I remember they came in as a family -- mom, dad, sister, brother -- and asked Shelley, the clerk (real name: Shifre, but we have to use something that the patrons can pronounce,) if they could leave their books on the counter since the returns cart was full. Each added his or her books to a single towering pile -- to Shelley, the mother’s Angela’s Ashes, the father’s Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, the teenage girl’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, the little boy’s Pokémon books; to me, biography, fiction, nonfiction (for that is where short story collections go -- in the 800s of the Dewey Decimal System,) and children’s paperbacks.
I watched them fan out into the stacks as Shelley checked the books in and then attended to another patron ( patron is library code for "someone who doesn’t work here" or also "an idiot") who had just asked for help. I was already organizing a cart of nonfiction to shelve, so I grabbed the biography and the short story collection and added them as well. Double-checking my organization to be sure I didn’t have a book from the 300s in with the 700s, I gave the cart a shove and headed into the stacks myself.
I almost ran the little boy over on my way into the 500s shelves; he darted out in front of me when he was looking for his mother. I pointed him in the direction of the biographies, where she crouched looking at the latest Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bio -- number fourteen in the library holdings, I want to say, but I can’t quite remember. At any rate, he found her and immediately began to plead to be allowed on a kids’ computer to play Blue’s Clues ABCs. She gave permission.
I reshelved the Year’s Best Science Fiction and noticed that there was already a vacancy in the shelf where the preceding year’s would go. Apparently the teenager had beaten me there. I shoved all the books together to close the gap, moved the bookend closer in, and took my now-empty cart back to the desk for a refill.
Shelving nonfiction is harder work than most people realize. After one looks at the numbers on the spines of one’s books long enough, they start to run together. Drivers have road nightmares, where they close their eyes and all they see is a stretch of desolate road; library pages have call number nightmares. So after a nonfiction cart, I usually need something mindless to give my eyes and mind a rest. This is when I shelve paperbacks.
I had already done the general fiction, sci-fi, nonfiction, and mystery paperbacks, which left me with my least favorite genre of all: the paperback romances. I hate these things. Their cover art always embarrasses me -- I’ve never been able to draw the distinction between some of these covers and softcore porn -- and the titles are even worse: today’s collection of literary masterpieces offered The Boss’s Baby, Donovan’s Bed, and Four Men and a Lady. I showed Shelley that last one -- one of our traditions is the Bad Romance Novel Title of the Day. There is never a shortage of candidates.
The sick thing is that these pieces of literary dung are the most circulated books the library has to offer, so they stack up quickly and someone has to reshelve them. So I quickly grouped the A’s together, the B’s together, and so on while I chatted with Shelley, who was bent over a stack of date-due cards, stamping a date three weeks from today on them, the Star of David on her necklace dangling and glimmering in the fluorescent light.
Upon pushing the cart out into the flow of library traffic, I once again nearly collided with someone, this time the father. He was carrying three Janet Evanovich mystery novels, the first three: One for the Money, Two for the Dough, and Three to Get Deadly, but I made him drop one in surprise when he stepped out of the aisle to see me bearing down on him.
As I crammed the M’s into the revolving shelves, I noticed the little boy again, engrossed in his computer game, and his sister sitting nearby, chatting on Yahoo!, her elbow resting possessively on two David Eddings books and the science fiction tome.
Then things start to get ugly. It seems that the father doesn’t want the daughter chatting on Yahoo!. Their "discussion" of the matter is held in fierce whispers, most of which I block out as not worth hearing. I know how those arguments go anyway; I’ve had them enough with my own father, not necessarily about Yahoo! Chat, but about enough other things to know.
Meanwhile, the little boy shuffles off into his native section of the library. Five minutes later, as my cart is approaching empty, there’s another whispered ruckus -- apparently he has caused a scene of destruction there and his mother has caught him at it. I swear under my breath, knowing that ultimately I will be the lucky one to clean it up, but when I venture back there with a cart of children’s paperbacks, the place is spotless. Below the threshold of even my own hearing, I murmur that all parents should be so good to library employees.
Often they’re not, and their children leave cairns of books taken in chunks from the shelves at random places throughout the section, like they’re making their own little Stonehenge. They also like to hide wooden puzzle pieces -- I was on my hands and knees once looking for Snuffleupagus’s face in the Sesame Street puzzle. It turned up in one of the board book bins, I recall as I add Kia Tanisha Drives Her Car to one of these same blue plastic tubs.
By the time I return this empty cart to the desk and start organizing a cartful of hardback fiction, the daughter has flounced outside, only stopping to check out her books because Shelley called her back. The little boy is now happily sitting at the front table, flipping through a Rugrats easy reader while his parents are the ones now engaging in an argument -- apparently the father thinks the mother’s chosen Jackie O bio is trashy. (I’m inclined to agree with his assessment of the book’s literary merit, but unlike him, I realize that she could be reading Four Men and a Lady. )
Their son decides to toddle up to the desk on his own and present his mangled library card to Shelley. It won’t scan and she has to issue him a new one, but he does get his books checked out. He wanders in the direction of the door before his mother spots him, snatches him up, slams her book onto the Formica counter, produces her card from her black leather purse, then storms out with tome and son.
The father follows wearily, setting his books silently onto the counter, soundlessly jerking his card from his wallet, not even responding when Shelley tells him the books are due on the 27th of November. He leaves then and I finish with the hardback fiction cart, but not before Shelley leans over and says to me, "I guess that bit about the family that reads together, stays together, is a crock."
Back to Stuff I Wrote.
© Cynthia 2002.