Ruffly Speaking

would’ve wanted—”
    Rita held up a traffic-cop hand. “Don’t say it! Be-cause, being the real dog person he was, he cared more about dogs than he did about—”
    I felt offended. “No. Actually, he didn’t. As a matter of— Maybe you even remember this. It was a couple of years ago. Some woman threw herself in the Charles, and once she started drowning, I guess, she changed her mind, and Morris jumped in and rescued her. This was in the early spring, so the water must’ve been freezing. And Morris was a big man, but he wasn’t any great athlete or anything, and he must’ve been at least fifty. It sounds sort of corny, but it was a genuine act of heroism. Shit. I wonder what he died of.”
    Rita took a small sip of water. “If it had been something like that, the priest would’ve... But maybe she did. I was sitting way at the back, so I didn’t hear very much.” She rested an elbow on the table, leaned her head forward, and covered the lower half of her face with her hand. It was an odd, uncharacteristic gesture. She removed her hand. “Nobody could’ve heard from where I was.”
    “Rita, no one is accusing you of anything.” I could have been. The soundproofing between her apartment and the one on the third floor is pretty good because I renovated the two rental units when I bought the building. Willie’s owner-absent nuisance barking traveled throughout the building, but the noise produced by Rita herself was really bad only in my kitchen. Whenever she talked on the wall phone by her stove, her voice plummeted straight down. Also, although I don’t have anything against public radio, I like to be able to choose my own station instead of having advanced adult higher education forced down my ear canals every morning. After all, this is Cambridge. If you want to start the day by listening to an intelligent discussion of world events, you open the window, and a couple of passersby will be setting the events in Bosnia in global perspective, and when they’ve gone, others appear, and you overhear a vicious argument about the economics of sub-Sahara Africa. Cambridge is a city in which you see graffiti in what I’m assured is grammatically correct Latin. I like it here, but I can wait until after breakfast.
    When Rita and I had sat in silence for a minute, I said, “Weren’t you thinking about having your hearing tested?”
    She jerked herself upright. The little curls on top of her head shook. She said nothing.
    “Rita, can you hear Willie? He’s walking across your kitchen floor. Can you hear him?”
    She closed her eyes and concentrated. Her features aren’t perfect, but she’s very pretty and perfectly groomed, sort of like Morris’s dogs, not that she resembles a lamb or even a Bedlington, and please don’t tell her that I even suggested the comparison. What really shows on Rita’s face, though, isn’t the careful application of cosmetics. It’s a promise that if you need to talk, she’ll pay attention and take you seriously. She opened her eyes. “If I listen hard, I can.” She rested her chin in her hands. “You know, Holly, a lot of people really do mumble.” The truth of the statement seemed to cheer her. “And they talk too softly. Male psychiatrists are the worst. They don’t bother speaking up because they expect everyone to hang on their every word.”
    I did not point out that Norris Lang, her analyst, was a male psychiatrist. I did not ask whether she ever had trouble hearing him. I eventually broke the silence. “Rita, I’m going to be blunt.”
    “ Mirabile dictu.” Rita’s mouth formed a sour line of worry. “And please do me a favor, would you? Do not, I repeat do not start telling me about how tactful and conflict-avoiding you used to be before you had malamutes, because I am not in the mood for it right now.”
    “Damn it, Rita! Look, in the past six months, I don’t know how many times you’ve been upset because you couldn’t hear something that everybody else could, okay? You can’t hear cats meowing or doorbells ringing, and you can’t hear the turn signals on your car, so you keep leaving them on.” By now, I was pleading. “And I know, I just know, that what you’re going to do now is spend forever analyzing whatever psychological reason made you hear Norris Lang instead of Morris Lamb, and maybe you’re going to say that you’ll get your hearing checked, but you’re going to end up not doing it. Rita, if Willie had trouble hearing,