A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  “Yes,” we said. We heard the Autoharp. Doris proceeded to whistle a lugubrious French song, tinkling along on the Autoharp. It had that characteristic of obscure French songs of seeming to go on a lot longer than it actually did and having no discernible tune. I mean it in the best possible way when I say that her whistling sounded like a seasick theremin. I think that was what she was going for.

  By the time it was over I felt a faint buzzing at my temples. This, it turned out, only intensified as the three days of whistling got under way. There is a very, very specific kind of headache that only comes from three days of whistling, similar, I assume, to the kind of hangover you get from drinking only single-malt scotch. You have to really seek it out, but it’s a doozy.

  It wasn’t that the whistling was bad. It was that there was so much of it. Also, some of it was bad. Some of it was awful, actually.

  • • •

  To really immerse myself in the experience, I had decided to compete. To prove you were serious, you had to send in an audition tape. I recorded mine in the women’s restroom at the Washington Post, where the acoustics were almost great. I say “almost” because the toilets were motion-operated. If you got particularly emotive, they flushed, instantly ruining the recording. Also people kept coming in. I wonder how they explained to themselves the sound of someone slowly and intently whistling “Princess Leia’s Theme” in the end stall, followed by the sound of flushing, then a voice saying, “Not again!”

  Eventually I managed to cobble together a whistling sample that didn’t have flushing noises on it, which I mailed in. When I heard that I was accepted, I guessed that the bar must be pretty low.

  When I arrived I was positive.

  There was, for instance, one guy with sharp, pointed fingernails who showed up at the Allied Arts competition in one of those newsboy caps that old men wear to disguise or advertise the fact that they are balding, shut his eyes, and proceeded to whistle tunelessly for several minutes to the accompaniment of what sounded like spa music, flapping his arms in a soulful manner.

  “Your performance was really something,” I told him, afterward.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I call it the Nightingale in Paradise. It is a Baha’i allegory.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. Why were you flapping?”

  He smiled coyly. “Oh, that just came to me. Choreo.”

  • • •

  If you ever find yourself in Louisburg during whistling season, I recommend without a moment’s hesitation that you go to the Allied Arts competition. There were people who whistled while playing the guitar, people who whistled while folding origami, people who whistled while fighting with ninja throwing stars, people who whistled while feuding with a large woodwind. I am not making any of this up.

  The real star of this event was a guy named Roy. Last year, everyone said in hushed tones, Roy had dressed up as Lady Gaga in full lace Red Queen regalia and played the piano while whistling. There was no telling what Roy would do this year. Roy was expected to escalate. Roy was a wild card. We knew he would be whistling, but that was all we knew for sure!

  Roy showed up with something that resembled a gigantic James Bond poster. He proceeded to whistle and play piano and sing to a long medley of Bond songs, donning an Adele mask and firing a plastic gun—one of those fake guns with “BANG!” on a flag that comes out of the muzzle. It was definitely something. Roy won.

  • • •

  I tried to make friends with the other whistlers, but every time I thought I had a handle on them as characters they would turn around and pull the rug out from under me. One woman was there from Canada. She seemed friendly. We both admitted we had never done this before on a professional level and were “just here for fun.”

  (There was a white-haired lady sitting next to her. “Ah,” I said, “you must be the WHISTLER’S MOTHER.”

  She gave me a blank look. “What?”)

  I was proud that I had isolated and identified at least one other normal person. Then she stood up at the Whistlers’ Dinner and announced that “I hold the Guinness World Record for the highest note ever whistled, and for the longest time whistling a single note—almost 24 hours!—which my swami encouraged me to do as a test of my mettle and a quest of self-discovery.”

  Oh good, I thought. Yes. Well. Good.

  The other normal person was named Maggie. She was from Indiana and could befriend anyone at the drop of a hat. At some point in your journey from childhood to adulthood, usually somewhere on the childhood end, someone sits you down and says something stern about Not Talking to Strangers because Who Knows What Might Happen, Maybe They’ve Got a Trunks Full of Axes, Maybe They’re Skinwalkers Who Have Faces with No Eyes or Mouths but They Can See You.

  Or, in my case, they administer the lesson in two blows: a Berenstain Bears book about Stranger Danger called The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers (Brother Bear almost gets into a stranger’s car to see his “model plane”!) and another book called You Can’t Be Too Careful, which consisted entirely of shortened newspaper accounts of gruesome accidental deaths. Neither of these had really sunk in, in my case—just a few months earlier, I had given my number to someone with a neck tattoo, named Galaxy, whom I met at a bus stop.

  But at least someone had tried. With Maggie it seemed that this had never happened. She greeted people at the neighboring gas station/convenience store like long-lost friends. She talked to some policemen as we crossed the street and somehow we wound up whistling “Amazing Grace” to them. She was the Midwesterner foreigners imagine all Midwesterners are like but most of us can only dream of being.

  My other friend, Lars, was a mustached paterfamilias with a full rack of shoulder-chips. He was still upset, he told me, that a palate whistler had been denied the title a few years earlier. That man had been incredible. That man had been so good that Lars had rushed the stage and mobbed him before the man’s wife could even get there. That man had whistled “Free Bird.” That man had been robbed, robbed! It was because the judges were biased. That man’s whistling was unlike anything you had ever heard or would ever hear again.

  • • •

  The host of most of the festivities was a New York whistler who seemed to have traveled directly from the Borscht Belt sixty years ago, without stopping to update his jokes. “He’s from Tsingtao,” he said of the Chinese contestant. “Where they make the beer.” He introduced a Japanese contestant as “one of our ninjas.” This seemed to be exactly what everyone expected. People got a real kick out of his joke about how he, a whistling champion, hailed cabs. (“Taxi!” he mimicked, raising a hand. “Taxi!”)

  He stalled for me while I tried to get my music ready. There are few places left on Earth that still require you to use a CD to play music, but the International Whistlers Convention is one of them. I had not come prepared. Instead, I had the tracks on my iPhone, and the sound guy could not get them to play.

  I had decided to whistle “Singing in the Rain” because after attending Whistling School I realized that I was way, way out of my league and needed something that didn’t have too many notes in it. Still, it took a lot of rehearsal. I sat in my hotel room at the Motel 6 whistling over and over again until my neighbor started to bang on the wall. Staying in a Motel 6 is bad enough under ordinary circumstances. (“Didn’t I see this room on COPS?” I asked myself. “Surely not. They would have advertised that fact, right? ‘As Seen On TV!’ Or is being featured on COPS as the location of a violent standoff with state officers the kind of thing you advertise?”) The last thing you want is a whistler like me dragging her way through “Singing in the Rain” on the other side of the wall.

  “For God’s sake, stop,” I could hear the person in the next room thinking to himself. “Surely this is hell.” The walls were so thin I could literally hear the person’s thoughts. Later he spent a lot of time missing his cat and being excited by the free soaps.


  Then again, if the walls were that thin, maybe that really was the original pattern of the comforter. That was reassuring. My assumption had been that someone had been disemboweled on it. But you couldn’t possibly murder someone when noise carried like that.

  • • •

  My actual whistling went, I thought, okay; the judges thought, terribly. I came in, I think, thirty-seventh out of forty whistlers. (However, men and women got judged separately, so I was only something like ninth out of ten where ladies were concerned. (Yay, gender disparity!))

  Usually at a contest or convention like this, you can get everyone together to go drinking and break the ice. But alcohol is apparently bad for your whistling muscles. So is coffee. So is anything salty. ChapStick and water, that’s the deal. (Also, you’re not supposed to whistle with your eyes closed, the judges informed us. You might think it made you more soulful, but you should use your eyes to connect with the audience.)

  It was hard to bond with anyone over ChapStick and water.

  Trying to do it made me exceptionally glad I never belonged to a dry sect or lived during Prohibition. I wouldn’t have known where to begin. How did people socialize before alcohol? I know sitting around as a family and reading the Bible aloud used to be big, but I can’t imagine it was much good when it came to bonding with the group of strangers around you.

  This is why people who don’t drink are always having to go to Couples Cooking Classes or play extremely involved board games or go bowling. With drinking, you can just sit. You either sit somewhere loud or sit somewhere quiet, and you drink. Gradually you feel wittier and more attractive and generally fonder of everyone around you.

  A glass or two in, and you are shouting in all caps. “I FEEL SO MUCH CLOSER TO ALL OF YOU ALREADY,” you boom. “LET’S BE BOON COMPANIONS—I WOULD GIVE YOU MY LIVER. I HOPE YOU KNOW THAT. BECAUSE I KNOW THAT, BUT I HOPE YOU KNOW.”

  Then you fall over a lot, and later you feel awful, but in the interim, it’s bliss.

  Not that I’m an alcoholic, by any means. I can state this definitively because I once took a test to make sure. “Do you ever drink alone?” the test asked. “No,” I replied, indignant. “I’m always surrounded by people. Sure, they’re like, ‘Petri, it’s nine o’clock in the morning!’ ‘Why do you have a flask?’ ‘This is a staff meeting.’ ‘Is everything okay at home?’ but I’m not alone. That would be weird and sad.” “Has drinking impacted your relationships negatively?” “Negatively?” I asked. “Alcohol is entirely responsible for my ability to get along with my extended family.”

  • • •

  When we finally did get around to bonding, the convention was all but over. It was karaoke night. We no longer had to worry about keeping our whistles dry, so it was time to party down. They’d even brought a wind-guard for the microphone in case someone wanted to whistle “Dock of the Bay.”

  Except nobody wanted to whistle “Dock of the Bay.” Everyone just wanted to sing. “Come on,” the woman who had organized us kept saying. “Come on, this is the only time all year when it’s normal to whistle! Come on! This is your chance to let it out! Nobody will silence you, like usual! Whistle, people! Whistle!”

  I looked around me and, not for the first time, felt like an impostor.

  • • •

  “It’s so nice to be among fellow whistlers,” everyone said.

  “Yes,” I murmured, trying to nod convincingly. “Isn’t it!”

  In an interview with The Village Voice, the MC said coming to the whistling convention for the first time was “like coming out of the desert after forty years and finding your tribe.”

  But I thought—Tribe? How can this be? What can whistlers feel guaranteed to have in common with one another? All they can say for sure about their fellow whistlers is that they are able to make a certain sound by blowing through their mouths. At a Star Wars convention, at least you know that the people you meet will agree that Han shot first.

  Then again, sometimes you misjudge how close a hobby will bring you to another person. Once, I started a Meetup group for people who love airports, based on the logic that everyone I’d ever met who confessed to enjoying spending time in airports was a great human being. The people who showed up to our first meeting (in the TGI Fridays of Reagan National Airport, just outside security) were not what I had envisioned at all. Conversation quickly fizzled. “Let’s meet at a train station next!” one of them suggested.

  I bristled. “I don’t think you understand the ethos of this organization.”

  • • •

  There was one other impostor at the whistling convention. She was there because she’d heard about it on NPR and wanted to know what it was all about. We recognized each other on sight.

  “You’re a journalist,” she said. “Do you go to this kind of thing often?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Is it always like this?”

  I thought it over. “Yeah,” I said. “Basically.”

  • • •

  Do you ever have the feeling, driving through a strange town, stopping at a strange restaurant, seeing strangers laughing at the corner table—what if? What if this were my table, what if these were my old friends, what if that waiter knew my order? What if this were home?

  That’s how it felt.

  Proust said one of the startling things about aging was how you started to see people you knew everywhere you went. There’s Kat’s laugh. There, right there, coming out of a stranger’s mouth. There’s the face of someone you knew in middle school, riding the bus on top of a strange body. There’s your old chair in a stranger’s living room. There’s your old coach. There’s your grandfather sitting in someone else’s living room sipping iced tea. Life keeps reassembling people. There are only so many tunes you can play on these strings of DNA.

  Every friend group has a Karen, and if you don’t know instantly who it is, it’s you. Every e-mail list has the same squabbles. Every class has the same people—the clown, the brain, Dave. Every horoscope is true.

  Depending on when you catch me, this is terrifying or not. All the effort you put into living your authentic life, and it all works out much the same.

  That was the depressing thing about whistling: It was so fundamentally identical to every other pastime. It was weird being on the outside, for once, peering in.

  The convention was like spending a weekend with someone else’s grandparents. It was nice. On some level, all grandparents are the same. “Here is some food,” they say. “Now, it is time for us to watch TV at a high volume.”

  But it didn’t feel like it was mine.

  When I got home and told people where I’d been all week, they all gave me a shocked look.

  “You whistle?” they asked. “I had no idea.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t whistle well, but I do whistle. I can make whistling sounds come out of my mouth. It could be worse.”

  • • •

  Not much worse, though.

  Which brings me back to where we started: Franklinton Baptist Church.

  On the contest application form was a box you could check if you wanted to go whistle at area churches after the competition was over. The way it was worded led me to picture a large gaggle of whistlers, standing in neat rows, soberly whistling “Amazing Grace.” I was up for that.

  • • •

  “You’re still up for it?” an elderly man with a large yellow pad inquired, the day before.

  “Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  “Great. And you’re staying in Franklinton, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said, wondering where this was going.

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll have you at Franklinton Baptist, okay?”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Amy can’t make it—will that be a problem?”

  “Shouldn’t be,�
�� I said. Dimly I began to wonder why he was telling me this.

  • • •

  The next morning, a little hungover from our karaoke revelry, I drove to the Franklinton Baptist Church, parked, and wandered in. I was wearing my Whistler Participation Ribbon to look festive. I glanced around. I didn’t see any other whistlers.

  The preacher came barreling over to me. “Are you our whistler?” he asked.

  Whistler, I thought. Singular.

  “Yes,” I said, “I guess I am.”

  “We are just so thrilled to have you,” he said. “Do you have music, or anything?”

  I swallowed. “No,” I said. “Just the whistling.”

  He nodded sympathetically.

  “You know,” I mumbled, “purity.”

  “Sure.”

  “Purity of sound. I pucker whistle. I’m a pucker whistler. Not palate. BOOOO palate.”

  “Well, we can’t wait.” He handed me a sheet of blue paper and a pen. “Do you have an intro you’d like for yourself?”

  I frowned at the paper. Did I have an intro? What was my intro? “Hello there, Franklinton Baptist! Alexandra is not actually a whistler! Well, she’s a whistler, but she’s not a good whistler. She is so sorry about all this.” “Hello there, Franklinton Baptist! Wow. I hope I make the mouth-noise you are expecting!” “Hello,” I finally wrote. “Alexandra is just blown away by how nice everyone is. She is honored to be here today, in this nice place, where people are so nice.”

  Then I got into the pew and started to think frantically about what I might whistle. Something patriotic, I thought. Something short. Something with not too many notes in it.

  The choir filed in. Parishioner after parishioner filled the pews.

  Who knew this church held so many people? I thought, frantically. Good God. It’s like a reverse clown car. I mean, er, not that, Lord. I mean a respectful metaphor, er, Lord. It’s like a very—beautiful—Eden-place. Er, listen, Lord, as long as we’re chatting, could You let me actually make some kind of sound that resembles a whistle? I’ll give You my firstborn. No, wait. You’ve been known to take people up on that. I’ll start flossing. I’ll—uh—I’ll—start going to church. No, wait. Something realistic. I’ll—give up—soft cheese. No, hard cheese. No, soft cheese. No—”