Going Down Fast

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Also by Marge Piercy

Novels

Going Down Fast
, 1969

Dance the Eagle to Sleep
, 1970

Small Changes
, 1973

Woman on the Edge of Time
, 1976

The High Cost of Living
, 1978

Vida
, 1980

Braided Lives
, 1982

Fly Away Home
, 1985

Gone to Soldiers
, 1988

Summer People
, 1989

He, She And It
, 1991

The Longings of Women
, 1994

City of Darkness, City of Light
, 1996

Storm Tide
, 1998 (with Ira Wood)

Three Women
, 1999

The Third Child
, 2003

Sex Wars
, 2005

Short Stories

“The Cost of Lunch, Etc.”, 2014

Poetry Collections

Breaking Camp
, 1968

Hard Loving
, 1969

4-Telling
(with Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon), 1971

To Be of Use
, 1973

Living in the Open
, 1976

The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
, 1978

The Moon Is Always Female
, 1980

Circles on the Water, Selected Poems
, 1982

Stone, Paper, Knife
, 1983

My Mother's Body
, 1985

Available Light
, 1988

Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now
(ed.), 1988

Mars and Her Children
, 1992

Eight Chambers of the Heart,
1995 (UK)

What Are Big Girls Made Of
, 1997

Early Grrrl
, 1999

The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme
, 1999

Colors Passing Through Us
, 2003

The Crooked Inheritance,
2009

The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2010
, 2012

Made in Detroit
, 2015

Other Works

“The Grand Coolie Damn” in
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, 1970 (pamphlet)

The Last White Class
, (play coauthored with Ira Wood), 1979

Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt
, (essays), 1982

The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days
, (daybook calendar), 1990

So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Personal Narrative
, 2001; Enlarged Edition, 2005

Sleeping with Cats
, (memoir), 2002

Louder: We Can't Hear You (Yet!), The Political Poems of Marge Piercy,
2004 (CD)

Pesach for the Rest of Us,
2007

My Life, My Body (Outspoken Authors)
, (essays, poems, and memoir), 2015

Going Down Fast

A Novel

Marge Piercy

TO SOL AND ADRIENNE YURICK

Friendship Stretches

Leon

August

The four-story building on the corner with bulging spinach green bays was coming down. The crane, taller by a couple of stories, was eating it. With clumsy delicacy the crane grazed, detaching a mouthful of two-by-fours and pipes and walls. A cloud of dust swirling on the wind that smelled of stockyards almost hid the iron ostrich neck. Even on the far side of the street where Leon stood the noise deafened him. Fine dust settled on his sweaty forehead.

The workmen on top had taken off their shirts. A husky Negro straight across from him sat astride a brick wall four floors above the sidewalk and swung a sledgehammer just ahead of the grasp of his thighs. Leon felt the impact in his arm, his thick arm under the faintly damp weight of his one still good summer jacket. Great work. Smash the city. Look at them sauntering over the gaps. Last week in demolition for an expressway two had been killed when a wall collapsed, and they got paid worse than he did.

The crane bit into a shiny yellow room, turned and with a tidy jerk spat the chewed wall in a dumptruck. Swinging back, the crane in passing knocked off a section of facade. Thunderous rubble fell. His legs shook. Chaos inside a fence of tulip colored doors. The crane poked around to the front, seized the fire escape, let go fumbling, then fixed on it again. Groaning, the metal held. The teeth twisted it like an arm till the tension sang and all at once it tore loose and boom, was thrust in the truck. Kids all around him stared, housewives with shopping carts. His attaché case against his leg. He'd miss the interview. All those dim bedrooms opened like cans. On the ground floor, through the smashed front window he could make out the graffiti-scrawled rooms of the bar where one of his early films had been given a showing.
Rat-Men of the Jackson Park Lagoon
. Bastards hadn't known what to make of it.

Turning he saw that Anna was watching from her room, kitty corner across the intersection, standing a little back from the windows so the workmen would not notice her. Why wasn't she downtown teaching? Summer semester must be over. Was Rowley there? He waited for Rowley to appear behind, touching her. No, she was alone, she looked alone. Naked face watched the walls crumble. She held herself across her full breasts. Her mouth looked as if it might be slightly open. He imagined her eyes melting. Would she identify with the crane or the walls? The walls, of course, or something behind them.

What if he was a little late to the interview? Looking over his shoulder he went back to his car to get his camera. Never knew when you could use demolition footage. The falling bricks rumbled through his body. Down the sidestreets Chicago was a murky late afternoon August green, moist as a swamp.

Anna

Friday, September 12

Rowley said something and Anna woke confused. She took a moment to understand that she was in his apartment and that his voice was the FM. Then she jumped up to turn the radio louder, annoyed with herself for dozing off during his own special show. His voice came out deep, persuasive and rough in spots like a good rum, talking about some blues singer. Then he played Ma Rainey:

If your house catches on fire and there ain't no water round
,

If your house catches on fire and there ain't no water round
,

Throw your trunk out the window and let that shack burn down
…

She went into his small kitchen to splash her face at the sink. Sleep still clogged her limbs. Her head felt big. Her dark hair swung forward into the stream of water. She had been up all night on a Greyhound from Cleveland, part of the time preparing lectures for the new class in the family she had been promised, part of the time in the stupefied depression trundling across Ohio and Indiana induced. Seemed as if she couldn't stare at that flat repetitive landscape for long without asking herself, what have I done with my life? where am I going? am I going? Rowley had not wanted her to make the trip using up some of their rare free time together, but once a year she thought she should see her family.

She found herself staring into the shelf of cookbooks over his stove, loose recipes stuck in unsorted, useless. The night coming through the open windows smelled of trees and cars. Strange, his voice in the livingroom talking not for her but for anybody with a radio, and yet as if it were the man, worked on her, coaxed and teased. Twice as disconcerting since it was a tape unwinding tonight. He might have left the studio already, might be drinking with pals, playing a session, listening to some group.

Making a face she took an armful of cookbooks down and began to sort the stray pages. Now he had with him an Irish girl who sang pleasantly but dwindled away in shyness and he was flirting gently, drawing her forward into the mike. Rowley was talented but not ambitious and that gave him an ease, a natural shaggy courtesy with others: he admired, he enjoyed, he wanted to share. This recipe for veal in sour-cream had been used at least once, for one corner was splashed and the paprika measurement corrected. On the back what record had she entered?

She turned and without thinking closed the nearest window. The first time Asher had invited Rowley over. Was it, come over Saturday and have dinner, my wife's a good cook? No, that wasn't Asher's voice. Only the intonation of
my wife
, gray word signifying possession and function. My wife, my broker, my dentist. They must have played some game. Indeed. Joan was a fairhaired British secretary Rowley had picked up at the Art Institute, taken to bed, forgotten as she had that game. She had not liked Rowley that first night. She was proud of that. Loud and arrogant she had told Asher and he had protested her quick judgment, judging her. Because Asher classed people by their opinions and competencies, he imagined himself free of prejudice, but he …
Stop
. The long argument called marriage was broken off. She thought of Asher as permanently wounded, but he was digesting his steak and airmail edition of the New York
Times
together not a quarter mile away. She sighed, combing her hand through the weight of her long thick hair, and folded the loaded recipe into her purse. She could not throw away scraps of the past even if they cut her fingers.