Ruffly Speaking

been there.
    But Matthew wasn’t impressed; he didn’t give Ruffly much credit at all. If there’d been a serious accident? A fire? An explosion? If his mother had been injured? Well, rationally speaking, it would have been her own fault. After all, he said, Stephanie knew she shouldn’t smoke.
     

24
     
     What stands between me and a darling black-and-white malamute puppy named Bernadette is a biological impossibility that’s entirely the fault of a woman once secularly known as Susan Cloer who joined the Holy Order of Breed Rescue; started combing the streets and animal shelters of Houston, Texas; encountered temptation; resisted it; and thus earned the only half-facetious title of Mother Teresa of the Malamute. The Temptation? Bernard. Starved down to fifty-nine pounds, the black of his coat bleached auburn by the Texas sun, Bernard was nonetheless recognizable as a better-looking Alaskan malamute than many of those seen in the ring. Equally evident—temptation, temptation—was this beautiful dog’s potential to sire the would-have-been Bernadette, to whom Bernard would doubtless have passed along not just the white tip on the end of his tail, but the incredibly striking diamond-shaped black markings on his white face, too—if only it hadn’t been for that damned Susan Cloer, as she was then. Texas. Tough. Stood right up to Satan. “Satan,” Susan announced, “haven’t you heard? All rescue dogs get spayed or neutered. All."
    And there went Bernadette, which turned out, by chance or by cosmic design, depending on your faith, to be the name of Ivan’s mother. Bernadette Flynn-Isaacson lacked black diamonds on her cheeks, of course, but she had a highly distinctive feature nonetheless, namely, the * saucer-shaped blue-violet eyes she’d obviously bequeathed to her son, who was currently seated at the I Flynn-Isaacson kitchen table surrounded by library books about dog care and mail-order kennel-supply catalogs— Cherrybrook, R.C. Steele, and a couple of others—that  Leah must have given him. While studying This Is the Alaskan Malamute, Ivan was eating the kind of lunch that: educated Cambridge parents feed their offspring, a nutritionally balanced and ethnically diverse combination plate consisting of fried squid, a slice of leftover pizza, and three marinated artichoke hearts spread with peanut butter and decorated with little mounds of raisins, an inventive twist on ants on a log, I decided. But was I disgusted? No. Curious. Interested. See what dogs will do for you?
    B.D., Before Dogs, you witness a little boy digging his oversize, still-ridged grown-up teeth into a marinated artichoke heart topped with peanut butter and raisins, and you’re gripped by nausea or repulsion, but A.D., After Dogs, postconversion, the negative made positive, your soul drool-scoured and restored to perfect acceptance of Nature in all her once loathsome guises, you greet life eagerly and harmoniously as a fascinating series of equally informative encounters with the Divine. I came close to asking Ivan for a sample to take home. Marinated artichoke hearts plus peanut butter and raisins? Discovered by Holly Winter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, July 4: the only food the Alaskan malamute has ever been known to refuse. Glory, hallelujah!
    “Would you like something?” Bernadette asked. “Shall I fix you a plate, too?”
    Is there one clean? I wanted to reply. And, if so, how could you possibly find it ? The mess was incredible—discarded pieces of clothing, half-empty jelly glasses, a bowl of rotting fruit, food-encrusted bowls, used tea bags, and, even by local standards, an extraordinary amount of printed material. On two long unfinished boards tenuously supported by wall brackets, I spotted two one-volume editions of the complete works of Shakespeare; a Danish-English dictionary; The, Chicago Manual of Style; Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family; a collection of Simenon mysteries not in translation, either (around here, escapism goes just so far); and, in what I suspected was a vestige of some abandoned cataloging scheme, a few dozen biographies of people who didn’t have much in common. Alice James, Joe DiMaggio, and Virginia Woolf rubbed spines with Roger Tory Peterson, George Sand, Wagner, and Billie Burke. Imagine the pillow talk. Kitchen or no kitchen, the battered copy of The Joy of Cooking looked out of place. The books were the least of it. Edging one wall in what looked like a