Ruffly Speaking

family—my mother’s red-gold hair—and as for her personality, well, for a start, in sharp contrast to Arthur, she has one.
    Anyway, when Leah and Arthur arrived, Rowdy and Kimi were indoors, the driveway-side door of the fenced yard was open, and I was making the rounds with the pooper-scooper. Yes, it was another thrilling episode in the romantic saga of My Life and Adventures with the Legendary Wild Dogs of the North. But back to Arthur. He used to remind me of a wooden spoon, but when he half-opened the Volvo door, I realized that what Arthur actually resembled was a rudimentary sketch of a chromosome, the long, slim outline devoid of genes, nothing but
    slimy, blank protoplasm, a true recessive type. He peered nervously around, and rightly so, of course. Alaskan malamutes are friendly to people, but they’ll happily devour garbage, sticks, plastic, anything at all. Song birds caught on the wing. Wooden spoons. Chromosomes.
    Before her father had finished easing open the car door, Leah had sprung from the Volvo, dashed around it, hurtled toward me, knocked the pooper-scooper from my hand, and practically bowled me over on top of it. In the two seconds before I returned her embrace, I caught a glimpse of flamboyant red curls and had a vague impression of something different about Leah. Make that some things, and I was right. The first difference to hit me was the perfume, Calvin Klein’s Obsession, as I later learned, and if you’ll pardon an aside, let me remark that the next time your dog gets sprayed by a skunk, go ahead and try the tomato juice, the vinegar, the New Dawn detergent, the Skunk-Off, and all the rest, but, after exposure to Leah, I’d pit only one fragrance on earth against a skunk’s, and that’s that damned Obsession.
    “You look wonderful!” I told Leah. “You’re so, uh, sophisticated!”
    Last summer’s multiple layers of sport-specific clothing—running shoes, tennis shorts, hiking anoraks, biking shirts with pockets in the back, footless dance tights, and all the rest, each specific to a sport in which Leah did not participate—had given way to solid black, as if Leah had gone into unwitting mourning for the child she had so recently been. Her hand clutched a tattered paperback copy of a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre, one I’d tried to read at her age, but only in English: Nausea. Leah’s, though, was in French: La nausée.
    Leah smelled and looked new, but sounded like her old self: “I am so glad to be here!”
    I grinned at her, but when my eyes caught her ears, I almost gasped. She’d pierced the right lobe in five places, the left in three. One more hole, and she’d have had half a golf course. And eight different earrings, one gold stud, one small gold hoop, one huge silver hoop... Well, you get the idea—ritual scarification, the symbols of a rite of passage.
    The rear of the Volvo held an even larger collection of Leah’s possessions than it had last year—suitcases, a backpack, a duffel bag, an assortment of cardboard boxes, a boom box, and a CD player. Real dog person, are you? Compact disc. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a Companion Dog player, but if there is, do let me know; Dog’s Life is always interested in new and unusual canine products. Regardless of what Leah’s stuff was, Arthur offered to carry it in. I declined. I offered him a cup of coffee. He declined.
    Leah seconded his refusal. “It’s a long drive back. He doesn’t have time.” I frowned at her, but her father looked more relieved than hurt.
    Fifteen minutes later, when Arthur must have been fighting the Friday traffic north, Leah was unpacking, and Rowdy and Kimi were still in a state of paralyzed bliss. At their first sight of Leah, they’d wagged all over, fallen to the floor at her feet, bounded up, and again hurled them-selves to the linoleum. After they recovered, they merely collapsed on their backs, tucked in their paws, and let their tongues loll out while she scratched their tummies. Then she smacked her lips and said, “Gimme kiss!” Rowdy and Kimi will do anything she asks. They scoured her face. She was home.
    When Leah saw the guest room, her room, she looked genuinely surprised and made a big effort to sound happy. “You redid it!” I had: fresh white paint, white miniblinds picked up for virtually nothing at Grossman’s Bargain Outlet, paisley Laura Ashley comforter discovered at Marshall’s at one-third the original price, all chosen for the person