Downtown (6 page)

The crowd was mostly young, half-obscured by clouds of cigarette and other smoke and steam from many cups of coffee, and dressed in plastic, beads, boots, fishnet, sunglasses, flips and bobs, and a great deal of skin. The men’s hair was, in many cases, longer than that of the women and often more lovingly coifed, and there was a thick frosting of Max Factor on every female mouth in the place. The room was full of eyes drooping under the weight of caterpillars like Rachel’s, and there were enough clunky, square-toed boots to stomp an invading army to death. Rachel shed her coat and threw it over the back of our booth, revealing an Aline dress in what appeared to be shiny white vinyl, with cutouts that showed a coy sliver of her belly button and more than a slice of the top of her freckled breasts. When she sat down it climbed so far up her white, crosshatched thighs that I instinctively averted my eyes. I blushed, hating the treacherous tide of heat in my face. It was another legacy from my mother, that involuntary pink suffusion from chest to hairline, and I still do it

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today, even though there is little now that startles me and almost nothing that embarrasses me.

“Well, aren’t you going to compliment me on my new dress?” Rachel grinned, lighting a Salem and looking around the room to see who was watching her. Everybody was.

“It’s stunning,” I said truthfully. “Courreges? I’m going to try some of his, but I thought I’d wait till I got up here.

There’s bound to be a better selection than we get at home.”

“God, no, but it is a good knockoff, isn’t it?” she said, drawing in smoke and letting it drift from her nostrils in twin plumes. “If you’re serious, I’ll show you where to get some neat stuff really cheap, but somehow I don’t think you are.

You’re blushing, you know.”

I gave up trying to pretend that I was merely waiting for a wider selection of Courreges and Quant to pick up a few things. She had a shrewd eye and probably a sharp, banal little mind behind the shutter-lashed eyes. I was maybe six years her senior, but she was decades, a lifetime older than me. I felt younger and rawer by years, provincial and diminished. And I was angry that I cared. She and this group of outrageously winged young butterflies jostling and preening in the IHOP might be far more outwardly sophisticated than I, but I was the new senior editor of
Downtown
magazine, and I willing to bet that there was not a college degree or the aspiration toward one in this entire group. I would hold on to that.

“Actually, I’m not,” I said. I was not going to play games with Rachel Vaughn. “I don’t own a miniskirt; at my old school the nuns make you kneel, and if your skirt doesn’t brush the floor they send you home to change. And miniskirts aren’t even allowed in Vatican City. We don’t see them in Corkie, except on TV. It’s no great loss. You need to be long and skinny, like Twiggy. My

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 40

brothers are always telling me I’d look like a beachball in one.”

“Your brothers are jerks,” she said. “You have a knockout little figure, even if it isn’t right for this stuff. Of course, that suit doesn’t do anything for you. Jesus, I know that suit.

There’s one in the back of mine and every other good Catholic girl’s closet in the country. They ought to just go on and issue them at Confirmation. I put mine in the poor box when I first came to Our Lady of the Eternal Virgins. I’ve got a closet full of these, but I lock it every morning when I leave, and I always wear my raincoat. London Fog is Aone, Pope-approved. Hang on to yours, and lock your closets. Sister Mary James and Sister Clementia both snoop.”

“What are they going to do, throw us out because of our clothes?” I said. “It’s not a school. There’s nothing about clothes in that astonishing little rule pamphlet. We’re all adult women.”

“Not in their eyes. To them we’re lambs who just can’t wait to go out and get shorn, or worse. And no, they can’t throw you out over what you wear, but if they disapprove they can poke and pry and wait until they find something they can use. They’ve done it to a couple of girls since I’ve been here. I can’t wait to get my own apartment.”

“Why do you stay?”

“Are you kidding? It’s the cheapest place in town. That’s the only reason anybody stays. The minute you have enough money you go to Colonial Homes.”

“Where’s that?”

“Out toward Buckhead. It’s this apartment complex where all the swingers live. It’s where you go to meet the Buckhead guys—the lawyers and stockbrokers and bankers. My friend Joyce moved out there and she says 41 / DOWNTOWN

there’s sports car in every garage and a party every night.

They’ve got a pool, and after work and on the weekends the guys go from door to door to get drinks and meet the new girls. And a lot of the girls grew up in Buckhead, so they’ve got a lot of money—”

“What is this Buckhead business?” I said.

“You really don’t know anything, do you?” Rachel said, looking around the IHOP with bright, avian eyes. “It’s where the rich people live. You ought to see some of those houses; they’re humongous. And some of them are real old. There’s one that they’ve made into this fancy country club that’s almost a hundred years old. Joyce—she’s a cocktail waitress and a dancer—she worked this party out there that was like a go-go club, you know, and she said all the faucets in the bathrooms are gold. When I’m living at Colonial Homes I’m not going out with anybody except guys who belong to that club. You ought to see Buckhead. We’ll go out there next weekend, if you want to. The Twenty-three Oglethorpe bus goes through there.”

Old? Almost a hundred years? I thought of the mellow stucco row houses off the squares in Savannah, gentled by the quiet centuries that had drifted over them, and the great white houses out by the river, older by decades than that. I was not beguiled by the spell of years as were many Savan-nians—no one in Corkie was—and indeed, I was in full flight from it. But just for a moment the dark resonance of the thick-piled years called after me, all these miles away. Back there, you might fall endlessly down through the centuries and not hit bottom; here, you sensed hard red clay just beneath the surface of time. I did not miss the endlessness, but I was sharply aware of the clay.

“I think Twenty-three Oglethorpe is the bus I take to work,”

I said. “I’ve got it written down somewhere…. I ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 42

thought you said you already had a boyfriend, who worked for that automobile thing…Carl?”

“Carl is fine for the Church’s Home,” Rachel grinned.

“You’ve gotta have some fun, after all. But when I hit Colonial Homes it’s good-bye Carl, hello Buckhead. And let the good times roll.”

“I hope you haven’t told Carl that.”

“I’m not a fool. Carl’s going to think he’s the greatest thing in shoe leather until he’s on the way out the door. But listen, it’s all a game. He knows. He’d bounce me out on the sidewalk so fast my head would spin if he got something better.

It’s just the way you do things up here. You gotta move fast and travel light.”

I said nothing, thinking that if this was the way the game was played in Atlanta, I would never get the hang of it.

Nothing here was like it had been back home. My clothes were wrong, my expectations unfounded, the experiences of my entire lifetime totally alien.

But then I thought, well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To learn how to move fast and travel light? So I’ll learn. I can learn anything this silly child can.

And when Rachel said, “Let’s cruise around a little and see what we can scare up,” I said, “Fine,” and got up behind her, and took a deep breath and squared my shoulders under my all-wrong navy blue coat and followed her into the crowd.

I can remember few more uncomfortable journeys in my life. Rachel seemed to know many of the brightly plumed young in the IHOP, and reached out to lay a hand on this shoulder and that; tossed back the red hair, now unbound and kinking furiously on her shoulders; laughed and blew smoke and dodged away from grasping hands. But she never stopped, and behind her, I plowed on, a stiff smile pasted on my mouth, feeling with every step the four or five all-wrong extra inches of

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cloth around my knees, feeling flat, assessing eyes on me, hearing barely muffled laughter that I did not doubt was aimed at me. When Rachel finally stopped beside a booth where two pasty-faced, wolfish young men in lank, collar-brushing hair and scuffed ankle boots lolled amid overflowing ashtrays, I said lightly, “Ladies room,” and found it and ducked gratefully inside. It was cramped and filthy, but blessedly empty, and I drew a deep breath and let it out, and then ran cold water into a basin and splashed my burning face repeatedly.

Some minutes later Rachel came in. Her face was flushed and her eyes were very bright. She opened her shoulder bag and fished in it for makeup, and began brushing brick-red blush on her cheeks and applying a thick icing of chalky lipstick to her mouth. She was excited; I could smell the musk of her body through the sharp-sweet perfume she wore.

“Bingo,” she said. “We’re invited to a party. Those two guys say there’s a great one going on over on Lindbergh; there’s some kicky apartments over there, and they want us to go with them. They’ve got a car, and they’ll bring it around and pick us up. The dark one, Earl, thinks you’re cute. He wants you to be his date.”

“Rachel, I really don’t think—”

“Come on. He’s older than he looks; he has a good job at Lockheed. And there’s nothing else to do but sit around Our Lady and wash out pantyhose. It’s dead on Sunday. Here’s your chance to meet some swingers and get to know the party scene. Here, let me poof some of this on you, and do up your eyes a little….”

She dug deeper into the purse and it spilled its contents over the counter. A small cardboard wheel tumbled out. Tiny pills were embedded in it. About half were gone. I stared as if an asp had crawled out of her handbag. I knew as surely as I knew anything, as surely

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 44

as I had known the condom, that they were birth control pills. I felt my chest and cheeks flame, and snapped my eyes to my own reflection in the mirror, busying myself with fluffing my hair. I wanted to say something hip and funny, but I could think of nothing. Embarrassment almost strangled me.

She said nothing for a long moment. Then she swept the pills back into her purse and clicked it shut. I expected her to make a wisecrack, but she said, sullenly, “I suppose you think I’m going straight to hell, don’t you?”

“No, I—”

“Well, I don’t give a shit what you or anybody else thinks.

I’m up here to swing for a change, to have a little fun before I get old and ugly and stuck with a million screaming brats, and nobody, not you or the Church or anybody else, is going to tell me how to live my life. Come or don’t come, I don’t care. But don’t stick up your nose at the way I do things.”

I did not reply. She went to the door, opened it, and looked back.

“Coming?”

I shook my head.

“I really thought you were different,” she said, and went out of the door and closed it. Through it, I heard: “You can make the last Mass at Saint Joseph’s if you hurry.”

I stayed there for a while, looking at myself in the mirror, my heart finally slowing its pounding. And then I put on my raincoat and walked through the crowd out onto Peachtree Street. Rachel and the two young men were nowhere in sight.

The rain had stopped, but last night’s heavy fog had come down again. I set off through it back the way we had come, stepping over the puddles and the litter, feeling more sharply than ever the rawness through my thin coat. I felt shamed, chastened, humiliated by

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my shock at the pills and her scorn at my prissy naiveté; disoriented, near to tears, and lonelier than I had ever been in my life. Loneliness was an emotion almost entirely alien to Corkie; we all lived, simply, too packed together for loneliness. I almost did not know what the emptiness was.

I had meant to find my way over to Saint Joseph’s, but suddenly I wanted, instead of dimness and stale incense and the mustiness of a dingy winter church, lights and chatter and the warm, buttery smell of popcorn. When I passed back by the little theater, I went in. Two hours later I came back out into the lowering darkness as one pulling exhaustedly for the surface of dark water, nearly drowned in somberness and obliqueness and Bergman’s enigmatic flickering, doom-charged images. I could not have made a worse choice, on this dark Sunday, to show me the Atlanta I had come in search of.

Walking the last empty block toward Fourteenth Street, watching the pale streetlights making shallow pools in the foggy emptiness, my shoulders felt weighted, literally burdened with the great freight of wrongness. Why had I thought it would be special, this upstart young city so far to the north of everything I knew? Why had I known so surely that I was coming to Camelot? I could not remember. I had only been to Atlanta twice before: once to a Beta Club Convention when I was in the eleventh grade at Saint Zita’s, when I and another girl had slept in the same room with the chaperoning nun and never left the anonymous downtown hotel; and once to visit my father’s younger brother Gerald in his little house in Kirkwood, when I was perhaps nine.

We had only stayed two nights before my father and my uncle got into a fight over some fancied slight to Ireland and we left and drove back to Savannah. I had thought of Atlanta, before I came here this time, as a place much ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 46

like Corkie, except that it had yards and did not smell of ships and shrimp and sulphur and the sea. Indeed, except for a trip to Ponce de Leon Park to see the Atlanta Crackers play and one to the great, dark brick Sears Roebuck on Ponce de Leon, I had done nothing here that we did not do at home in Corkie.

But it was different; somehow I had always known that it was. It was Camelot, the Camelot of the wonderful stage play, the movie. Splendor, glamour, it was all here. If I could only find the key.

In that dark twilight, I knew for the first time that perhaps I would not.

When I got back to Our Lady, I went straight to the dining room, for I felt a great, whistling hollowness inside, and thought that part of it, at least, might be hunger. But the room was bare and dark. Sister Mary James, putting her head out of her quarters, told me that there was no dinner served on Sunday nights.