Miss Edith Wants To Tell You: This is a Nice Book.

Some time ago, I noted that I was reading Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out. I was enjoying it, you may recall.

I’ve finally finished reading it – it became my bedtime reading because, I found, I was enjoying it so much that the best way for me to appreciate it was to read it in very small installments, a tiny bit at each bedtime. I won’t say that I’m in love with Tepper, the way I have fallen in love with other books over the years, but I really did enjoy it. Trillin’s got a tone, a – bear with me here, there’s a reason I’m using this phrase – a nice, light tone, wry, but realistic – that I found very soothing at bedtime, and occasionally I chortled aloud as I read, prompting Notarius to ask, “What?”

One such segment came early in the book, on page 32. Tepper is sitting in his parked car outside of Russ & Daughters, which Trillin fans know is a place that the author has a kind of obsession with. This is where you go to buy your lox, your whitefish, and things like that. An appetizing store.

So Tepper’s sitting in his car outside Russ & Daughters and the counterman from the shop comes outside to see if Tepper needs help or something. The counterman’s concerned that Tepper maybe can’t get out of the car for some reason, that something might be wrong. Tepper assures him that everything’s fine, he’s just sitting in the car, and the two fall into conversation. I love Trillin when he does stuff like this. I just love it:

Finally, the counterman said, “You know, it can get pretty irritating with some of those customers.”
“I’ll bet,” Tepper said.
“They’ll say, ‘Gimme a nice whitefish.’ So I’ll say, ‘One whitefish, coming right up.’ Cheerful. Pleasant. And they’ll say, ‘A nice whitefish.’ Can you imagine? This happens every Sunday at least once. I could prevent it, of course. I could head it off. You know how I could prevent it…”
“Well,” Tepper said, “I suppose –“
“Of course! I could just repeat after them exactly: ‘A nice whitefish.’ But I won’t. I won’t give them the satisfaction. What I really feel like saying when they correct me – when I say, ‘One whitefish, coming up,’ and they say, ‘A nice whitefish,’ – is, ‘Oh? Well, I’m glad you said that, because I wasn’t going to get you a nice whitefish. If you hadn’t said that, I would have looked for a whitefish that’s been sitting there since last Tish b’Ov – an old, greasy, fershtunkeneh whitefish. Because that’s what we serve here mostly. That’s out specialty. That’s how we’ve managed to stay in business all these years. That’s why the Russ family is synonymous with quality and integrity in this city for maybe seventy-five years – because they sell their steady customers rotten, stinking whitefish. That’s why the boss gets up at four in the morning to go to the suppliers, so he can get the fershtunkene whitefish before his competitors. Otherwise, if he slept until a civilized hour, as he maybe deserves by now, he might get stuck with nice whitefish.”


I loved this segment. It captured perfectly the way a certain type of person speaks. Someone with a Jewish, urban background; someone who’s been in the service industry a long time. Someone who takes pride in what they do and is mortally insulted by some pinhead’s unconcerned dissing of their profession. Having worked in retail for so long, I understood how the counterman felt. And I know – I know – that I use the word “nice” in this way sometimes. What slayed me was that… well, it’s like the word “nice” becomes Yiddish, in this context. Everyone uses the word but somehow it takes on an extra layer of depth when it’s used by alter cockers and demanding ladies standing on line in a store somewhere. The word becomes different, somehow.
It’s sometimes also used to convey the idea that one is taking pleasure in something beyond what one would expect. “Nice” can be used to modify or emphasize words unexpectedly, in a way that doesn’t sound right if you take the phrase at face value, but which makes total sense if you speak this weird language – which I want to call a Jewish urban language, but I’m not entirely sure that that’s fair. It might just be a generational thing. But I suspect that those of us who were raised in families where people used the word “nice” this way will carry it on to future generations. My niece, for example, who’s a mere child, and who seems to lean on “like” a lot more than “nice,” is a child who, someday, may be an adult who stands in a deli and asks the counterman imperiously for a nice whitefish. If she eats whitefish, which she might not. I suspect she’s a kid who’ll only go for belly lox and call it a day.

Later in Tepper, our hero falls into conversation with another person who visits Tepper in his parked car. They discuss how the visitor’s wife, an aspiring writer, writes things that the visitor finds completely mystifying. He just doesn’t get the stuff. He eventually admits that she’s really great at one thing in particular, which is describing serpents. He goes on for a while, saying how great the serpents are, even if the rest of the writing is just gobbledygook to him. Tepper considers this (I could just see him nodding his head thoughtfully) and comments:

“I like seeing a nice serpent now and then.”

A nice serpent. Man. I just about died.

Niceness, as a quality in people, may be overrated, but Miss Edith has to admit, there really is nothing like a nice serpent now and then.

Incidentally, one of my initial pleasures in reading Tepper Isn’t Going Out was reading the descriptions of how sales leads were generated by Tepper’s company, which is called something like Worldwide Lists. These little asides, which Trillin tosses throughout the book bit by bit, kind of like how in a salad you occasionally get a mouthful with a particularly tasty tidbit – a candied walnut, or a bit of pear, or whatever floats your boat – are definitely one of the reasons this book is a small joy. I don’t know if everyone would find this stuff entertaining, but god knows I did. In conclusion, I just want to thank Calvin Trillin for Tepper Isn’t Going Out; it was a palate-cleanser for me, a nice read.