The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  His whole life, I realized, was made up of these last two crummy decades. No wonder he was cynical and discouraged by the world and agreed with kids in his generation who were called nihilists and slackers.

  As soon as he got to college, he was appreciated by other students and he made friends, but he still wanted his own apartment. He didn’t say why. I assumed general misanthropy and a continuing desire to wear neatly pressed khakis and well-ironed shirts. But one of his cousins liked to tell that the boy had insisted on wearing Christian Dior shirts when he was only five. It went back that far.

  In high school, in a newly overdeveloped suburb of Boston, he remained the misfit he’d been in childhood. His closest companion was his dog.

  “People think I wear the same khakis every day,” he’d said when he was twelve. “In reality I have dozens of pairs, all the same.” In high school he liked to wear a navy blue sports jacket with the khakis and an oxford shirt, because the jacket had lots of pockets to keep things in and putting things into the pants pockets ruined the straight line.

  What things? Keys, wallet, change, pens, pencils—this was before he had the drugs to carry and hide.

  “Kids in my school don’t even know what a sports jacket is,” he’d told me. “One kid asked me, ‘Why do you wear a suit to school?’ That’s how ignorant they are.”

  “Listen to this,” he once said casually during a long phone call during the high-school years. “‘Dear Fellow Student, We regret to inform you that your classmate, __ __, has committed suicide,’” he read.

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s a form letter. I get a few every year. It’s always the same format.”

  In his senior year, as he prepared for college, his biggest worry was where he would have his shirts ironed properly.

  “Where do you have them done now?” I asked.

  “My mother does them.”

  “What!” I said.

  “You think that’s wrong?”

  “Of course.”

  “She irons my khakis, too,” he said. “And she can’t get the crease right.”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “It’s too hard. She likes to do it. It’s a privilege for her to iron for her family.”

  “Where did you pick up this way of thinking?” I asked. “In your Republican conservative clubs?”

  “Around. It’s everywhere.”

  I’d had this shirt discussion with him many times.

  “You can say, ‘Press only, no starch,’” I’d told him.

  “I’ve tried that. We don’t have it in the suburbs. The Chinese always starch them. They say okay, no starch, and they come back a stiff board, with a thousand wrinkles ironed into them. The regular dry cleaner just refuses.”

  The other side of the problem was that sometimes he had to pick up his father’s shirts. Wherever they brought them, his father yelled, “Not enough starch!”

  “He has us driving all over Massachusetts, and into other states, to get more starch in his shirts. My mother and I both have to do it. We alternate. He opens the box, we’re waiting in fear, and he shouts, ‘Look at the collar! It’s not stiff enough to stay up!’”

  Once when we were on the phone during the high school years, I’d heard him say to his father, “No thanks, I’ll do it later.”

  “My mother is away and he wants to know if I have any clothes for him to add to the machine while he’s doing his,” the boy said. “I’d never let him do my laundry. He’s the worst launderer in the world. I’d rather do my things separately than let him mangle and destroy whatever he touches.”

  “How does he do laundry that it can be so bad?” I asked.

  “He uses a thimbleful of soap powder for ten bath towels and fills the machine with an ounce of water. Then he pours in a gallon of bleach. Or he washes a few socks and pours in a whole box of soap. Then I hear him call me, ‘Quick, come here! Why are all these suds overflowing?’ He has no idea! He puts the shirts in with socks, so the sleeves and socks are tied together and wrapped around each other like a tightly wound rope with a thousand knots. I’ve had to secretly throw out whole loads of wash he’s done.

  “He’s like one of these cleaning people who don’t speak English and put sweaters in the dryer for seven hours on hot. My best sweater—he threw in—I take it out, it wouldn’t fit a mouse. I didn’t recognize it. I thought it was part of the dog’s toy animal.”

  I IMAGINED the boy in the big house his parents had designed. It was up on a hill and looked like the Guggenheim Museum. But all around it were other houses that didn’t look like any museum. The hill was a developer’s free-for-all, similar to the one where the electrologist lived, only a more expensive freer-for-all to do anything. The bigness and the mixed bag of architectural details must have contributed to the high prices. People with that money made in the eighties apparently didn’t know that the houses weren’t built in any known architectural design.

  One winter night when I was visiting, the boy took me around the corner to one of these houses. He had a job feeding the fish and the cats when the family was out of town and he had to go over some instructions with them.

  “This is the most hideous fish you ever saw,” he told me as we walked up the icy hill in the dark. He’d refused to dress for the cold weather—he hated the idea of warm jackets and was wearing his gray Chesterfield overcoat and loafers. Outdoor-weather gear was something he detested, among many other things. “I detest leeks,” he’d said while telling a story about the day his cousin had taken him to a restaurant in New York, where he’d ordered a vegetable pie. “I thought there would be the usual number of leeks and I could avoid them, but it was all leeks and I detest leeks. It was an entire pieful of leeks!”

  As we walked to the house, he said, about the fish, “It’s a huge black tubular body that looks like it’s made of rubber from a car tire and it has fangs for teeth.”

  “Will we see it now?” I asked him.

  “Only if the topic comes up in a subtle way,” he said. “Don’t mention that I told you about it. Don’t say anything about anything.”

  Before we’d left for the rubber-fish house, I’d tried to convince the boy to dress for the weather. After a while, he’d become peeved and then lost patience with the whole project. “It’s fine to wear this coat!” he said. “We’re just going across the road.” As we crossed, he complained about the cold while his loafers slipped around on the ice. Wearing a scarf or hat would have been demoralizing for him.

  “That’s what I meant by cold,” I said.

  “Usually I avoid inclement weather conditions,” he said. “I don’t have these problems.”

  We were greeted by a woman wearing a long quilted turquoise-blue-print bathrobe and fluffy royal blue animal-shaped slippers. Which kind of animal, I didn’t care to know—I knew I’d seen ears of some kind on the slipper front—rabbit, dog, something for sure. The woman was in her forties, maybe right around my age, I thought, and her hairstyle was this: two red braids down to her waist. Long braids and bangs at this age, to say nothing of the robe and slippers at seven P.M. She had slightly buck teeth and a retainer or some other orthodontic device on the upper teeth.

  “Hello,” the robed woman said, in that way mothers have of trying to be friendly with odd, silent children and teenagers.

  “Hello,” the boy said. He introduced me in his awkward style, as if the words were unbearable to speak. It was having to say my name that seemed to be the worst part for him.

  I’d been told that the woman had attended a college that had a prestigious dance department. One reason I hadn’t been accepted by the college was that no one advised me to express my interest in ballet. No one told me one thing. In fact, my mother wanted to go to antiques stores in the college towns we visited. Antiques hunting was higher on her priority list than the college interview, and I can’t blame her for that. In Bennington, Vermont, she’d bought some English yarn for knitting sweaters.

>   I walked ahead of her, down the Main Street of the town—it looked like the town in the movie The Stranger—while I thought about how badly I’d done at the interview.

  Later on, I couldn’t remember whether I’d been on the waiting list or just plain rejected by the college.

  “Children are overrated,” my mother liked to say.

  THIS IS what can happen to a Bennington graduate, I was thinking as I tried not to look too hard at the woman who could have been my classmate had I mentioned an interest in dance during the interview. She’d given up a career as a harp player to marry and have children with a person with a job in some corporate profession.

  The house was chock-full of furniture—all brand-new, dark wood—and upholstery and carpeting in more different bright colors than I could take in. I was getting the jittery feeling, leading to the panicky feeling. I knew I fit nowhere into the worlds encountered when visiting the boy and his family and their friends.

  As the woman showed the boy where the cat food was stored, I saw her husband sitting at a new kitchen table in a new kitchen. I tried not to look at the room too carefully. The man looked tired and overworked as he sat there with plates of food in front of him. He had the look of having been beaten down by work and the pressures of corporation life about which I knew nothing until I saw network executives portrayed in The Larry Sanders Show.

  After making a hasty retreat from the kitchen, I said to the woman, “I understand you have a big fish tank.”

  “Oh yes, would you like to see it?” she said. The boy looked at me with the look described as “daggers.”

  We were taken to the fish tank. Around the fish tank were all kinds of other things—expensive art objects, complicated music-listening systems, many-colored glass bowls, glass objects in all shapes, marble things—I couldn’t tell what. Marble balls, marble ovals, marble squares, marble, glass, stone, concrete, tile. I began to feel I might faint. Instead, I took some breaths as quietly as possible. I tried to remember the inhale/exhale ratio I’d read about in Dr. Weil’s books. Was it four, seven, eight, or seven, eight, four?

  “What kind of fish is it?” I asked.

  “We have to go,” the boy said. “I have homework.”

  The secret was this: He’d told it to me months before, in a long phone description of his activities. Part of his job was to resuscitate the fish if it stopped breathing. The nature of the fish’s physiology and anatomy was that it might stop breathing every day.

  “I have to give it artificial respiration,” he’d told me. Everything in his life was a bizarre adventure.

  He had to check on the fish once a day.

  “I have to go over there and see if it’s stopped breathing. Then I have to resuscitate it. They showed me how.”

  He had to put both hands into the tank, catch the fish, and shake it up in some special way.

  I asked whether the fish’s medical emergency had ever occurred during his watch. He said, “No, they tried to get me to practice once, but I was, like, ‘I don’t need to practice. I’ve taken a course in CPR for humans.’ If it ever happened, I might just let it suffocate, depending on my mood.”

  A BETTER adventure for the boy involved what he called “living in the snowbelt.” If we had a foot of snow, they had two feet. They were so lucky that it was always snowing in Massachusetts in the winter.

  “We live in the snowbelt,” he liked to say in a competitive way, even though he didn’t like snow. Snow interfered with driving and driving was his favorite activity.

  The boy’s father was a friend of a professor at Harvard. The boy didn’t care for the professor’s politics, or his children, because they all went to Harvard and were friends with observant Jews. “Can you believe kids wear skullcaps around Cambridge?” he’d said. One of these religious, scholarly students asked permission to park her car out in the wide, spacious driveway of the boy’s family’s house. There was no parking in Cambridge. The car was left there for weeks at a time.

  “Several blizzards came and went,” the boy said. “The car is buried under ten feet of snow and they decide they need it and they’re coming to get it. So I’m home by myself at night expecting the kid to come from Cambridge, I look out my window, and I see six girls in formal evening gowns standing around in the driveway.”

  “That sounds like a teenage fantasy,” I said. “Six girls in gowns appear in your driveway while you’re looking out your window one night.”

  “Maybe, but they weren’t that pretty,” he said. “A couple were Asian.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I said.

  “I thought in the fantasy they would all look like Grace Kelly.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. That again. But how could they be wearing just gowns in the icy weather?”

  “They had little sweaters,” he said.

  I knew the style. But all I could imagine for the gowns was the kind of dress Grace Kelly wore in Rear Window, when she’s all dressed up and stuck in an apartment with James Stewart in Greenwich Village. “Why didn’t you go down to help them?” I asked.

  “Well I did, eventually. But first I wanted to see what they would do. I knew where there was a trowel, or some tools and shovels in the garage, but I waited a bit. After a while they knocked on the door and asked for help. I said, ‘We might have something in the garage.’”

  “Wasn’t that cruel?”

  “Possibly, but I don’t like their old seventies jalopy in our driveway. It’s an embarrassment to our cars. And how could they have left it for months of snowstorms and thought they could just come and easily pick it up?”

  “Did you help them?”

  “No. I stayed up in my room and watched. It was nice enough of me to leave my homework and other activities and go down to the garage and give them the equipment. Don’t you think?”

  “How long did it take them?”

  “They were kind of hysterical. They had a prom or a dance to go to. They were, like, ‘Oh no, we’ll be late for the prom,’ or whatever. They dug for a while and gave up.”

  “Did you invite them in for some shelter?”

  “They didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. They went back in this one girl’s car that they’d come in. Who knows what they did. Now the car is still there, half dug out, half visible in its seventies unsightliness, and a continuing embarrassment to us.”

  DURING THE early high-school years the boy sounded happy once or twice. One night he answered the phone in a boisterous manner I’d never heard him use. He was calling out in a competitive way to his college-girl babysitter. She had moved in for a week to cook, drive, and be a companion while his parents were away.

  “She’s really my cousin’s girlfriend,” he said. “It’s not a true business arrangement.” He’d already told me a number of descriptions of her, and other girlfriends of boys he knew.

  “Isn’t her face out of proportion to her body?” he’d said.

  “Is it the one with the large chest?” I asked. This was all I could remember other than some extra-good manners.

  “These string beans are delicious,” I’d heard her say to the boy’s mother at a dinner where boiled soft string beans had been served. The beans had turned gray from the method of cooking.

  “It’s the fault of the guests,” the boy’s father had said when the boy’s mother had announced the condition of the string beans. “They were late. The vegetables overcooked.”

  “That too,” the boy said when I mentioned the chest size. “It’s the tiny facial features with the body that’s disconcerting. We think a plastic surgeon worked on the face.

  “She comes for a week with seventeen sweaters and a bag full of shampoo,” he whispered into the phone. “You owe me eight thousand dollars!” he called to her.

  “I’m beating her at every game,” he said.

  “How do you pay each other the debts?” I asked.

  “I offered to pay her from my stock account.”

  “What if you win?”

 
“She has to iron my shirts,” he said.

  “Is she willing?”

  “She has no choice. I’ve instructed her on the technique. It’s all settled.”

  I REMEMBERED the early years of my marriage, when I’d taken on the matter of my husband’s shirts. My life was a waste at the time. When I attempted to iron one shirt in an emergency and I was caught by a neighbor—not even a feminist—who had come to borrow soap powder or just be annoying about some problem in the dilapidated building, she said, “You iron shirts? Send them out, it doesn’t matter. They’re covered up by a jacket anyway.” I’d never thought of that.

  The boy spoke to me about shirt pressing for about half an hour every week until his anxiety reached an intense pitch when his senior year was over. In the end he calmed himself by concluding: “I’ll pay some kid to iron them for me.”

  THE DENIAL

  IWAS SURPRISED when he called me in Nantucket in August—the summer of the yoga ball. I’d last heard from him when he was painting his first apartment with his new friends the first semester of college. The boy had practiced talking to his parents’ friends his whole life, then he tried out his skills with his peers in college, and he was soon a beloved comrade. But I knew he had a coldhearted streak, too. It was easy to think of any number of reasons he wouldn’t want to stay in contact. I’d figured that he had a new life, with friends, even girlfriends, and he didn’t need to talk to me anymore, to me or to the guy who watched the Juicerator infomercials.

  In a dark and truthful moment, I had realized that I had something in common with that juicerator guy. Because not only did I stay on the phone for hours with the boy but also I had seen parts of those infomercials, too. I’d seen some trampy-looking women waxing their legs with honey wax. One licked her finger and said, “Tastes good, too!” I had to turn off the TV when I saw that.