postal

i am standing in line at the post office. it is a small space and the seventeen people in line in front of me make it smaller. then there's the metal gate pulled down over the front window which makes this small, overwarm rectangle of a room feel unnecessarily like a cave. a cave full of wet wool and wet shoes and wet hair and wet socks. packages with the ink smearing and melting off.

i am standing in line because i could not imagine a better time to mail a package than during a snowstorm on a weekday afternoon at just before 3pm. evidently there are several of us out there thinking the same thing. there are at least three people wearing postal uniforms standing behind the bulletproof glass in the post office. and although there are more than three bulletproof windows for taking in packages, only one of the postal people stands there behind the glass calling, slowly, "next!" this should be unnecessary as the place is small and there is a bell, accompanied by a light, to indicate where the next package-toting, wool-wrapped stink bomb of a person should go. and there's the fact that there's only one person working. this does not seem to matter. "next!"

this is the first time i have ever entered a post office in the five boroughs without my knitting and i can feel the room shrinking, growing darker and so warm i am sure my hat will melt into my already sweating skull. i can feel unbearable heat radiating from the brown wool pants i've knit and shoved into the small box i'm carrying. i can taste wet dog in the air. surely i will die. there is a young man several people ahead of me who appears to be a stray member of a prettyboy band from the eighties. his gaunt body perches high atop the skinniest legs i've ever seen, legs wrapped in beyond-pegged camel colored jeans. his hair, loose, dark curls, falls considerably lower in front, over his eyes, than it does in back. he wipes the same stray strand out of his eyes over and over. he is shipping out fifty or so boxes that look suspiciously like small pizza boxes. perhaps he is mailing out fifty record albums. but it does not matter, really, what he is mailing. it seems somehow necessary for him to deal with each of the fifty packages in some separate and painstaking way. each one has different rules.

one of the other postal folk strolls up to a window and i think, several of us there think, she will save us, rescue us from waiting behind the boy with the record albums and the tiny ankles. but she takes a shipper who has brought up a package without the requisite info. no paperwork. shipped overseas. now, it says right there on the wall that we all ought to have our paperwork ready before we get ourselves up to a window and i do. i do. but not everyone is me and so now we will continue to stand. next to the sign warning about paperwork are others. have your money out before you get to the window. have your i.d. out if you intend to pick up a package. pay in small bills if you have them. while i am still the twelfth person in line, i count out singles. one. two. three. all the way up to ten. i do not think i will need ten, but i am like the post office. anxious about small things. i want to be ready.

the pregnant woman in line behind me has hit me several times with her unborn child. hard. not what you'd call accidental bumps so much as things bordering on punches. her baby is only days from being born and i find it difficult to believe she cannot feel or see herself hurtling toward my back repeatedly. when the woman in front of me turns from time to time in her restlessness and huffs in frustration, i am slapped with a steamy gust that suggests she's been eating the socks of homeless men and this only serves to increase my feelings of suffocation. a baby screams intermittently. the man a few people ahead of me wearing bank man clothes with no jacket has been kicking a huge bin of envelopes slowly forward, the bin scraping and hissing with each shiny leather kick. suddenly the second postal woman sees him and yells. tells him to bring his bin of envelopes over to the window. people ask detailed questions about stamps. people do not know the zip codes of small towns in indiana.

i am near the front now. the skinny legged boy with the coils of eighties hair drooping into his eyes is finishing up his shipping. he gets out a phone and begins to order. spring rolls. some sort of pork. he does not leave the postal window. he gives an intersection as the address for the food delivery and then explains to the person taking his order that he'll be at the intersection there in front of the bank, that he doesn't work at the bank so he doesn't want the food delivered to the bank. he'll be there on the corner in front of the bank when they arrive with the food. he says more than once to the person on the other end of the line that he'll be there. he'll be waiting, he says, outside the bank.