Ruffly Speaking

conceded. Rita found the aids disgusting. They weren’t, really, except for the color, which I’ll admit was a little repulsive, like the rubber fake-flesh on a Halloween mask. With Rita’s help, I fitted them into my ears. Boom! The refrigerator roared like a diesel engine. My head filled with cracking, snapping, buzzing, shrieking, and screaming.
    When Rita spoke, her voice sliced through my eardrums. “Well?”
    “This is... These things are really weird.” Imagine trying to talk while your voice is being bounced off the moon and piped back into your own ears. I sounded loud and hollow, like an eerie stranger.
    Without actually saying that she’d told me so, Rita nodded in satisfaction. “You thought it was just vanity, didn’t you?”
    “Yes. How do you get these things out?” The impulse to rip them from my ears was almost irresistible, but Rita had paid a fortune for them, and I was afraid of breaking them.
    Rita let me keep suffering. “Now we both know why so many people who get hearing aids end up leaving them in a drawer somewhere.”
    The whirring and humming or maybe just the unnatural quality of sound made it hard to pay attention to her words.
    The stranger’s voice that was mine spoke again. “Rita, this can’t be right.” I stuck my thumbs in my ears and pried the aids out. The world returned to normal. “Leave them out for a while, okay? I didn’t get it before. I do now. Give yourself a break.”
    While Rita carefully stowed the aids in a little gray pouch that she tucked in her purse, I began to clear the table. Every dog in the house must have been listening for the telltale scrape of chairs on the linoleum, the clatter of plates, and the flow of water at the sink. From the yard, Rowdy and Kimi yelped and woo-wooed. Overhead, Willie’s sharp Scottie yaps echoed the smooth malamute pleas. When I let my dogs in, they barreled ahead, slammed into each other, and leaped and pranced in what I took to be a ritual dance aimed at appeasing the great god of pizza crust, who occupies a high place in their pantheon, right up there with Harbinger. And who is this doughy deity? I am, of course. Play it right, and you’re everything to your own dogs.
    Deity or not, I never neglect a training opportunity. Stand!” I told them. They froze on all fours. I was tempted to ask Rita to play judge and run her hands over them, but she wasn’t exactly in a playful mood, so I Praised the dogs, doled out the crust, and released them.
    Then I rejoined Rita at the table. “Rita, I was just thinking. When the dogs bark like that?” Tact. Rowdy and Kimi’s extraordinarily varied and fascinating vocalizations range from woos to yelps to whines to growls to howls. Universal truth: Your own dogs communicate. It’s other people’s dogs that just plain bark. Willie, for example, barks. “Isn’t that going to... I was wondering. If the hearing aids amplify all that, isn’t it going to damage your hearing? You know, noise-induced hearing loss?”
    Rita shook her head. “They cut off. Otherwise it could happen, but there’s a built-in device.”
    It seemed to me that built-in cutoff was exactly what Willie’s vocal cords needed. I didn’t say so. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t believe in surgical debarking.
    “And if they’re not turned on,” Rita continued, “they’re just like earplugs.” She stood up. “Holly?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’ve had it for today. I’m going to leave these things out and go and take a hot bath. You know, what you did helped a lot. Thank you.”
    “I didn’t do anything.”
    “Trying them. It helped a lot.”
    I shrugged.
    Rita rested both hands on the back of the chair, straightened her elbows, and leaned forward. “I’ve been thinking. You know what it’s like? This, uh, sensory bombardment? It’s exactly like what William James wrote.” She paused. “About what the world is like to a newborn. He wrote that it was ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion.’ Maybe that’s how I need to construe it.” Construe. Now she was really herself again. “As a rebirth,” she added. “Learning to wear these things is like being reborn. So if it feels traumatic, maybe it’s because it is traumatic, because, in terms of sensory input, it is a kind of birth trauma.”
    “I like the phrase,” I said.
    “Birth trauma?”
    “Uh-uh. ‘A great blooming, buzzing confusion.’ That’s beautiful.”
    Rita waited.
    I smiled at her. “I love it. It’s perfect. ‘A