"I don't know what else you can expect, if you go around looking like that," he said.
"I'm sorry...." I started again.
"And you should be," he said sternly. "Anybody who walks into a place like this in the middle of a day like this looking the way you do has got to expect to get stared at a little."
The thing is, I wasn't used to the language; not used enough. I could communicate all right, and even understand some jokes, and I knew the spoken language, not some formal unusable version, because I learned it mostly watching those shows on the television screen. But I got confused this time, because "looking" means two different things, active and passive, and I was thinking about how I'd been looking at him, and....
That was my lucky day. I didn't want him to be angry at me, and the way I saw it, he was perfectly justified in scolding me, which is what I thought he was doing. But I knew he wasn't really angry; I'd have felt it if he was. So I said, "You're right. It was very rude of me, and I don't blame you for being annoyed. I won't do it any more."
He started laughing, and this time I knew it was friendly. Like I said, that was my lucky day; he thought I was being witty. And, from what he's told me since, I guess he realized then that I felt friendly too, because before that he'd just been bluffing it out, not knowing how to get to know me, and afraid I'd be sore at him, just for talking to me!
Which goes to show that sometimes you're better off not being too familiar with the local customs.
The trouble was there were too many things I didn't know, too many small ways to trip myself up. Things they couldn't have foreseen, or if they did, couldn't have done much about. All it took was a little caution and a lot of alertness, plus one big important item: staying in the background—not getting to know any one person too well—not giving any single individual a chance to observe too much about me.
But Larry didn't mean to let me do that. And ... I didn't want him to.