“Where’s the ethnic section?” the couple demanded. They had suddenly appeared in my path as I zoomed past General Metaphysics in pursuit of a ringing phone.
“The… ethnic?” I asked.
“Ethnic,” they responded, stretching out the “th” as if they were lisping in Parseltongue. “You know. Eye-talian.”
“OK,” I said. “Do you want travel for Italy, the Italian language, the art.”
“The coozin,” they said. I looked at them blankly. Someone’s cousin? “The coozin,” they repeated. “The cooking.”
Ah. That I could do. I led them to the Italian cooking shelf, at the start of Food and Cooking, placed, in a moment of uncharacteristic logic, near the cafe.
They looked at the books on the shelf and poked at them with outstretched fingers, not actually taking any down or opening them.
“Magazines,” they said (or almost said — I had gotten sufficiently accustomed to their accent that I knew that this was what they meant when they said “Maxuns”). ‘Gonna be cheaper.”
I stepped over to the magazine rack and looked through the Cooking magazines. We didn’t have any specifically about Italian cuisine, but one of the healthier-looking magazines (Clean Living?) had a cover story on “Italian Foods You Can Prepare Without Much Fat,” or something like that. I pulled it out and brought it to them.
One of them took it, looked at the front and back, and jabbed at it with an index finger that wore an ornate ring. “There. Good. We’re done. Appreciate it.”
I’ve learned that “I appreciate it,” when said by a customer to a bookseller, almost always means, “I have no more use for you. Go away.” I got away.
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