Page 70 - WTP XII #3

Quiet Questions (continued from preceding page) practically our backyard,’ she’d said, getting mom’s
permission. It was, practically. Still is.
“Sorry,” a woman’s cooing interruption, “Excuse me.” This snaps Anita back to her standing squarely in front of the dog park’s western entrance.
“Oh, sorry,” Anita says, pulling at Bruce’s leash and stepping aside. A second tug from the leash brings her eyes down to a stoic and unmoving Bruce, stead- fast and patient and cute and wondering. The ques- tion on his face is almost painful. Asking if she’s brought him here only to look. A small, but bitter cru- elty. Anita stares back into his question, if not to reas- sure then at least to avoid interacting with the wom- an. Thankfully, the woman and her lanky, poodle-ish dog practically bounce past Bruce without so much as a sniff of recognition or another word. Just inside the second gate the woman stoops and performs a skilled flick of her thumb, releasing her dog to bound gangly its way towards the others.
Anita looks at fifteen or more dogs and half a dozen more humans, scattered and smattered and grouped up. Two of the three benches to the left sit unoccu- pied; the furthest from her has one woman sitting and another standing, the two of them talking, no one seems to notice Anita. Bruce is still blocked by the gate. Still time to chicken out. Still time to escape the very real reality of this thing.
A pained whimper pulls Anita’s eyes back down to Bruce, his whole body pointing towards the mayhem of the other dogs. His eyes then turn and dig into her. She presses at her dripping armpit with a rather cold hand and wishes she were wearing a T-shirt, despite her head still longing for a hat. Bruce’s eyes go from pained to tortured.
“Ok.” Bruce can hear her trepidation and it incites another whining whimper from the depths of his throat, his eyes back on the glimpses of his most fa-
vorite place. Her eyes follow his up over the fence. Still no one has noticed the nervous woman trying to breathe through it by the western entrance. Her eyes dart to the closest bench. Empty and waiting and some distance from the nearest possible hu- man interaction.
Another whimper. “Ok,” Anita answers, but remains motionless. “Alright,” she answers him again.
Focusing on the simple effort, Anita finagles the first gate. Helped by the fact that Bruce, instead of amp- ing up his excitement at the fulfillment of his little heart’s desire, is downplaying things, sniffing at the well-scented ground near the base of the fence. Like everything is cool. Whatever. No biggie. She takes half a moment to love him for this, then dangles her forefinger off the second gate’s latch, looks behind her for any incoming surprise hellos, then back down at Bruce, whose joy can no longer be contained, only suppressed. His eyes shine up at hers with want, his tail metronoming at about 120 BPM.
“Patience,” Anita says, lifting the second gate’s latch and walking out onto the dirt. Bruce stays obedi- ently by her thigh, but ready to burst. Anita glances and catches a tall woman waving in a gentle way that Anita interprets as feel-free-to-ignore-me-complete- ly, so Anita does. She walks Bruce over to the nearest bench and sits in the very center of its four-foot-wide plasti-dipped expanse. She looks at the dirt long enough to start worrying that people might think she’s weird and glances over again. The tall woman, dressed as though she’s just woken up and emerged from a tent, glances, but there’s no second attempt
at a wave. Anita waits for the woman to look away, like she has something to prove to this stranger, and when the woman turns back to the other people in her group, Anita turns back to the dirt.
Bruce is miserable; having given up hope, he lies at her feet, head on one paw, eyes longing. Anita looks into the dirt and tries to still the welling inside her as it pushes up into a tightness at her throat. She is unsure of how to move forward now that she’s here. Pretty sure she’s creating some trauma of neglect with these half-measures of giving Bruce what he wants and locking them into some relationship without trust which will rely miserably and solely on a food bowl and water dish. Despite feeling like she hasn’t cried enough and has justified it by call- ing herself numb, she’ll be damned if she’s gonna let go the waterworks in front of the Patagonia amazon and the rest of these randos and their mutts and... Goddamnit!
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