MCAS Practice Test 11

from *Something That Fits: A Memoir* by Joelle Kestrand

¹The year after college, before I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I took a job at the reference desk of the Kimball Avenue branch library. The head of reference, Mr. Pellegrew, had worked that desk for twenty-six years, and on my first morning, as he unlocked the book drop, he gave me a single piece of advice: “Nobody comes to the reference desk because they know what they're looking for.”

²I thought it was a joke. It was, partly; Mr. Pellegrew said most things with a straight face and let you decide. But by the end of the first week I understood what he meant. People came in carrying half a memory. A book with a green cover that a teacher had read aloud in fourth grade. A form a landlord had mentioned once. A word a doctor had used, which a woman repeated to me carefully, like a password she was afraid of getting wrong.

³My job, at first, was to stay out of the way. I shelved. I sorted the carts of returns, which followed a system so complicated that I suspected it had been invented to keep new employees humble. I learned the difference between a call number and a barcode, between an atlas and a gazetteer, between “I need a book that's sort of about this” and the actual name of the thing the patron needed. That last skill took the longest.

⁴Mr. Pellegrew was a translator. I did not have that word for it then, but it is the right one. A woman would come in describing a book she half remembered—something about a lighthouse, she said, and a dog—and he would nod, ask two questions, and walk her to the fiction shelves, where the book she needed was waiting at eye level. He liked to explain the catalog in words a ten-year-old could follow, and he never laughed at anyone. When I once smirked at a man who asked for “the big book with all the countries in it,” Mr. Pellegrew waited until the man had left and then said quietly, “He knew what it does. That's the hard part. The name is the easy part.”

⁵In the spring he taught me to mend books. The repair table sat in the back workroom under a buzzing lamp, with a bone folder, a pot of glue that smelled like a school hallway, and rolls of linen tape. You lifted the torn page, brushed glue along its edge, laid the tape so that it bridged the tear, and pressed it flat. It sounds simple. It is not. Use too much glue and the pages fuse together; use too little and the spine splits again in a month. My first dozen repairs went into a box under the table that Mr. Pellegrew called “the museum.”

⁶By summer I was good enough that he let me work the desk alone. I remember one patron in particular: an old man, very thin, who asked to sign up for the library's books-by-mail service and handed me a list of the titles he wanted first, printed in careful capital letters. “For my daughter,” he said. “She thinks the walk here is getting to be too much for me.” He said it lightly, but his hand shook a little as he gave me his library card, and I understood—the way you suddenly understand things at twenty-two, all at once and too late to pretend you don't—that this was not a small errand for him. It was an admission.

⁷I packed the box slowly. I checked each title twice against his list, running my finger down the careful capitals. When I showed him the box, he read the spines one by one and said, “Good. That's good.” Then he signed the form, and left, and I stood at the desk with the strange feeling that I had been trusted with something larger than a box of paperbacks.

⁸I have thought about that year more than I expected to. I did not stay at the library; I became, of all things, a teacher, and I spend my days with teenagers who often cannot name what they need either. But I think Mr. Pellegrew's desk taught me the most important part of the job. People rarely arrive with the right words for their trouble. They arrive with a lighthouse and a dog, a book that's sort of about this, a word they are afraid of getting wrong. The work is to listen long enough to hear what they are really asking for—and then to hand them something that fits.