Ruffly Speaking

what? Why doesn’t she just quit answering the phone and use the TTY instead?”
    Matthew was exasperated. “Because most people don’t, and the reason they don’t is that they don’t need them, and it makes more sense for the small number of deaf people there are to use hearing aids and amplifiers than it does for everyone else to change everything just for them. And that’s the point about Ivan. You can’t reshape the world so that he can’t get in trouble, because, even if you changed everything, he’d just discover something new.”
    While Matthew and Leah scrapped about whether the world should be changed to accommodate people who couldn’t hear, I kept a protective eye on Rita, but I couldn’t tell how she was responding. Then she suddenly addressed Matthew: “One in ten,” she told him defiantly. “That’s the incidence of hearing loss in this country. One person in ten. That’s not a small number.”
    Matthew’s beautiful manners and his disbelief did battle on his face. I felt so sorry for him that I said, “Rita, is that right?”
    “Yes,” she said. “It’s more common than all other disabilities combined.”
    “Damn it, I wish I’d known. I would’ve put it in the article about Stephanie and Ruffly.”
    In an effort to lighten the tone of the conversation, I spoke a little frivolously and must’ve ended up sounding outright delighted that there were a whole lot more deaf people around than I’d ever imagined.
    And, in a strange way, I was. I was delighted. In case you don’t have malamutes, maybe I’d better explain that the apparent callousness of my response was Rowdy and Kimi’s fault. Back when I had golden retrievers, I was a nice, normal person with conventional thoughts and feelings. In those days, for instance, when my friends got promoted or won the lottery or inherited substantial legacies, I experienced heartfelt pleasure for them and did not concoct silent schemes to divert the money into the treasury of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. A simple creature of the here and now, I saw things merely as they were. Now I’ve been taught always to envision possibilities. Simply to survive, I’ve had to learn to view the world from the malamute angle as well as from my own. Sometimes I fear that my two once-radically-divergent points of view may eventually merge into one; even now, I find myself regarding road kill less and less as senseless highway slaughter and more and more as potential dinner. When squashed animals on the roadside actually make me salivate, I’ll know that the dogs and I have finally become one.
    But my transformation from decent human being to shameless opportunist was as yet incomplete. Although I knew all the statistics on the millions of abandoned dogs killed by needle and gas all over the United States each year—millions of wonderful would-be hearing dogs—I wouldn’t actually have deafened anyone to save them. But one in ten? One person in ten already hearing-impaired? A beautiful prospect arose. During the previous year, the Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care of the City of Houston, Texas —one city—had euthanized 1,909 dogs, which, in case you wondered, meant thirty-one tons of canine carcass dumped in the Houston landfill. So call me callous if you want, but, while we’re at it, what about all those other people with special needs? If you’re in a wheelchair, it’s hard to reach light switches high on the wall, but it’s easy for your dog; and it’s a lot of work to wheel that chair, but pulling it along is your dog’s idea of fun. So in Houston alone, it seemed to me, there must be at least 1,909 people with special needs that those thirty -one tons of dog could have met beautifully. Not just people who had trouble hearing and seeing and walking, either, but solitary people who simply needed a friend. Loneliness, too, might be much more prevalent than I’d ever dared to hope.
    Elation.Jubilation.
     

19
     
     What taints the pure capitalism of my investment in my house is not only the color I painted it—red—but the ideologically sus-pect planning I’ve devoted to it. Like the old Soviet five-year plans and ten-year plans, my short-term projects always require revision or renewal. Take the one-year plan to build a window seat in my bedroom, which had its target date postponed a couple of times and then got totally fouled up when Rowdy began sleeping in the spot where the window seat is supposed to go. Now, if I had the