Going Down Fast

by Marge Piercy

  “Kid, we’re topnotch rabbit buriers around here,” Leon rasped, “but you’d be surprised how many people can’t walk upright if they don’t have something heavy in their hair.”

  Hard to believe in a world beyond this island of light caulked by darkness. The brown couch was low and scarred with cigarette burns through which foamrubber showed. His baby’s sweater lay on the table, growing dirtier. Looking at the film of grime and ash, she decided she would have to clean.

  Wednesday–Sunday, October 29–November 2

  Wednesday: Anna learned that Rand Grooper of ISS had got a grant from the housing administration to do an objective study of democratic participation in the processes of urban renewal planning in the area. He had farmed out a piece to Miss Clay in return for her name on the proposal. Miss Clay enjoyed a reputation in Washington since she had run a monumental study on re-enlistment among WACs. Anna had handled the volumes of the report, full of mathematical tables demonstrating among the sample of five thousand WACs that the desire to have offspring negatively correlated with re-enlistment intentions; favorable attitudes toward authority systems, on the other hand, demonstrated positive correlation. The project had caused a stir in military and governmental circles, and her services were in demand.

  The ISS board of directors interlocked with the University. Grooper was an ambitious young man. One arm of the University was preparing the renewal plan. Anna was reminded of her foray into market research, when she had worked briefly for a consumers’ testing organization that specialized in producing tests for companies who wished to demonstrate the superiority of their products.

  Thursday: Her friend Marcia called her. “Meet me for lunch, no excuses. I won’t have you hiding in a sulk.”

  They had lunch in Woody’s bar where the hamburgers were the best around, the noon atmosphere dim and relaxed, the dark beer on draft cheap. At first she kept glancing at the table where she had seen Rowley last.

  Black stretch pants showed Marcia’s musculature of a dancer, under the layers of red and purple poncho and thick auburn hair. Her scrubbed face would have been gentle, a little tired around the mouth, but over it Marcia painted a luminescent landscape. Today jade green and cobalt ringed her sad brown eyes and several sets of furry lashes fluttered bravely under brows drawn concave. Nevertheless, Anna thought, we both look like nice healthy Jewish girls, a bit battered but with centuries of chickenfat embedded under the skulls, welldeveloped laps and heavy emotional runoff in damp weather. She was arming herself, certain from Marcia’s forward leaning posture that she was in for it. “Who told you?” she asked.

  “Jennie Rosen. Her husband asked Rowley to come to dinner with you. I couldn’t believe it! What did he do?”

  She smiled at the question’s form, then with a twist of her lips, paused, paused, and briefly told.

  “That jackass! An ego as big as his head. But don’t tell me you couldn’t make up. Sore pride—that’s your problem. Understandable, but not much for gals our age.”

  “Come on, don’t rub my nose in it. I have another forty years to sit on this tuchus.”

  “You shouldn’t throw away a good thing. All day I meet people. Maybe ten percent of the things that shave are men, and they’re married with six kids so I can look anyhow. Rowley has his troubles—who hasn’t?”

  “Maybe it’s significant that he isn’t married.” Echoing Leon but why not? “A man who’s never been willing to commit himself—”

  “Anna! What man do you know who committed himself? Some woman got him.”

  “Some woman’s got Rowley, so this is academic and a mite painful.”

  “Oh god. Who? Do I know her?”

  “Caroline Frayne.”

  Marcia caught her breath. “You mean he gave her that ring?”

  She sighed. “No, that’s from the guy she’s supposed to be engaged to. She can’t still be wearing it.” With a frown she pictured Caroline in green pants, green shirt, hand just touching Rowley’s: no ring. She could not be sure. “You mean when she first got back from Europe.”

  “Anna, I saw her in that chichi little coffeeshop with the folksingers last night—she waited on us. Jennie’s taking my class at the Y—a riot, you should see her prancing around.”

  She itched with shame. Her they had talked about. “Did Caroline hear you?”

  “I don’t think so.” Marcia looked upward trying to remember. “We weren’t yelling. And part of the time she was singing. The chap who runs the place lets her start the program.” Marcia wrinkled her nose. “A grapefruit has more talent.”

  “Still!”

  “She is pretty. That innocent slutty look. To think I left her a tip.”

  “Are you sure she’s talentless? I never heard her. Remember I told you I got edgy whenever he was backing up an attractive singer, because I had to be on the fringe of his music, not really sharing it. I can’t carry a tune across the room.”

  “Oh pooh. What have you been doing with yourself? Jennie swears she called your place nine times, and I’d just about given up hopes of finding you in.”

  “If I don’t keep busy I feel like a sack of last winter’s potatoes.”

  “Who have you been busy with?” Marcia waited, her eyes bright.

  The sum total of places one went was too small. “Oh, mainly Leon Lederman.”

  “Leon Lederman …” Marcia absently scratched her nose. “Do I know him?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Vaguely, defensively she described him, but to her sorrow it worked.

  “Him. Isn’t he married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Ummmm. That loudmouth.”

  “Come on, Marcia, you said you don’t know him.”

  “I remember him now. I had to throw him out of a party for starting a fight.”

  “But I’ll bet it was a good cause. Let me pay for the beer.”

  Friday, Halloween: Miss Clay’s office had new decorations: a vast aerial photograph of the neighborhood, and a map with crosshatching indicating blight and decay. Anna stood in front of the photo, mesmerized. In the foreground the gray battlements of the University swelled, dominating the landscape. The photo slanted one way toward the white teeth of the lakeside towers, and shaded the other way into the amorphous sootiness of the Black Belt, crowded even denser by the curvature of the wide-angle lens. White and black, high and low, the photo was almost schematic. Her own building was a bump a nudge could topple.

  The review board for the renewal study had been appointed, consisting of a mayor’s appointee to the downtown planning office whose further advancement was connected with the local project’s success; the chairman of the division of social sciences who hoped to find time in between testifying for the redevelopers at hearings on their movement into Rowley’s neighborhood and his services to a Presidential blue ribbon panel on crime control; and a clubwoman distinguished for her organizational work among other upper-middle-class liberals, who had thrown the weight of her group behind renewal.

  It was hoped that such a wellinformed board of review would greatly facilitate the work of the project in investigating renewal.

  Friday was the climax of the week for Anna’s officemate Mrs. Cavenaugh. On her because of age and righteousness devolved the delicate task of cutting the Friday afternoon cake. It was understood, Anna found the first time she took a piece to shocked stares, that pieces diminished with seniority and status.

  The coders, interviewers and minor technicians were not permitted coffee till the others had finished. Building rumor claimed that the wee folk used to be given coffeebreak with their betters. Certain graduate students serving out their peonage at the Institute, however, had been observed making a meal of the cake.

  When she arrived at Leon’s, he had been buying candy-bars, good ones, he said, the kind he had wanted to be given. He was good with the tinseled children, had a deadpan way of kidding they played up to. “Do you really live here?” the kids
asked. “Is this a store?”

  “Sure it’s a store. This is a store where we give words away. Do you want a long one or a short one? How about rococo? or snorch? or troglodyte? Grunt’s a good word.”

  When the last kids disappeared from the streets, he sat down and methodically ate all the remaining candy. They went to a triple horror bill in the Loop. Chewing buttered popcorn in the balcony she had the disturbing sensation of having grown constantly younger since leaving Asher. Leon had days when he wanted to plunge back into his own or an imagined adolescence. He would begin to bolt quantities of Pepsi-Cola and pseudo-foods: potato chips, donuts, peanuts and confections named Korn Kings and Tayco Twists and Nutniks.

  On the way home as she looked at his lowbrowed face set in a scowl over the wheel she realized he was depressed and had been so all week.

  Saturday: Leon had an appointment with his lawyer at ten thirty. He insisted that she come, then left her in the outer office to leaf through magazines. His voice boomed through the closed door. He emerged pale from anger.

  He drove up to the near North Side and then slowly along a street of large wellkept apartment houses, searching an address. Parked.

  “What are we here for?”

  “Justice.”

  She looked at him narrowly. “Who lives here, chief?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Why didn’t you take me home first? Why drag me along at all? Okay, march in.”

  “Can’t. Got to wait for Joye to come out.”

  “You could have left me in the Loop, idiot. I’m in the way.”

  “Don’t be funny. Joye’s seeing some dentist, I just found out.” He drummed on the wheel. “Haven’t I told you I’m a madman?”

  Joye did not appear, with or without his child.

  Sunday: After a late brunch of waffles Leon said, “Let’s go see Vera.”

  She said hopefully, “She’s a strange girl … isn’t she?” But he would not comment.

  Snow was falling lightly. The wind skimmed the flakes along the ground and heaped them against curbs and stoops and hedges, except where they caught like ashes in the grass. Church-goers in new-looking winter coats were pouring out of pumpkin-colored St. Thomas. On Vera’s street the Nation of Islam—women stately in white habits and men in dark suits—were chatting in clumps outside the yellow brick mosque.

  The worn name on Vera’s building advised that it had been Granada Courts. They buzzed JAMESON and after a long pause she buzzed back. The doorlock was broken anyhow. The lobby was vast with rough plaster walls and Moorish archways. In the weedy court stood the remains of an ashtray shaped fountain surmounted by half a cupidon. They climbed one of a maze of stairways. Vera was standing just outside her door, peering blankly down. Barefoot, she wore slacks and a deep blue sweater above which her faced burned with a dark jarring intensity.

  Anna had a foretaste of discomfort. She was intensely sure that Leon hardly knew Vera and contrary to what she had thought, was barging in unexpected and maybe unwelcome. By this time Leon had followed Vera. Testily she went after. He must be interested in Vera to come charging over here—but why drag her along?

  Vera lived in a large light room with a corner kitchenette and a skyfilled view of apartmenthouse roofs and the bare twiggy summits of trees. Anna felt even more an intruder when she saw the boy sprawled in selfconscious but stubborn languor on the bed. Cheese, French bread, dairy orange juice and butter lay on a table before the windows, while a percolator steamed on the hotplate.

  Vera offered the food and coffee, sitting primly on the bed’s edge. Leon sat in an armchair, she in a highbacked wicker rockingchair. She had a sense of being watched, and then she noticed the masks on the wall. “Those are your work?”

  “Of course,” the boy answered for her. “Who else would make such crazy things?” He poked Vera hard. “Introduce me, stupid.”

  She told them that he was Paul: just that monosyllable. A jealous lover, this black wedgewood girl. Anna smiled. The boy was rangy, with a slight but good build, skin a few shades lighter than Vera, and a highbrowed sensitive unfinished face. Large awake eyes. He was still arranged in what must be meant to represent a relaxed sprawl, but finally he bounded up to help himself to bread and cheese. In his movements a natural grace fought it out with stiff selfconsciousness.

  “Aren’t they gorgeous fetishes?” He waved at the bizarre masks put together of scraps of corduroy, satin, velvet, denim, bottle caps and corks, a bit of a pencil, a salvaged cigar butt, some wire. “She’s been making them since she was seven.” He was talking to them, yet half turned away. He lifted one from its hook and swung on them, spangled leer and long green satin nose with frayed rope ends for moustache and brows of steelwool. For just a moment she thought … she was obsessed, she saw him everywhere. Letting his hands dangle and flap, Paul went hopping sideways, whirled and tossed the mask at Vera. “Naturally they were cruder then.”

  “They were never crude or natural.” Vera smiled—she would have said with amused tenderness except that reactions touched Vera’s face and were gone too quickly to judge more than the afterimage. “I brought a bunch into school on Friday and let the kids put them on. Of course they all got destroyed, but the kids had a party. Even Carla, one of my girls who won’t even speak but sits with her head on her desk, was running around and laughing. Finally I even got them doing a play.”

  “Well, that’s how the masks got started, so why not?” Paul said.

  “You’ve known each other for a long time,” Anna said.

  They stared blankly. Leon looked over his shoulder. “Sure, kid, they’re brother and sister.”

  Then she saw that they were. “Oh. You’re going to school here, Paul?” Quick before they realized what she had thought.

  “He’s a real student,” Vera said. “School bored me. Kindergarten wasn’t bad, but after that, it got less inventive.”

  Paul pouted. “Then why did you do so well?”

  “Because I didn’t care.”

  “A real student! I’ll never get my degree if I can’t pass that science class. It’s ridiculous. I’d get my degree in June, but I’m flunking the same course I dropped once before. Imagine, I was going into archaeology.”

  “So you’re flunking nat sci,” Leon muttered.

  “I don’t mind your giving up archaeology …” Vera’s voice was clear and sad. “But you won’t give thought to what we’re going to do.”

  Paul reached overhead for another mask made from the top of a bathroom scale. “I’ll be a clown.”

  His sister ducked her small chin, considering. Then with a pleasurably malicious smile, rolling her eyes white, “No. You aren’t funny enough.”

  “Bitch. Mean bitch.” Drawing his bare foot up he shoved her off the bed. She sat hard on the floor with a surprised giggle.

  Perhaps Paul enjoyed the masks because they freed him. She felt for his rangy awkwardness, his embarrassed glib efforts to entertain them. Vera was closed, did not care what they thought. She must be the older but they seemed twins. Old daydream: boy twin, agreeable other. First sexual phantom. Much better than dumb tagalong sister Estelle. Her periodic efforts in more recent times to get through to Estelle (through what? into what?) brought puzzled resentment. She envied Vera a brother, a man to love her no matter what, with full visibility and loyalty.

  “How’s Caroline?” Leon asked between mouthfuls of cheese. “What’s she doing with herself?”

  Her breath caught. He was testing her nerves.

  Paul wrinkled his nose and declaimed in a loud bored drawl, “Princess Grace. Does she ever do anything?”

  Leon persisted, “She break her engagement?”

  Vera wriggled her toes. “Break it?”

  Paul asked her, “Did she ever pay you for that whopping big phonebill?”

  “Naturally.” Vera’s lips shut tight. Turning her back she plumped up the pillow, piled the used plates, put the leftover juice on the outside windowledge. After she had watched the w
eak snow littering down, she turned around with a yawn.

  Anna rose. “At any rate, I have to be going.”

  As he got up Leon said to Paul, “If you really are flunking that course, get in touch.”

  “Oh, Paul hates to be tutored. He’s too stubborn,” Vera said.

  “I wasn’t offering to tutor. Still, I can guarantee you’ll pass.” Leon let out a slash of grin and ducked out, tramping downstairs. The door across the landing opened an inch, an eye surveyed them. As she descended through the gloom she heard Vera’s windchime laugh and the door bang shut.

  That evening he spoke of them. “Sick scene, eh?”

  “All those masks and dolls? It would get on my nerves.”

  Leon shoved them away with a thick palm. “Not the decor. The way the kid is eaten up by his sister. She answers for him. She decides what he’ll do. You hear that bit about ‘we’—if you aren’t going to be an archaeologist, what will we do? She acts like she’s married to him.”

  “Well …” They had charmed her, the sense of play and private pastures and the longlegged games of young giraffes. “I’m not sure how much one controls the other. They both obey a certain style. He answers for her too.”

  “Style? She’s an ordinary domineering bitch with a kid brother under her thumb. Another sick family all hung up on each other. What choice does he have? Probably doesn’t see what’s happening. Doesn’t see the obscene trap he’s grown into.”

  “Then you aren’t interested in her.”

  He snorted. “That frigid tank? A real castrator. Those managerial chicks, spade or white, they freeze my blood.”

  “I thought maybe that’s why we went.”

  “Uh uh.” He slumped on the couch, with his massive head bent forward on his chest. With his sleeves rolled halfway up the hairs in the light made his arms look dipped in water. Slowly the lids over his milky eyes settled. When he did not speak she thought he had dozed off and took up a book to read.