Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online Page A

DOWNTOWN
    river, and the thick, dank, shrimpy smell of the river itself; smelled sweat and linseed oil and iron fittings heating in the sun and exotic spices from who knew where in the world, that was the breath of the docks. I tasted on my lips the salt of the sea and the sweet, fetid aftertaste of the sulphurous water and the nectar of sun-ripened peaches from roadside stands out toward Tybee Island. I felt the dark, amniotic water of the August shallows of the ocean in my own blood; felt the soft, blood-warm rain of summer under the icy needles of the rain I ran through; felt as well as saw the strange, silken spring light that seemed to rise from the greening marshes.
    Savannah…
    “Look out!” Rachel cried, giving a little hop, and I looked down and saw a used condom lying on the sidewalk almost directly beneath my blue pumps, and sprang over it like a startled rabbit. When I came down I landed in a puddle, and felt the filthy water spatter my pale new stockings.
    “Somebody must have had an awfully good time last night,” Rachel laughed. I could not answer her. My cheeks flamed and my voice seemed to have died in my throat. I had never seen a condom before, used or otherwise. My brothers and father had conspired to keep me mindlessly chaste all my life. I could not have said how I know that that was what I had seen, but I did know.
    We fetched up in front of a little Permastone chalet blazing light and full of people, its windows frosted over with their breath and the warmth inside.
    “Here’s the IHOP,” Rachel said. “Is this okay, or is there any place else you’d rather go?”
    “I’d sort of like to go down to Tight Squeeze,” I said. “We drove through it last night, and I could see it from my window till all hours. It looked…I loved the way it looked. I’d love to really see it—”

    ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 38
    “You just did,” she said. “That was Tight Squeeze right about where the guy left his calling card on the sidewalk.
    We were the only living souls in it. Take it from me, you’d rather see Tight Squeeze on a nice sunny day, or a warm spring night. It’s the pits on Sundays and in bad weather.”
    I felt like a small child who had just been told about Santa Claus. In silence I followed Rachel into the International House of Pancakes. I still go to IHOPs sometime, when I happen upon one. It was the first place I ever went in Atlanta beside the Church’s Home for Girls, my first journey out, and it still makes the best potato pancakes with sour cream I have ever eaten. And I have eaten them everywhere, from the Russian Tea Room to neighborhood delis in half a dozen countries.
    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

    39 / DOWNTOWN
    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