A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  The pastor took his place at the lectern. I applied some more ChapStick and took a sip of water. I wished for something stronger.

  “We are so, so lucky to have a whistler with us today,” he said. “A champion. All the way from Washington, DC! She says thank you for being so nice. Come on up here.”

  With nervous, slow steps, I approached the microphone. The congregation leaned forward expectantly. Something patriotic, I thought. Something short. How about “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”?

  I very slowly and breathily whistled “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” It was not the most impressive thing that has ever happened. I also knew a song called “When I Get Back to the USA” that dated back to World War I and seemed to have roughly the same tune, and midway through, I discovered that I had somehow switched to whistling that instead. The tune ended and deposited me on the other side, like someone who has gotten momentarily distracted at the end of a moving walkway. I nodded at the audience and scuttled back to my seat.

  “Thank you for that,” the pastor said.

  I felt like the Emperor’s New Whistler. Everyone still sat forward with a baffled expression, like maybe if they thought it through a couple more times what I had just done would be impressive. A man got up and started leading us in prayer. He thanked the Lord for sending me to whistle “Let Freedom Ring.”

  Maybe that’s what I whistled.

  • • •

  As soon as the service was over, I hightailed it out of there, breezing past congregation members who came up timidly to say, “I wish I could do what you do.”

  “You can!” I tried to tell them. “Did you hear that? I’m not a whistler. I’m an impostor. You definitely can do what I did. Anyone can. All you have to do is put your lips together and blow. It’s not like I’m Alice Shaw.”

  “Alice who?”

  “You know, the famous lady whistler, with the decollet—”

  A blank look. “I don’t know these whistler things.”

  Whistler things. Oh God. Maybe I’m one of them, after all.

  How to Join a Cult, by Mistake, on a Tuesday, in Fifty-Seven Easy Steps

  Make sure it’s Tuesday.

  Schedule yourself a somewhat boring evening. Make sure all the other events on your list are things like “Attend a Friend’s Experimental Theater Production of a show called People in Deconstructed Cars Who Are Having Sex Doubts.”

  Walk down the street in Harvard Square. Another square will do, in a pinch.

  Look friendly and approachable as you walk. Avoid the Head-Down-Eyes-Down-Hands-in-Pockets walk that you would do if you were a ladybug and someone had just told you your family was dying in a fire, or the Head-Up-Elbows-Out-Darting-Swiftly-Among-the-Passersby like a lady gazelle on the way to an important board meeting. I recommend the jaunty I-Have-Nowhere-of-Pressing-Importance-to-Be-So-I’ll-Smile-Indiscriminately-at-Everyone walk.

  When a cluster of women on the corner ask you if you want to learn about the Woman Image of God in Scripture, smile and say, “Yes.”

  Listen as they explain the book of Genesis with a lot of pointing and exclamations. Wonder what country their accents are from.

  Say, “Wow,” a lot. As you look at the Bible, realize that it’s been a long time since you went to church. Ponder the fact that this isn’t because you actively Lost Faith, but rather because you keep sleeping through Sunday morning with a hangover that feels like a Greek god is about to come pounding her way out of your skull. Feel dimly remorseful about this.

  When they ask if you want to come to Bible Study with them, say, “Yes.”

  Wonder whether saying, “Yes,” was actually a good idea when they all say, “Really?” like this has never happened before.

  When they ask your name, tell them it’s Gloria.

  Follow them to their car as they repeat, “You’re the first person to say yes. You must not be from around here.”

  When asked where you are from, admit that you’re from Wisconsin. Climb into the car. Reassure yourself that nothing says, “We won’t rape you” like “We’re a bunch of women going to Bible study.”

  Buckle your safety belt, because being safe is important.

  Drive a little bit farther out of town than you were expecting and pull up outside a massage parlor with a neon sign. Reassure yourself that all the best churches probably got their starts above massage parlors. Realize that this is an obvious lie. Console yourself with the thought that “Hey, I’ve never been upstairs at a massage parlor before! That’s probably where they keep the happy endings!”

  Climb up the stairs to a nice carpeted hallway above the massage parlor.

  Answer an enthusiastic “Yes” when the women ask if you want coffee. Hand them your coat. Smile when you meet their “Deacon,” a dark-haired man with an equally mysterious accent.

  Join him and a recent female convert for Bible study in a small room with a table and a whiteboard.

  Make the mistake of disagreeing with him when he asserts that the Emperor Constantine was actually Satan and we know this from the Book of Daniel.

  Point out that all of his decoding of hidden biblical meanings—“It’s not ‘communion’! Communion is a lie made up by Constantine/Satan!”—seem to be based on this specific translation, and you are pretty sure that the Bible was originally written in Hebrew and Greek.

  Realize that he won’t move on until you admit that he is right. Glance nervously at your watch and realize that it is getting to be later than you thought.

  Decide the best way to get a ride back to Cambridge is to agree with everything the Deacon says.

  Get through the remaining scriptural points in record time.

  Make a nervous noise that sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball when the Deacon says, “So, do you want to be baptized?”

  Say, “No, no, rather not, think I’ll pass, actually, but I’m, you know, flattered and everything.”

  Watch as the Deacon’s face falls. “You know, the last person who agreed that all of this was true and didn’t accept baptism . . . she got hit by a bus.”

  Admit that baptism sounds a lot more appealing when you put it that way.

  Make another hairball noise when the Deacon says, “Great. We’ll get everything ready. Go put on your robe.”

  Stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Realize that your great idea to barricade yourself in the bathroom while you call a friend with a car is not going to work, because your phone is in your coat and not in the bathroom with you.

  Apologize to God. Apologize first for the fact that you are in a bathroom, putting on a robe, about to be baptized into a church of people of whom you know nothing other than that they think Constantine was Satan and they like to hang out on sidewalks. Apologize for how the majority of your prayers happen when you think you have lost your wallet or cell phone and usually take the form of a kind of look-I-know-the-universe-operates-by-certain-rules-but-couldn’t-you-possibly-make-a-small-exception-in-my-case bargaining. Promise that if you make it out of this you will straighten up and fly right. Admit, somewhat ruefully, that this was exactly what you promised last time on the condition that you found your wallet. Promise that this time will be different. Admit, somewhat ruefully, that this was what you promised last time too.

  Hear singing.

  Put on your robe. Reflect that, historically, people who put on robes had something bad in store for them. Jesus? Gandalf? Hugh Hefner? Cross. Balrog. Old age and, probably, syphilis. My point is, it never ends well.

  Walk into the chapel. Kneel in the baptizing tub. Reassure yourself that this probably isn’t a cult because everyone seems so polite. Besides, aren’t cults supposed to revolve around charismatic leaders? You have yet to see anyone who possesses more charisma than a slice of whole-wheat toast. Also: zero pentagrams so far. And hey, no one has painted “DIE PIGS” o
n any walls in blood yet. Realize that you are grasping at straws here.

  Say “Amen” when the Deacon tells you to say “Amen” as they pour water over you.

  Emerge from the bathroom to a large cluster of people singing and addressing you as Sister Gloria.

  Accept your head-covering. Point out, timidly, that no one said anything about a head-covering. “Yes, of course they did,” the Deacon will tell you. “Paul said that for a woman to pray with her head uncovered is just as shameful as if her head were shaven.”

  Take “Passover.” Listen politely as the Deacon explains that the only true time to take “Passover” is on January fifteenth at twilight, but that this is a temporary Passover that will cover you in the eyes of God if you are hit by a bus between now and then. Wonder why being hit by a bus is becoming such a big theme of this evening.

  Listen politely as the Deacon explains the rules for your new life. “Three big ones,” the Deacon explains. “First, no eating food that has been sacrificed to a false god.” (That will put a big damper on Thanksgiving.) “No eating the meat of an animal that has been strangled to death.” (This sounds fine, since you don’t even know where to begin to find an animal that has been strangled to death.) “No drinking blood.” (Well, there goes Sanguine Saturday!)

  “Also, no sexual immorality. Do you know what that means?”

  Say, “Goats?” in a timid voice.

  Watch the Deacon pretend not to have heard you. “No. It means you’re married to Jesus now.”

  Say, “Aha,” in what you hope is a reassuring tone.

  Stay for a supper of hot soup and logic puzzles, specifically one of those puzzles where you have to rearrange matches to form a perfect square. Now that you are married to Jesus and prohibited from drinking blood, you have a lot of such wholesome evenings to look forward to!

  Finally get your ride back to campus!

  Listen carefully to their warnings that your Passover is only good until January fifteenth at twilight. Promise to come back for more Bible study. Bid your new sisters good-bye.

  Climb the five flights of stairs to your dorm room. Smile propitiatingly at your roommate when she asks, “Why is your hair all wet?” Explain that you may have just accidentally gotten baptized into a cult.

  Google the Church of God that you just joined.

  Realize with growing alarm that there are numerous Web sites for Churches of God and that they all claim that the other Churches of God are agents of Satan in disguise.

  Hope you didn’t join the one that’s an agent of Satan!

  Avoid Harvard Square for several days.

  If you have to walk through it, use the Eyes-Down-Head-Down Ladybug Family Emergency walk. Tell your friends to watch out for people addressing you as “Sister Gloria.”

  Later tell a somewhat altered version of this story to your mother, who quite reasonably panics because, as an only child, you are her sole reproductive investment and this story makes you sound like a total idiot who is just a few brain cells short of being sexually attracted to fire. Patiently field her questions by shouting, “Look, it seemed impolite to just get up and leave, and they were women!” in response to everything she says, including but not limited to: “How did you know they were women? They might have been witches! How did you know?”

  Admit that this is what you should have been worried about. That they could have been witches. That was the big concern here.

  Months later, after your Passover has expired, you have graduated from college, and the whole incident is only a distant memory, spend an afternoon ravaging the carcass of a Borders bookstore for cheap books.

  Freeze as a cheery female voice asks, “Have you heard of the Woman Image of God in Scripture?”

  Emit a startled yelp.

  Say, “Oh yeah, I’m familiar.”

  Walk away.

  Teen Jesus

  Once, in high school, I was Jesus.

  I don’t know if it helped on my college application or not.

  Then again, you can never really tell what is going to help with a college application. I once spoke to the head of the Harvard admissions department for a story and she told me that, as “supplemental material,” somebody had mailed in a taxidermied squirrel. The reason this did not help the person’s application was not, as you might expect, because it was a taxidermied squirrel, but because it was not a well-taxidermied squirrel. It started to fall apart in the mailroom. So the takeaway here was not, “Don’t mail a dead squirrel to the Harvard admissions department” but actually, “If you’re going to mail a dead squirrel to Harvard, make sure that you taxidermy that thing correctly.”

  But people will try anything.

  That wasn’t why I was Jesus, though.

  I was doing it because I was in a church youth group, it was Easter season, my church was doing a tableau of Stations of the Cross—all the spots Jesus stopped on his way to getting crucified—and there were no other volunteers.

  Really, that last reason was why. It wasn’t the most stringent church youth group in the world—we were Episcopalian (as Robin Williams liked to say, “Catholic Lite—all of the pageantry, none of the guilt”), where church is really more of an excuse to wear a bow tie once a week than anything. Some people say they’re spiritual but not religious—we were religious but not spiritual. All Christ Church asked was that we show up once a week, sometimes for pizza and a movie with Spiritual Implications like Lord of the Flies or Dead Poets Society. We also sold pancakes, Super Bowl chili, and holiday wreaths—well, Christmas wreaths; I guess selling wreaths with your church group is one context where it’s definitely safe to say “Christmas” instead of “holiday”—and saved the money to go on pilgrimage. We sold a lot of pancakes, so we flew to Ireland. A previous group that had not really had their act together had gotten only as far as Canada, and I think they had to go on foot.

  Among the many great facets of Episcopalianism—besides choral music and never having to feel guilt—is that women in the church can do all the things men can. You can’t be pope, but then again, neither can anyone else. So when nobody else volunteered to be in our Station (we were supposed to depict Saint Veronica wiping the face of Jesus with her handkerchief), I got the gig.

  Veronica was portrayed by my friend Michaela. We were the two least cool members of youth group. During the pilgrimage to Ireland I bought books and she read them. Everyone else got sucked into a vortex of drama because one of the couples in our group had decided to break up and wanted us to take sides. Horribly complicated alliances formed and dissolved wherever you looked. It resembled the lead-up to World War I. (The fact that I suggested it resembled the lead-up to World War I tells you just how cool I was.)

  When it came time to be Jesus it was a bright warm spring afternoon. I put on a white robe. Michaela and our deacon very carefully drew a thick beard on me with face paint and eyebrow pencil.

  I tried to look beatific. If there was ever a time to look beatific, I reasoned, now would be it. It was harder to look beatific when I was outside toting a large wooden cross down the sidewalk, to the excitement of onlookers, but that seemed about right for the part. The good thing about being Jesus was that if people reviled you and muttered all kinds of evil against you, you could argue that you were just doing your job.

  I staggered over to Michaela in what I hoped was a stately but pained manner. She wiped my face with her handkerchief. In the actual story, there was an image of Jesus left in the handkerchief and it became a sacred relic. In our rendition, there was a big brown smudge from where my beard had rubbed off. It wasn’t really the sort of object you wanted to make into a relic. Then again, people made relics out of knee bones and things, so you could never be sure. Maybe it would have been exactly the ticket.

  “Bless you, my child,” I said. (That was my one line.) I might also have said, “Please, I’m thirsty.” />
  I handed the cross off to a member of the congregation and staggered beatifically offstage.

  • • •

  Being Jesus was not actually that hard. This surprised me, given all the literature. If all you had to do to make it into Heaven was walk in the footsteps of Jesus, I was going to be a shoo-in.

  A few years passed.

  Heaven slipped a little out of mind, to be replaced with more practical concerns. Like college.

  College and Heaven seemed to have a lot in common. Everything I had heard about college suggested that it was an earthly paradise. You could drink and lie around all day, surrounded by a minimum of seventy-two virgins. Probably more, if you took advanced math. You would never have to work again. There would be free wings, on Wednesdays, anyway.

  The only trick was getting there.

  Having religion had prepared me well for the college application process. There was a kind of religious warfare between different approaches. You could take the puritanical approach—make your children as miserable as possible for as long as possible by forcing them to wear drab uniforms and banning fun. In the end, it turned out that the whole process was random and the only people who were rewarded were the members of a tiny, preselected elite.

  Or you could try to buy your way in with costly indulgences. (“The gymnasium is named after me! And I donated this relic of a thighbone! Junior’s getting in for sure.”)

  I read somewhere that the emperor Charlemagne used to be followed around at all times by a monk, ready to baptize him at a moment’s notice if he ever showed the slightest sign of being about to die, so that he could go straight to Heaven with a clean conscience. These days, this approach is called helicopter parenting. People hover just over their children’s shoulders, feeding them SAT words, shredding incautious birds in their rotating blades.