Consider Hayley, our hire of two months, a relative endurance run. Hayley is twenty-four years old, and she is earning $8.35 an hour. Every morning, she comes in with a large coffee from a retailer whose name I will not mention, usually with “skim latte” indelibled on the cup. A latte of that size, from that retailer, costs $4.25. Which is roughly thirty-one minutes of labor for Hayley. Pre-tax. This chronic decision of Hayley’s will translate into an annual expenditure of approximately eleven hundred dollars. On an expected income of sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. All of which is fine. Someone may choose to spend that proportion of her income that way; you never know what coffee, or anything, means to another person. In a very nondirective manner, I remarked to Hayley last Friday that the coffee provided for free by our center was from the retailer she chose to frequent—the same retailer. I just mentioned it, I didn’t press the point. At no point did I make any open judgment about the value of the coffee per se, as I understand that it is about the value of the coffee to her.
Over the following week, however, I observed that this information had no influence on Hayley’s coffee-obtaining habits. I refrained from pointing out that the coffee she drank was promoted in conjunction with a life style that it was not, without additional funds, naturally yoked to, any more than polar bears are yoked to a certain red-canned cola drink. I know that such observations just make me sound like a killjoy and a pedant. I get it. I like and admire Hayley; she is a team player. I don’t judge. But I have of late been tempted to judge. When Hayley comes in to my office crying, saying that Dusty (her cat) has cerebellar issues—that Dusty is just walking in circles, Dusty is not eating properly—and she needs the rest of the week off to take care of her, I say yes, even though I am short on people trained to handle our new insurance contract. What else can I say? Hayley’s coffee behavior reveals that she is not a rational person, who would understand that the best thing she can do, for her and for Dusty, is to keep coming in to work. I know from experience not to give advice. People have to come to things on their own; I understand that. For example, I should admit to myself that it makes a difference to me that Hayley is my sister. I like to think that this does not affect my objectivity, but maybe it does.
Perhaps I should also admit that sometimes I have a fantasy that I have been invited to speak to a room full of people, or of Hayley, eager to learn from me. I am, technically, a young woman, I say to them, or her. But, owing to the exceptionally high turnover rate at my job, and the nature of the job itself, I have dealt with more than most people have, and for that reason I believe it is not misleading to say that I am of a class of individuals who were once termed wise old men. I work at a call center. Incoming calls, not sales. Service. Helping people. “Helping people” was recently ranked the No. 1 factor in job satisfaction! But I understand why many people fail to maintain their positions here for more than ten days. And I don’t pass judgment on those people for their failure. Or, for that matter, on myself, for my success. The four hamburgers of life—there’s the hamburger that tastes good now but makes you feel bad later, the one that tastes bad now but makes you feel good later, the one that is good both now and later, and the one that is bad both now and later, and of course we’re all meant to find the good/good and feed ourselves appropriately—vary for everyone. I find this hamburger idea very useful. It comes from a book called “Happiness.” The author explains that we all need to pursue metaphorical hamburgers that balance current pleasure with future happiness, which is to say: Meaning. Or, at least, that is his argument. He used to teach at Harvard. Another book I read says there are only the drowned and the saved. That also sounds true.
The reason I excel in my work, I want to explain, is that I am naturally empathic. To be empathic you have to understand people. I believe I was rapidly promoted—I no longer have to field phone calls; I teach people how to field phone calls, and I even teach people how to teach other people how to field phone calls, as well as taking consults on particularly challenging phone encounters—because I understand people. Someone shouts at me that I’m exactly the kind of crook who calmly buries people in mass graves, upon the occasion of my sincerely trying to help him/her co-discover why he/she has not received a reimbursement for the preoperative laboratory tests associated with emergency gall-bladder surgery—I understand that person. I understand everyone. Or, rather, I used to.
One Friday afternoon a few months ago, I came home and found Hayley microwaving a bagel. I said, “You shouldn’t microwave a bagel—you should toast a bagel. That brings out the texture.” She’s my sister, after all, and so sometimes I feel that I can speak more openly with her than I would with other people. Hayley started crying.
She said, “Travis is going to think I did it on purpose.”
“He’s not going to care about a bagel,” I said.
“It’s twins,” she said. “And if I tell him it’s twins he’ll definitely leave.”
But Travis had already left. I hadn’t seen him for weeks, and I felt pretty certain that Hayley hadn’t seen him, either.
Hayley continued, “I think it’s fair for me to keep that it’s twins a secret. It’s my body. I can keep him out of the delivery room. And anyway I don’t want him to see my private parts in that way.”
I pointed out to her that she was living not with Travis but with me. That it was me, not Travis, who was there for her, sharing a microwaved bagel.
“It’s true,” she said. “Travis has always been very conservative with his food.” She paused, as if in reflection. “Can I say the second baby is yours? We could say you chose to adopt a baby, and it just happened to be at the same time that I was having one, which would make sense, because of your admiration for me. But which baby would I keep? What if I can’t help but choose the cuter one? That’s really wrong. Think how terrible you would feel if Mom had done that with us. We need to just flip a coin, no thinking, no deciding.”
It was the irrationality of it all that was drowning me. Or her. I continued to sit with her, because she is my sister and she was distressed, but I was conscious that I wanted to be rereading about the four kinds of hamburgers instead, reminding myself how to make good-now, good-later decisions. My sister said that the thing that seemed really gross to her about kids was having a minivan—the way the passenger door is on the opposite side from the driver’s door, so that you have to get out of the driver’s seat and go all the way around to the other side to open the kids’ door. She had seen so many women doing this, and it seemed like a real bore. Was what she was saying about minivans and their doors even true? Don’t most minivans have doors on both sides? I didn’t say that I didn’t know why she would have to have a minivan, and I didn’t say that I hoped she didn’t think I would be leasing the minivan for her. I didn’t say that because I knew I would be leasing it for her. Even if I successfully negotiated the minivan down to a hatchback. Maybe if I could actually be nice to my sister, in my heart, I wouldn’t have to be so nice to her in the pastures and parking lots of our real world.
I said, “You know what? I think this is such good news. We’re losing sight of how this is happy news. We just have to decide that it’s good news, and then it is—it’s good news.”
Hayley cried a little more. I talked a little more. Wandering among false sentiments and unwanted thoughts, I found myself doing something really not very nice at all. I found myself telling Hayley that I thought she should come work at the call center with me. I believe that I proposed this so that I could hold it against her when she inevitably turned it down, treating it as if it were beneath her, which I knew she would do, and I knew that it would make me furious when she did this, and I entrapped her anyway. What can I say? I am the youngest of three. When we were little, my sister had an easy way with a soccer ball, and my brother fixed up an old car on his own, and he never had trouble filling the seats with girls who had shiny hair. Both of my siblings were more fun and more naturally attractive, and happier, than I was. My brother loved ordering me to remove his dirty socks and then inhale from them—that kind of thing. I miss those days. Now my brother has two children whom he believes his wife conceived with her own father. He went so far as to order DNA tests. He didn’t believe the results; he has no job; his wife has taken the kids back to Wichita, where she is living with her parents; he is in Wichita, too, which I know only because his wife calls sometimes to cry and to ask for money. My sister is more conventionally in decline. I know it sounds as if I don’t care for my siblings, but unfortunately I do. (Where are our parents? You know, they aren’t here.)
So I said the thing to my sister, about how she should come work at the call center, because, after all, it was about helping people, and helping people is a great way to get one’s mind off one’s own troubles, as she herself had said to me during that time when she went to three A.A. meetings, because she liked one of the men there and she wanted me to lend them my car, which I did, though most people wouldn’t lend a car to recovering alcoholics—would they?—and they got a speeding ticket which they did not notify me about but which later showed up in the mail. The certainty I had that she was going to say no, that the job wasn’t right for her, was so strong that I felt electric and happy—a currently tasty emotional hamburger that would taste very bad later.
“You know?” she said. “Yeah, no. That makes sense.”
“I just wish you would think about why you won’t give it a try.”
“I will give it a try. I’m saying I’ll try.”
“Because what do you lose from trying?”
“Right. I agree. I’m going to try. It could be my lucky thing.”
We didn’t actually need anyone at the time. We had just lost a big contract with a particular phone-service supplier, and we were suddenly low on work. Though at least wait times on calls had been reduced. Also, a study had come in about health risks associated with working at call centers—it was a study out of Sweden, which I think is not a proper compare group, since those people go months without sunshine, and then months with too much sunshine—and so resources had been allocated to transform the unofficial smoke-break room into an official smoke-free meditation space, to conform to a new and surely reasonable regulation that a prescribed percentage of profit go to worker well-being. That plus the fact that other regulatory legislation had recently made it legal for the state’s prisons to run call centers, staffed by inmates, and for various reasons the prison call centers only had to pay the inmates/workers ninety-five cents an hour. . . .
“We just have to hold up our brand, which is experience,” I said to Kyle, my boss. Kyle values my input. In discussing Hayley, I pointed out to Kyle what he already knows—how valuable it is not to have to again and again be training new people, that my sister would be a person we trained who then . . . I don’t know why I was making an argument for her as a steadfast, reliable person or why I didn’t mention her pregnancy, which was—soon—going to be obvious.
Kyle said that my recommendations had never failed him.
On Monday night, I told Hayley that the following Monday could work as a start day, though honestly Tuesday would maybe be better, less hectic, and that for the training weeks it would be just half pay, but that period could be as short as two weeks—
“I meant to tell you that I prayed about that,” Hayley said. “I’m going to take three more weeks before I start. For myself. To focus on me. It wasn’t a decision I made—I want you to understand that. It was a commandment I obeyed. I got us something really great, though, for our home.” It was a special frying basket for a taco-salad bowl. You placed an extra-large tortilla in it, you heated up a pot of oil to a hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit, you lowered the frying basket, you lifted out an edible bowl. “I thought it would be fun for us. And I know how much you love to cook.”
I don’t love to cook. I just cook as a service. I don’t even like to eat that much—it’s just a necessity. I can think of no hamburger that is good now or good later. They’re all terrible.
When Hayley finally showed up for her first day of work, she wore a crop top. I told her that this was inappropriate, and she told me that she believed the body of a woman carrying a child was a beautiful and holy thing, and that it was sad that I could not see it that way. On the second day, she stayed home sick. But in the weeks after that, I should acknowledge, Hayley had decent metrics. We mainly follow Average Handle Times (A.H.T.s) and First Call Resolutions (F.C.R.s); following these metrics is part of my job, and not just snooping. Hayley’s A.H.T.s were not within goal parameters, but her F.C.R.s were those of a more experienced handler. Did these numbers truly represent her? I know that metrics can measure only what they measure, and that they can’t measure what one might collectively call immeasurables. That said, I tend to think there is an instinctive—but misguided—tendency to overvalue “immeasurables,” as if they should be equated with love or dignity or art when, in fact, they are as much a grab bag of data as more easily captured factors are. It may be true that you can’t—yet—measure human kindness in a customer call, or other interaction, but I do think, for example, that kindness manifests itself in aggregate F.C.R. numbers.
But Hayley’s metrics weren’t so impressive that they could explain why Kyle kept stopping by her cubicle. One day, he brought her a stress ball to squeeze. He squeezed the ball and talked about its texture, and laughed. Another afternoon, I heard Hayley’s laugh; it was coming from Kyle’s office. Left behind at her cubicle, I saw, was Hayley’s coffee, resting on a high ledge. I crossed the office with the purpose of throwing the branded paper cup away, but I found that it was unexpectedly heavy; it still had coffee in it, six ounces or so, just abandoned there. Did she even like coffee?
I felt that I understood something. Hayley was trying to represent herself as a woman who had a certain amount of money, enough money to waste, and in advertising herself in this way she was wagering that a man with a certain amount of money would say to himself, “She is one of us.” And he would then be moved to club her on the head and throw her over his shoulder, and basically this would be good. Instead of trying to work her way toward greener pastures, she was trying to sexually advance herself to greener pastures. Even while pregnant. I told Hayley that evening that her behavior with Kyle would only foul and not further her development.
But who cares? On the first of February, only thirty-one weeks along—not a particularly good number, not really a good number at all—Hayley, well . . . it became necessary to go to the hospital. Humanity was making its way toward us.
“I told you not to drink so much coffee,” I said as I drove.
“You never said anything about coffee,” Hayley replied.
“I did. I knew a woman who worked at that diner on Berry, and when pregnant women came in asking for coffee she would secretly give them decaf, as a public-health intervention.”
“What’s happening to me has nothing to do with coffee.”
“What’s happening is a result of your decisions. You’ve made choices. One right after another. And now it’s not as if Kyle is going to solve this for you.”
“Jesus. Sometimes life just happens.”
“That’s what losers think.”
“You’re the one who’s making decisions. You’re making a decision to be a terrible, terrible mother—”
“What are you talking about? I’m not a mother,” I said.
“You’re my mother,” she said.
“But I’m not your mother,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“I’m really good with people,” I said. “I’m actually really good with them. People like working with me.”
Hayley said that I was only good with people on the phone.
I told Hayley something true, which was that I thought she looked really bad, and had for a while. That she looked much worse than other pregnant women, and that now, because of her decisions, she was going to have two tiny premature little nonpersons with all sorts of problems, and that I hoped she would enjoy what she had sowed.
“Please stop the car,” Hayley said.
“I’m sorry, are you O.K.? Is something happening?”
“Please stop the car now.” Then, “Now I am making a decision. If you don’t stop the car, I’m calling the police.”
Of course I wasn’t going to stop the car. But at the red light on Eufaula I had to stop the car. Hayley opened the door, she got out of the car, she didn’t even close the door, she walked to a white truck in front of us, she spoke through the window, she climbed into the truck.
Was I supposed to follow Hayley, pursuing her across the twenty-five-mile-per-hour zones to the hospital, where things would proceed pretty much exactly the same as if I had not followed her? Was I supposed to return to work, where, through no fault of my own, I would be perceived as cold and un-empathic? Was I supposed to pull over and do a five-minute “breather” as a way of understanding that in such moments our vision invariably clouds? Or was this a situation in which our first instinct is our best instinct and the clouding occurs in deliberation? Who was I to Hayley, really, but a chance shaking of the biological dice? Let her go.
As these thoughts presented themselves, one after another, like a series of flashcards for learning nothing, I found myself passing a mock-Tudor house with a trim lawn, bordered with topiary. It was a house that I recognized. Beyond the house were horses, then ten miles of sod farms. In middle school and then steadily through high school, I had been infatuated with a boy who lived in this house, a perfectly untouchable Joshua Michaelson. My love for him was not entirely unrequited: once, after finishing a chemistry-lab writeup we were partnered for, I was invited, albeit by his father, to stay for dinner. Joshua showed me a special freezer, for the quarter of a cow they had purchased, and there was also a greenhouse with geraniums and tomato plants. Next to the kitchen table, on a high shelf, was a red plate that I was told was part of a Quaker tradition; it read, “You Are Special Today,” and one ate off it only on one’s birthday, or on some other very special occasion. I had loved Joshua before, but now I loved him with the intensity of someone who would have felt honored to be a piece of furniture in his realm. In my house, at that time, there were hundreds of goldfish that our mom had brought home in plastic bags, in one of her streaks of spending and what she called “bouts of personality.” Joshua was the oldest of five brothers; also at the table was a live-in nanny, a woman from Hungary, whose name I didn’t catch. I had never met a nanny before. She had corn-silk hair pulled up in one of those ponytails that lend a special shape to the head, a sort of volume which I’ve never succeeded in reproducing. I don’t know where the mom was. The nanny seemed at least one part tennis star. I felt, at that dinner, that I was sitting amid the most beautiful, intelligent family in the world.
Joshua’s father drove me home. I asked him to drop me off at the house two doors down from my actual house. The porch light was not on at my house. Inside, my mother was sleeping. Outside, Hayley had gathered the plastic bags of goldfish from all the corners of the house and was finishing placing a stack of them on our front lawn, next to a sign that read “Free! Please take!” She was never a keeper of family secrets. Only I was. I never used to tell Hayley, or anyone, anything. But for some reason, I suppose because Hayley had an undeniable talent with the other gender, that evening I confessed to her that I was in love with Joshua Michaelson. She stood quietly next to the fish. Quiet was rare for Hayley. She knew the Michaelson family.
Finally, she said, “You’re too good for him. Just remember that. He’s not rejecting you, you’re rejecting him.”
It wasn’t true, I know, but something about my sister’s way of being—it was our household that was secretly the golden one. I was able to believe that. For a moment.
My phone was ringing. I was in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot across the street from the call center. “How can I help you?” I answered automatically. It was a nurse speaking to me. Hayley was either well or she wasn’t well. She was absolutely fine, things were under control—also, I should get over there right away. The nurse’s phonic demeanor was calm, measured, efficient, and empathic. I drove to the hospital in a kind of dream state, like that of those elderly callers who, having left longer and longer gaps between phrases, at some point stop responding altogether, even as they remain on the line; one tries not to be the person who ends a call, though devotion to that ethic can ruin one’s numbers. The closing words should always be “Is there anything else I can do for you?” It is an honor to be in that position. At the hospital parking lot, a gate lifted, as if it knew me, as if it were in agreement with who I was.
What a miracle of organization and civilization that hospital seemed to me. I had done nothing to help build or sustain it, and still it received me, as if it didn’t matter what I did or did not do or say. It was like coming across a cathedral on a high, empty tundra. You could just go inside. People with specialized skill sets were here, night and day. The lighting inside was so evenly distributed, so uniformly bright. Staff clocked in and clocked out, name tags were printed. Arrows on the floor directed people to magnetic resonance imaging, or to endoscopy. How had all this happened and been made available? To me, and to my family? Yes, I knew that these places also spread infectious diseases and ruined people’s credit ratings, but all that was dim at the perimeter of my vision, and I felt instead that I had entered a mansion and, against all expectations, my sister was in residence. The receptionist asked me who I was there to see.
“I’m here for Hayley Ward,” I said. “I’m the nanny for the Ward twins.” Though I had made no decision, I felt happy, expectant. I needed a family. And here Hayley was bringing one to me. Love was about practice, the book on happiness had said. Or maybe it hadn’t said that. I think it was that winning at squash was about practice, and then it turned out that victory had been insufficient? I didn’t know. Maybe I could learn on the job. ♦
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