Carol Cail

REMAINDER


My friend and I sort books. We met at a Friends of the Public Library meeting four years and three months ago. She was wearing a blue shirtwaist dress. I was probably wearing jeans. We both enjoyed the peanut butter cookies shaped like bookmarks. When she volunteered to help with the annual book sale—to raise money for our library’s wish list—I raised my hand, too.

We picked Fridays for our days to sort the books that people donate to the sale. The room where we work is in a corner of the underground parking garage, cool in summer and warm in winter, but stinky with gasoline fumes all year round.

It’s amazing, the thousands of different topics and authors. And it’s great that people can’t bear to trash books—even when they should—we get dirty, ragged, out-of-date junk, as well as books that appear never opened. Some have inscriptions in them, such as, "To Dad, hope you love this as I love you," and I feel bad because it’s obvious he didn’t.

My friend became my partner two years and five months ago. She likes to sort the cookbooks, biographies, and medical. I like history, self-help, and classics. We both hate religion/philosophy—but it’s easiest of any to categorize, every other word being God or Love. Romances are obvious, too, the clinch covers and the titles that sound like snobby perfumes.

She isn’t physically strong, so she mostly fills boxes—all the same size beer cartons for good stacking—and I both fill and handcart them to storage. Good exercise!
Usually it’s just the two of us, the way we like it. Once a guy with his bulldog on a leash came in to help, but we ran him off by patting each other on the rump and using lovey-dovey names.

Today, I’m sorting alone. She forgot and made an appointment with the dentist.

It’s always an adventure, opening a box of old books. We find all kinds of interesting stuff: rocks, picture postcards, clippings, invoices for everything from software to cookware, ticket stubs, homework papers, pressed flowers, photographs, greeting cards, lots and lots of bookmarks and lots and lots of private notes and letters. Once I found a five-dollar bill; I said I’d buy tape with it, the kind we use to fix torn boxes. But actually I bought her a cheese slicer.

We’re allowed to take home one paperback book for every hour we sort. Or we can borrow as many books as we want and bring them back after we’ve read them. I have a to-read pile by the bed, higher than the headboard. Mostly nonfiction, but some Stephen King.
This isn’t the first time I’ve sorted alone, especially lately. She has a headache, or she has to pick up a relative at the airport or whatever. I work twice as fast alone, Super-Volunteer, rescuing endangered books to be bought and read another day.

A man comes to the door of the sorting room, big guy with a chapped nose and sepia teeth. He’s chipping in five Xerox boxes of paperback Westerns, mysteries, and romances. I thank him for bringing me more work. It happens a lot, just as we’re handling the last of the donations, someone pulls up with a pickup load of contributions.

It’s okay--I can sort a while longer. She isn’t at home.

Once a group of work release kids spent a couple of hours performing their community service by getting in our way, putting books into wrong boxes, and, when their guiding officer went to the rest room, making demeaning remarks to her and me. After they left, we giggled over a like-new copy of Bloom County Babylon.

Seems like a long time since we giggled over anything. Or even talked, really talked.

I finish sorting the paperbacks by genre. Take a swig of water from my bottle. It’s so quiet in here, I can hear my head throb. At the bottom of the last Xerox box is a layer of pristine hardcovers, nonfiction. I lift out an oversized, full-color, slick-paged Encyclopedia of Food and Drink. The price sticker is still on the glossy book jacket: $39.95.

Man, she would love this.

Whirling like a discus thrower, I launch it at the cement block wall.