Going Down Fast Read Online Free PDF Page A

you?”
    â€œJust called … to find out how you are … and things.” Limping.
    â€œYes, I’m just dressing to go to registration.”
    â€œYou don’t feel like having lunch then?” His voice raveled into silence so that she could not be sure he had finished.
    She made excuses, preoccupied with a chill in her scalp. He is interested in me. Don’t be absurd. Yes he is. Discourage him quick.
    Registration was hectic and boring and she was glad of it. She sat in the gym riffling the catalogue, dividing and stamping forms and yawning, yawning. Beside her worked an older man and one her age who talked only to each other. The associate professor did not approve of females and the younger man was a PhD bucking for tenure. She was happy to be ignored, for she feared if anyone smiled warmly or asked how she were, she would burst into selfpitying bloom.
    An old student came to register, a paperclip bowed and thin boy with blotched shy face under tumbled hair. She loved him and had spent hours tutoring him in the drafty room she and the other tweeny teachers shared, and she wanted to whisper, Freddy, I am so sad. She had never told him anything that had happened since she was ten. Long mutterings among stacks of graded test papers, books loaned and returned, papers passionate as love letters on Caste vs. Class as Concepts in Social Stratification, Draft Dodgers or Culture Heroes: a Survey of Student Attitudes toward CO’s. She always had students she granted hours before or after classes. Now she would feel less neutered in that exchange.
    Although she did not have her PhD she was being rewarded with a small class in the family this fall. If a subject bored her, she maundered, but if she were interested she could find rapport with the class like a handle hidden under the desk and bear down. Not that she did not hate the textbooks. She had dropped out of graduate school because sociology seemed such a lot of scholastic, pseudoscientific obfuscation. The kids went into sociology because they had a sense of something wrong, a sense of their society pushing on and warping people and they wanted to understand it and change it. But their professors were working for the Department of Defense or market research firms or IT&T or General Dynamics. When she had been a student at Inland with the University still trying through homeowners associations to keep its neighborhood white and with bopping gangs fighting in the streets, there had been no course in the department which confronted racism. There had been, however, professors working on pilot counterinsurgency projects for penetrating black militant groups and putting down the expected riots.
    She was a popular teacher and the other teachers patronized her for that. She was confused herself. She did not want her students to die slowly or at once. They streamed through, always too many to deal with, and if she selected a few to teach, that was in spite of her job, not through it. If she had anything to teach them, it was the opposite of the course, and never as authority-surrogate.
    She managed to pass the day without speaking of herself, without turning her face to anyone. How many days would go that way? She felt chilled traveling home on the El looking into ashy backyards of the Black Belt. Her building was integrated: one prune-faced spinster who had come back to school for an MA in education. Her landlady celebrated her liberality by ending repairs and telling blacks who applied that she had Done Her Bit. Even so she felt martyred to her principles, brought on by a flunking medical student who drank a container of insecticide in his room.
    But the roaches seemed not to mind integration. They flourished and filled the walls. Chicago roaches were large shiny waterbeetles that could wear the eastern cockroaches for shoes. She found them even in the refrigerator. No one grew used to them, but anyone could learn to live with them. Like other things,