Free The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht

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.
    â€œThis 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.”
    â€œWill we see it now?” I asked him.
    â€œOnly 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.
    â€œThat’s what I meant by cold,” I said.
    â€œUsually 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.
    â€œHello,” the robed woman said, in that way mothers have of trying to be friendly with odd, silent children and teenagers.
    â€œHello,” 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.
    â€œChildren are overrated,” my mother liked to say.
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    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