Free Going Down Fast by Marge Piercy Page A

door. He emerged pale from anger.
    He drove up to the near North Side and then slowly along a street of large wellkept apartment houses, searching an address. Parked.
    â€œWhat are we here for?”
    â€œJustice.”
    She looked at him narrowly. “Who lives here, chief?”
    â€œWho do you think?”
    â€œWhy didn’t you take me home first? Why drag me along at all? Okay, march in.”
    â€œCan’t. Got to wait for Joye to come out.”
    â€œYou could have left me in the Loop, idiot. I’m in the way.”
    â€œDon’t be funny. Joye’s seeing some dentist, I just found out.” He drummed on the wheel. “Haven’t I told you I’m a madman?”
    Joye did not appear, with or without his child.
    Sunday: After a late brunch of waffles Leon said, “Let’s go see Vera.”
    She said hopefully, “She’s a strange girl … isn’t she?” But he would not comment.
    Snow was falling lightly. The wind skimmed the flakes along the ground and heaped them against curbs and stoops and hedges, except where they caught like ashes in the grass. Church-goers in new-looking winter coats were pouring out of pumpkin-colored St. Thomas. On Vera’s street the Nation of Islam—women stately in white habits and men in dark suits—were chatting in clumps outside the yellow brick mosque.
    The worn name on Vera’s building advised that it had been Granada Courts. They buzzed JAMESON and after a long pause she buzzed back. The doorlock was broken anyhow. The lobby was vast with rough plaster walls and Moorish archways. In the weedy court stood the remains of an ashtray shaped fountain surmounted by half a cupidon. They climbed one of a maze of stairways. Vera was standing just outside her door, peering blankly down. Barefoot, she wore slacks and a deep blue sweater above which her faced burned with a dark jarring intensity.
    Anna had a foretaste of discomfort. She was intensely sure that Leon hardly knew Vera and contrary to what she had thought, was barging in unexpected and maybe unwelcome. By this time Leon had followed Vera. Testily she went after. He must be interested in Vera to come charging over here—but why drag her along?
    Vera lived in a large light room with a corner kitchenette and a skyfilled view of apartmenthouse roofs and the bare twiggy summits of trees. Anna felt even more an intruder when she saw the boy sprawled in selfconscious but stubborn languor on the bed. Cheese, French bread, dairy orange juice and butter lay on a table before the windows, while a percolator steamed on the hotplate.
    Vera offered the food and coffee, sitting primly on the bed’s edge. Leon sat in an armchair, she in a highbacked wicker rockingchair. She had a sense of being watched, and then she noticed the masks on the wall. “Those are your work?”
    â€œOf course,” the boy answered for her. “Who else would make such crazy things?” He poked Vera hard. “Introduce me, stupid.”
    She told them that he was Paul: just that monosyllable. A jealous lover, this black wedgewood girl. Anna smiled. The boy was rangy, with a slight but good build, skin a few shades lighter than Vera, and a highbrowed sensitive unfinished face. Large awake eyes. He was still arranged in what must be meant to represent a relaxed sprawl, but finally he bounded up to help himself to bread and cheese. In his movements a natural grace fought it out with stiff selfconsciousness.
    â€œAren’t they gorgeous fetishes?” He waved at the bizarre masks put together of scraps of corduroy, satin, velvet, denim, bottle caps and corks, a bit of a pencil, a salvaged cigar butt, some wire. “She’s been making them since she was seven.” He was talking to them, yet half turned away. He lifted one from its hook and swung on them, spangled leer and long green satin nose with frayed rope ends for moustache and brows of steelwool. For just a