#regularly and finally snapped and made the decision to trap and stab the man which sure yeah bad idea but like. she’s traumatized

[deityofhearts]

good thing I am “that person” who acknowledges that characters aren’t one dimensional girlbosses who have zero flaws and make the right choices forever even when going through immense stress and trauma <3 unlike some people in manhwa comment sections 🤭

[terryquinnblog]

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE GRILLE

Would identity prove to be a lifelong issue for him? It was not enough that Jimmy, Christened James, had been obliged in his teens, by a religious order, to change his name to Terence. Which led to the nickname Terry – a handle he thought sure he would live and write under for the rest of his days. How could he have guessed that, for 27 days anyway, several dozen New Yorkers would later assume he was called Hartmut Munker. And how foresee that such a radical, if unwitting, identity shift should not only cause confusion for himself and others, but end by subjecting him to an irksome self-reckoning?

It was so innocent, the mishap that set this tangled comedy in motion. After he and his wife, Jane, enjoyed a dinner date with another couple at a mid-Manhattan restaurant on a spring evening not too far in the past, and the bill was split and signed for, Terry slipped Hartmut’s green AmEx card into his wallet and Hartmut slipped Terry’s into his. Surely it’s a comment on the nation’s credit card security system that a citizen can walk around a major metropolitan area for nearly a month, racking up purchases of over $3,000 and presenting a card embossed with someone else’s name, one that bears that person’s signature, while blithely signing his own legal name, James V. Quinn, to bills that will be charged to one Hartmut Munker. (Meanwhile his friend, just as unwittingly, is busy doing the reverse.)

In hindsight, he will come to see that it simply doesn’t matter. That you can sign your name Daffy Duck and walk off with a pepperoni pizza, a flat-screen TV, a scooter, a pair of cargo shorts. Nobody cares. … Or almost nobody cares.

To grasp how badly he made a fool of himself near the end of that month of quasi-fraudulent purchases, one needs to know a bit about how things work, or don’t, at Brooklyn’s Central Post Office station across from Borough Hall. Six days a week, the place is a massive, overcrowded and laughably understaffed block-square venue of boredom, pent-up anxiety and despair. A pressured environment capable of erupting at any moment not just in bouts of rudeness or altercation but of physical violence – whether patron on patron or patron on staff.

For example, one rainy afternoon, not a year before pocketing the wrong card, Terry walked into the Central P.O. with package to be shipped and saw an elderly woman, halfway down the endless line, pummeling a male 30-something with her sopping umbrella. “Nobody cuts in on me!” she kept screaming, as the guy cursed her floridly and swung back with his briefcase in self-defense. The Postal Service had just announced that the price of a first-class stamp was about to rise by a penny, causing hordes of Brooklynites to rush in and buy however many one-centers they felt they’d soon be needing to affix alongside the first-class stamps they were stuck with. The squabble looked harmless enough until the woman shifted to a savage poking technique. Now she was drawing blood. Most New Yorkers are leery of breaking up fights and are content to onlook. This day, however, would prove to be the exception.

The incident occurred before the time when the system’s central station and branches were outfitted with the now-standard plastic barriers that separate buyers from staff. And so, a strapping young sales clerk took two steps back, leapt over the marble counter and snatched away the rabid lady’s umbrella in mid-lunge.

“Don’t want to hear about who was before who,” he stated with quiet authority. “Looks to me like you’re maybe, what, 43rd and 44th in line? So what’s the big difference when you get your penny stamps, huh?” They had no words. “Behave, dammit.” He retreated two steps again and hopped back to the side of the counter he belonged on. Murmurs of approbation, all around. A maneuver nothing shy of Solomonic.

And today, stamps were again the issue at hand. It was a slow afternoon – a mere 16 patrons ahead of him on the queue leading to the window where only money orders and stamps were being sold. He needed 400 of the latter for a mailing he was about to send out.  He’d brought the current New Yorker along; this would be a breeze. And a piddling three-quarters of an hour later, the customer ahead of him completed her purchase, which had been marked by two cellphone exchanges with a daughter (Samantha), who seemed to need help with her trig homework, plus a peevish lecture, delivered by the attendant, on the service’s policy forbidding just such counter-side calls.

“NEXT!” the staff person blared in a gravelly alto, from behind the grille of her window. Within seconds he and she were face to face.“Not to worry, ma’am, no cellphone,” he began with a smile, just to humanize the situation.

“I beg your pardon?” the woman replied, deadpan. He placed his order.  She stacked twenty rolls of the new first-class stamp on the far side of the barrier and quoted him the price. They were back on track. He slipped ‘his’ AmEx into the machine and, as happens regularly at the Central station, the mechanism’s software failed to accept the card. This obliged him to slide the credit card through the window for manual processing. The woman passed back a slip for him to sign, and when he did, peered at what he’d written.

“Is there some sort of problem?” he asked, at once regretting his word choice. Still, he’d spent nearly an hour in this building now and could see, but not quite reach, his tidy pile of stamps. He was ready to be elsewhere.

“You know, sir ...“ the woman said, her facial muscles seizing up in concern, “ ... as signatures go, I wouldn’t say we’ve got the best match-up here.”

Insanity, he’s thinking. There’s got to be twenty more folks lined up behind him now, and this supposed Civil Servant is flunking him on penmanship? “Fine,” he snaps. “Pass the slip back, please.” He signs again, James V. Quinn, with exaggerated care and initials the revision. “OK?”

Wrong tone of voice. Nakedly patronizing. What is the matter with him? Hasn’t Jane calmly suggested, at least twenty times in the past, that perhaps he should think about working on his patience? He hears the grumbling at his back, the coded shuffling of feet. It’s that hometown variety of intense upset, on the cusp of boiling over. He and this balky attendant are seconds away from being catcalled.“Here,” she finally says, pushing the stamps and a receipt his way. “But tell you what. I’d advise you to look into this matter.”

“I’ll do that,” he assures her.

“NEXT!”

 ######################

 Of course, he did no such thing. But his doppelganger did. A full week later, well after he’d forgotten all about his delightful hour at the Central P.O., Hartmut called.

“As I suspect you may not be aware, Terry,” he said in his fluent though Bavarian-inflected English, “I have your AmEx card and you have mine.”

“What?”

“Have you received this month’s statement yet from American Express? If so, let’s compare our standard of living, shall we?” So Hartmut. He could see the man’s impish smile.

And sure enough, the Quinn family’s April statement arrived in the mail the following day, crammed with the record of purchases Dona and Hartmut Munker had made. Hartmut’s bottom line and his own proved to be $3.27 apart. They were not just the best of friends, they were like brothers.

At once he hustled back to the Main Post Office and saw, with great relief, that the woman he’d victimized was again at her post. He took his place at the end of the stamps and mail orders line, which this day was so long that it had curled twice upon itself in serpentine fashion. “All the better,” he muttered, lost as he was in a penitential funk. He’d brought along no newspaper, no novel, no New Yorker. He was determined to take stock for the duration. Only reflect, in a spirit of unsparing honesty, on what he suspected was a pattern of untoward behavior.

With each crawlstep ahead in his trek toward atonement, his righting of the wrong he’d done this woman, he felt the stab and cruel twist of a recent or long-past act of condescension. The bite, the stealthy gnawing of wrong-headed positions he’d taken over the years, then lordfully insisted on, with his four younger brothers, his sister … with Carlos, his house cleaner … with the college students he taught … the choristers he sang with … past girlfriends, teachers, coaches, pastors, salespeople, his parents … with Jane. He’d known better than them all, for certain, on this occasion or that, only to be proven misinformed. Wasn’t it a running joke throughout his marriage, he felt compelled to admit, trapped as he was in this dizzying spiral of self-indictment? The more forcefully he championed a decision on stocks vs. bonds allocation, say, an opinion on which street he and Jane should turn down, which highway they ought take, the more likely it was he’d be shown to have been incontrovertibly wrong.

“NEXT!”

She couldn’t mean him, not already. Yet she did. Somehow he’d reached the head of the snake. “Wake up, buddy,” someone behind him prompted. Not quite composed, he advanced.

“I don’t need any stamps today,” he told the woman. “I’m just here to apologize, ma’am.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Definitely the same attendant, as if any confirmation were needed. Same scrunched-up mouth, same underworld pallor, same tension in the shoulders and neck. Yet this time around, each mark of her harried demeanor only deepened his sense of fellow-feeling.

“I’m the guy who signed James V. Quinn for 400 stamps yesterday,” he went on, “then handed you a credit card that-“

“Hold on a minute.”

“-that belonged to a friend of mine named Hartmut Munker, remember?” She regarded him, blank-eyed. “I gave you a hard time, I’m saying, and I’m here to say I’m sorry.”

“You’re telling me you don’t intend to purchase a money order or stamps. Do I have that right?”

“No, I’m just-“

“Don’t make me call in Security, sir.”

“Security?“

“NEXT!”

“But-“

“NEXT IN LINE!”

 ######################

 Once more he set out on the walk of shame, past coil upon coil of people just like him, quietly putting in their time. Other law-abiding residents of the Blessed Borough of Brooklyn, awaiting their chance to conduct a touch of business with the woman behind the grille.