Chapter Fourteen

MR. EL. HE’S perfect for my secret book club. She knew the minute she saw him. He was a regular, often stopping after work at a local construction company, and on Saturdays, he’d bring his twelve children with him. A Black Jew, he was descended from a cluster of Black Philadelphians who had followed their rabbi to establish a community in South Jersey in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the community was thriving, with their own synagogue in an enclave they named Berakah (Blessing). He was her favorite library user. Every librarian had one, even if they didn’t admit it.

Exceptionally short, Mr. El wore what looked like child-sized work clothes and tiny boots that were always mysteriously clean. Nan tried to picture him doing work that involved heavy tools and hard manual labor and failed. He must be a supervisor doing mainly paperwork.

She loved talking to him when he came in to pick up his many interlibrary loans from Ivy League university libraries and international libraries. The books were written in Arabic and Hebrew and French and mostly related to Judaism—to Talmudic studies, philosophy, and comparative religions.

He was not the rabbi, but he often served as study leader. The library staff agreed he was their most interesting library user. No one had ever met his wife, but she was probably interesting too.

“Can you imagine the dinner conversations at their house?” Nan asked. “Those kids are super smart.”

The El kids had their library routine down pat. They’d march right up to the checkout desk every Saturday with a stack of books arranged facedown with the barcodes ready for the checkout machine, their individual library cards on top of the pile. The oldest went first, and Nan swore the rest of them lined up after her in order of age. Every single one of them thanked the assistant every single time. The assistants all loved waiting on the El kids.

“So many Els, they’re in almost every class from kindergarten through high school. I don’t know how Mrs. El does it, having a baby almost every year,” Mona said. “Like the Catholics in the old days. My grandmother had fourteen; can you believe it?”

Nan envisioned growing up with twelve more sisters, twelve more Frannys and Reginas. Awash in sisters, what a horror show that would have been.

“I bet those El kids don’t watch TV all night or have their eyes glued to their phones all the time,” Mona added. “That’s what’s warping kids today, making them stupid.”

“Stupid about a lot of things but smarter than we ever were about a lot of other things,” Nan said.

Like sex. She’d learned about sex, at least the heterosexual kind, from library books. Anything written by Frank Yerby, with his lurid tales of tortured passion and revenge between enslaved women and their masters; D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (which she read in fifth grade), with its graphic descriptions of erect phalluses and women waiting to be plowed like fields, all in dialect so heavy she really had to work at it to know what the heck was going on; even her favorite life instruction manual, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with its frank descriptions of extramarital sex, lurking pedophiles, and unwanted pregnancies.

When it came to lesbian sex, that was more of on-the-job training for her, starting at age sixteen in her junior year, with the captain of the high school girls’ softball team. The few library books on the subject that she’d ferreted out—Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and Isabel Miller’s Patience & Sarah—helped though.

She had mixed feelings about the rainbow stickers used now on the library’s young adult books. The stickers were supposed to lead LGBTQA+ teens and their friends to the books that would help them, but if they weren’t brave enough to take those oh-so-obvious books out, how was that helping? If the queer books blended in with all the other young adult books, maybe they’d be taken out more. She lost sleep over that one. Maybe she would form a teen advisory group and ask them.

At least she kept her book selection up to the minute with LGBTQA+ books for kids and adults, plus all the others needed to meet demand—the vampire books, the graphic novels, the speculative fiction. Good god, those alone could take her whole budget. The people who read Harry Potter books over and over even as adults—she found it hard to understand why they didn’t branch out eventually. But who was she to talk, she who read Barbara Pym novels over and over because she found new things to smile at every time?

Mr. El stood patiently in front of her.

“I’m so sorry,” Nan said. “My mind was wandering all over town. What can I help you with?”

He handed her a slip of paper on which he’d noted a book title in his tiny block printing, as precise as an engineer. He never chatted, never made small talk. He was all business in such a polite focused way that she didn’t take offense. It was a relief in fact; he was the only library user who didn’t gossip or chatter on.

“I’d like to request this dissertation on Black Jews in Africa, but it’s only available as a reference book in a library in London, not available for interlibrary loan,” he explained.

He was also the only library user who regularly consulted the official worldwide library catalog even though it was free online and easy to use.

You’re amazing, Mr. El. You are the ideal library user. You give my life meaning.

“It may also be available in digital form in a dissertation database,” she said. “I’ll be happy to find out for you.”

She asked him to fill out the interlibrary loan form with all the information he had. She was dying to talk more to him about everything, anything. Where did he find these books he requested? How did they help him in his studies? Did he ever read anything for fun? She said none of these things. He was as far away behind his eyes as he could possibly be.

“Thank you very much,” he said, turning to leave. “By the way, you’re the best librarian we’ve ever had here. No disrespect to the others, of course.”

“Of course,” she said.

They thanked each other again in that ridiculous repetitive way people did when they wanted to say so much more but could only nod and bow.

That was her opening. She’d never get a better one. Leaning close, she spoke quietly, hoping no one else could hear.

“Mr. El, would you consider joining a book club that I am forming privately? It’s more of a conversation than an obligation. Not reading the same book together but getting together to talk about what we’re already reading. You are the most dedicated reader I know.” She waited, afraid to hear him say that his life was so full of obligations a book club would be impossible for him. So many children, so much study and reading, so many synagogue meetings.

He bowed in a formal way and said he’d be delighted. While he wasn’t a beaming or smiling kind of person, his eyes gleamed a little brighter. He handed her a business card, encouraged her to let him know when the club was meeting, and left quickly. A few minutes later, he came back.

“I forgot to pick up my interlibrary loan,” he said. “What I came for.”

He didn’t say Because I was excited, but Nan felt his excitement in this little flurry of forgetfulness that was so unlike him. One little success for the day.