-shouldered, even smaller looking when he stood than he’d appeared seated. A handsome, lively flat-coat trotted along as he walked toward the stage.
    “Show us his recall, dear.”
    The precise little man, every hair glued in place, his tie just so, left his handsome boy on a sit-stay and crossed the stage. He turned, took a few hundred breaths, passed a few birthdays, and applied for social security. Then, snapping his fingers, he said, “Watch me, Dicky. Dicky, come.”
    Dicky walked slowly toward his owner and sat, as precise and dutiful as his master, clearly as bored as we were.
    “Now let me try,” Beryl said, reaching into the pocket of her navy blazer and pulling out a tennis ball. Instead of placing Dicky on a stay or commanding his attention, Beryl bounced the ball, scooping it out of the air with a smooth, practiced move, the way the dog might have were he close enough.
    When Dicky turned in her direction, it was as if he were the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and someone had just thrown the switch.
    “Dicky, dear,” she said in an animated voice, “come to Beryl,” and with no further encouragement, Dicky flew across the stage and sat in front of a complete stranger, gazing into her eyes as if she were the Messiah, for indeed, to Dicky, that’s exactly who she had just become.
    “Good lad.”
    She tossed the ball to Dicky, who rose and caught it to a round of applause.
    “There, dear, does that answer your question?”
    The little man nodded and left the stage, Dicky still holding the ball in his mouth.
    “Just a little thought about who the dog is, and you can enliven his response and keep his mind on the work at hand.”
    Rick, standing still on the stage, began to look as if he were smoldering. Were I closer, I might be able to see his aura, red as the rage he was trying to control as Beryl eclipsed him with her quick, confident answers.
    I remembered reading a story that the psychic Edgar Cayce told. A friend of his had once been waiting for an elevator, and when it arrived and the door opened, no one aboard had an aura. She let the elevator go and took the stairs instead. When she’d reached the lobby, she found that one of the cables had snapped, and the elevator had fallen, killing everyone inside.
    I’d always wondered why she hadn’t warned them. Was it part of her belief, and Cayce’s, that the man who is destined to drown will drown in a glass of water? Did they think there was nothing one could or should do, that the people on the elevator were all fated to die, like strangers who share the same terrible lot