Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

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

    45 / DOWNTOWN
    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