Ruffly Speaking (6 page)

After Rowdy and Kimi had swallowed the liver, they threw me a few more of those bipeds-are-so-stupid looks, but soon got distracted by the olfactory traces of a dog who’d left his mark so high up on the trees and fences that Rowdy and Kimi, who aren’t exactly minis, nearly toppled over trying to cover his scent with theirs. Irish wolfhound? Great Dane? My dogs lingered at shrubs and pressed their noses together at tree trunks as if to share information about the big fellow and decide what to do about him. Meanwhile, I looked around. Dog-walking makes the perfect excuse to linger in neighborhoods that are tonier than you are.

Highland runs parallel to Brattle for two long blocks —Sparks to Appleton, Appleton to Reservoir. Like Brattle, it has houses that the inhabitants might justifiably refer to as mansions, but never do. Off Brattle is just what it sounds like, the neighborhood off Brattle Street, but it’s also a way of life and a way of language. Off Brattle, you don’t inhabit a mansion; one has a big house. You didn’t go to Harvard, either; one was an undergraduate. It must be a required course, for God’s sake. Cambridge 101, Advanced False Modesty: The Linguistic Pragmatics of Less Is More.

So Highland Street is Brattle without the traffic: big houses painted in earth tones, soft mauve, or a warm, pale yellow like homemade mayonnaise, old brick and natural stucco, and none of the aqua vinyl siding and gray asbestos shingle that still survive in my neighborhood, Fresh

Pond, which is only a few blocks down Appleton from Highland, but on the opposite side of Huron, where a big; house is just that and isn’t apt to be all that big, anyway. But don’t get me wrong. Despite the muted mauve voices —earth tones, old brick—and the educated hues of the paint, Off Brattle is an intense study in color, and that color is green. In early June, Highland Street is like the masterpiece of an artist who worked green to its verdant limits, Henri Rousseau without even the ladies or the lions. Vegetable opulence.

But here and there amid the wisteria-trimmed piles of stucco, the Victorian arcs, and the vast, restrained colonials resides the evidence that sometime not all that long ago, someone ran desperately short of cash and had to sell land. Morris Lamb’s house was one of the tattletales. To judge from its architecture, the era of need must have been the mid or late nineteen fifties, when Morris’s flat-roofed cube with its heavily framed plate glass windows must have looked daringly modem. Morris or one of the previous owners had tried to force-fit this angular peg into the curves of the neighborhood by painting its harsh uprights and cross beams an ultra-toned-down pale tan with just a hint of lavender, and by planting a miniature forest of low-maintenance, fast-growing shrubs around the foundation and all over the front yard. The camouflage was about as successful as ripping the tail fins off an old Caddie, soldering an upside-down peace symbol on the hood, and expecting the result to pass unnoticed in the new car lot of a Mercedes dealer.

Rowdy and Kimi applied their noses to the leathery leaves of a rhododendron at the edge of the sidewalk in front of Morris’s house. Pleated blinds covered the windows. The two-car parking area next to the house was vacant. The shrubs were trimmed, and fir bark the color of redwood had been spread under them so recently that the air smelled strong and woodsy. The house looked neither inhabited nor uninhabited. There was no For Sale sign in the yard. Having learned nothing, I called to the dogs and moved along.

Just beyond Morris’s, separated from his modem misfit only by a weed-free path and a narrow shrub border, was a three-story house with peeling cream-yellow paint and stark, handsome lines. The color was softer than the bright yellow of the Longfellow House on Brattle Street, and the Longfellow House wasn’t in desperate need of a gutter and roof job, but, properly renovated, this place would have had the same festive look of a three-tiered wedding cake. And, although there were stretches of lawn, the yard was mainly devoted to border after border of perennials. I stopped. My mother grew perennials. In fact, Marissa was a terrible snob about flowers. Not about people, I should add, or dogs, either, really, but flowers. She would have loved this place. Delphiniums were everywhere, along the front of the house and in profusion in the long, wide borders, where the heavily budded spires were beginning to stretch upward, but weren’t yet in bloom. Bleeding hearts and candytuft were on their way out, and the main sources of color were the blue forget-me-nots, columbine, and alpine asters, the pink coral bells, and the spreading clumps of magenta-flowered geranium sanguineum. Delicate white azaleas were in bloom, and the peony buds were about to open. Espaliered against a tumbledown carriage house visible at the rear of the deep lot was what I guessed might be a quince tree. Clematis vines climbed the twin trellises that flanked the front door of the house. Along the sidewalk ran a shabby but graceful white fence that came to an abrupt end at Morris’s property line.

While I was admiring the garden, Rowdy and Kimi followed an invisible track across the damp concrete to one of the carved posts of the peeling white fence. Like most dominant malamute bitches, Kimi can lift her leg with the best of the boys—and did so on the shabby white fence. When she’d finished, the Best of Opposite sniffed the post, brushed past it, veered around, sniffed it again, turned around yet one more time, and at last began to cock his leg.

At the exact moment that Rowdy’s hind foot rose from the concrete, a true Cambridge type suddenly emerged from the depths of a thick clump of peonies in the side yard and marched toward us like a tiny Caesar toward the Gauls, and, in case you think I’m being fanciful, let me add that her nose was distinctly Roman and that her short, straight steel-gray hair zoomed directly down from the crown of her head to her brow, just like you-know-who’s. She wore a pair of khaki canvas work pants and a short-sleeved white shirt that looked like the top of a coffee shop waitress’s uniform. On her feet were a pair of L.L. Bean Original Maine Hunting Shoes, which aren’t shoes at all, but the longest-lasting and most incredibly ugly boots on earth, guaranteed to keep your feet dry, comfortable, and one hundred percent hideous from the first wearing to the last resoling of your Bean boots or the final resouling of you, whichever comes first. If you’re looking for sin, I guess you can find it anywhere, even Off Brattle, and I was perfectly willing to believe that lust, avarice, and pride might thrive in private behind the delphinium spires and the colonial facades, but damned if I could imagine a real Cambridge type guilty of personal vanity.

“What beautiful delphiniums you have!” I called out brightly. “I’ve never seen so many in one garden.”

About ten feet behind the white fence, the woman came to an abrupt halt. She was small and rather bony, and the weathered skin on her face seemed stretched over oddly flexible iron. Brandishing a six-pack flat of delphinium seedlings in her trembling right hand, she delivered a lecture on the history and architectural significance of the fence that now separated us. She was an animated speaker who projected her voice with skill and vigor. Maybe she’d had training. In fact, as she went on, I began to suspect that this woman had been taught that the secret to conquering the fear of public speaking was to imagine something silly about the audience, that everyone was naked or that the listeners weren’t people at all, but heads of cabbage. At any rate, she certainly didn’t acknowledge that only three people had shown up and that two of the three were Alaskan malamutes. She looked neither at the dogs nor, I might add, at the fence post they’d just finished marking. I didn’t look at it either. Why look? I see dog urine every day. I don’t need a refresher course. And damned if I was going to apologize. True Cambridge types aside, reality
is
reality: Fences are fences, and dogs are dogs.

The woman’s head turned back and forth on its axis. Her eyes swept upward. Perhaps she addressed God. Perhaps God listened. If so, the Deity had to hear it all. You don’t. Here’s a sample: “Central to the dispute as to the precise year of its erection is, as one might suppose, the War of 1812, i.e., did Theodosius Smith merely place an order for it before taking up arms, or was it, in point of fact, not merely commissioned but actually crafted, delivered, and erected in its entirety prior to his departure?”

With every word she said, I seemed to shrink. I should have walked away.

“Alternatively,” she continued, “could it possibly be, as Milligan posits, that Agatha Smith, the eldest of the surviving daughters, supervised the construction during her father’s absence?” She paused. Maybe I was supposed to be taking notes. “We shall probably never know with any great degree of certainty, although...”

Her blue-gray eyes cold with outrage, she went on and on. At the end of what seemed like an hour, when I felt about two inches high, she threw Rowdy a single glance of scorn. Then an expression of sudden sweetness transformed her face. It smoothed the wrinkles, even diminished the jut of her jaw and chin. She softly cleared her throat and reached what she evidently felt was a climactic conclusion. Her voice was very soft and infinitely censorious. “Longfellow is reputed to have admired it.” Cambridge! I mean, what’s the most Longfellow could’ve said?
Nice fence,
right? And when you consider the eminent people, including highly qualified AKC judges, who’ve admired Rowdy and Kimi? Well, you’re bound to conclude that, all in all, my dogs were a lot more praiseworthy than her stupid fence. And, of course, the dogs didn’t mean the fence any harm. In fact, all they did was admire it, just like Longfellow. But in a different way, of course. Or so one assumes.

7

 An hour later, Rita was smashing her fist on my kitchen table. “So you’ve got the perfect comeback! And what do you do? Stand there and let this old snob make you feel
small.”
Bang! The spectacular Emma’s pizza that Rita and I were sharing for dinner practically leaped up, as if a misguided chef were tossing the finished product instead of the dough.

I replied with dignity. “I didn’t have to say it aloud. Thinking it was enough.”

“Would you not
shout
at me?” Rita’s slice of pizza dropped to her plate, and her hands flew to her ears. Her hearing aids whistled. “Christ, I hate that sound! You know what it is?”

“Feedback. It happens when—”

“Wrong,” Rita snapped. “It’s the sound of old age.”

“Rita, there are
children
who wear hearing aids, and, as a matter of fact, there are dogs—”

“So instead of being an old lady, I get to be a
dog!
Hallelujah!”

If you know Rita, the first thing that’ll hit you is that she didn’t sound like herself, and, as it turned out, the foreign sound of her own voice was one of her approximately seven thousand complaints about the hearing aids, which she’d picked up from the audiologist that morning and had been dutifully wearing all day.

“But in dogs,” I said, “they’re implanted in the ear.
Dogs
don’t have the option of taking them out when they’ve had enough.”

Rita shook her head. Her sleek hair danced. “I’m not supposed to. I’m supposed to... Christ, how am I going to see patients like this? I’m going to turn into one of those silent types. Twice an hour I’ll utter a single word:
Um.
I can’t believe people pay for that.” She took a bite of pizza and chewed. When she rested the slice on her plate, her eyes filled with tears. Emma’s pizza is good enough to make you weep, but the effect isn’t usually literal. “Holly, I can’t chew right! And when I smile... When I move my jaw, these things feel like stones being jabbed in my ears.”

Rita and I have been through some tough times together, but I’d never before seen her look defeated. I felt terrible.

“You just got them this morning,” I reminded her gently. “You’ll get used to them.” My tone was the one I use for dogs forced to wear those horrible Elizabethan collars that prevent postoperative animals from ripping out their stitches. When the incision heals, though, the Elizabethan collar comes off. Rita was supposed to wear the hearing aids for life.

“Talk to me,” Rita ordered. “Distract me.”

Rita is a born psychologist. What distracts her is mental life. Those jokes about therapists asking about Mothers? All true. Fathers, too, sometimes. Early childhood. Links to the present. Therapists are loopy about ' connections. So to cheer Rita up, I talked about Marissa and her delphiniums and also about her ever-so-slightly authoritative approach to the obedience training of small human beings, and then, since Rita was still looking glum, I used her favorite phrase. “I had this fantasy…”