Never let the mask slip

The thing is, you never want to take off the mask if you don’t have to. You keep yourself contained, calm, carefully tucked away. All your tendrils in place. Nothing unfurled. You smile with your mouth but not your eyes. You make people feel understood and cared for from the moment you punch the clock in the a.m. to nine long hours later.

You are a customer service specialist.

The problem is that there are certain people who want only to break your shell. They will try anything, everything, demand your manager, a refund, resolution, restitution. You are a customer service specialist. An operator. An advocate. Your mask never slips.

It takes skill. It takes the type of mental prowess that monks develop when they meditate, learning to lower their heart rate and metabolism, to create internal conditions that normal humans can’t. But you can. You listen to people lie all day. You listen to their ridiculous stories, and you do so with a smile on the mask that is your face.

That is what you’ve done for twelve and a half months. That is the job you chose to take your mind of what happened a little over a year ago. It has been the perfect antidote. You simply turn off your brain when you arrive at work, and by the end of the day, all you have left is you and your mask, and you go to a bar.

You might have continued this way indefinitely.

And then she came in. She. She, who destroyed your world. She, who burned your soul and scattered the ashes like flower petals. She, who taught you by leaving you how to do this job. How to have ice in your veins and a polished stone where your heart used to be. Remember your heart?

She was returning six espresso makers.

At first, she didn’t know it was you. At first, she was so busy fumbling through the purse you gave her for her 25th birthday that she didn’t look up to see who she was talking to. She had the six espresso makers, and she’d stacked them in various tote bags and must have had a hell of a time on the escalator. “Hold on,” she said, still rummaging through the hobo you’d picked out special, her favorite color, a wistful lavender. You'd even tucked a shiny penny into the change purse for luck.

“We were registered,” she said, still not looking up, “and somehow your system,” and that is how they always say it, your system, like it’s you personally who screwed up their plans, “your system allowed our guests to order six espresso makers.”

“So you only wanted one?” you ask, because part of the job is to ask very basic, almost childish questions.

“Well, of course! I’m not opening a coffee shop!” You don’t respond, even though you kind of want to say that coffee shops don’t have six espresso makers, either. Finally, she does look up, and she sees you, and something in her face shifts, but nothing in yours does. You have perfected the mask. She says, “Oh.” She says a bad word. She looks at the line behind her. She looks somewhat hopefully, craning her neck, to see if there’s a chance she can go to a different customer service provider, but there is nobody else. Your coworker is on her coffee break. You are short staffed. Always. That is part of the customer care experience.

She takes a breath and tries to find some common ground, but you are all business. You ask her for the gift receipts. You enter each code. You say nothing about the fact that she left you for your former best friend or that you caught the two of them in your bedroom on a night they thought you were working late or that you then went off the grid for a while before landing this job. That you left your highly specialized gig in tech, where you were making good bank, and you wandered for a while before landing here. You say nothing about how you would have treasured her forever, and that you still don’t know exactly what went wrong. You do know she didn’t marry Marcus, though, you do know that he caught her with his roommate soon after, and that he tried to be your friend again, but you were not amenable, and at that time, you hadn’t perfected the mask. What he saw was rage. He’d let a 17-year relationship go for a few hot nights with your now ex.

You give her the money, carefully counting each coin. She is trying to find something to say but you are a robot. An automaton. You give zero back with her pennies. None are shiny.

She doesn’t look the way you remembered. She was fresher then, blue eyes brighter, less shopworn. You wonder who she married and who the next guy will be. The postman? The milkman? Any man?

There is a moment when you think she might say sorry, or you think she might say it’s good to see you, or how have you been, but you aren’t giving anything for her to hold on to. So she takes her money, and she gives a little nod of something, random acknowledgement, and with her cheeks flushed, she turns away.

You don’t say that you tweaked the registry, that you amended the ordering information to say she wanted multiples of anything, unseen by the guests who order. You wonder how she’ll feel when the gravy boats begin to arrive. Potentially twenty gravy boats. Thirty ladles. One hundred tea spoons. A thousand trivets.

It won’t happen. She doesn’t know that many people. But it amuses you because it could.

You go to the bar after work. You ask for a beer from your favorite bartender, and she serves you with a smile, and your mask slips, and you adjust your jaw and you rub your fingers into the hollows of your cheeks, and then, only then, do you smile back.