X. Bev from the coffee shop tells me that in the morning, the Wells Fargo employees have to stand across the street from the bank and cross and enter one at a time. This is the first I’ve noticed it. The two of us watch it play out. We presume this is for some kind of security purpose, but we aren’t really sure. The employees are wearing matching red-and-black backpacks, carrying coffees. One by one, they’re waved over by a petite woman in a pale-blue blouse and dark ponytail. A strange little morning dance.
X. Before the farmers market was on Main Street, it was in the parking lot behind the shops, and before my father had other children, he used to bring me there. Every Saturday, he got cash from the ATM behind the Wells Fargo. Even then, the road was torn up. Cars would wait behind my father and I, a little belligerently, as we walked through the drive-thru. When it had rained, the pitted asphalt would collect water, and we would have to step carefully around the puddles. My father would get twenty dollars, which was the smallest amount the ATM could dispense, and we would go to the market together.
X. My father has had other children. Now he brings my little brother to the market every Saturday, and he no longer walks through the ATM, because the market is on Main Street and all the vendors take cards.
X. I don’t bank at the Wells Fargo. I don’t because I once heard my father say it was evil. This was 2008, and so he was speaking in large, economic terms, on the scale of markets and bailouts and Wall Street, but all I knew about banking was the Wells Fargo, with its long teller counter and gray-beige carpeting, its slick black countertops and pens on silver chains. And I was a child, and did whatever my father told me to do.
X. I don’t have a reason to go to the Wells Fargo, since I don’t bank there and don’t feel like starting, but I want to, for the sake of this essay. So I decide to ask if they’ll trade me quarters for dollars, which I presume I can do without having an account. Laundry in my building is two dollars for a wash and seventy-five cents for a dry. There are more modern dryers that cost a dollar fifty, but they don’t dry your clothes very well, and anyway I like the rolling rumble and warm gray-brown color of the old machines. My building doesn’t have a machine to split dollars into coins, and at this point I’ve emptied all the coin jars I have and started to ask my job to pay out my tips in quarters only.
X. Most of the businesses I’ve worked at have gone to the Wells Fargo for change. At the Italian luncheonette, the owner would cross the street in the morning to get our coins for the day. I wrote the soup specials with chalk marker in my slanting teen handwriting. At the winery, the Wells Fargo let us park in their parking lot and broke our hundreds into small bills. I practiced taking a cork out of a bottle and putting it back in until it broke into small, shredded pieces.
X. The sign for the Wells Fargo is a light-box sign, which is to say a hard plastic shell around a light source, so that the colors shine brightly to advertise to passing cars. The Wells Fargo sign faces Jackson Street, which is the southbound half of Highway 95. From my apartment windows, you can see the Wells Fargo sign all the time. At night I have to close my blinds to keep out its yellow-red glare and that of the streetlights, which, around here, blink after 10 p.m.
X. The Wells Fargo is the primary object in view from my living-room window. I live alone, and my dining table has only one chair. I eat my meals with only the Wells Fargo for company.
X. It must be the bank manager’s birthday today, because he’s wearing a black sash over his black dress shirt. The sash reads “Happy 50th Kevin” in shiny gold letters. The interior of the Wells Fargo is sparse and sprawling—a lot of wide, open spaces for a bank. It’s done up in cream and dark wood tones, with tasteful splashes of red. Above the teller windows, there’s a large vinyl mural: a collage of Wells Fargo accoutrements and iconography of the American West. There are only two tellers when I arrive, and they’re both busy. A man in a maroon shirt and green shorts is at the far end of the bank, talking at length with the young man behind the counter. I hover in the doorway, and the bank manager notices me. He takes an old-school Bluetooth headset—the kind with a little wing for the microphone so that it reaches toward the mouth—off of his ear and comes over to where I’m dithering. My mental note-taking must look like confusion. This is when I notice the “Happy 50th Kevin” sash. Kevin, one presumes, asks how he can help me.
X. Both the Italian luncheonette and the winery are out of business now. After the vineyard burned, the winery sold every bottle it had left and closed the shop. They split the proceeds among the employees and mailed us greeting cards with cash inside. I’m using one of the twenties to buy quarters at the Wells Fargo.
X. “I’m just here to buy quarters,” I say.
The birthday boy directs me to stand in the tangle of stanchions instead of the atrium.
“I’ve seen too many people get passed up in line because they were standing over there,” he says, and it’s a kind thought, even though there’s hardly anyone in the bank. It’s his birthday, so I humor him.
I get to the window and explain myself. The teller is a middle-aged woman with a gray ponytail slipping down into the collar of her standard black polo shirt. Behind her, and really all throughout the bank, there are gold balloons with “50!” printed on them and decorative red-and-black warning signs that say things like “40s End Here!” and “Over the Hill!”
I trade my twenty for two rolls of quarters in orange-and-white paper.
“Mission accomplished,” says the woman at the window as she hands me the coins. She said this to the woman before me, too, so I suspect this is her way of saying, “You can go now.”
X. Back at my apartment, I watch the guy in the maroon shirt exit from the bank’s back door and head towards the parking lot and the ATM. He’s wearing white socks, which shine brightly in the sun. He walks slowly, shifting all his weight from one foot to the other. I watch him until he disappears into the tangle of cars.
X. One of the Wells Fargo website’s corporate history pages discusses the bank’s founding in 1852, referring to it as “an innovative start-up,” and makes reference to Wells and Fargo’s “[advocacy] for inclusive communities.” Since the 1970s, Wells Fargo has employed dedicated corporate historians who gather historical documents, artifacts, and accounts about the history of the bank. Unsurprisingly, the corporate history webpage makes no mention of the subprime mortgage crisis, redlining, or any of the embezzlement scandals.
X. In the front wall of the Wells Fargo, right next to the adjacent storefront, there’s an ancient after-hours deposit slot. The retro text on it calls it an “after hours depository,” and the more modern sticker above informs visitors in no uncertain terms that it is for BUSINESS USE ONLY. They use capital letters to make this very clear.
X. Banks are an interesting place to be, a bit like a fortress: innately concerned with violation and robbery. Anything that protects from something imagines it. At the front of the Wells Fargo, there’s the plastic strip that provides height measurements for the security camera. At the back, the vault. The vault is visible, or at least the door to it is—a grid of iron bars like an Old West jail. A bank is always permeated with anxiety. Fear of a robbery, sure, but also the everyday anxiety of simply not having enough money. This is the reason I have to need quarters to go inside—I can’t justify my presence without it.
X. Beneath the yellow text on the light-box sign, there’s the dark-red silhouette of a stagecoach with two drivers. Wells Fargo’s corporate historians have published many articles on the association between the bank and the California Gold Rush and the Pony Express, hence the shape on the sign.
X. As I sit on the bench in front of the Wells Fargo, considering the after-hours depository, a young man rushes past me, bent over to steady a large white filing cabinet on a red hand truck. The whole operation, man included, rattles and groans.
X. The Wells Fargo sits at the southernmost edge of the block across from my apartment, and unlike most buildings in the downtown area, it has three visible sides. It’s a rectangular building with a flat roof, beige stucco bricks in straight lines—I can’t tell if they’re real bricks or a pattern in the stucco—capped with dusty dark-brown metal sheets and supported by a gray stone foundation. At the back and the front, the gray stone becomes black marble, usually dusty, but with small silver specks in it. The bank has thin, dark windows that span the whole space from the floor to the ceiling, covered entirely by thin metal blinds.
X. The Wells Fargo maintains several long, thin strips of plant life and mulch all around the building, on either side of the ATM driveway, and in front of the entrance. I mention the mulch because the mulch takes up most of the space, and is only occasionally interrupted by a small shrub or a shock of tall grass. The grass grows in small areas because it’s limited to a tiny gap in the black plastic sheeting that lies below the mulch. Much of the grass is dried out.
X. The ATM is twenty-four hours and brightly lit. The whole building, in fact, is covered in downward-tilted lights that look like half-closed eyes. The light they produce is white but not harsh, and they cover the three exposed sides of the bank to provide a sense of security.
X. I have to go outside to check that the silhouette of the stagecoach is really there. A tree blocks the view of it from my windows. It is dark outside, and I lock my door before leaving.
X. In front of the ATM, there are bright-yellow guardrails to keep drivers from hitting the machines. The guardrails have been there forever, sentries around the ATM. They’re oddly constructed, a vertical line with a rectangle intersecting the top of it, so that the overall effect is that of a stick-figure man making an exaggerated shrug. I used to climb on them as a child.
X. In 2015, robbers crashed an SUV into the exterior window of the Wells Fargo History Museum in San Francisco, California. Not the bank—the museum. They made off with several gold nuggets that had been on display. The museum opened again three weeks later, once the glass had been replaced. It hosted tour groups and had a gift shop.
X. At night, the metal blinds don’t block the view into the Wells Fargo, and the whole place becomes completely permeable. I can see the rolling chairs behind the counter, the large, bowl-shaped lights that swing from the ceiling. I can see the balloons and the decorations, the locked vault. I can see Kevin’s office. Behind his chair is a large photograph, printed on canvas, of a stagecoach against a sunset. The shelf behind his desk is littered with small ceramic, plastic, and glass stagecoaches, a collection that I imagine took years.
X. The mythology of the American stagecoach is deeply intertwined with attack and robbery—Wells, Fargo, & Co. stagecoaches carrying gold and other valuables across the American West were often robbed and looted. Most available accounts of the history of the American stagecoach are the product of Wells Fargo’s history department, which regularly provides fodder for marketing and evidence in trademark disputes. “Few other corporations in this country are as historically conscious—or as dependent on history for its public image—as Wells Fargo,” writes Philip L. Fradkin in Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West. I suppose this is because keeping the image of the threat at hand makes the safety more impressive.
X. Once, in our dusty backyard, my father caused an ember to burn my young skin and said nothing about it, which is how I realized there was no guarantee that he could protect me from anything.
X. A car comes out of the ATM driveway, a small gold sedan. Its rear tire gets caught on the curb, and the vehicle pauses for a moment at the top of the arc before it bounces back down to the pavement.
X. Waiting for the arrival dance at the coffee shop across the street, I see my father’s car pull up to the stoplight. He drives a Jeep, because he’s enchanted by the idea of riding high above the rugged landscape.
X. The woman who goes into the bank, the woman with dark hair, is wearing a purple sweater today. She arrives along with Kevin, who is wearing a blue suit. It is no longer his birthday. He has to wait on the corner until the woman in the purple sweater gives him the all-clear. She disappears for a long moment; puts a university-football-game foam finger in the front window; exits and walks a short distance away from the bank, checking for threats, and then waves Kevin over. This is the dance.
X. At nine o’clock, the woman in the purple sweater takes down the foam finger and unlocks the door to the bank. I can’t begin to decipher the connection between these two tasks.
X. At night, when all the windows of the bank become permeable, I watch a janitor clean the floors. The windows reach all the way down to the gray stone foundation, but the foundation ends a little below eye level from the street. So as this woman mops the pale-brown tiles, I watch her feet move across the floor—just glimpses between the legs of chairs and the tellers’ counter. It is so strange, the contrast between the elaborate theater of the morning, the slow grand entrance of the company, and the ending, a solo, this quiet cleaning up, the woman all by herself in the still-lit bank. At this moment, by a trick of the light, I can see straight through the entire thing.
Annie Sheneman is a second-year MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho, where she serves as the Nonfiction Editor for Fugue. She writes essays about banks, puppets, streets, agricultural equipment, or whatever else interests her at any given moment.
Her Instagram is @annie_sheneman.
