Viral Read online

  For my parents

  Contents

  Smile Report

  On Friendship

  Lucille’s House

  States

  Three Marriages

  A Boy My Sister Dated in High School

  My Daughter and Her Spider

  If You Cannot Go to Sleep

  No-No

  Guided Meditation

  Viral

  Biographies

  Viral

  Smile Report

  Cashier #43 was not smiling enough. I called her into my office.

  “But, Mr. Pruffer, I was smiling,” she said. “I really was. Whenever a customer came up to my register, I smiled just like the manual says to do. I showed my teeth and everything. I lifted the corners of my mouth.”

  “That’s not what the facial expression cognition software is telling us,” I said. “The reports have been very clear for several days. Over the course of the twenty-seven documented Customer Interface Junctures it rates your facial expression at a median of five out of ten, which is really somewhere between a wan look of apology and a grimace, rather than a smile. That is extremely sub par.”

  Her name was Gladys Kemp. She stood in the middle of the floor in front of my desk, silent, her eyes cast down, her lips pursed as though she were holding something inside her mouth that kept trying to escape. She looked like she was in her mid-thirties. She had the first faint tracings of lines around her eyes, the blue shadows of tiredness beneath, but these things somehow only called attention to the melancholy prettiness of her face. She still wasn’t saying anything.

  “Look,” I said, trying to project a gentler, more sympathetic attitude. “Let me show you how it works.” I gestured toward the chair across from mine, and when she’d seated herself in it I turned the screen on my desk toward her so that it was at a ninety-degree angle from both of us. I leaned forward a little so that I could look more closely at what it showed. She leaned forward, too. Our faces were quite close together and I could smell something faint and lovely, lavender or green tea.

  I pointed to the screen with my pen.

  “The software graphs your smile over the course of the day according to a series of standardized characteristics. Broadness is only one of them. As you learned in your employee orientation, when a customer approaches it is important to raise the corners of your mouth like so”—I demonstrated for her—“so that your teeth become visible, but not your tongue. It is important to narrow your eyes and lower your lids”—again, I showed her how it was done correctly—“because the relaxation of the eye is another demonstration of a genuine pleasure experience and the customer will be able to discern immediately, if your eyes are too wide, say, or too rigid, that the smile is only a facade and not an expression of authentic good feeling. It is also important that you allow the smile to grow and fade on your face smoothly. A real smile isn’t slapped on like a sticker; it blooms like a flower; it opens and closes gracefully. Like this.” I showed her. Open. Close.

  “I see,” she said. She looked down and I saw her lips crumple laterally and she put her hand up to cover her mouth. She was still leaning forward, and now she crossed her legs, one over the other. Her straight, dark hair fell forward and she brushed it back with her hand.

  “As you also should have learned when you were hired,” I said, “the best way to create this expression convincingly is to cultivate the emotion that traditionally underlies it. That is, think a happy thought that might bring on a smile of its own accord when a customer approaches. Now, you have a college degree, I remember from your file.”

  “I have a master’s degree,” she said, “in biochemistry. I was going for my PhD but when the government stopped giving student loans, I couldn’t manage the expense.”

  “Well, someone as clever as you should be able to think up something that can help you to smile at customers. I mean, really . . .” I put my head on one side and pursed my lips and raised my eyebrows quizzically so that she could see that I was addressing her as an equal, a Partner-in-Success, in whom I was disappointed and from whom I expected better work, more commitment, less slacking in the future. “Am I right?” I asked.

  She was silent for a moment.

  “Yes,” she said, quietly.

  “Of course I am. Now, what can you think of to be happy about? Let’s brainstorm together about this.”

  She was staring downward again, and I saw that her jaw was clenched and her eyes were wide and then, suddenly, bright. She blinked a couple of times.

  “Come on,” I said. “Help me out here. Things in your life to be happy about.”

  She looked at me and blinked several more times, and I noticed that her eyes were a lovely and unusual shade of hazel brown; they seemed almost translucent, suffused all through with light. I stared into them, I admit, a little captivated, and abruptly, right there, in the chair in my office, Gladys Kemp began to cry. Tears rose and dropped from her eyes. She made a noise like something feathered being strangled and covered her face with her hands.

  I let her cry for a minute before I stopped her. It’s good to get the emotions out, experts say, so I handed her the box of Kleenex on my desk. Then I sat with my arms folded and watched her. She took a Kleenex and wiped her eyes with it and blew her nose.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, between sobs. “It’s been such an awful week. My landlord is going to evict me and my daughter from our apartment for nonpayment of rent and my daughter is sick but the doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong and they are going to do more tests but the tests are so expensive and then our cat got run over by a bus. I’ve been trying to smile, really I have, but it’s just been kind of difficult this month.

  “I promise that I’ll do better next week. Please. I can’t afford to lose this job.”

  And she looked at me again with those enormous eyes and I thought for an instant that I might disappear inside them and become trapped the way some insects become trapped in amber and you see them stuck there millions of years later and all at once I understood that those insects weren’t struggling and fighting to get out. They were luxuriating; they were deliriously happy. They were drowning in honey.

  I was summoned back from these thoughts by the tune my computer plays when a new message arrives in my inbox. I was still at my desk and Gladys Kemp was watching me, waiting for me to speak. I hoped that I hadn’t given any external indication of my thoughts, any sign of what I had just been feeling when I gazed into her eyes a few moments before. But her expression was unreadable: she just watched me, neutral and expectant. What would I say?

  “Well,” I said. “There were extenuating circumstances, I guess. As long as your rating improves next week, we don’t have to make a big deal out of this.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  I nodded calmly but I didn’t reply. It’s best to maintain a benevolent detachment from the staff and I didn’t want her to think that she’d gotten away with anything. I stood up to show our interview was over, and she stood up and she seemed relieved and excited and, before she left, she leaned across the desk and offered her hand for me to shake and I took it and she squeezed my fingers and—she smiled.

  It wasn’t the smile we were looking for, not the with-teeth smile of magnanimous welcome, not the one for customers. It was different from that. It unfolded diagonally across her face, her lips pushed together on one side so that the whole expression was lopsided. But it was at least a smile. A real one.

  I could tell it was real because I found that I was smiling back. I was smiling as she turned away from me and walked toward the door. I was still smiling as she opened the door and stepped through it without looking back. I was even smiling as the door closed and I sat down at my computer to look at the new message that had arr
ived, and as I slid the cursor across the screen to open up the window for my email, and as I looked and saw that the new message was from my supervisor, Dr. Kyler, whose office is several floors above mine.

  When I read the message, however, I stopped smiling.

  Dr. Kyler wanted to see me. On a matter connected with standards of personal comportment. My personal comportment. She suggested I come as soon as my current Team-Member Interface Juncture was adjourned.

  My Team-Member Interface Juncture was already adjourned. I took the elevator up several floors. I could see myself reflected in the metal surface of the door, but the image was warped so it looked as though my face was oozing off one side of my head. The doors slid open and I stepped out into the long, carpeted hallway and passed by the name-plated doors of the vice presidents and the directors, whose ranks I hope that someday I will join although, if I was being called up here because my conduct was not in line with the standards of the company, what hope did I have of ever having my own office on this floor? I had thought that I was doing well, managing my present responsibilities quite productively when clearly something had been going very wrong.

  Thinking these kinds of negative thoughts, I arrived at Dr. Kyler’s suite and knocked. Her personal assistant opened the door. He smiled at me broadly, in just the way we train all our Team Members to do, but at the very same time he also somehow managed to look me up and down with a mixture of distain and suspicion, or else a mixture of dislike and regret, or else a mixture of sympathy and contempt. I wasn’t sure exactly which, but I didn’t like it any way.

  “She said you should just go on in,” the personal assistant said and pointed to Dr. Kyler’s office door.

  She was sitting at her desk, putting on her glasses so she could study a sheaf of printouts that lay in front of her. When I entered, she glanced up at me—and then she smiled. Until that moment I had thought I was pretty good at generating a spontaneous expression of warmth and welcome on my face. But whatever ability I possessed paled next to the astonishing skill of Dr. Kyler. The smile that she turned on me made me feel like I had come home after a long journey, like the world was a safe and wonderful place if only I would learn to see it that way.

  “Well,” she said, beaming luminously. “Well.”

  “I came as soon as I got the message.” I wanted to show her that I really cared about being a part of our company, that I was more than just an average Team Member.

  “Yes. I see that and I appreciate it very much. Why don’t you have a seat?” I did as she instructed. She studied the papers further. Neither of us spoke. At last, I said:

  “What is it that you want to see me about?”

  “Nothing serious, I’m sure,” she said. “I’m sure this whole meeting is entirely unnecessary. That it is overkill. But I’ve always felt that it is better to nip things in the bud. Catch them before they get out of hand. I’m sure you’ll agree with me.”

  “Of course,” I said. I waited for her to continue. She cleared her throat.

  “This company considers it to be of the utmost importance that our Team Members, even our senior Team Members such as you, maintain a demeanor at all times that matches with our brand. Since we trademarked the expression “Service with a Smile” all those years ago, we want to make sure that everybody, at all levels of the organization, reflects that crucial concept.” She was looking intently into my face as she spoke. She was still smiling at me, of course, but now her smile had shifted so that it was less bright and more gentle and enveloping, more compassionate and caring and even slightly melancholy, as if her heart was full almost to bursting. She said: “With the Team Members you supervise, you have to be aware that they will take their cues from you. If you do not create a positive environment, they will not either.

  “The facial expression cognition software,” she said, removing her glasses, “tells us you have not been smiling enough. In fact, when you have been talking to other Team Members you have been looking, well . . . in some cases you have been looking what can only be described as miserable.” She looked at me again. Now her smile said: Go on and explain. Don’t be afraid. You have my attention and, what’s more, you have my sympathy.

  I sat there looking back at her. I opened my mouth to speak but no words were waiting inside it, so I shut it again. I thought about Gladys Kemp and how when she was telling me about her sick daughter and her run-over cat, I had stopped thinking about my expression altogether because I was listening to what she said. I felt unhappy for her and even a little—could this be right?—angry on her behalf that she had wanted to continue with her studies but couldn’t do it because she did not have the money. I thought back through the preceding week and the week before and I realized that I’d talked with several of the Team Members I supervised about their Smile Reports. Each one of them had told me the reason why they weren’t smiling enough: one had a husband who had lost his job and now, instead of looking for a new job, just sat at home all day watching television and drinking black Sambuca ; another had lost all her savings in a pyramid scheme based on selling nutritional supplements; another had a son who ran away from home and could not be found. When I had listened to these stories, and in fact for many hours afterward, I had struggled to generate even the most rudimentary outline of a smile. I had thought that these intervals of despondency had gone unnoticed. But obviously I had been wrong.

  Dr. Kyler was still looking at me, with that expression of attentive compassion on her face. It was an expression that said: Trust me. Let’s work together to alleviate this problem. And in response to it I promised myself silently that, beginning today, I would strive to cultivate this very look for myself. I would memorize it; I would stand in front of my mirror and practice until I got it right. I would begin right now. If she could manage to maintain her positive outlook even through this regrettable conversation, I could do the same. I took a deep breath and concentrated hard. At last I felt the corners of my mouth begin to rise.

  “I apologize,” I said, “for these unfortunate lapses in my professionalism. It won’t happen again.” Dr. Kyler nodded, encouragingly. “I hope that we can overlook them provided my future performance shows improvement.”

  “Oh, nothing would please me more,” she said. “I’m sure that will be possible.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Again she nodded. Then she stood up.

  “Well, I feel that this has been a most productive meeting,” she said.

  “Yes. Well. Great. Thank you for taking the time . . .”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said and led me to the door and let me out.

  I smiled at the personal assistant as I passed his desk. I smiled at myself in the elevator going back down to my desk, although my reflection was stretched and distended so my lips looked like long pink tentacles extending from my face and undulating in an undersea current and I couldn’t tell whether I looked happy or just demented.

  That night, at home, in front of my bathroom mirror, while the microwave in the kitchen of my apartment thawed and then heated my supper (chicken à l’orange; mixed vegetables), I practiced pushing the lines of my mouth into a series of expressions that ran from mild amusement through sympathetic encouragement to amazed delight. I was pleased with them. I felt I was developing a skill set that would serve me well in the future. While I ate, spooning the cubes of whitish meat from the plastic tray into my mouth, I made a mental list of things that would elicit those expressions. I checked my phone for messages and found that there were none. I watched a television program about the recent, rapid growth of deserts all over the world, an unexplained phenomenon. For some reason the sand is creeping into places where it’s never been before. It isn’t following the normal patterns of soil erosion previously documented by geographers. Instead, it’s gulping down whole towns in single afternoons, as though it was a ravening animal. A man talked to the camera about how he saw a schoolhouse in his village eaten by a wave of sand. The ground opened like the jaws of a snake, he said. An
d then the school was gone.

  I switched off the television. I went to bed. I tried to smile into the dark but I kept thinking about the ground opening up and swallowing the building where I lived, so I found it difficult.

  The next morning on my way to work I practiced my new repertoire of smiles. I felt pleased, like I had been given a second chance against the odds. But when I arrived at my office, on my desk I found a note that had not been there when I left. I picked it up and read it. It was from Gladys Kemp.

  It said: I know that this is not really usually done at work, but I wanted to thank you again for understanding about my situation and I wondered if you would like to maybe sometime meet up for a cup of coffee or something like that . . . anyway: here’s my phone number. And there was her number, all those lovely digits in a row, and I looked at them and felt the expression on my face turn serious. I felt a kind of nervous anticipation, a fluttering inside my chest. It was not a bad feeling but it made it difficult for me to maintain the sense of placid optimism that I had been carefully cultivating since I woke. I put the piece of paper face down on my desk and looked at it. I wanted very much to call the number, but immediately I thought about what might happen if I did. What if we went out for coffee and it turned out that I bored her or we did not have that much in common? What if we dated for a while and then things did not work out and we had to see each other at work every day and now it was not a happy sight but a painful one? What if we went out and fell deeply in love and I began to feel her feelings along with her, which is what should happen when you love someone very much, and I began to worry about her daughter’s illness and her lack of opportunity and even her lost cat? Any of these outcomes would wreck my Smile Report. And what about Gladys Kemp? She was already struggling to keep her face under control. How on earth would she cope with any more disruptions in her life?

  I swallowed hard and tried to think of calm, benign things like flowers and nice, melodic music, and with some concentration I was able to neutralize the breach in my demeanor. I stood struggling mightily and it occurred to me that if this woman had such an adverse effect on me simply by giving me her phone number, what would happen if I actually called her number and took her up on the offer to meet for coffee? It could have far-reaching negative repercussions for my entire career.