Going Down Fast Read Online Free PDF Page B

out a budget.
    If she got sick or had an accident, it would be gone. Even a string of bad cavities. No one had to care what became of her. Oh, her parents, in a formal sense. Like gentle gray hamsters they lived in the old flat in Cleveland and ran what had been a drygoods store and was bleakly surviving as a cheap clothing store that still sold a few patterns and yarn and thread, with new fluorescent lighting under the high stamped tin ceiling. During highschool she had worked behind the counter. She could still smell the mothball odor of certain drawers, see the packets of needles on which women dressed in the mode of 1920 sat sewing.
    Her parents knew nothing of her. “My oldest dotter, she teaches college out West, in Chicago. Yes, in college she teaches.” A photo of her stood on the buffet taken at high-school graduation (big, sleepyfaced, shy, oddly inert in the robes), fortunately almost obscured by the many many pictures of her sister’s two boys. Three years younger, Estelle was already the ageless housewife with a strong resemblance to their mother emerging. Estelle now treated her as if she were younger, but seemed so naive she thought of Estelle as stuck forever at eighteen. Estelle and Ben had a house twenty minutes by car from her parents, and there was a great deal of visiting.
    From a distance she loved them, loved to shop with extravagance for birthdays and bring them pretty things they would never buy themselves. Visiting them, she was exhausted after half an evening. A numbing gas that turned her bones to lead seeped from the television. She could never believe how little they knew or cared about her life and the world it was lived in. When her father, who was slumped comfortably with his round shoulders in the roundbacked chair eating decorously a dish of chocolate icecream, remarked that America oughtn’t to let those Chinese reds threaten us, but we ought to go in with a couple of big bombs and show them who they were talking to, she felt in their innocence a streak of evil and sat bemired biting her tongue. While she was married to Asher they had taken an interest, but since their loud reactions to the divorce, little. Except for one, conversation with Estelle.
    She had been helping Estelle put away clothes warm from the dryer, when her sister paused with a folded sheet held to her plump breasts. “So now you’re on your own, where do you live? In a dormitory? Or one of those co-ops like you used to?”
    She had been startled. “No, in an apartment. I have a small apartment.”
    â€œTo yourself? My, isn’t that strange.” Estelle thought about it, still holding the sheet. “It must be kind of nice, coming home and stretching out with all that room to yourself. But aren’t you scared at night?”
    Did Estelle really think she slept alone? With embarrassment more for Estelle than herself she looked into her sister’s large deepset brown eyes that mimicked her own. She hardly felt proud of it, but everyone who knew her at all knew that if she were taken down to Antarctica and marooned, when they came to dig her out she would have evolved a passionate entanglement with a seal, she would be enmeshed in a violent and harrowing triangle of penguins.
    Something must have shown. Estelle, who had married from home right after highschool graduation, stepped closer to peer at her. “Do you date now? Do you go out with boys?”
    Boys. “Yes.” And she had thought she would tell Estelle about Rowley, by way of trying it out. What she had anticipated: Yes, I know he isn’t Jewish, but …
    â€œThat must be … fun.” Estelle was looking at her carefully, trying to read something. “Do you tell them you were married? Do you call yourself Miss or Mrs.? Don’t they wonder where your family is?” Estelle’s blind strong curiosity gave off whiffs of dissatisfaction. “Of course you don’t have a place to ask