The Unprofessionals (7 page)

“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.”

I
WAS 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.

The guy probably missed out on the infomercial for the mineral powder or powder of minerals that a group of suburban housewives had put together, apparently without benefit of professional acting instructions or commercial-making tips. I was tired when I watched it at three
A.M.
, but I thought I heard the women say, “Gimme that,” and, “Lemme see,” as they approached one another, attempting natural-sounding conversation about their product. In another infomercial, the spokeswoman was wearing a giant cross on a chain around her neck while she talked about skin rejuvenation.

But the boy acted as if we had never stopped our years of long conversations, and we were soon talking about calendula cream. He mentioned that a gardener was planting flowers near his parents' house. I asked if he'd seen any actual calendula plants growing out there.

“You can make your own skin lotion,” I said.

“Oh, I don't need that anymore,” he said. “When I came out here my skin turned perfect. I have a bronzed look.”

But the all-night conversation was just the warm-up for the next call. “You won't believe this,” he said. “My parents think I'm on drugs! And that I've fallen in with a ‘fast crowd.' They say I'm a con man and I've conned everyone so I can keep doing drugs.”

The unusual combination of drug addict–Republican conservative must have been what he was alluding to. How could my close friend be a Republican? That had been almost as hard to accept as the drug news. I hoped it was a matter of wardrobe and grooming that he liked and the stage would pass.

At the time of the drug-denial phone call, he was staying with his parents in Beverly Hills. He said that they had dragged him back there, where he was being kept under surveillance and subjected to indignities involved with drug testing. “They think I've tampered with the specimen. Can you believe that?”

I didn't know about drug testing. How it's done, this was news to me. Why did I have to know? The situation had never cropped up with anyone I knew. All those TV programs about watching your children for signs of drug use were shows I could turn off. One reason I had postponed having children was the fear that they would become teenagers and start to smoke cigarettes. I didn't envision tattoos, piercing, rap music, alcohol, and drugs. Too much thinking didn't always pan out.

“Think a million times before giving birth.” I'd read that quote, or something like it, in an article about Louise Nevelson. Even with all the mascara the famous artist was wearing in the photo, I took the idea seriously. She had put her work first and neglected to give her son enough attention. He became embittered, and they were estranged for a long time. Late in life, they had a reconciliation. A stormy and tormented relationship could be read between the lines.

When I called the boy back the next day, his mother answered. She was cagey in every sentence.

“We have reason to be suspicious,” she said. “Did he tell you why?”

I told her that he had mentioned his weight loss and the fast crowd they thought he hung out with. “Everyone in my family's overweight,” he'd said. “They have no idea of normal weight.”

“Did he tell you the other part?” she asked.

“He said he wasn't using drugs. That's all.”

“We have evidence,” she said.

“What kind of evidence?” I asked. I pictured needles and packets.

“I can't speak about it,” she said. “This is a problem within our family. I have to go pick up the dry cleaning,” she added, and hung up.

The boy called the next day. “What evidence? They found matches and a lighter in my apartment in New York.”

“What was all that doing there?”

“Some of my friends smoke,” he said.

“You allow smoking in your home?” I said.

“Eighty percent of the kids in New York smoke.” It was a made-up statistic, I could tell.

“Why don't you go to some rehab place?” I said. “That will settle the matter, or if you need help, you could get some.”

“I'm not using drugs!” he said. “It's ridiculous! I've already gone with my parents to a clinic. They did tests and told my parents I'm not addicted. But still, they won't let me go back to New York. I have nothing productive to do here.”

The next day he called and said, “Did you tell my parents I should go to rehab? They burst into my room this morning. They woke me up at nine
A.M.
and said, ‘So you want to go to rehab?'”

“I suggested it would answer the question,” I said.

“Don't mention the word! Did you tell them I had connections in New York?”

“I said ‘friends and connections' as your reason for wanting to be there. That's what you told me.”

“Don't say the word ‘connections' to them!” he said. “My parents are behaving like paranoid imbeciles! I have a plane ticket. I'm going to run away, back to New York. And now I really am going to change my name.”

Since he was eleven, from time to time he would say, “I've always hated my name.” One name he was considering was “Rick Logan.”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It sounds like a private detective,” I said.

“I thought of that, too.”

“And it's an airport.”

“Does that matter? You think it's not a good association?”

“Not that good,” I said.