Free Body of Glass by Marge Piercy Page A

from when there had been weather falling on it. Across the front a wide veranda had once offered a place to sit, but all the wood had been scavenged and now the many doors had their own jerry-built stairs leading to the ground.
    They crept up the old fire escape to the top floor of many small, unused rooms. “Imagine the maids,” Gadi said. “Like slaves.”
    “They weren’t slaves.” Shira frowned at him. He always liked to dramatize everything. “They were paid.”
    “Paper money,” Gadi said solemnly. He slid the window up. They had rubbed soap on it to make it slide better. He stepped in easily, gracefully, and reached to help her. Gadi had been growing fast for the last year and a half; now he was eight centimetres taller than Shira. She despaired of growing more. She was resigned to being short like Malkah. Malkah told her that for generations everyone had been taller than their parents, but no longer. In Tikva, they ate real food, but most people ate vat food, made of algae and yeasts. She had tasted it on a school trip; it was disgusting. Their teacher lectured them when they gagged on it, about two billion people who had starved to death in the Famine, when the ocean rose over rice paddies and breadbaskets of the delta countries like Bangladesh and Egypt, when the Great Plains dried up and blew away in dust storms that darkened the skies and brought early winter, when the deserts of Africa and the new desert of the Amazon spread month by month. Without vat food, most of the world would starve, as huge numbers had done in the twenties and thirties.
    They climbed into the hall and took off their shoes before they crept along the dusty passageway. Where are we going?”
    “The blue room.”
    It was the nicest of the rooms that still had furniture. The walls were the same faded dun as the other rooms, but on the floor was a pale blue rug; on the old metal bed, a raggedy cotton bedspread offered homely comfort. The rooms up here were barely big enough for a double or single bed, a dresser, a chair. At home she could never bring Gadi up to her room, any more than he could bring her to his. When they were younger, they had played in each other’s rooms, but now if they shut the door, their families would ask why. Like every other girl in Tikva, she had been given an implant at puberty to prevent pregnancy, but kids their age were simply not supposed to be interested in sex, and yet every kid was, in a nervous silly way.
    Gadi sat down lotus position on the bed, and she sat the same way facing him. The light from the window turned his fine curly hair into a halo of down. “What do we have to eat?”
    She pulled half a round loaf of rye from her bag. “Rye from the bakery and the usual.” Telapia was a staple of life in the town, part of their meekro - fish farming, growing cukes, tomatoes, peppers, all part of the same self-contained system under the wrap. They had grown up eating fish at least five days a week: the same fish.
    Gadi groaned, but he reached for the food. He was always hungry. Meals in his house were haphazard. He ate at Malkah’s a couple of times a week ― somehow his presence at the dinner table was acceptable, unremarkable. Shira nibbled, keeping him company. From below came the quiver of machinery, a high-frequency whine, voices raised and then lowered. The building was solidly made and gave them sufficient privacy if they were careful. Avram was downstairs in his lab. She could vaguely remember when Sara had worked in the lab with him. Now he had a young assistant, David.
    They cuddled, Gadi putting his long arm around her, their legs tangled in the quilt. “Rabbi Berger didn’t have to talk to you that way,” Gadi said. “You were right, he just didn’t like the way you said it.”
    She shrugged, pressing closer. “He says I have a bad attitude.”
    “Good. Keep it up.”
    “He’s so bony. Do you think he rattles when he runs down the steps?”
    “Am I too skinny?”
    “You