way2go! 6, Schulbuch

48 LITERATURE You never got more than one shot because if the bomb missed the target and hit the table – as it nearly always did – it would explode spectacularly in a thousand candy-coated shards, wonderfully startling to the diners, but a call to arms 11 to Mrs. Musgrove, who would come flying up the stairs at about the speed that the M&M had gone down, giving you less than five seconds to scramble out a window and onto a fire escape and away to freedom. Des Moines’ greatest commercial institution was Younker Brothers, the principal department store downtown. Younkers was enormous. It occupied two buildings, separated at ground level by a public alley, making it the only department store I’ve ever known, possibly the only one in existence, where you could be run over while going from menswear to cosmetics. […] Younkers was the most elegant, up-to-the-minute, briskly efficient, satisfyingly urbane place in Iowa. It employed twelve hundred people. It had the state’s first escalators – ‘electric stairways’ they were called in the early days – and first air-conditioning. Everything about it – its silkily swift revolving doors, its gliding stairs, its whispering elevators, each with its own white-gloved operator – seemed designed to pull you in and keep you happily, contentedly consuming. Younkers was so vast and wonderfully rambling 12 that you seldom met anyone who really knew it all. The book department inhabited a shadowy, secretive balcony area, reached by a pokey set of stairs, that made it cozy and club-like – a place known only to aficionados 13 . It was an outstanding book department, but you can meet people who grew up in Des Moines in the 1950s who had no idea that Younkers had a book department.  Underline the adjectives and the adverb-adjective combinations (e.g. briskly efficient ) in extract 4. What function do they have in the text?  What is the fanciest department store you have ever been to? What features would a department store need to have to attract customers in the future? But its sanctum sanctorum 14 was the Tea Room, a place where doting mothers took their daughters for a touch of elegance while shopping. Nothing about the Tea Room remotely interested me until I learned of a ritual that my sister mentioned in passing. It appeared that young visitors were invited to reach into a wooden box containing small gifts, each beautifully wrapped in white tissue and tied with ribbon, and select one to take away as a permanent memento of the occasion. Once my sister passed on to me a present she had acquired and didn’t much care for – a die-cast 15 coach and horses. It was only two and a half inches long, but exquisite in its detailing. The doors opened. The wheels turned. A tiny driver held thin metal reins. The whole thing had obviously been hand-painted by some devoted, underpaid person from the defeated side of the Pacific Ocean. I had never seen, much less owned, such a fine thing before. From time to time after that for years I besought them 16 to take me with them when they went to the Tea Room, but they always responded vaguely that they didn’t like the Tea Room so much anymore or that they had too much shopping to do to stop for lunch. (Only years later did I discover that in fact they went every week; it was one of those secret womanly things moms and daughters did together, like having periods and being fitted for bras.) But finally there came a day when I was perhaps eight or nine that I was shopping downtown with my mom, with my sister not there, and my mother said to me, “Shall we go to the Tea Room?” 11  call to arms: Mobilmachung 12  rambling: weitläufig 13  aficionado: Liebhaber/in; hier: Bücherwurm 14  sanctum sanctorum: das „Allerheiligste“ ( eine Anspielung auf das Marvel-Comic-Universum ) 15  die-cast: aus Zinn gegossen 16  to beseech sb. (besought): jmdn. anflehen 5 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv