A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  The man ahead of me was middle-aged, with receding hair.

  “What are your hobbies?” they asked.

  “I collect kidney stones,” he informed them.

  “Ah,” they said. “And, uh, what—what would you do with the prize money?”

  “If I won, I would use the money to pay for a lysterectomy on my ninth kidney stone, which I postponed to come here to audition.”

  Compared to him, I seemed completely ready for television.

  “I am a Star Wars buff,” I told them. “And I play the accordion and I do stand-up, and if I won I would probably waste the money on one of those life-size breathing statues of Darth Vader.”

  This was true. I had seen it at the Sharper Image in the mall, and I had fallen for it instantly. It was far out of my price range, but that didn’t stop me from salivating in its general direction as I waited for them to kick me off the free massage chairs.

  “Or college,” I added, a bit lamely.

  It didn’t matter. They called me a few months later and informed me that I was on.

  I would like to say that I spent the months between getting the call and my taping date intensely preparing.

  But why study? As a trivia buff, my entire life was preparation for my appearance on Jeopardy!

  A love of trivia is not something you decide to pursue. Miscellanea simply cling to you like burrs. You find them in your socks after long walks. You wander into bookstores and come out hours later with stray facts clutching at your elbow.

  My mind is a disaster zone full of a great mess of facts. I know when Oscar Wilde was born (October 16, 1854) and when he died (November 30, 1900) and what he allegedly had to say about it (“Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.”) I know that the working title of Gone With The Wind was Tote the Weary Load. I know that Ernest Hemingway’s penis was larger than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, at least according to Ernest Hemingway. I know that the painter James Whistler failed out of West Point because he began his final examination with the words “Silicon is a gas.” I can tell you that there was a guy named Colonel Jasper who distinguished himself in the defense of Fort Moultrie on June 28, 1776, at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, although I mistrust this fact because I heard it from a place mat.

  A better way of putting this might be that I’m a fact-hoarder. If there were some sort of physical external manifestation of all the stray quotations and bizarre bits of trivia that go banging around my memory, my family would be staging an intervention. They would come to the house with a big bin and several specialists from cable.

  “You don’t really need to know anything about Rutherford B. Hayes’ wife,” they would say reasonably, loading that fact into a garbage bag.

  “They called her Lemonade Lucy!” I would yell, clinging to it. “She was a teetotaler who served nonalcoholic drinks at White House functions!”

  To love trivia is to be a hoarder. “You never know when this might come in handy,” we insist, holding up the factual equivalent of a dead cat impaled on a plastic fork. “See? Fuliginous. It’s a word meaning ‘sooty.’”

  Maybe our quality of life would be higher if we didn’t have to step around these facts on our way out in the evenings. But in the meantime, we can go on Jeopardy! That’s the golden carrot shining at the end of the tunnel, to mix some metaphors into a nice fine hash.

  • • •

  Some people say you can’t study for Jeopardy! If you don’t already know a given piece of information, there is absolutely no way you will know it on the instinctual level that’s required in order to succeed on the show. Your brain will clank around trying to remember Edgar Allan Poe’s minor works and eventually produce a few names that turn out to be Lifetime movies, and meanwhile everyone else will have buzzed in.

  Other people say that you should, in fact, study. I split the difference by not studying and feeling vaguely guilty about it.

  I tried, a couple of times, to restore my instinctual familiarity with broad general topics. I went to the grocery store and wandered through the produce aisle, carefully reading the names of all the brands of apple. But I knew what my true blind spot was. Sports.

  Sports were my Achilles’ heel. I was the captain of my school’s trivia team and every time we showed up at a tournament and the category turned to sports, we sighed and sagged into our seats. The only thing I knew about sports was that something existed called the Dick Butkus Award. I was not sure what it was for. “For most unintentionally homoerotic sports moment of the year?” I suggested. “For being the tightest end?”

  After the sixth or seventh repetition this remark ceased to amuse.

  It’s not that I don’t know sports because I’m a girl. I don’t know sports AND I’m a girl. I know about plenty of Historically Male subjects. Give me a napkin and a pencil and I can reconstruct the Battle of Gettsyburg for you, with fishhooks of troop placements and side cavalry movements and everything. Sports just never sang to me, except for one time when I saw a musical about baseball. But none of the information in Damn Yankees! was current. The Senators no longer existed, and “sell your soul to Satan in song and then sort of stand there during a big dance sequence” is not actually how you get to the World Series.

  It wasn’t that I had no sports experience. I’d played volleyball. Well, “played” was strong. I’d provided some very strong support from the bench. “Spike!” I would yell. “Did we just complete the Transcontinental Railroad? Because that was a GOLDEN SPIKE!”

  “Stop,” our coach said.

  “That serve must be World War I pilot Manfred von Richthofen! Because it was an ACE!”

  “Please stop.”

  But they never asked about volleyball, anyway.

  Sports, as far as I could tell, were just a way to feel really manly while wearing colorful socks.

  Even after studying several books with names like Mad Dog Lists the Most Athletic Sport Truths, the most I could say about baseball was that you could get up during a game to go get snacks and then run into someone you hadn’t seen in a long time, talk to him, hit it off, share your hopes and dreams, decide to start a life together, walk down the aisle after a reasonable courtship, give birth to a son, watch that son grow into a man you could be proud of, and then go back to your seat and nothing would have changed. Possibly someone would have one or two more balls. Football I had no grip on at all. You could tell me almost anything about it and I would believe you. “That’s a first down,” you could say, “and he got that because of nepotism.” “Sure,” I would say.

  Soccer was like that, but the people who got angry about it were thinner.

  That was as far as my studies went.

  The same “They” who said that you could not study for Jeopardy! also said that it all came down to buzzer technique. Corner a disgruntled Jeopardy! loser in a bar and he will maintain that he knew all the answers, he just couldn’t get the dang buzzer to work the way Ken Jennings did. Jeopardy! contestants have penned numerous books on this subject, with titles like Buzzer Zen and You Know the Buzzer, but Does the Buzzer Know You? and What Ken Knew. For the next few months, I stood in front of the television watching Jeopardy! and practicing with a retractable pen. Click-click. Click-click-click-click-click. It was like having an angry cricket in the room.

  The trick was that Trebek’s contract mandated that he got to finish reading the question before anyone buzzed in. If you buzzed in before he stopped talking, your buzzer locked for several critical fractions of a second. Buzzer Zen said you needed those seconds.

  I knew this would be a problem. I’d been on a local quiz show called It’s Academic where my strategy was to buzz in as early as I possibly could, as soon as I had a vague inkling of what the question might be. Sometimes this worked. More often, it did not. But it was my only weapon.

  I had appeared on the show yearly ever since I was a freshman, but the teetering elderly ho
st, Mac McGarry, who looked like an amiable rectangle, still had difficulty pronouncing my name. “Pea-try,” I reminded him. “Like a vegetable that’s making an effort.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  I wondered how Trebek would like that mnemonic.

  • • •

  My biggest fear was that I would show up at the studio in California and the Kidney Stone guy from auditions would be there too, with a little jar. “I brought my lucky one,” he would whisper.

  But when I got there, there was no one carrying a kidney stone. Openly, anyway.

  All the contestants for the week are directed to the same hotel in Culver City. It was like summer camp, if your summer camp was full of people who muttered threatening facts at you in the elevator. (“Henry VIII beheaded both his second and fifth wives.”)

  The actual day of the taping dawned bright and clear. All the Jeopardy! contestants boarded a very tense shuttle to ride to the taping and back. It was like being in one of those tumbrels that carted people to the guillotine during the French Revolution, except you had to ride back with them afterward.

  On the shuttle with me and my mother (who had come along for the ride) was a one-armed man who had booked an entire week’s stay in LA on the assumption that he would win. “I don’t want to have the hassle of travel,” he explained.

  My mother, on the safer assumption that I would not win—or, at least, that I certainly would win no more games than could be taped in a day—had bought us flights back for that same weekend.

  The ride to the taping offered the nerdiest one-upmanship I had ever heard in my life. Obviously I don’t remember any of the dialogue exactly (even Thucydides said that the best you could do was come up with words that seemed appropriate to the occasion) but here is my general sense of how it went.

  Person A: I’ve been studying types of trees.

  Person B: Sure, types of trees. Larch. Poplar. Chestnut.

  Person A: Maple.

  Person B: Willow.

  Person A: Sophora japonica.

  Person B: Of course. That’s basic. Mistletoe.

  Person C: (who has been waiting for this chance) Isn’t that more of an EPIPHYTE?

  Person D: (hastily) Frankly I think we’re better served by not studying. I’ve been focusing on my buzzer Zen.

  Person E: Absolutely.

  Person D: (unable to stop himself) Although I did look over all the flags of all the countries past and present and fictional and dreamed-of and certain insignias floated but not approved by the UN.

  Person F: And don’t forget ESPERANTO!

  Person C: (says something in Esperanto, a nonexistent language that some guy made up in the 1880s)

  Person F: (says something obscene and hurtful in Esperanto, to which Person C has no idea how to respond)

  Person G, who has said nothing up to this point and is desperate to make his mark: (starts speaking Elvish)

  (Everyone turns to glower at him.)

  Person A: That’s not Esperanto.

  Person B: That’s Elvish.

  Person C: This isn’t Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!

  (Dismissive laughter)

  Person G: (recedes from the conversation in shame, pretending to be suddenly very interested in something that is going on outside the window)

  Me: So how about this LA weather, huh?

  Person A: I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but I thought the caliber of question was frankly beneath me.

  Person B: Oh, absolutely.

  Person C: I can’t wait to meet Trebek.

  Person D: I miss the mustache.

  Person C: Me too.

  Person E: I wonder if he’ll sign my picture.

  Person F: (hushed, reverent) I hear he hates autographs.

  Person A: (fervently) I hear he takes all the contestant quizzes and the year he doesn’t pass it he’s going to quit.

  Person B: I hear he sleeps in a golden box like a pharaoh and is made of magic.

  Person D: When I was married we walked down the aisle to the Jeopardy! theme song and we named all our pets after Potent Potables and my son’s name is Portmanteau and sometimes Trebek comes to me in dreams and reads me facts from the future.

  Person G: (grimly, with some satisfaction) I know everything there is to know about sports!

  (Awkward hush)

  The shuttle finally arrived at the studios. We showed our IDs to the guard and walked inside, to makeup and the waiting room.

  There, we ate fruit from a tray, marshaling our favorite facts around us for comfort (“The World War I poet Wilfred Owen loved pineapple chunks,” I murmured to myself, as I loaded my plate with them) and listening to the instructions from Maggie, a hoarse-voiced, good-humored lady who was tasked with herding us from place to place.

  In that room was the kind of frenzied camaraderie that I assume gladiators felt before rushing out to the arena. In a moment, we would be at one another’s metaphorical throats. But right now, we were all brothers in useless trivia. Overcome by nerd relief at being in a roomful of others of our kind for once, we thought it might be a good idea if we sang together, though I can’t remember what the song was. I want to say it was “The Elements” song by Tom Lehrer (“antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium”). But it might just have been “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others).” Maggie seemed used to the response. It was like if you were to go out into the wild and round up a strange beast that had believed all its kin extinct. “Oh my God!” we exclaimed. “You mean other people like me exist, out there, in the world?” “Yup,” they said. “And now, you must destroy one another, on television.” “Okay.”

  They let us practice with the buzzer, but not for long. Then we sat down in the audience to watch to see if our names would be called to compete. The studio was freezing. Well, not quite freezing. It was like sitting in a meat locker. If I were a beer, I would have been very comfortable. Alex Trebek regaled the audience with corny jokes and the audience laughed hysterically just so they could move and warm themselves. “I went into the closet to get a suit,” he said, “and then I came out, out of the closet. Ha-HA!”

  “Wahaahahaha,” we all laughed, nervously.

  Then ensued several hours of waiting as they taped episodes with players who were not me, otherwise known as The Part of the Day Where Every Fact You Have Ever Learned Slowly Seeps out of Your Body. As I sat in the audience, I was suddenly struck by the realization that I knew nothing. “The beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of your own ignorance,” I muttered reassuringly. “As—what’s his name said.” I began panicking.

  Finally my turn came, after a round hinging on English Castles, during which I realized that “English Castles” was one of the numerous areas of knowledge that had slowly melted out of my brain. I was beginning to have sincere doubts about my own name by the time they called it.

  Breathing a sigh of relief that at least I had been spared the castles category, I stepped onto the stage. The stage of Jeopardy! looks like a spaceship designed in the 1980s.

  Most people who compete on Jeopardy! are, if not in the prime of life, at least in the twenties or thirties of life. They have been informed that the studio is cold, and they are dressed accordingly in sensible dark suits.

  I was none of those things. I was eighteen, wearing a pink sweater set that my mother had selected. My mother had the awkward habit of picking clothes and giving advice that was several years ahead of my stage in life. At fourteen, I already owned numerous Talbots pantsuits, and she was always advising me not to sign prenups.

  Things got off to an optimistic start. The first category that greeted my eye was something called “Math Jokes.” It is no exaggeration to say that I had been preparing my entire life for this.

  “What is the circumference of a pumpkin divided by its diameter?” “Pi,” I shouted. “Pumpkin Pi,” T
rebek corrected. “That’s the joke.”

  We tore through logarithms (why are lumberjacks such good dancers?) and what the chicken crossed to get to the same side (a Mobius strip) and the square root of 4 b squared (2 B, or Not (negative) 2 B).

  I was ahead at the commercial break.

  But then the dark times came.

  One of the categories was “Cars.” I had no idea how many car companies there were. For the better part of my childhood, my family drove a 1979 Chevy Zephyr with no air-conditioning and a broken speedometer, and I thought that this state of things was typical. One day, we got pulled over. “How fast were you going?” the cop asked. My father looked gravely at the broken speedometer. “Zero miles per hour,” he said. The cop glanced at the car. “If that’s all you’re making,” he said, “I’ll let you off with a warning.” Although this was a vivid and cherished memory of my youth, it offered no clues for this category.

  “The first logo of this sporty Italian car maker included the Visconti serpent, a Milanese symbol,” Trebek read. I had no idea. (It’s Alfa Romeo.)

  “‘The relentless pursuit of perfection’ is the goal of this luxury automaker,” he tried.

  “What is a Jaguar?” I suggested. The jaguar seemed like he was pursuing something or other with ruthlessness. (Nope, Lexus.)

  I was still leading when we finished the Jeopardy! round, but only by a hair. And not a big hair.

  There was a brief lull, during which Trebek asked us questions intended to draw out our personalities. I have no idea what I said. I remember opening my mouth. I remember closing it again after nearly a minute had passed. What emerged in the interim is an utter blank to me, as it was at the time. I think I said something about squirrels and camaraderie.

  The Double Jeopardy! round offered such arcana as “Produce” and “Famous Duets.”

  I remembered my time in the produce aisle. I tried to rifle through my recollections. There had been—apples there. And—also—potatoes. Or maybe those had been more apples. I fumbled blindly through the aisles of memory, overturning things.

  My competition—Sara, a veterinary assistant from Connecticut, and Nick, a paralegal—were perking right up.