Going Down Fast

by Marge Piercy

  “There, see! I told you.” She threw her arms around Rowley in a quick strong hug. He could not respond.

  Gino shrugged. “You aren’t so pretty either. She thinks a lot of you.”

  He found he could plod along if he thought of her marriage as a temporary state, like the spring she decided she too would sing. Not that she had ever been as lusterless as poor Caroline. He must see that she stayed in school.

  He took them for chicken and ribs at the place on 47th. Gino liked it because it was soulfood. Oh well. The kids did act pretty, obviously in love and giddy with joy at being somewhere together. Gino seemed frozen in his affection: he called her Sam or Smartass, and when he touched her, it was with a roughness that apologized, that claimed it was not sentimental. Yet Sam beamed.

  “Promise me you’ll tell them. I just can’t,” she said. “I just can’t go through that scene with Dad.”

  He showed them around the studio and took them to a coffeehouse with good rock. Then he drove them through the greenlit tunnel roads under the Loop and parked near the river. Lights from the Sun-Times presses. The wind sawed into the back of his neck as they walked through a light dusting of snow on the bank. The cold entered him like steel as he followed them joined and embracing, and bits of their laughter struck his set face.

  That night he slept on the couch and they shared his bed. He lay awake, pitching. He tried not to listen, he put his head under the pillow until he felt smothered, but their whispers and rustlings and jinglings and mumbles worked like hot sand into the inner part of his ears.

  Tuesday–Wednesday, November 11–12

  They were sitting around the diningroom table with the remains of mincepie and icecream and the second round of coffee. “Not bad pie,” Harlan conceded, who thought Shirley cooked too bland. What they used to call the General Foods syndrome when they were always on the lookout for a free meal. After Shirley dragged the kids off to bed, Harlan held out a cigar, gesturing for Rowley to sniff it appreciatively while he lit up one for himself.

  “Hey!” Long time. His nose tickled.

  “No, tobacco, man. Hot red tobacco—no cooler smoke.”

  “Who brought these in?”

  “We’ll never know.” Harlan puffed, wrinkling his forehead. “Had a call from Sheldon Lederman, renewal’s iron man. Invited me in for a chat before the public hearings. First I heard of them. Turns out the University has their consents already—”

  “He was bluffing. There aren’t that many defeatists here.”

  “First, the University owns more real estate than we ever suspected. They been buying under dummy corporations. The old hospital signed—there are connections.”

  “All right, that’s maybe forty percent. They need sixty.”

  “Remember our surprise they included some of their own lily blocks? Our neighbors over there signed in droves their approval for having neighbors no more. Lafleur down the block who’s taking his family to L.A. That amazing ofay bitch on the corner who recalls sunflowers nine feet tall and figures this was a lovely village before all the riffraff from Chicago took it over.”

  “A city board has to pass on it. That’s our real battle.”

  “And we are going to make it a loud one. I want every person in these blocks at the hearings. But we have to submit names ahead of time, and time’s running short.”

  “I’ll testify. I’m willing.”

  Harlan tapped ash gently. “You look bohemian.”

  Rowley drawled, “You calling me a Polack?”

  “Second, you’re only a tenant.” Harlan held up his palm. “God will record your willingness. In the meantime, raise money, cause we’re going to need it. And get us publicity! I can’t see why we can’t get anything in the papers. I keep calling up and getting the royal runaround.”

  “You wait till I do a program on it. I’m seeing Cal tomorrow. I’ve got the script blocked out already and I figure we’ll use some of the tapes we’ve made at meetings.”

  “I’m seeing UNA tomorrow night—meeting with their steering committee. I figure they’ve got to support us. I’m taking Blanche and J.J. and maybe Short—I think he’s come around. Those UNA types are all liberals and interracial. I figure if they send some of their University types to the hearings to testify against the administration experts, it’ll look pretty good. They claimed these blocks weren’t organizable, but I’m taking our membership lists, and they’ll have to eat crow … This is some cigar.”

  “So Lederman gave you a couple of cigars imported I imagine through Canada, and told you to reflect upon the moral of luxury?”

  “He said as how he was sad to see me wasting my considerable energies obstructing the public good, and he was sorry I was going to lose this house. It had been brought to his attention that I had tried to buy a house nearer the University. A very attractive one is just coming on the market, right near a good school for my children, and if I thought financing would be a problem—”

  “They tried to bribe you?”

  “Don’t be crude.” Harlan sucked, sucked on the cigar. “We’re discussing a great institution—one founded on oil needs a little grease to keep it running.”

  Rowley leaned back in the chair till it creaked, bracing his nape on joined hands. “I can’t help but have the feeling something is missing. All this fuss for a couple of dormitories.”

  “He said something about a research park too. I don’t quite get it. Some sort of institute that does defense contracting? Besides, they’re putting up townhouses too, at thirty-eight thou.”

  “Some of the financial goodies are plain enough to me now. In urban renewal, the city uses eminent domain to clear land and sells it off to the developer dirt cheap—often less than half of what the city has spent in tax money to buy and clear it. Then the FHA insures a bargain-type mortgage for almost the whole damn cost of the development. Add tax concessions, and the redeveloper doesn’t even need to lay out much hard cash to clean up. All this is to build places that will rent or sell for the upper third economically. So you end up subsidizing the redeveloper and the upper middle class.”

  “Racism for fun isn’t good enough any more, now they got to make a profit.” Harlan snorted. “Lederman told me to stop acting as a race man and act more as a member of the middle class. This only two years after one of their agencies kept me out of a co-op that voted us in. All day long I fight a nasty colonial war against the down and out. Society rates my job with trash collector. Human garbage disposal. I punish my clients for being black and poor and female.”

  Tommy appeared in the doorway in striped pajamas. “Daddy! Read me about Pollywinkle. Daddy?”

  “Tomorrow, Tommy. Daddy’s talking.”

  “You never do. You never do any more! Daddy?”

  “Shirley!” Harlan bellowed and Shirley led her son away, consoling him in a high voice meant to be overheard. Harlan shook his head. “Don’t know what I expected. A crude man who was going to try to put me down. But Lederman was urbane, genial. He really did think he was talking to me for my own good. Like he was admiring the fuss we’ve created, and warning me it’s time to cash in or back off.”

  “He has a mind like a hungry pike and the ruthlessness of the just. The joy of the real operator. When you walk into his office, you know you’re in the presence of a man who is happy in his work.”

  Harlan gave him a puzzled stare. “When did you meet him?”

  “Remember when I roomed with Joe and that kid Leon? That was his son.”

  “The circles you moved in. Now look at you.”

  “Leon’s a jagoff. He got into trouble at the University. The dean contacted Sheldon—big alumnus, committeeman. How would he like them to handle it? Treat him like the hooligan he is, says Lederman: kick him out.”

  Harlan raised his brows. “Sounds like facesaving. What had the kid done?”

  “Boosted some books from the University store.”

  Harlan made a face of disgust. “That’s sick. His father could have bought
him every book there.”

  “Lederman believed in making the kids struggle. Don’t give them anything they really want. Know what you get? One kid who can’t put a dime in a parkingmeter, and the other who can’t admit to wanting anything.”

  “His son.” Harlan winced with incredulity. “Of course I see what Lederman’s up to. It’s the Jews’ interest to keep us in the ghetto because they own the business there—”

  “Man, if you think Lederman cares for some palsied refugee with a candystore in the Black Belt!”

  “How’s your kosher girl? Haven’t seen her lately, worst luck.”

  “You ought to work for the CIA. Haven’t seen her myself since last summer.” Corpses of the cigars lay in the ashtray. “I looked into that housing authority study on relocation, and there’s meat for us. Proof people displaced have to pay lots more rent. I’ve located a batch of similar studies, some with racial breakdown. When you figure the statistics are collected by agencies who benefit from more of same, the odds loom even higher.”

  Harlan was not listening. Dipping his finger in ash he wrote on the oiled walnut veneer. FUCK he wrote and wiped it out with the side of his hand. “Did you know that joining the middle-class is like ordering one of those pink light-up phones from the telephone company?”

  “Well now, how is that, Mr. Bones?”

  “Because you never stop paying, you pay every month of your life, and it would be cheap at one tenth the price.”

  Lederman had sent for him after he’d stumbled on Leon’s suicide attempt. Sent him, questioned him, tried to charm him, ended haranguing him. What a need that man had to be right, to be acknowledged right. Forsake my son and cleave only unto me. In a strange way he had made Rowley think of his own old man, and that set his spine stiff. Both had been true believers in the American dream, both had looked on the bottom of the Depression and called it hell. Sheldon did not want to be beholden to him, but Rowley had told him that he didn’t want a job or a letter of recommendation or introduction or a scholarship. “There’s nothing you’ve got to give out that I want.” Sheldon had laughed in his face and finally sent him on his way, calling him a fool and meaning it, but slapping his back.

  Finally he stopped at Vera’s—an impulse he had been ignoring. Climbing the narrow stairs, he knew he would find her with a man. He felt raggedly a fool plodding up through the dim smells of wet worn wool, soft coal, male cat and piss, cooking oil and porkfat. Her voice questioned down at him, “Paul?”

  Jealousy struck him before he remembered, walking into the light from her open door, that Paul was her brother. She sucked in her breath with surprise and danced backward. “It’s Rowley. Come for my head, remember?”

  Across the hall a door opened a crack, an eye watched.

  “Oh?” She stood aside, her eyes razory. Wearing a loose olive sweater over slacks, she was lean and wiry, a girl on a smaller scale than he usually liked. Her thighs in the slacks looked resilient, hard. In one nice arc of movement she nodded him in, let the door shut and turn. Still moving she reached up, one knee on the bed, took the mask, spun around and handed it over. “Here you are.”

  “Come on, want to rob me of my pretext?”

  “For what? It’s the only thing could interest you here.”

  “For seeing you. Why not?”

  “Do you usually chase after black girls?” The faintest of smiles: delicacy not of china but of the forelegs of a deer.

  “Don’t usually chase after any kind.”

  “Don’t start on my account.”

  He noticed with a pang that her feet were bare: small, narrow, with a sharp bone jutting in the heel. “Do you think you have a special reason to mistrust me?”

  She stood with her hands locked behind. “Whatever you think you want, you won’t find it here. If you don’t listen now, you’ll lose your temper by and by as well as waste your time.”

  “Because you’re involved with someone?”

  Her mouth thinned. “I don’t belong to that whole messy game.”

  Her words resonated strangely. “You mean people?”

  “That isn’t all there is to being human. If it were, yes, I’d be something else. Why not? Half those I pass on the street don’t think I’m a person anyway.”

  She stood like an exclamation point, ticking conviction. “You sound like a stubborn twelve-year-old.” He saw a child, skinny with wiry pigtails and broad ashy part, straight fragile colt’s legs, black and arrowy body. Bastard image, half the young Sam, half the girls of his gradeschool, the despised haughty colored girls who fought it out with him for the top of the class in the fifth, the sixth, the seventh grades. Thelma Hawkens, Rosetta Townsend standing with him in tense agonistic spelling bees. He let the wicker rocking chair tilt far back. Vera suffered his stare with cold presence. Girls who could read and sum and spell to the top of the class but never were chosen to play the princess or act the Spirit of Christmas to Come.

  “You’re from a small town, right?”

  Plainly puzzled she sat down in the armchair. “Green River, Michigan. Going to tell me I’m a product of small town morality?”

  “No.” He smiled. “Caroline comes from your town too.”

  “If you think I judge her, you’re mistaken. I only think she mixes with people who make use of her and leave her unhappy.”

  “Small town. With many blacks?”

  She let out a silent laugh. “All in the way you look at it. In one of these suburbs they’d get excited. Ten families.”

  “Were you all very close?”

  “We knew each other. We lent a hand. But … my father’s an educated man.”

  “With money enough to send you to an expensive school.”

  “I went to teacher’s college in Kalamazoo and Paul is on a scholarship.” At that she got up and began clearing the small table by the window.

  “Were you just going to eat?”

  “No!” Rapidly she packed the plates away in her corner kitchenette. “Our father’s a farmer.” She sat back down. Coming aware of her bare feet she took her sharp heel in her hand, squeezing. “You can see I’m a country girl.”

  “I’d believe you came off the moon. Caroline has more of that Michigan flatness in her voice.”

  “You mean I don’t sound colored? You aren’t the first to comment.” Her face screwed up monkeylike. “Our father was a stickler for proper diction.”

  “In Green River you must have been isolated when kids started dating. Even around here gradeschool kids play together block by block, but highschool kids sort out. People begin to watch them together.”

  “If you see me dramatically alone, you’re dead wrong. For one thing, there were four of us. Sylvia married too young, but the rest of us were close. Particularly Paul and I.” She glanced at the clock.

  “You’re expecting him?”

  “Yes.” Her face contracted in anger, smoothed.

  He thought if he politely asked if he should leave, she would surely agree. “An educated farmer. What was he doing there?”

  “Our family has farmed in Green River for five generations,” she said with glacial precision. “Our greatgrandfather, a freedman, came North and settled there …”

  Hearing the lock turn he looked. With her back to the door she went on in the same tone. “The farm we have is the original minus a few acres lost in depressions, plus what our father has added since the last war. The farm has always passed to the oldest son, the others being trained for teaching or the ministry and moving out, except during hard times when the farm supports the extended family—”

  “God! The holy Jamesons, chosen to rake manure by the Lord himself. Pure, pennykissing, squeaky with religion, highminded in the presence of their cows, anointed with grade AA butter, even their pigs decent and clean!”

  “The brother,” Rowley said with satisfaction and got up, extending his hand.

  Tucked up even tighter in the armchair Vera introduced. “Mr. Rowley. He’s a friend of Caroline’s.”
>
  After a perfunctory shake Paul collapsed on the bed. At Caroline’s name he threw Rowley an amused curious look: like, are you getting a piece of that?

  “Would you mind wiping your filthy boots on the mat rather than my bedspread?”

  “My boots—if you’d look instead of sticking your righteous Jameson nose in the air—are clean. I did not get them wet, because I had a ride here.”

  “By way of Alaska? You are a mere two hours late.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was being timed.”

  “What did you expect me to do with supper?”

  “Eat it.” He giggled in simple enjoyment. The boy was tall but loosely built, a couple of years younger and shades lighter than Vera. Family resemblance, yes, and they probably all were handsome. But Paul’s face was softer, easier. It lacked that cameo precision that caught his nerves: he was pleased it was so.

  Paul caught his examination and swung around to stare back. Then he laughed. “I know you now. Yes indeed.” He rose on an elbow to scan the wall. Scanned it again. “Vera, since when are you so polite? Where’s his head?”

  “I am not! I gave it to him.”

  Obediently Rowley held up the mask.

  She folded her arms, drumming her fingers. “Well, where were you?”

  “I ran into some people.”

  “Hard enough to knock you out? You could have called.” She hugged her thin arms. “That’s the last time I cook supper for you.”

  “You bore me when you make threats you have no intention of keeping.” Leaning back he played with the braids of a lewd/innocent face of chintz and straw. “It was someone I owe a favor—”

  “That toad?”

  Paul made a warning face. “You don’t know him.”

  “I’m surprised you want to. Your taste is rotting.”

  Paul rolled to his feet and glared equally at her and at Rowley. “You never annoy me so much as when you don’t know what you’re talking about but think you do. The family arrogance.”

  “Lately you’ve been down on the family.” Tipping her cropped head toward Rowley. “What do you think, is he too old to put himself out for adoption?”