Under the fluorescent tube lighting and next to a potted fern Mark stood in the wrap-around line watching a baby girl mess with a keyhole near the bottom of the double glass entrance doors. She was kind of a cute kid.
“Sally, you really have to get over here before someone opens the doors and you get hit in your little chin,” said the woman in front of Mark, probably the baby’s mother. It should’ve been obvious that the kid wouldn’t understand if she talked so fast.
“B-aahh,” said Sally, and pressed her face to the door. She looked at the mark it left and giggled. Spit bubbles creamed out of the corners of her mouth when she did this. The mother just sighed and looked at the tellers, who were all mildly pretty or at least groomed well enough to be not unattractive. Except one, anyway. The one was most rotund with greasy hairsprayed blond curls that bounced and floated like a canoe on water above her lipsticked and smiling face when she chuckled and nodded to the customers. Downright gleeful, that one.
“Oh! I am sorry,” said the man who was talking on a cell phone as he walked in.
“W-aahh!” said Sally, wiping a fistful of tears from her face and sitting on her bum in front of the door. You could still here the echo of the door clunking on her little kid chin when the bruise puffed and looked like a smashed crab. Somebody might have landed an uppercut on a teakettle, that’s how it sounded.
“Sally! I told you you had to get over here!” said the mother. She looked tired, and she walked with a funny clip-clip in her heels over to Sally and the door.
It was all a pretty good thing to see, Mark thought.
The baby cried for a long time while the mother deposited her checks and then clipped her heels on out of there with the little teakettle-kid, crying, slung over her shoulder.
The teller smiled and said the thing she says that means “you’re next,” so Mark walked up and handed her his paycheck. He had to pay his credit card bills. She did the things she did to put the money in his account. Mark noted the dust on the ferns and the gum stuck to the floor and then she said, “Here’s your receipt, thank you,” looked over to the front of the line and said that thing again, the “you’re next.” When Mark looked up to inquire why his account balance was a full 200 dollars lower than the paycheck he’d just deposited, the man behind him in line was already telling the teller to do whatever it was that he wanted to do, so Mark got back in the front of the line, in front of the other customers. They just stood there with their feet on the ground looking ahead, and after a minute another teller called him over. It was the jovial one, and she was really most rotund.
Mark told her that he should have 200 more dollars in the account and that he’d like to see the account history. She said “Okay, we’ll just go ahead and see about that,” smiling and showing her pink lipstick stained teeth a little bit while she clicked her little keyboard and printed the thing out. Mark told her that he only pulled out that 200 dollars once, to pay the rent, and not twice as it said in the account history. Moreover, the two transactions happened during the same minute, which he told her was probably impossible within the physical limits of our universe. “Take a seat and sign in,” she said, “someone will be right with you to help. Sorry!” Mark explained that he needed to get to work, and that he was in a hurry, so she said, “It will only be a minute!” and said the thing to get the next person in line.
There was a little chained-to-the-desk pen and Mark plucked it out of it’s holder like it was a plastic flower, signed in, sat in the chair, and there he waited. Just standing there, a lady behind the counter kept clicking a mouse and looking at her little computer screen with her mouth kind of hanging open. She clicked that thing for a long time. Like the viewing gallery in an operating room, that’s how it felt: surgical.
After ten minutes, the most rotund teller said something to the lady just standing, who looked up at Mark, down at her screen, then walked through a monochrome operating-room door and closed her mouth to smile at Mark. How she could help him, she asked, and he told her. She said that she couldn’t help him. Not unless he went and investigated the ATM himself. She couldn’t tell him how to do it, but that there would probably be a phone number on the thing. He just sighed and left because he had to go to work, and he was late.
When he got home that afternoon there was a bum sleeping on the chair he kept on the porch. The bum woke up, blinking, when Mark came up the steps.
“Sorry, man…” he said. Mark said that it was alright but the bum owed him one. “How about this, bum: I’ve got a problem with the bank, and you’re in a unique position, seeing as how you probably don’t often deal with banks, to offer an objective perspective. They pretty well fucked me over and now I’m gonna be late for my credit card payment, which means I’ll have to pay a bunch of fees and interest. If this happened to you, what would you do?”
The bum scratched his beard. He smacked his lips as if he were thinking of cheap scotch and said, “They call it a Mexican Sundae. What you’ve gotta do is you gotta shit in a box, dress it up like a delicious sundae, sprinkles and all that, wrap it up festive like a birthday present and chuck in the post box, C/O Person Responsible. And I’ve got a rumble in my guts right now, if you’re into it, buddy.” Mark was into it, so he handed the bum a paper plate and he went into the alley next to the house. Mark could hear him farting and straining and cursing. Mark and the bum wrapped the thing up in a box, with some sprinkles and a plastic spoon and whipped cream. It was postage stamped and dropped in the mailbox. Mark imagined the tellers’ faces, and maybe the rotund one would jump right into it with that spoon, and Mark thought that it would be a pretty good thing to see.
