Ruffly Speaking

terror would probably have blotted out my voice, and even if she’d been a dog lover, Rowdy would have been a bizarre sight, a big smoke-black dog, his pink tongue hanging out as he panted from the heat, a black jersey bow on top of his massive head. Alice Savery’s steely fingers dug painfully into my arm. Then she let go and sped across the room toward her desk, presumably in search of whatever ultrasound device she’d used on Ruffly. I tried to beat her to it. We reached the desk almost simultaneously. Her hand grabbed for one of the gadgets. I snatched the gadget. “He won’t hurt you!” I bellowed. I tried to let her see my lips, but she wasn’t watching. “He’s perfectly friendly!”
    As if to prove my claim, Rowdy moved toward Alice Savery. She sidestepped, threw panicked looks left and right, and suddenly darted toward the dim end of the room that lay at the front of the house. As I bent to pick up the leash that trailed from Rowdy’s collar, I heard what sounded like the rattle of chain. When I looked up, Alice Savery was at the window that overlooked Highland Street, her back toward me. I shouted her name. Anyone who can hear finds it almost impossible to believe that someone else cannot.
    Hooked over the windowsill was a wide, sturdy-looking metal bracket, and out through the open window, Alice Savery was dropping the metal chains and rungs of the emergency escape ladder the bracket was meant to support. Years of manual labor seemed to have given her the strength and agility of an athlete. When I was halfway to her, she had one leg over the sill. Her hands clutched the bracket. I dropped Rowdy’s leash and sprinted, but she’d already swung her lean body over the sill, and one of her feet must have found a rung.
    “Don’t!” I hollered. “Stop!”
    She transferred her full weight to the ladder, and the bracket dug into the rotten wood of the sill. Then, as her frozen face vanished beneath the window, the bracket moved, and its hooks shifted. In seconds, the old wood gave way under Alice Savery’s weight.
     

34
     
     A month later, Rita’s freshly streaked hair was long enough to cover her ears completely and reliably. Even when she shook her head, the aids didn’t show at all. Aid, I should say. To leave her left ear free for the telephone and to give herself a chance to adapt to amplification without total bombardment, she’d taken to wearing only the aid that went in her right ear. Three days earlier, however, she’d stepped into the shower, soaked her head, poured on shampoo, and discovered only when she was halfway through lathering her hair that one of the unbearably uncomfortable foreign objects to which she would never adjust was still firmly lodged in her right ear canal. It was now at the audiologist’s for repair or replacement. Consequently, I was walking on Rita’s left. Rowdy was ahead of Us at the end of his six-foot leather lead, sniffing bushes and, early on the warm summer evening, making sleddog-sure that we didn’t hit a patch of thin ice. Willie trotted Merrily along in what Rita considers perfect heel position, that is, anywhere that might even remotely be considered vaguely in the vicinity of her left side. His eyes crackled, his beautifully trimmed black coat gleamed, and every one of the tiny black Scotties running around his new red collar and down his leash looked exactly like him.
    “I keep telling you.” Rita shook her head. “It’s much more complicated than that. The hearing loss alone was not what made her paranoid.”
    “Well, it didn’t help,” I said.
    “If she’d done anything about it, it wouldn’t have hurt, either,” Rita snapped.
    I’d found Rita and Stephanie amazingly unsympathetic about Alice Savery’s hearing loss. The news had come as no surprise at all to Stephanie. “If the only thing the person’s doing about it is denying it, I can always tell,” Stephanie had said. “There’s a certain expression one sees on people’s faces when they’re missing a lot of what’s being said and trying to pretend that they’re getting it. Of course, I have an advantage. I watch people’s faces.” She had paused, cleared her throat, and added, “Also, one tends to assume that other people’s hearing is more or less like one’s own. My starting assumption with Miss Savery was probably rather different from yours.”
    Willie greedily eyed the ankles of a passerby, but they belonged to a runner who was too quick for him.