return room, friday, summer shift

Early morning, the stained glass window in the north wall of Wilson library discolors beautifully a construction crane uplifting a handful of men in mismatched hard hats. They scrub seriously with spare rags the permanent spots, as if stained glass were a curable cold and not a fixed condition. Their furrowed brows, their tongues curled between their lips, their neon-taped shirts all freckle the window, which resembles a kaleidoscope wavering between arrangements. A little later, near the central bathroom, a worker glimpses the inside of a forbidden maintenance closet, with its rainbow of rags hanging to dry on the wall and the startled face of the janitor who always, no matter the time, smells of a recently smoked cigarette.


Just before lunch and just outside the elevator, the president's wife, who coincidentally resembles another more famous president's wife, stands slightly stooped over the slightly too-small desk of a coworker's crowded office, her skinny leg made shapely by the lift of a leather pump, key-lime green to match the key-lime suit and skirt she wears at least once a month, which certain library employees snidely refer to as her 'leprechaun suit.' She is like a voluptuous line-backer dipped in popsicle paint.


During the hazy hours of the day, we find a circus of commanders and coquettes from Circulation, the mysterious boss or underling who magics themselves from who-knows-what-department to push carts or pester the maintenance man, the old friend, the skinny son, the tour group parents and their pale, perplexed children; and sometimes in passing we note the way stray dreadlocks are constantly escaping from the woolly turban of the poet Frost who works upstairs.


At lunch, the ominous notes of a cello being tuned in preparation for a lawn performance sound for all the world like a distressed woman about to phone home or hospital, and the shock of sun sliding over the music library's window with the concert banner clinging to its ledge by a single piece of tape, and the woman stepping up to its ledge, in slow motion, to shout for a silent second at a bassoonist in the orchestra below – all these charms can't quite calm the nagging anger that I've just paid upwards of five dollars for a single wedge sandwich.