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. And then the school was gone.