Going Down Fast

by Marge Piercy

  She threw her arms around him. “That must be it!”

  She could not go on calling a dead phone. On her way back from work on rainy Wednesday she headed over, speeches bumping one another in her head: all crude, awkward, apologetic and stupid. Ho ho, guess what, old Leon, we’ve come full circle. Yes, I know I hated him last week, but the moon or the wind changed … She saw herself arriving. Leon would be sitting in his director’s chair bundled up, tousled and still blowing his nose. “Why isn’t there coffee?” he’d bark, and she’d trot out to the kitchen. He would launch into denunciations of his family, the doctors, the hospital, the wasted time. They would argue about his happening and why he had kept it secret from her and she would help him edit the film. He would have a new plot for reaching Caroline or abducting Jimmy. “What’s for supper?” She would never, never have the nerve to tell him about Rowley. She could not look him in the eyes and say, I’m leaving, it was all a mistake. She would take his temperature and off they would go to bed, clumsily, furtively, gently. All would recommence. Ay. And then she would see Rowley, his eyes. Had to, had to tell him.

  She knocked and peered in the rain-streaked window. The shade was up and the key on the floor as she had left it. She hung around in the rain stamping her feet and watching her breath, but it was dark and she felt Rowley waiting and suddenly wanted to be with him, with him at once.

  The next morning the phone rang. They had finished breakfast and he was going through a stack of new releases while she measured the windows for draperies. When he put down the phone she took one look at his face and got down from the chair. “Leon?”

  “The old man. He walked out of the hospital. That was my mother.” Turned on his heel. “Got to call the station.”

  She followed, waiting. “Do you think you’ll be back for supper? Or will you spend the night in Gary?”

  He drew his hand through his dark bushy hair. His eyes tightened, grew catlike and cruel. “Get changed. You’re coming.”

  She did not dare say anything but with suddenly fat hands put on a teaching dress and pinned up her hair. In ten minutes they were in the car heading south to the Calumet Skyway.

  The thaw continued. Yesterday, the day before, an unclean gray rain had fallen, not hard but constant like a bad cold in the atmosphere. Everything felt clammy. The world had begun to dissolve. Sidewalks flowed between granite levees stained tan with old dogpiss. Deep waterfilled ruts snaked through the deeper ice of streets. Sand, cinder, turds, grit and rocks were left exposed as by the retreat of a glacier. A pause in the Ice Age. The winter would be continued after a short intermission.

  Covertly she fingered her hair and moved a bobbypin to tighten the chignon, looked at him—his walrus moustache and strong nose and coarse black tumbled hair. She touched his thigh. From the Skyway the sky was low and battered, clearing in patches over the immense gray city. She could not lose the sense of going on a journey. “Hey you,” she said softly.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s good. That’s all.” Tatters of the night lay warm and tenuous on her. Turmoil and compromise. She was humiliated to want him as she did, and nothing else was worth the sweat. Loving him justified nothing, changed nothing outside their coming together which would always be ragged and flawed and the strongest thing she had to assimilate into herself. He had come to her and this time he was putting himself on the line: but there would be other parties and pretty easy girls and invitations too sincere to be passed up. She would have to make her own peace with her pride. That was what she decided was Anna this windy wet February day as they passed a great storage tank where turning flights of smoke-colored pigeons like specks in a film flickered against the rusty sky.

  He just drove. He disengaged his concern because traveling would take the time it took and then he would see what was up. What he must do. She curled on her side looking demure and sleepy. Occasionally her gaze turned on him and asked, Is it all right? are you worried?

  The sky was dull red over the refineries. Squat orange flames blew off. Rolling down his window he stuck out his hand for a ticket at the tollbooth and handed it to her. Clark emblem on the low round tanks. He speeded some on the tollroad, running past the orange South Shore trains to one side, freight running contrary, E J & E on the other, high tension wire strung from towers he had called soldiers as a kid, soldiers marching tall in rows blam blam blam from the backseat of the old Terraplane, past dunes, marsh, scrub, approaching the vast steel mills. A nonlandscape, abstract. 90 East. It never failed to move him in contradictory spasms. The Calumet River steamed with chemicals alongside.

  “Close the window. It’s gassing me,” she said.

  Downhome smell. Clouds of stink rotting the lungs. U.S. Steel as far as the eye could travel on the left. On the right gritty Gary led to the twin domes of downtown. An even line of slender stacks suddenly belched rusty smoke. They were putting oxygen into the open-hearth furnaces, making the flames leap and roar. A belt of coke cars pulled out empty. Parkinglots glittered cars.

  Why hadn’t he gone into the mills? He’d wanted to clear out of Gary. Fighting with his old man, girl on his back to marry her. The ships had drawn him. At least they moved. But through childhood he had been fascinated by the mills where his father went. Sunbright corn likker steel. The shapes of the buildings, the stacks, the towers, the furnaces excited him. Inhuman manmade scene. He remembered the long strike when the air had been clean over the drab houses. Steel shaped men and land: for miles the mills pissed into the lake and dirtied the sun. They were beautiful.

  Gary West exit. He had a gut perception that slacked his foot on the gas, a slight queasiness that resolved in a shrug as he touched his tongue to his moustache. Overlap with the old man. Because he was bringing her home—not that it was. As he downshifted on the ramp she counted change and handed over the ticket. Then they were on Grant heading south. Because he was fulfilling the old man’s pattern, choosing his own dark somewhat alien woman later then usual. A woman he damn well ought to treat more kindly and in better faith than his father had. Having learned something? Only Annie would judge.

  The house was custard yellow with several cars already in back. The paint was peeling. Sparrows perched on the nylon clothesline. A birdbath stood in the circle of pastel stones near a bottomheavy snowman turning to slush. As they left the car a woman maybe forty opened the stormdoor on the second-floor porch and peered down. “How are you, George!” she called, giving it two syllables. “How’s life treatin’ you these days?”

  He waved in answer and pushed her ahead through the kitchen door. She could have killed him. She didn’t want to march in first with her nervous face hanging out. A sausage-shaped blonde powdered pink as a plastic baby sat at the table in a kelly green tasseled dress, her ringed hands spread flush on the tabletop and her mouth open. A tall hardbodied woman with irongray hair streaked with white chopped vegetables at the sink. She had to be his mother.

  He introduced her by name without explanations. The blonde was his brother’s wife, and his mother, who came from the sink wiping her hands on her apron, took Anna’s hand in a wooden grip, abrasive and strong. “You made pretty good time,” she barked. She did not kiss Rowley but insisted on taking his coat and brushed it carefully as she went to hang it up. “Hope you didn’t speed, but I know you better, don’t I?”

  The sausage was looking her over an inch at a time, but she had expected that. His mother looked in quick sideways glances, shyly. An atmosphere of funeral hung in the house, food and coffee were pressed on them with that ritual insistence, but the man in the posie-covered easychair was alive. His skin was ashen, his eyes bulged in his pitted face, the cords stood out in his hands. Yet his face was alert with an annoyance she recognized. His sandiness had sunk into his children without a trace, but his strength had come through. He was the wreck of a big tough man. At his feet lay an old retriever blinking out of looselidded red eyes and thumping his tail.

  “Got you to run down, did they?” He squinted
at Rowley, gave her a close, suspicious look. “Dropped everything and came flying. Well, you can fly back for all of me. I’m not going to the hospital no more. They cut me open enough times to air out my insides. Let them practice on puppydogs. Every time they lay a finger on you, another two hundred, five hundred bucks. Some racket.”

  “Don’t worry about the money. Hell with those excuses. Get done what you have to.”

  “Don’t worry!” he mimicked. “It’s my body, and I’m holding on to it. They can keep their drugs and bottles. No more.” He pounded the arm of his chair. The dog gave a throaty bark and got up fatly to nose him.

  She hung back at the archway beside Rowley’s mother who twisted her apron in her hands. Rowley planted himself in front of the easychair. “What are you planning? Going to sit there till you get enough worse you have to go in? Then they cut even more?”

  “Think I’m going to hang around your mother’s neck, don’t you?”

  “Listen to him,” his mother said. “Listen to what that old loon thinks is an idea. He’s lost his mind.”

  “What idea?” Rowley crossed his thick arms, waiting.

  “Stop bearing down on me. Go on, get over there, sit down. What did you bring her for?”

  Rowley ambled over to sit on the doggy couch, motioning for her to follow. “Figured she might as well see how mean I’m likely to get, if I live long enough.”

  “Tell them what you say you’re going to do. Tell him, if you aren’t ashamed in company,” Rowley’s mother said from the archway.

  “Going down to Brown County, that shack Hanson’s got on Bean Blossom Creek. You recall, I used to take you hunting. Old Hanson, he don’t get down much any more. He’s tickled to have somebody to fix it up.”

  “He’s going off where nobody can take care of him and all I’ll do night and day is worry. Oh, I always knew there was a lot of spite in you—”

  “Would you be contented, woman, seeing me turn into a vegetable in the hospital? Into a yellow turnip?”

  “Go down there and crawl into a hole like an old sick tomcat. Who’ll know when you get the pains? Who’ll know when you need help and what to do for you?”

  “I’ll get them to put in a telephone. There’s doctors down there. I don’t want nobody looking after me. I don’t want nobody looking at me, period.”

  “Tell him he can’t do that.” His mother took a step past the archway, her eyes fixed on Rowley. “Make him see he can’t.”

  Rowley sat forward against the slope of the couch, his knees spread and his hands resting on them. He bit down on his teeth. His eyes were narrow and bright. “No, I can’t say that.” Slowly he said through gritted teeth, “He’s got a right to the kind of death he wants.”

  The old man broke into a grin. His face was sucked hollow but the grin was broad.’ He had his own dark yellow teeth. “They don’t use that dirty word in the hospital. But I know I’m a loser. I like that country. They’re spoiling it, but they’re just getting started. It’ll last me out. I’m square with my policy, and the union’ll bury me. Got my plot paid for out at Mount of Olives. The papers are in the bottom drawer of my chifforobe, in a tin box. You can check them over. I’m all squared away.”

  “Feeling proud of yourself, aren’t you, mister!” His wife turned to walk out, then stopped to glare at Rowley. “You’re two of a kind, if you can’t see how wrong this all is. The blind leading the blind!” Two more steps and she turned again, jerking her head at Anna. “Come on, you can help me set the table for dinner.”

  As soon as they were in the kitchen, his mother took her arm in a hard grip. “You talk to him. Make him see. Make him come back and tell his father he can’t act that way!”

  Mother stayed mad and he knew her well enough to guess that she would never entirely forgive him. Her feelings ran deep and sullenly, down in some tunnel where she could neither enjoy nor exhaust them. He pitied them both. Harry arrived at mealtime and started yapping at the old man. In the meantime Mother managed to catch him outside the bathroom. “Are you going to marry her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Figured you wouldn’t have brought her otherwise.”

  “You didn’t blink an eye. Sam told you, uh?”

  “I don’t know what gets into that girl. Course I’d be nice to your girlfriend.”

  “Were you nice to Gino?”

  “He’s not a bad boy. Your father can’t stand him, but he shoveled the walk without my asking.” She looked at the wall, the imprint of former wallpaper wearing through paint thinned by scrubbing. She was a fierce scrubber. “She doesn’t look very Jewish.”

  He laughed then, leaning against the shut door in the bathroom, laughed till his ribs ached. Her sharp suspicious eyes brooded on him, her mouth turned in. He saw himself bringing Vera, and would mother have said, She doesn’t look very colored? For a moment he felt winded and sad through and through. “It suits me.”

  “Well, I suppose so.” She was bristling.

  He gave her a pat on the shoulder. “She suits me. You know? That’ll have to do.”

  After an enormous meal, plain in the main dishes but fancy in the trimmings, they drove back. She felt worn out with paying attention, staring at everything indirectly and being stared at, not indirectly. She felt numb in her ears and eyes and facial muscles. All the way back she sat in a mild stupor. She hadn’t even noticed where they were, except that they were almost, almost home, when he said, “Look, they started.”

  The crane stood beside her building with neck bowed and suppliant, head resting on the ground. Her old rooms lay open. The outer wall and circlet of windows were gone to dust. The pale blue walls of her bedroom, the white wall of her kitchen were nude to the passerby. She felt a dart of shame. Only the poor were blatantly exposed, her walls with their personal stains and bumps, the rub marks of her bed, the smudge over the radiator, the Che poster and the lamp he’d not thought worth taking.

  The crane rose and leaned into the building. “Wait,” she said to him. “Park. I want to see.” Rowley pulled over just past the traffic light and she hopped out to watch as the crane’s teeth ate into her floor, her walls, and the pale blue cracked and splintered, a rain of loose plaster dribbled from the teeth, and where she had slept was space. Five, six minutes and her rooms vanished and had never been. She got back into the car and they looked at each other. “Didn’t take long, did it?”

  “Come on,” he said, “you can vaporize a man in two seconds, what do you want?”

  “Your mother asked me to talk to you.”

  “The old man’s okay. Cancer won’t pin on a blue ribbon for endurance. And if you go the hospital route there’s a point where you stop being human, but no point where they stop making money off your carcass. I expect him to have an accident some time in the spring. He’ll wait for the spring-it’s pretty in Brown County.”

  “Why does he have to get away from her? That’s what hurts her.”

  “That’s the way they are together. I’m sorry for her. But I can’t change the way they’ve been chipping at each other all these years. Can only try to do a little better myself.”

  “I’ll remind you of that.”

  “Not too often.”

  As he pulled into their street, she said, “I have to send Marcia my new address.” Yes, because Marcia would be pleased for her, Marcia would understand and be pleased.

  When the phone rang after supper he hurried to answer it, thinking it was the girl who wanted him to back her up calling with the recording date: electric this time and so was she, a sloe-eyed part Oglala Sioux with a smoky voice. It was Paul, though, with news. He stumbled over words. When he stopped they both listened to the line static. Then he called Sheldon Lederman from whom he got nothing: not even anger. Then he called the station lawyer for background. At last, reluctantly, he came over to Anna. “That was Paul.”

  “Does he want to talk to me?” She started to get up.

  “No. Listen, Anna—”

  “Is he ever go
ing to be friends again?” She grimaced, shoved the evening paper at him. “Know what? Sheldon Lederman is out. Reasons of private business and lots of eulogies. His replacement is Tom Lovis. I think you know him, which reminds me—”

  “Listen to me. Leon’s been committed by his family.”

  “What? Committed what?”

  “Sheldon committed him to an asylum.”

  Her face folded on itself. “No!” she said loudly. “No!” It was a long time before she would admit that she believed him. She paced, she argued. “We have to get him out. Don’t say it’s impossible! Don’t you care?”

  For a long time she proposed tricks for getting Leon out. Finally she began to cry.

  He could not touch her at first. He felt awkward, cut off. “It was that scene he put on in the shopping plaza. How the hell did he ever get the money for the equipment?”

  “I gave it to him.” She sat in a chair weeping, huddled. “I gave him the money.”

  Because she saw him. Burned by electroshock, yes, and swollen with the white thunder of insulin and bloated. Worse, she saw him surviving, she saw him settling in The lion would have his cage. The world would be a room, oh a big one with lawns and gardens and pingpong and tennis courts. He would get fat and diet, he would intrigue and push against the rules to see how far they gave. He would find his constituency and his opposition. Perhaps they would let him make films, or perhaps he would experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of psychodrama. He sat on a bench hunched with heavy shoulders, his orange head bowed and his eyes milky and only half open looking into himself, and then he let out that slash of grin and got ready to rasp a challenge, ready to push outward so that he might feel someone pushing back. He sat on a gray bench. His eyes met hers but did not see her. He and the bench were embedded in a shroud of cotton batting. They were systematized. They were digested. Something in his stance said that he believed a little less in connection, that he knew a little better what they could do to him. It was a good institution, simpler than the society and with the lines of control just as taut but more visible.