Dog People

29 ERIN FLANAGAN DOG PEOPLE M argie settles on the bench, her ankle hooked at the wheel of the stroller, rocking it back and forth. The only thing that stops the baby from crying is movement , so this morning Margie spent fifteen minutes loading everything she might need into the stroller basket—diapers, wipes, an extra onesie, a bottle, blankets, hand sanitizer, a magazine she’ll never read, her keys—all for a ten-minute walk to the park four blocks from their house, their first official outing that doesn’t involve a doctor’s visit. Katherine is three weeks old, but it’s hard to think of her as Katherine and not the baby. Who at three weeks old has enough personality to fit a name? Margie only hopes that when the baby grows up the name will suit her. If not, there’s always Katie or Kate or Kit Kat. She’d like to have a sparkplug named Kit Kat, but chances are she’ll be a Katherine (Margie realizes she herself is most likely a Margaret ). At home, at night, Katherine screams for hours on end, but here in the park she is quiet. The baby, even at three weeks, seems to follow Margie with her eyes, like one of the black cat clocks with the swinging tail and large plastic eyes that survey the room back and forth. A man in a black rubber apron and work boots comes over and sits next to Margie on the bench and lights a cigarette. It’s mid-September and the weather has just started to turn from mild summer to the beginning of fall, a slight breeze blowing through the hair on Margie’s perpetually sweaty neck. “I’m sorry,” she says and stands to leave but then sits back down. Why should she be the one to leave if he’s smoking? The smell is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but she knows it’s bad for the baby. She hates confrontation and would rather get up herself than ask him to leave. But the baby is quiet, and Margie’s own body, so tired. She settles back on the bench. She hasn’t slept through the night since her seventh month of pregnancy. She assumed once she didn’t have this baby kicking around in- colorado review 30 side her, along with the worry of how the delivery would go, she’d finally be able to sleep. How short-sighted that was. How ridiculously wrong. The apron the man is wearing is covered in small white hairs, and Margie instantly thinks of pubic hairs, which causes her crotch to itch. There is so much about giving birth she hadn’t anticipated. Of course, in hindsight, how could she not realize they would shave part of her pubic area, that she might shit on the bed when she was pushing for hours on end. The man gestures to his apron. “It’s a poodle,” he says. “Excuse me?” Margie says. To the left is an aluminum slide and four swings, a teeter-totter that looks like a dinosaur. She has never been to this park before, even though it is only four blocks from her house. She imagines the hours and summers they’ll log here in years to come—how much fun it will be to teach Kit Kat to swing—but now there is nothing they can do. She pushes the stroller with her ankle, then pulls it back. “The hair. It’s from a poodle. I work at Trudy’s.” He gestures across the street with the hand holding the cigarette, and she sees Trudy’s Salon and Boarding, a building she’s never noticed before, the letters of the sign in a garish neon pink. She looks at her baby, embarrassed suddenly by the baldness of Katherine’s head. “Sounds like a fun job.” The man shrugs. Margie guesses him to be in his mid-thirties , with a scruffy beard of three to four days, a smudge of dirt or grease on his damp pants. He is what she would call unconventionally attractive, if anyone would think to ask her, a category she knows...