A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  Finally I decided on something (usually a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt) and pulled on my brown Merrell loafers, which added an extra inch to my height just in case any middle school boys were having doubts about not approaching me.

  People tell you to “Leave room for Jesus” at these dances. To be safe, I gave Jesus the whole dance floor to himself, lurking in the corner as far away from the pounding strains of “Bye Bye Bye” as possible. If anyone was hardy enough to ask me to dance, I had prepared a series of talking points. “Gee, how ’bout this lighting! It’s like a reptile tank in here!” “Sorry, whenever I attend a dance it is as though someone flips a switch in my head to ‘boring’!” (I literally wrote this down in my diary at the time as a possible thing to say.)

  Everyone else, it seemed, was going to a party afterward with People They Knew. There might be Alcohol there. Someone had even gotten a hotel room and it was going to be Crazy.

  I got into the car with my mother and headed home to my books.

  • • •

  Let me pause and note that middle school is terrible. Middle school is when your friends on the softball team mysteriously decide to become your cold, distant acquaintances on the softball team and you spend your time squatting in left field feeling lonely and cold and wondering what you did wrong and tying the grass together into little grass knots. Middle school, in our case, was when we went from “An All-Girls’ School with Uniforms So Everyone Looks the Same Even if You Suspect That Danielle Has Slightly Cooler Shoes” to “An All-Girls’ School Without a Uniform Thereby Exposing the Fact That You Were Wearing Those Brown Men’s Docksides Not by Obligation but Because You Genuinely Thought They Were a Quality Fashion Choice, and, If Given the Chance You Would Combine Them with Cargo Khakis. Also Sometimes You Wear Vests for No Reason, and Clearly the Abercrombie Crowd Was Correct in Excluding You.”

  If I could grab middle schoolers by the ear (hey, you, reading this book—are you anywhere near a middle schooler? If so, grab him or her by the ear for me! Though I take no legal responsibility!), I would tell them this. No one who enjoys middle school is a good person.

  Hope for a better experience somewhere else in time was what kept me going. I consoled myself with the thought that, hey, if this were not 2002 but 1902, my dance card would have been bursting at the seams. The past was my equivalent of Hogwarts. It was the fantasy world where all my dreams came true, all my jokes landed, and I could wear a festive tie.

  Such visions are always the solace of the uncool. The best way of getting excited about Paradise is to have the worst existence possible. This also means that your idea of Eternal Bliss can be something vague involving harp-playing and chanting in a robe, two activities that seem somewhat lacking after the invention of AC and cable. But if you’re a medieval peasant whose life consists of carrying plague-infested rats from one dung heap to another, almost anything else sounds good!

  And compared to middle school, carrying plague-infested rats from one dung heap to another sounded almost appealing. I knew smallpox was no picnic, garderobes would be gross, and I might die in childbirth, but if given the choice between middle school and the Middle Ages, I’d really have had to think it over.

  In the meantime, I just had to prepare myself for all possible time jumps as best I could. That was why I was learning Greek.

  I’d made some progress. My Ancient Greek was at the precise level where if someone dropped me back in time I would be able to converse for a few seconds, and then it would just be embarrassing. The only phrase I knew off the top of my head was “Go to Hell, a single, specific time!” so I doubted I could form many lasting friendships.

  I frowned down at the exercise. The textbook’s protagonist was an Athenian farmer named Dicaeopolis and he was sitting there on the receiving end of a strange verb.

  I knew from studying French that the earliest chapters of a language textbook tended to have the most excitement. People in textbooks start off performing bold, dramatic actions and being very candid about their feelings and possessions. (“I am the king! I am strong!” “I am the queen! I am beautiful!” “You are happy!” “Yes, I am happy!” “We buy an ice cream in the park!” “Give me the big green book!”)

  Confrontations are rather elliptical because of everyone’s limited vocabulary. Instead of telling Jean the Gardener that he is getting too close to the princess and he needs to back off, the villainous Corvax has to stride over menacingly and force him to count things.

  Corvax: Jean!

  Jean: Yes?

  Corvax: Forks.

  Jean: Forks?

  Corvax: How many forks are there? Count them!

  Jean: One, two, three, four, five.

  Corvax: Plates. How many plates? Count them.

  Jean: Two. Four. Six. Eight. Ten. Ten plates.

  Corvax: How many cars are there?

  Jean: Two. Four. Six. Eight. Eight cars.

  Corvax: Nine.

  Jean: Nine?

  Corvax: You are in error. There are nine cars here. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Nine cars.

  • • •

  Love scenes, on the other hand, ran something like this:

  Sylvie: I would like a grapefruit. I like grapefruits! Could you give me a grapefruit, please?

  Jean: Here is your grapefruit. I love you.

  Sylvie: Look what I have! I have a train ticket, a Walkman, a grapefruit, and a skeleton!

  Jean: And me, I have a motorcar! I love you.

  Sylvie: I also love you.

  • • •

  The more phrases you learn, the less exciting these people’s lives seem to get. Princesses fall out of the picture altogether and in their place (at least in my case, since our textbook had not been updated in a while), all you have are people dressed in eighties fashions who are having very specific problems with their magnetoscopes, a word I think means “Betamax player.” In the accompanying videos, everyone goes into slow, clearly enunciated hysterics over routine daily problems. “ARE WE GOING TO BREAK DOWN WITH RESPECT TO THE PEUGEOT CAR?” they ask. “UNFORTUNATELY, I BELIEVE THAT YES.” “I WAS SITTING PROGRESSIVELY IN THE BATH WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG. MICHAEL, WHEN WILL WE GO TO THE DISCOTHEQUE FOR THE SURPRISE PARTY?”

  Dicaeopolis in my Ancient Greek textbook never got invited to any discotheques, but he still had his share of adventures. His oxen broke down. He acquired a mule. He farmed. He went into, out of, and around places. Sometimes he went toward them. It was not the most riveting thing that had ever happened, but it was still better than the Latin textbooks, where my friends informed me that the protagonists had been sitting under, near, and around the same clump of trees for the past six months. “For a while,” my friend Marissa confided, “we thought we had gotten them out, but the next chapter they were right back where they started.” It was like Groundhog Day with verb forms.

  Now I gritted my teeth and stared down at Dicaeopolis. I would learn these verbs, so help me. And when the call came, I’d be ready.

  • • •

  My debutante ball was scheduled for when I was a college sophomore. For years I could see it approaching slowly from a great distance, like one of those ominous lights at the end of long tunnels that they tell you not to walk toward.

  I know why I thought it was a good idea: It was bound to be a strange, out-of-time experience that would be good fodder for tales.

  I don’t know why my family thought it was a good idea. It was 2008 and having a debutante ball was a horrible way to meet anyone, unless the person in question was a visitor from 1830 who had yet to assimilate. Then again, we had strange hobbies. My mother was a big history buff who had the house set up so that if George Washington ever happened to drop by he would feel perfectly at home, if a little creeped out by all the pictures of him everywhere. She had chairs like he would have sat on and green felt tablecloths like he would hav
e seen at Colonial Williamsburg (I guess to him it was just “Williamsburg”) and decanters of whiskey that had been made at a replica of the distillery where he used to make whiskey himself. She also had bought me a complete set of Colonial attire so that I could spend weekends at a historic farm pretending to be an eighteenth-century farmer’s daughter. We tried to get this to count toward my high school’s community service requirement, but the effort fell through pretty quickly.

  “What is it that your volunteer work consists of?” Ms. Deaver asked.

  “Um,” I said, “well, I go to the Colonial Farm and I get into colonial garb and I spend three to nine hours there doing farm chores, you know, hoeing and also making the root vegetables comfortable and such, so if anyone visits the farm that day, they can see somebody hoeing like they would have hoed back a few centuries ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ms. Deaver said. “How is this helping people?”

  “Well, nothing helps someone as much as seeing how people lived in the eighteenth century,” I ventured. “As they say.”

  She fixed me with a flat stare. “What about making sandwiches?”

  “I’m not feeding the body!” I said. “I’m feeding the soul! Nothing feeds the soul like people in sweaty linen outfits and bonnets pretending not to know what airplanes are.”

  “Yeah, no,” Ms. Deaver said. “I think you’d better find something else.”

  Sometimes we got into heated family discussions in which my mother and my grandmother loudly agreed that arranged marriages weren’t so bad while my father and I maintained aggressive silences. (“It worked for centuries! Why mess with it? And I think it’s good that the family’s involved in the choice. The family SHOULD be involved. Hey, Alexandra, you know who you should consider? That nice Pederson boy!”)

  So maybe the ball was no surprise.

  Having a debutante ball in spite of yourself was a long tradition on my mother’s side of the family. “I was really into feminism,” my mother said, wistfully. “But your grandmother insisted.”

  My grandmother seldom insisted on anything. She and my grandfather were the fun side of the family. They liked to crack jokes, wrote funny toasts for their friends’ birthdays, and referred to lunch as “Beer and Wine Time.”

  They had been retired long enough that they found going to the grocery store almost painfully exciting, deserving the kind of excruciatingly detailed attention other people reserve for attempts to scale Mount Everest.

  They spent most of their TV viewing time alternating between FOX News and The Weather Channel, which put them in an almost constant state of panic, either about Something Ominous and Red That Is Sweeping into the Country to Devour Your Cattle in a Funnel of Wind, or Something Ominous and Blue That Is Sweeping into the Country to Make Your Children Dependent on Government Handouts.

  Like my mother, they were proud Hoosiers. Of course, if I were to come out into any society, it would be Indiana society. Thanks to their years of lavish praise, I had come to view Indiana as a place almost as magical as the past—a state with no equal in the world.

  Whenever we drove across the Indiana border, my mother insisted that we roll the window down so she could inhale deep lungfuls of Indiana air.

  “Mm,” she would shout over the rushing wind. “Doesn’t the air just smell sweeter here?”

  It smelled okay. It smelled like air. If I had to describe it at an air tasting I would probably say “distinguished, yet approachable” or “like air” or sneeze uncontrollably so that you would skip me.

  My mother’s family has always believed that all good things come from Indiana. Indiana people are superior to other people. Indiana corn is the best corn. Indiana dogs are better behaved than dogs from other places. Indiana writers are the best writers. Hoosiers play the best basketball. Films about Hoosiers are more stirring than films about other people from other places. Hoosiers, Hoosiers, now and forever!

  My father was from Wisconsin. But who did Wisconsin have? Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Joseph McCarthy, and Liberace. That, my mother said, was Wisconsin in a nutshell. Indiana had Benjamin Harrison. James Whitcombe Riley. Kurt Vonnegut. (I knew from reading Cat’s Cradle that Kurt Vonnegut considered the group of people bound by the simple fact of being from Indiana a “granfalloon”—that is to say, a superficial grouping that signified nothing. “If you wish to study a granfalloon,” Vonnegut had written, “just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” Somehow this never came up in conversation.)

  I thought Indiana was cool, but only because Indiana had produced my two male cousins. I idolized them. They were by far the cool half of the family. In middle school they wore hemp necklaces, and followed sports as avidly as I didn’t. They addressed me as “Z” and used terms like “dece.” “That’s dece, Z,” they would tell me.

  For several years after they let the word drop casually at a family get-together, I worked hard to incorporate it into my conversation. (“Yes, seeing Lord of the Rings sounds like it will be totes dece, yo!” “Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare play, but Hamlet is also pretty dece.”)

  While I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen counter dragging Dicaeopolis through his paces, they read books with titles like K-Dawg: Rize from the Streets and 365 Days of Andy Roddick. My aunt thought it was good that they were reading something. But I knew better. They were as cool in the present as I was going to be as soon as someone came along to whisk me back to 1919. What did they need to escape into books for?

  Drew was my age and Scott was three years younger, which, when you’re little, is a lot. To a seven-year-old, a four-year-old might as well be a side table. As a consequence of this mismatch, whenever we put on family skits, I forced Scott to play inanimate objects like Turkey and Barrel.

  It never ceased to amaze me as a child that people would simply clump you together willy-nilly with anyone else who fell under the heading “child”—as though you had anything in common with someone who still believed in the tooth fairy and had yet to arrive at any awareness of death. This is hard to explain to grown-ups, as they have lost all sense of how rude and arbitrary it is to be expected to make hours of conversation with people you have nothing in common with but age. “How would you like it if I said to you: Mr. Miller is also over forty, and even though you have never seen one another before and have nothing in common but your age, I expect you to spend two hours together without throwing mashed potatoes at one another or stomping on Mr. Miller’s toy truck?” you say. “That’s how I spend most of my evenings,” your parents respond.

  The other thing my cousins excelled at, apart from sports and life, was chess, which left me utterly flummoxed. It seemed wildly unjust that people who could actually have a good time at a middle school dance without taking any breaks to curl up and read Faulkner in the bathroom should also be lords of the ultimate nerd’s game. I spent a summer as the only girl at chess camp desperately trying to rectify the situation, but got nowhere. I won zero games. If you didn’t win many games, they had a prize for most improved, but I couldn’t win that because I hadn’t improved. There was no prize for Most Stagnant. I couldn’t even get a trophy for best sportsmanship because my sportsmanship was terrible.

  Even though they were the only people I knew, we thought it might be a little too Osmond-y for my cousins to double as my escorts at the ball. Besides, Drew was already escorting someone else.

  I pitched the idea to my college friends but got no bites. I think they thought I was joking. “Hey,” I told them, “want to come to a debutante ball? I need two of you.”

  “What?” they said. “Where?”

  “INDIANA!”

  “Are you even from there?”

  “NOPE!”

  “Isn’t that a little retro?”

  “A LITTLE? It’s literally feminist hell! For the afterparty, I bet we burn Betty Friedan in effigy. I assume there’s a big ice sculpture of a glass ceiling.”


  “And you’re going?”

  “Duh I’m going! ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT A DEBUTANTE BALL! It’s like an all-expenses-paid vacation to 1876! DEBUTANTE BALLS TO THE WALLS! Maybe they’ll marry me off to a TOTAL STRANGER from a NEIGHBORING COUNTY!”

  “Why are you speaking in all caps?”

  “BECAUSE I’VE BECOME HYSTERICAL! I’M PRACTICING MY HYSTERICS!”

  Instead, we had to fall back on my aunt. But she delivered. “Don’t worry,” she told my parents. “She’ll like them. They’re intellectual.”

  • • •

  The debutante ball was organized by something called the Indianapolis Performance Society. Once or twice a year, they got together and put on an amateur production of something that had gotten big laughs in 1890. One year my aunt played someone who was bitten by a penguin, which allowed her to display a lot of range.

  The party fell right around Christmas. I flew to Indiana from college, my excitement mounting. This was it. My big, time-traveling break.

  That was where all my skill sets lay. I’d been studying hard and reading up. I could curtsy. I had passable skill on the pianoforte. I couldn’t swoon, but I did occasionally get light-headed if I locked my knees by accident. My Greek was in line. I had all my drawing room quips locked and loaded. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” I could even dance, although not well enough to attract a Gentleman with Tracts of Land. At least, not very much land.

  My time machine was set to 1890, my dance card was open, and my giant white dress and gloves were on their way in the car with my parents. I was good to go.

  • • •

  The place where we went to rehearse for the ball was located at the top of a large warehouselike building that was full of vintage cars. The whole top floor was packed with shiny chrome and big fins and front seats that went all the way across and those pointy hood ornaments that you could use to impale unsuspecting pedestrians in crosswalks. It seemed like an appropriate place to begin your voyage back in time.