Free Going Down Fast by Marge Piercy

eyes bright.
    The sum total of places one went was too small. “Oh, mainly Leon Lederman.”
    â€œLeon Lederman …” Marcia absently scratched her nose. “Do I know him?”
    â€œProbably not.”
    â€œWhat does he look like?”
    Vaguely, defensively she described him, but to her sorrow it worked.
    â€œ Him . Isn’t he married?”
    â€œDivorced.”
    â€œUmmmm. That loudmouth.”
    â€œCome on, Marcia, you said you don’t know him.”
    â€œI remember him now. I had to throw him out of a party for starting a fight.”
    â€œBut 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?”
    â€œSure 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