The Nerd

After working a month alongside the woman if anyone had asked Jerome McNulty what Madeline Horowitz actually looked like, he would have been at a total loss for words. Jerome inherited Madeline – that’s the most judicious way to put it – when, having just graduated with a master’s degree in library sciences, he landed the chief administrative position at the Anderson town library.

Madeline was reference librarian and taught a creative writing class free to the general public Wednesday nights from seven to nine. With Coke-bottle glasses that made her myopic, hazel eyes inordinately large, an angular nose that was slightly too large and cadaverous skin tones the young woman was anything but pretty. Favoring unfashionable skirts and sweaters that look like they had been dropped off at the Salvation Army or moldering on a consignment rack at the second-hand clothing store, Madeline wasn’t ugly or homely per se, just irrevocably nondescript.

Late one afternoon in mid-August, Jerome was sifting through a pile of unpaid invoices at the front desk when a middle aged woman approached the checkout counter with a handful of books. “Go wait in the car!” she snapped peevishly at an adolescent son loitering in the entryway. The boy lowered his head meekly and shuffled out the door. Once he was gone from sight the woman turned to Jerome. “You got one gem of a reference librarian,” she noted, gesturing with a flick of her eyes in the direction of a desk situated two hundred feet away where the owlish Madeline Horowitz was cataloguing a stack of new additions to the library’s collection. “She’s one hell of a sharp cookie!”

When the patron showed no further inclination to pursue the matter, Jerome asked, “How did she help you?”

The woman’s lips contorted in a squiggly mess as though someone had stuck a fresh-cut lemon between her teeth. “It’s embarrassing and I’d rather not say,” she muttered in a gravelly voice and lumbered out the door.

Shortly before closing Jerome meandered across the hardwood floor. “That woman with the paisley blouse and young kid… you helped them?”

“After a fashion.” Madeline pushed her thick, black-framed glasses up on the bridge of her bony nose. She stared straight ahead lost in the deep repository of her private thoughts. “The issue had less to do with her than her hormonal son.”

“Perhaps you could be a bit more specific.”

“The boy wanted a particular book and his mother asked where she could locate it in the stacks.”

“Which book?”

“Anthony Adverse, a novel in three volumes written in the mid 1930’s by Hervey Allen.” For the first time, Madeline’s spinsterish features melted in a wispy smile. “Problem is, we’re in the middle of summer so it’s not as though he might be reading the book for a class assignment or book report.”

Anthony Adverse – Jerome had stumbled across the title somewhere in the Minotaur’s maze of graduate school. “What’s the plot?”

“A newborn abandoned outside a Catholic monastery in the Italian Alps is raised by the nuns. Because he was discovered on the feast day of Saint Anthony, the infant is given that particular name.”

“Nice sentiment.” Jerome wanted to get back to his invoices at the far end of the room. “So where’s the problem?”

“Why would a pimply-faced twelve year-old want to rummage through a literary classic longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace during the dog days of August?”

“That’s obviously the one question no one thought to ask,” Jerome returned glibly.

“Around page three hundred or midway through the first volume, the author introduces a new character, a nymphomaniac, who seduces the guileless Anthony.”

“You told the mother about the debauchery?”

Madeline nodded. A reflexive gesture, Madeline pushed her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose a second time. “Which put an end to her son’s newfound interest in literary fiction.” “I’m a bit of a nerd,” Madeline said, “both minimalist and small-minded Luddite as well.”

Jerome was blindsided by the odd remark, which had nothing to do with the ongoing conversation. But then he had noticed that the woman’s thought processes at times seemed to careen disjointedly, ricocheting randomly from one unrelated topic to the next.

Luddites. He recalled that, back to the early eighteen hundreds, bands of English laborers, opposed to the new technology, destroyed machinery especially in the cotton and woolen mills that they feared was threatening their jobs. But he certainly couldn’t picture Madeline Horowitz taking a sledge hammer to the library’s file cabinets, computers or decorative furniture. “What college did you attend?”

Madeline crooked her head to one side. “I never went to college… didn’t felt the need.” She seldom if ever wore makeup and her thin lips pressed tightly together blanched to an ashen hue as she became lost in a deep-seated reverie. “It was far too long,” she murmured almost as an afterthought.

“What was too long?”

“Hervey Allen could have scrapped the entire third volume altogether and the book would have still remained a literary masterpiece.”

*****

In late September Jerome cornered Madeline in the entryway as they were opening the outside doors to the public. “I’d like to sit in on one of your creative writing classes.”

“I’m flattered.”

As the clock in the lobby approached quarter to seven, a steady trickle of patrons trickled into the library and made their way to the main conference room. Several high school students were sandwiched between middle-aged participants and an elderly woman with mild hand tremors and an auburn wig that was slightly askew. While the participants – ten in number – bunched together around a quarter-sawn oak table, Jerome settled himself in a chair near the water cooler.

“We’ll begin as we always do,” Madeline opened the session, “with a ten-minute writing drill. Tonight’s topic is ‘sitting down to a family meal’.” An enthusiastic buzz filtered through the room. “The mood can be humorous or serious, but you must include the expository prose we discussed at the last session as well as some dialogue and as much vivid description as you can squeeze into the allotted time.” “Think right brain, left brain,” Madeline continued in an offhand, relaxed manner. “You’ll want to balance good grammar with a spontaneous flow of imaginative ideas”

An effeminate looking blond-haired man in his thirties dressed in jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt circled the room handing out pencils and sheets of paper. Finishing the route, he doubled back and placed a single sheet on Jerome’s desk.

“Five, four, three, two, one…” With a crooked thumb, Madeline pressed the button on an imaginary stopwatch.

Surveying the room from his vantage point near the water cooler, everyone was scribbling away frantically. As the head administrator, Jerome had come to observe not participate. Still, he hesitantly picked up the pencil and lowered his eyes. Black on white. Jerome sketched several rudimentary flowers with a blizzard of pistils, stamens and sepals fanning out from the top of the stems. A dozen elaborate curlicues later he surreptitiously raised his eyes. At the head of the table Madeline Horowitz was scribbling away like a madwoman. While the other classmates seemed equally consumed putting black on white, Jerome could think of nothing whatsoever to say. His mind had gone tabula rasa, deteriorated into a dead zone!

An hour and a half later when the class wrapped up and everyone had left the library, Madeline said, “If you have a moment, there’s something I’d like to show you.” The lights in the front hallway suddenly dimmed, indicating that the staff was locking the front door and shutting down for the night.

“I’m in no rush.” Jerome replied as the last of the employees said their goodbyes and left the building.

Reaching into a burlap satchel, she removed a small paperback. Done up in an ornate, brushed script, the cover read: Anderson Public Library Annual Short Story Collection 2025.

“Disregard the text,” Madeline said with sheepish grin as Jerome thumbed through the hundred or so pages. “I took the first five hundred words of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and repeated them for filler.”

The back of the book was covered with descriptive commentary, a series of fictitious quotes and blurbs. “You made this?”

“At home… on a desktop publishing program.”

“But how-”

“I stumbled across a bookbinding manual,” Madeline explained, anticipating his train of thought, “at one of the neighboring branches and taught myself how to cobble together a soft-cover book.”

“By hand?”

“It might be nice,” she rushed ahead, “to bind a modest anthology at the end of the writers’ group… a hundred pages or so, showcasing their works. I’m sure the local newspaper would do up a flattering spread on the library. You could even have a local small press print a few dozen copies to display and sell in the front lobby.”

“Andrew, the flamboyant fellow who handed out the paper and pencils, writes poetry not prose.” When the participants read their ten-minute writing assignments, Andrew’s was a bawdy limerick in rhyming verse.

Madeline chuckled as though at some private joke. “Andrew also favors Elizabethan sonnets as well as haiku written in the traditional three-line, five-seven-five format.” Andrew would be allotted ten pages of poetry in lieu of a short story.”

Jerome scrutinized the paperback. He flipped the cover open to the opening page which contained the copyright and publishing notes. Next followed the title in bold relief and a table of contents. The paperback book, which looked as though it had been assembled by a sophisticated publishing firm, was flawless, utterly perfect in both form and substance.

“What about the elderly lady with the wig pointing toward her left ear?” Jerome pressed.

“That would be Freda Jankowski. She lives at the senior center two blocks down the street. Her thoughts are muddled, a bit scrambled at times, but we could effortlessly edit her prose and make it presentable.” “Most people look at Freda and see an old fart who can’t remember what day of the week it is and yet for thirty-seven years she taught high school English… how to properly construct compound sentences and avoid dangling participles.” “Freda Jankowski committed a victimless crime. She got old and debilitated.”

Madeline ran her fingertips over the cover of the paperback. “This is not about winning the Booker Prize. It’s about self expression and sharing a meaningful experience with the rest of the community.”
Madeline tilted her head at a cockeyed angle, her nerdy mind roaming off in a multiplicity of unfathomable directions. Jerome, who was becoming familiar with the woman’s eccentricities, waited for her thoughts to congeal. “Jack London,” she muttered, “was one of the greatest short story writers.”

“To build a Fire… Call of the Wild,” Jerome replied.

“Two of the very best short stories ever written,” Madeline confirmed, “but he couldn’t write a decent novel to save his soul. The same could be said for Sherwood Anderson and the Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev. Their novels were abominable.”

Jerome blinked. “Certainly not everything that finds its way onto a library bookshelf is world-class literature, but what’s your point?”

“Think how wonderful it would be for these ordinary souls, people like Freda Jankowski and Andrew, to actually see their writing in print and experience the thrill of accomplishment.” Packing up her belongings, Madeline wished him a good night and left the building.

*****

The following day Jerome cornered the reference librarian in the staff lounge and handed her the book she had left with him the night before. “I want you to show me how you put a book together.”

She poured a dollop of cream into her coffee and watched as the dark liquid lightened. “I can show you some basics now if you like.” Madeline led the way back to the conference room where she laid a piece of copier paper on the table.

“Each sheet contains four pages formatted this way.” She folded a sheet in half scribbling a two and a four on the facing page. Flipping the sheet over, she placed a one on the right-hand margin, a four to the left, creating a four-page spread. “The next four-page sequence is six, seven, five and eight so on straight through to whatever number fleshes out the full-sized book.” “As long as you align the individual pages in proper sequence, the text will always flow properly.”

Jerome stared at the blank page for the longest time. “Then it’s just a matter of formatting.”

Madeline nodded and an ephemeral, wispy smile flitted across her face for the fraction of a second. “Polyvinyl acetate glue with a cloth mesh binds the spine and holds all the pages in place.”

“The glue must be quite strong.”

“Flexible not strong,” she corrected. “Strength isn’t nearly as important in bookbinding as flexibility.”

“I don’t follow you,” Jerome returned.

Wandering over to the window facing the rear lawn, Madeline pointed at a huge oak tree uprooted and lying flat on the ground. “That tree was knocked down during that awful wind storm last week.”

“The town is coming later this week,” Jerome noted, “to clean up the mess, but what’s your point?”

“Was there any damage to the surrounding grass or shrubbery?”

“No, of course not.”

“Where the tree was too inflexible, the grass and delicate plant life could bend and even lie flat during the worst of the storm. Gentle glue can hold the pages of a modest book like this together for the next hundred years, where a heavy-duty carpenter’s glue would eventually turn brittle, crack and break apart.”

Jerome turned and looked her full in the face. “Have you told the writing group about your book?”

“I was waiting for your approval.”

“Well you have it on one condition,” Jerome returned. “I want you to teach me how to bind soft cover books.”

*****

At the following meeting of the writers’ group Madeline told the members about the anthology. Everyone was ecstatic. By late September she collected all ten offerings and, having inputted them into a desktop publishing program, was ready to churn out a complete manuscript every couple of days.

“When you fold the individual pages,” Madeline explained, “Hold the edges together with your left index finger then slide the fingers of your right hand across the topmost edge, crimping the paper in the middle. That way, when you run a flat edge over the middle of the sheet, it’s a perfectly symmetrical crease.” She quickly teased the edges of a fresh sheet together, ran her fingers deftly over the upper ridge and dimpled the paper in the middle. Running the flat edge of a wooden ruler the length of the page, she created a perfect fold. “One down twenty four to go.”

“I think I’ll practice on a few blank sheets,” Jerome replied sheepishly, “before ruining what you’ve already printed.”

With his master’s degree in library sciences, it took him a dozen false starts before the library administrator could fold a sheet of paper with any degree of confidence. Fifteen minutes later all twenty five sheets for the first book were resting in a neat pile.

“Now the fun starts.” Madeline placed a rectangular, wooden contraption with four plastic knobs on the table. Gathering up the first bundle of pages, she tamped the front edges on the surface of the table to create a smooth bead then sandwiched them in the binding jig and tightened the knobs until the thickness of the spine resembled that of the front edge of the book. With a small brush she dabbed the back of the book with white bookbinding glue, forcing it firmly into the small crevices between each folded sheet. Satisfied that there was sufficient, tacky glue, she ran a strip of mesh reinforcement the length of the spine and drenched the cloth backing with a second coat of polyvinyl acetate.

“We’ll let that set up for a few hours.” Madeline seemed quite pleased with her handiwork. “Once the cover is attached we’ve got our first completed book!”

*****

It took three weeks to finish the ten-book run. Then Madeline printed up several extra copies for public relations and to display in the library entryway. “We don’t ever seem to run out of ink,” Jerome observed. Madeline had just printed up the colorful cover stock for all the books in one, continuous run.

Opening the front panel of the printer, she teased a plastic cartridge out of the machine then peeled away the paper sticker to reveal three small holes that had been strategically positioned on the topmost surface. “I refill the cartridges with a hypodermic needle and small syringe whenever the ink runs low. Blue, yellow, red… it’s a simple enough process.”

“You drilled the holes?”

“At home on my father’s drill press.” Madeline voice assumed a dusky sarcasm. “The chintzy cartridges cost a small fortune, the ink next to nothing.”

*****

By late October Indian summer was a distant memory; Bermuda shorts and open-toed sandals were stored away until the following spring. “I’d like to take you out to dinner this weekend.” Jerome was standing alongside the reference desk.

“That’s so sweet of you.”

“It’s the least I could do after such a successful launch of the anthology.”

The local newspaper, the Anderson Beacon, ran a two-page spread, interviewing both Jerome and Madeline along with several of the fledgling authors. Seizing the initiative, the library council enthusiastically set aside funds for fifty additional print-on-demand soft-cover books to be sold as an ongoing fund raiser. Upon viewing her story in the slender volume, one member of the writers’ group, a young mother in her late twenties, was so overjoyed that she burst into tears. A gleeful Andrew Bateman had taken to strutting about as though he were the Anderson Public Library’s poet laureate. While Freda Jankowski insisted on donating free copies to each of the residents in her elderly housing facility, Jerome remained somewhat non-committal, suggesting he would take her most generous offer under advisement.

“Is there a particular night that’s good for you?”

Madeline had resumed scrolling down a computer spreadsheet. “Let me get back to you,” she replied never bothering to lift her eyes from the screen.

In a state of mild confusion, Jerome shuffled back to his office.

Shortly before going off shift he returned to the reference desk. “Regarding dinner…”

Madeline was cleaning her glasses with a spray solvent and amber polishing cloth. “Is this a formal date?” She glanced in his general direction but with her glossy, near-sighted eyes, it was doubtful she saw much of anything.

“I suppose you could call it that,” Jerome hedged.

“Well then,” Madeline’s tone was blunt, businesslike, “that presents a bit of a problem.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The employee manual has a workplace romance policy.”

The library administrator was beginning to feel light-headed, totally out of his element. “I’m not asking you to marry me,” Jerome shot back in a slightly piqued tone, “just dinner at a fancy restaurant.”

Having sufficiently polished both lenses, the Madeline returned the glasses to her face. “The employee manual,” she rambled on, ignoring his previous remark, “describes specific rules for managers dating subordinates or colleagues from different departments.”

“Okay.” Jerome felt his brains going haywire, turning to mush. It was as though the nerdy, minimalist Luddite inhabited a parallel universe of her own creation, and everyone who dealt with her was co-opted into that unnavigable, foreign terrain.

“There are disclosure requirements for relationships lasting beyond a specified duration as well as guidelines on acceptable behavior when expressing romantic interest in a colleague.” “Worse yet,” Madeline continued, “you can do nothing to hinder company operations, embarrass colleagues or distract them from workplace duties.”

Speechless, Jerome could only gawk at the deranged creature. “Jesus Christ! I asked you out on a freakin’ date, not a trip to the altar!”

“Marry me and I’ll go out with you.”

Several minutes passed before he could reassemble his fractured thoughts. “Aren’t we putting the matrimonial cart in front of the horse?”

“I’m no fool!” the reference librarian spoke even more doggedly now. “You’ve fallen in love with me. I could see it in your eyes and hear the tenderness in your voice as far back as Anthony Adverse.”

“And you?”

“Since long before the sordid novel in three volumes,” Madeline confessed. “I was smitten early on. But no matter. I’ve a simple solution.”

“A solution,” Jerome repeated.

“We go out tonight to a fancy-schmancy restaurant of your choosing, where you can formally propose and plan our future happiness.”

“I don’t even have a ring.”

“That’s incidental, of no great consequence.”

Jerome briefly considered his options. “Where do you live and what time can I pick you up?”