A spot of fiction....
She pulls up in her tinny white Celica, every Friday around 3. Always the closest lane before the commercial accounts. Cigarette dangling out the corner of her mouth as she juggles items that all customers driving through the bank do, but I can't see them. She writes her account number and signature in red ink, balancing the papers on her thigh. Through the tinted glass and the air chutes' shiver and thwack, through all that distraction, she can't see me. She peers over at the glass sometimes with her amber shades on, but I can tell she's not trying to find someone's face.
There are little intercoms on each of the lanes, but what most people don't know is that you can turn them on the hear the people out there but they can't hear you. Every time she creeps in, I mute the intercom so I can hear what music she's listening to. A lot of it is stuff I like: the Clash, Beastie Boys, the Toadies. She knows all the words and mouths them, sometimes using her steering wheel cover as the neck of a guitar or slapping an unseen leg to the music.
She wears some sort of polo shirt that looks like a uniform. Her dark hair is swept aside, strands buzzing around her face like ribbons.
She seems to be happy to have been released for a moment from work, happy to be out in the heat. She smiles to herself alot, little half smiles, when she looks at the cars around her. The SUV's with cell phone mothers, the ghetto stars with their Continentals. It would seem that the suburbs have a lot to offer her in humor, and she seems like she's not even among us, but on another plane.