Women, it seems, are everywhere. It’s clear they own the place, the way their voices echo like bossy birds around the library, and you hear them talking authoritatively about the state of the Reading Rooms, the state of their personal childcare, and they all wear clunky one-inch Mary Janes for the middle-aged set with shitty knees, their thighs pinch and bloom under too-tight slacks—slacks they might have gotten away with eight years ago but they cannot yet psychically commit themselves to the next size up—and tucked into the slacks are blouses of flimsy faux-silk, over which are draped lightweight buttoned sweaters of varying cuts, which they all wear to combat the relentless A/C, and their woman-backs are all fat, broad and down-turned, like someone’s been sitting on their shoulders for years, their posture is terrible, and no matter how they try to accessorize, all the cheap earrings and necklaces and scarves do zero to hide the lumps of their figures, and you catch yourself staring sometimes at how similar the men all look but how weirdly different the women all are: how some balloon in the bellies, which look like covered bowls, and some balloon in the butts, which they constantly try to cover up with their sweaters that are always too short, and some even balloon on the sides—like the fat had nowhere else it might possibly go so it went to the sides—and when you stare at them in the way that you do, as if saying oh sweetie, they always look back at you in a collective expression of what appears to be a common recipe of pity and scorn.

Your reckoning comes in the shape of your boss, a good friend of Barb Newberg’s, who goes by the name Marjorie Pinkwater.

Relatively speaking, Pinkwater is fit. She wears her hair short, which you’ve always disliked on women but it somehow suits Pinkwater, and she dresses sensibly but with a whiff of style: ironed slacks and those blouses that tie in the front, and she reminds you of a young Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep. But Pinkwater is serious, like Barb Newberg. She is good at her job, does not appreciate irony, and gives everyone Flextime.

In fact, you’re not sure that anyone has ever put in a full day’s work here, the men and women all work primarily in five-hour shifts, and Pinkwater regularly hands out little colorful bags with soaps inside for people’s birthdays, gift cards to Starbucks or a mysterious place called “TJ Maxx,” and even though you’ve only worked here for a month, so far every Wednesday morning Pinkwater has arrived at the Library loaded up with Panera, giant plastic bins packed with bagels, with muffins and danish, which she leaves for everyone in the break room, and when you asked Pinkwater why, why so many pastries, she looked at you like you were nuts and said, “Hump Day!”

This afternoon, Pinkwater is in the break room talking health care to everyone while spreading strawberry jam on a bagel. It’s all in the news. She’s pushing for better coverage for part-timers, she says, but no promises, and although you rarely speak in this place, at this new job, the way she talks so eagerly about expanding government prompts you to say: