Ruffly Speaking

don’t know why she’s making such a big thing of
    it. Stephanie wears hearing aids and it doesn’t bother her. Rita’s being a big baby.”
    No one asked your opinion, I longed to say. The task of explaining Rita’s distress to a seventeen-year-old was beyond me, especially because I didn’t fully understand it myself. Instead of trying, I changed the subject by asking what Ivan had been up to in the past few days. After observing his assault on Alice Savery’s door, I’d taken increased interest in what Leah called “The Amazing Adventures of Ivan the Terrible,” and Leah was always happy to relate new episodes. As I’d heard earlier in the week, although Alice Savery hadn’t appeared during the raid, she’d evidently been at home and had certainly seen enough to read the lettering on Ivan’s shirt. On Tuesday, she’d presented herself at the Avon Hill Summer Program and insisted on seeing the director. She hadn’t complained directly about the boys, but had stated that she wanted to make a gift to the program, a gift that turned out to be a stack of photocopies of a page from a walking guide to Cambridge architecture, the page that contained a capsule description of her fence with notes on its historical significance. The director was, of course, mystified by the visit until Matthew Benson made the connection.
    Ivan’s latest prank at the program, the one Leah told me about in the car, involved Matthew himself. As I’ve mentioned, Matthew was teaching a course—or maybe a seminar, workshop, or module—about urban flora and fauna, and one of the fauna had, indeed, turned out to be the cockroach, which, as Matthew had explained to me, was a zoologically fascinating insect of ancient and noble lineage. The topic put Matthew in an unusually talkative mood, and he became outright animated as he went on about it. I wasn’t very responsive, but Steve, who was there, too, caught Matthew’s contagious enthusiasm, and the two had a long, technical discussion about evolution and adaptation that almost sent me rushing to call the exterminator.
    Steve commented afterward on what a bright kid Matthew was. I had to agree, but couldn’t resist adding that as companion animals, Border collies were a few million evolutionary steps ahead of roaches, and how would Steve like it if his clients started showing up with little portable kennels crawling with vermin for him to spay and neuter? Steve said that he, like every other veterinarian, would be happy to find a new area into which he could expand his practice, and he claimed to welcome the challenge of mastering microsurgical techniques. Furthermore, Steve said, neutering roaches couldn’t be any worse than de-scenting skunks.
    But back to Matthew. The Avon Hill Summer Program followed a hands-on, learn-by-doing approach. Consequently, instead of just reading about roaches and listening to Matthew lecture about them, his students watched them in the flesh, if flesh is the right word for what insects have. In the shell. In the shell surrounding some revolting mess of squishy, roachy slime. Whatever. The point is that Matthew’s roaches lived in some sort of dry aquarium in the AHSP science lab, or they did until Ivan liberated them.
    “And then Matthew and the director asked Ivan why he did it,” Leah said, “which turned out to be a mistake, because Ivan can explain anything, anyway, and his mother—she’s a single parent—is a professor of socioecology at B.U., and—” B.U. Boston University.
    “Of what?” I asked.
    “People and the environment.Rain forests. Trash recycling. Lots of things. Ivan can tell you all about it. She’s a really good parent that way, and she reads Shakespeare with him, things like that. Otherwise, she’s pretty oblivious, but she tries. Where was I? Oh, so they asked Ivan why he did it, and he had this great explanation about how they’d been studying the cockroach’s beautiful adaptation to varied natural environments—they don’t have to keep evolving, basically, because they’re perfectly adapted now—but how were you supposed to observe it when the roaches were trapped in a glass box?”
    “The director bought that?”
    “Not really. Matthew made Ivan sit down and work out how fast roaches reproduce so Ivan would understand the quote significance of his act unquote, and the director kept wringing her hands and wondering about whether to spray now or wait and see what happened. It was Matthew’s fault,