Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons

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