Ruffly Speaking

the breed of breeds, the dog of dogs, dog to the nth, the incomparable Alaskan malamute. I pay no higher compliment. Was Ivan ready, though? And which sex? I was leaning toward a bitch small enough for Ivan to control. Also, I had a hunch that it might do Ivan some good to discover that there was one creature on earth smarter than he was, and for raw IQ, the odds are in favor of the bitches. (Yes, in malamutes, too.) On the other hand, for a boy without a father, a male might be a better choice. So I’d asked Rita, who, for the first time since she’d got the damned hearing aids, had shown up at dinnertime with a collection of gourmet take-outs for us to share. By the time I’d finished telling her about Ivan, my kitchen table was littered with empty and half-empty plastic containers, and I was pouring boiling water onto freshly ground French roast Swiss-water-process decaf, which is what Cambridge psychotherapists drink except when they’re due to see really boring patients and want to be sure of staying awake. Mostly, though, therapists find their patients interesting and thus avoid what they consider to be the perils of caffeine. Writers love caffeine, of course. I, for example, regularly dose myself with the stuff. Tea is my usual drug of choice for the sustained-release effect needed to turn out free-lance articles and stories, but when my column is overdue, I switch to coffee, and when I’m up against a serious deadline, I hit my nervous system with a Puerto Rican wonder drug called Café Bustelo, and if you think that café is nothing more than the Spanish word for coffee, that’s only because you’ve never tried Bustelo, siempre fresco, puro y aromatico, the greatest writing tool since the invention of the stylus.
    “For once?” I demanded.
    “If dogs were the panacea you think they are...” To display the aid in her right ear, Rita lifted the hair that had grown almost long enough to give her a choice about whether to go public about her hearing loss. That’s how she explained it, anyway. It seemed to me that what really gave her a choice were the aids, not her hair. If she couldn’t hear whispered conversations or the turn signals on her car or a million other everyday sounds, it was perfectly obvious that she had a hearing loss, wasn’t it? How could she possibly keep it a secret? Only one way, right? Hearing aids.
    “As a matter of fact,” I said, thumping Rita’s coffee mug onto the table in front of her, “Willie would make a not-bad hearing dog.” As such, he’d have to accompany
    Rita everywhere, thus ridding me and my third-floor tenants of those damned home-alone barking fits, but I didn’t say so. “Willie is very sound-oriented, and he could hardly be any more alert. And Rita, they do that, you know. Sometimes you really can have your own dog trained to assist you. And if Willie doesn’t shape up—”
    “Do me a favor,” Rita said sharply. “For once, for once, Holly, please do not rationalize. I know it works for you. Boom! Your hearing goes to hell, and what’s the first thing you say? ‘Hallelujah! The perfect excuse to get another dog! And now if I’d only go blind....’ Or that’s what you’d like to think. But the fact is that just like everyone else—”
    “Could I remind you of something?” I took my place at the table and sipped some coffee. It wasn’t bad—not show quality like Bustelo, but good pet quality and altered, of course: no caffeine. “Rita, this is something you’re always saying, okay? Try assuming that we’re all doing the best we can. I am trying, and maybe I’m not succeeding, but I am trying, all right? So go easy.”
    “I’m sorry.” She held the coffee mug in both hands as if she were about to offer it to me as an apologetic libation. “Holly, look. Sometimes it just doesn’t help to have you take things so... so lightly. Maybe eventually I’ll be ready for that, but I’m not now. It’s like... You remember that thing I got through the mail? That, uh, pamphlet on alien abduction. And all you thought...”
    A month or two earlier, Rita had received a booklet designed to inform mental health professionals that zillions of people who might appear simply to have lost their minds had actually been abducted by beings from outer space. The booklet explains how I happened to become a repository of esoteric bits of information on the topic of alien abduction. Before reading it, for example, I’d always assumed that little green