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Then we check out that we on Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy.

“This is the place,” Miss Moore say, presenting it to us in the voice she uses at the museum. “Let's look in the windows before we go in.”

These lines describe the children's cab arriving at FAO Schwarz, a famous toy store in midtown Manhattan. The kids misbehave and yell at the cab driver as they exit his car so that when they turn around to encounter Fifth Avenue, the immediate difference between where they were and where they are now silences them. The people are dressed up in fancy clothes, which seems odd to the kids, demonstrating that people in their neighborhood rarely get dressed up, and only for special occasions—certainly not in something as impractical as a fur coat in the summer heat. Miss Moore builds up the kids' anticipation of the store by speaking about it in a reverent voice and telling the kids to look through the windows before going in. By having them look through the windows first, Miss Moore immediately frames the children as outsiders looking in.

And it’s like the time me and Sugar crashed into the Catholic church on a dare. But once we got in there and everything so hushed and holy and the candles and the bowin and the handkerchiefs on all the drooping heads, I just couldn’t go through with the plan.

This quote comes when the kids all squeeze through the door of the toy store for the first time. Sylvia compares it to a moment in her past when she couldn't go through with a dare in a church because the sacredness of the environment intimidated her. This comparison demonstrates that Sylvia has a similar feeling about the toy store: it is a place where she feels compelled to alter her behavior. The quote also suggests that the store has an almost religious seriousness that she did not expect from a toy store.

We all walkin on tiptoe and hardly touchin the games and puzzles and things…Then me and Sugar bump smack into each other, so busy gazing at the toys, ’specially the sailboat. But we don’t laugh and go into our fat-lady bump-stomach routine.

This description of how the children walk through the toy store demonstrates how out of place they feel in the foreign landscape of Fifth Avenue. The children don't touch the toys because they know they cannot begin to afford them, though they want to play with the toys and are mesmerized by the idea of such expensive things. Sylvia and Sugar do not make their usual jokes when they run into each other because this setting is so much different from what they are used to. Here Bambara illustrates how our surroundings can dictate our behavior.

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