Sound of Symphony Anthologies

My Life in Letters: Mrs. Bates by EMMcNulty

Writing Prompt: Alaina Castillo – Parallel Universe

"I'm looking through a bookshelf to an alternate reality."

Submission: E. M. McNulty

My Life in Letters: Mrs. Bates

Mrs. Bates had been the St. Anselm's High School Head Librarian now for the past thirty years, since 1953. Well, if truth be told, she hadn't always been the Head Librarian. She'd been the Assistant Head Librarian for the first twenty years, and had only gotten the coveted Head position ten years ago when Sister Bernice, at age 89, had finally kicked the bucket and left the post as Head Librarian to Mrs. Bates, the next in line.

It was a good, stable job, and while it didn't pay as much as the public schools did, with the exception of one sizeable clique of juniors commandeered by the notorious captain of the football team, Jay Carney, most of the kids she had to deal with were respectful and well behaved. But luckily, Mrs. Bates didn't have to actually teach classes to any kids, and she didn't have to deal with them in large numbers. She was thankful for that. She had listened enough to the other teachers complaining about the students during coffee breaks in the teachers' lounge, and she knew that most teenagers in large groups were nothing but trouble. That's why she had become a librarian. Her father had given her two choices when he had agreed to pay for her tuition at Vassar. It was either become a teacher or become a librarian. She had opted for librarian and had never regretted that choice.

Mrs. Bates knew full well that the rowdy male students like Jay Carney were the darlings of the football coach, Brother Moore. And it was widely known that Moore let Jay and the other football players get away with murder in the classroom because their finesse on the football field filled the historic St. Anselm's football stadium to capacity practically every Saturday night from the beginning of September to the end of November. The extra revenue that the football games brought in paid for many things that the high school needed, even some things on the library budget. However, in spite of that fact, Mrs. Bates didn't give a whit about football; she had never been to a single game in her thirty-year tenure at the school. She cared about books. Although, while she was in the teachers' lounge, she often pretended that she cared about the students too. But the truth is that she really only had patience for some of the students, the diligent kind who liked to read and took their research projects seriously. And thankfully, she mostly worked with these students, the ones who came in to use the library as individuals or in small numbers for group projects or research papers, and the odd one here or there, who came in on their own to check out a book and read during their free period. Jay Carney, unless forced by a teacher to go, normally wouldn't be caught dead at the library.

When Mrs. Bates wasn't busy helping a student to locate something in the card catalog, or teaching someone how to use the microfiche reader properly, she spent most of her time stacking and restacking the books, making sure that each book was always placed on its proper shelf according to its correct call number in the Dewey Decimal Classification System. She also spent more time than she would have liked to sending out overdue notifications to students who had kept a book past the due date. Mrs. Bates had noticed that it was usually the same students who were repeat offenders in that category: the disorganized ones. If Mrs. Bates hated anything more than trouble maker students like Jay Carney, it was anything or anyone who was disorganized, and she prided herself on the impeccable state in which her library could always be found. Mrs. Bates was not disorganized; there was never so much as a pencil or index card out of place in her library, let alone a book misplaced on the wrong shelf.

And this is why it initiated a small, obsessive, fanatical streak in her when certain unusual items started turning up on the bookshelf in the back of the library near the linguistic atlases, near call number 912.2. Who would even go to that particular book shelf in the library? It was in a darkened, seldomly used section of the library, where she had made an economics decision some time back not to keep the lights on all the time, leaving instructions for the students to press a large red button on the far wall to turn on the lights if they wanted to retrieve a book from that area. But she didn't remember seeing any student turn on the lights there. She would have known. She would have been able to see the lights go on from her perch at the front desk, and she would have come round to check things out.