Free The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht Page 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.”
    â€œOh 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?
    â€œWhat kind of fish is it?” I asked.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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.”
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    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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œSeveral 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