Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online Page B

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

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    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