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Show 167 And then the customers were interesting, quite different from those of the bowling alley. When eating at the bowling alley, she had always left her name tag on. She was proud of it, that name tag, proud of being identified as an employee of the drug store. In her own mind, it set her apart from the other customers-shoppers, mostly housewives -as a representative of the working world. The working world, the larger, more exciting world where important things happened. But walking to the coffee shop, she unpinned the name tag and slipped it into her purse. It was not that she felt self-conscious about it-well, perhaps a bit, she confessed to herself-rather she desired an anonymity. Without that name tag, she could be anyone. Anyone at all. She did not stick out in this different world. For although some of the customers here were Christmas shoppers, the local housewives who shopped the center and came here for a special lunch, by and large the clientele was not that of the bowling alley. Some were customers from the exculsive hotel beauty shop, or members of the more fashionable service clubs and organizations which held their monthly meetings in the hotel board rooms. And then there were the tourists, a number of tourists, visitors to the city, although of course nothing like the hoards at the huge hotels over by the airport. But the groups which most interested her were the business men, who stayed here because it was close to the airport-only fifteen minutes in heavy traffic-but was relatively free of the heavy tourist load. There would be groups of them at the coffee shop, in the hallway to the lobby, clustered at the elevators, three or four men together, sometimes a half dozen or more. In their grey or blue or green business |