DC By the Book

Excerpt: Driving north of Connecticut Avenue, past the shops in Chevy Chase, DC, Witchita Hills sat on an actual hill, a cluster of houses gathered close together on small plots of land. A subdivision really with individual houses, more accidental in design than planned, and in the last year of Richard Nixon’s presidency with Watergate the most conspicuous of Washington monuments, Witchita Hills was self-consciously democratic and middle-class, a look of studied poverty about the place suggesting or so it was assumed among the residents, a new intellectual freedom with responsibility born of the sixties.

Excerpt: She drove all the way south on Connecticut Avenue until it became 17th Street and intersected with Constitution Avenue, turning left on Constitution past he Washington Monument, the Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art – past the Capitol where her father had worked before he died – she had not even brought the children downtown to see the city of Washington, to them their grandfather worked at the very center of it where north and sought and east and west meet at the Capitol, at the heart of the heart of the known world. She turned right on 1st Street, past the Supreme Court, left on East Capitol, the Library of Congress to the right, the Folger Shakespeare Library, wandering through the back streets of Capitol Hill to a right on 4th Street, and again on A Street- two blocks to 426 A Street, S.E., a blue clapboard, three stories with a turret.

Excerpt: I’m going to the library with my friend Vivienne, was the story she told Lucy when she called from the public telephone at school. I may be home a little late. When the clock over the Information desk at the Chevy Chase Library got to five, Maggie packed up her things, crossed Connecticut Avenue, and headed up McKinley to Witchita Hills, taking the back way along Columbus, turning left just above the Mallorys’ house, through their yard to the back door, where Zee was in her jacket ready to leave.