A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  We waited among the vintage cars to receive etiquette and basic dance instruction from a woman in a dress large enough to slipcover New Jersey. She told us to keep good posture, make eye contact, and not disgrace our families. Then we went slowly through the motions of learning how to waltz.

  Immediately on arrival I was introduced to my two escorts. I could see right away what my aunt meant. Russell was attending Stanford. Nick had just gotten back from a mission to South America and had a lot of feelings about it. In order to demonstrate that my aunt had been correct in selecting him, Russell spent the whole evening talking earnestly to me about eigenvectors. I kept leaving the conversation and crossing the room and returning and he was still there, a little bit farther along, like an instructional video through which you could not fast-forward.

  • • •

  Next there was a luncheon for honored grandmothers, because of course there was. I don’t know where they sent the dishonored grandmothers. Maybe they had a separate buffet.

  As I walked to my table, I overheard someone’s mother speaking to an Honored Grandmother in an urgent tone.

  “Her father would be escorting her but he recently died of a brain tumor so my brother is,” she said, sounding apologetic. Yes, I thought. How DARE he? You SHOULD apologize. He must have done it deliberately, to spite everyone and sour his daughter’s prospects. What a whimsical, self-centered act, to die of a brain tumor, when you were wanted at a debutante ball!

  I sat down at the table full of debutantes. They were all skinny and had lovely glossy hair, the one trait that most intimidates me in women, apart from an ability to walk confidently in heels. They looked like they’d been poured into their dresses and said “when” way, way too early. Not that I blamed them. One of my fellow debutantes was still smarting after trying on a dress in front of her Honored Grandmother.

  There had been a long pause. “Well, clearly you’re not anorexic anymore,” her grandmother said.

  “Who’s doing your hair?” one of them asked.

  “Me?” I said. I tried to pronounce it in such a way that if you didn’t know, you might think that Miiiii? with a rising intonation was the name of a sought-after hairstylist.

  “Who’s doing your makeup?”

  “Evian Plump is doing my makeup,” someone else said. (I do not actually remember the name of this person, but I remember that it started off sounding somewhat exotic and wound up with a good Hoosier surname.)

  I thought it might sound suspicious for Miiii to be doing all my beauty maintenance, so I maintained a respectful silence. My makeup regimen at the time consisted of seeing if I found a tube of CVS mascara in one of my coat pockets and, if I did, applying a painstaking single coat to my lashes, getting just a little bit on my nose in the process. I looked like a Dalmatian who was bad at applying eye makeup. If this were the eighteenth century I could probably have passed it off as a beauty spot, but even then it would be a bit suspect.

  Glancing around the table, I began to worry a little bit about my concept of how the evening was supposed to go. These girls didn’t seem to know that we were in the past. My watch was all set to the Gilded Age but . . . they were talking about pedicures. This felt suspiciously like middle school.

  Come now! Bring up the dance cards!

  I already felt like a sore thumb—in flats, in a dress I’d purchased online from a disgruntled bride and had already worn to my high school graduation, no hairstyle, less makeup, and no friends in the crowd. And the night hadn’t even started.

  • • •

  The actual venue was a place called the Indiana Roof. It looked like a theater set of a Spanish village. You kept expecting a bullfight in the middle of the dance floor. There was a stage at one end, lit up with red and green floodlights and little strings of white Christmas lights. That was where we were going to stand for the big presentation.

  We debutantes and our escorts ate dinner in an upstairs area overlooking the dance floor while our parents, friends, and acquaintances drank at the bar downstairs. Periodically, a wave of laughter from below crested, broke, and washed over us as we sat picking at our tepid salad.

  I tried not to spill spinach down my bodice. Class and taste, I told myself. Fine, this wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting. Fine, what I’d been expecting was that I would get out of the car and walk into the room and everyone else would be sepia-tinted. So far nobody was. If young F. Scott Fitzgerald was here, he was crouching behind the bar, mainlining gin and attempting to avoid notice.

  The trouble with all the things that People Don’t Do Anymore is that some people still do them.

  Sing barbershop quartets in coordinated sweaters? Hold doors for women? Wear hats? Attend Regency balls? Carry on as though the outcome of the Civil War is still undetermined? Sure. Chivalry’s not dead. Chivalry’s active on Reddit. Chivalry wears a fedora and expects you to put out. People keep telling Chivalry the hat looks dumb, but Chivalry won’t listen.

  It’s all going on somewhere.

  People still do all the things that people don’t do anymore. But they do it now, and that makes all the difference. It’s like you relocated your family to 1838 to build a new life with peace, quiet, and smallpox germs, and discovered that your entire high school had moved in next door. You can go to a debutante ball or a medieval weekend and there’s never a there, there. You can never get inside. It’s a gathering of everyone else who couldn’t make it under the velvet rope, dressed in scratchy, uncomfortable outfits, consoling one another. These weren’t historical strangers I could charm with my knowledge of the clavichord. They were people my own age. This was exactly what I’d come to 1890 to avoid, and it spelled disaster.

  The thing that I hate most on this green-blue Earth is when you are stuck by yourself in a group of people who all know one another and don’t know you. That, and the opposite—because really, it’s terrible no matter which end you’re on.

  There is never a moment when you sound more like a jerkturd than when you are talking to people whom you have known for years and there is a stranger, lurking somewhere in your midst, like the Ringwraith at the party. “Did you hear Christine broke three ribs?” someone asks.

  “Yes!” you say. “FINALLY!”

  “I’m so glad she’s not volunteering with those orphans any longer.”

  “I hate her so much.”

  “Everyone hated her.”

  “She was just using those orphans to get into business school.”

  “I KNOW! I was so worried she had changed.”

  “She would never change.”

  “I’m glad she’s not paralyzed.”

  “If she were paralyzed she would post the WORST Facebook updates.”

  “I bet she’d do marathons.”

  “UGH SHE WOULD.”

  “And untag herself.”

  “OH GOD, I’M BOILING OVER WITH VITRIOL.”

  The person listening timidly interjects that “Christine doesn’t sound so bad.”

  At this point you have to scrounge for anecdotes that explain why Christine was so terrible. Usually it turns out that you really had to be there. “She was always asking about the point value of our math assignments,” you say.

  “OH GOD,” your friends chime in. “Always.”

  “And she went to prom with Jim Billington.”

  “THE Jim Billington.”

  “I don’t know these people,” the intruder says.

  “Jim was the worst.”

  “He used to ice-skate.”

  “This doesn’t sound bad.”

  “They always used to say, it’s okay to HAVE hooked up with Christine, but it’s not okay to BE hooking up with Christine.”

  Your listener gets a pained expression. “Your high school was the basis of Mean Girls, right?”

  “YES, BUT THAT HAS NO BEARING ON THIS!” you shout. “
TRUST ME! I WORE KHAKIS EVERY DAY.”

  And if you’re the listener—well, the same applies. Once the conversation gets away, it is gone. Your only hope is to hold it aloft as long as possible and strangle it before it can touch earth and gain strength from its native soil.

  This was always harder if you were me. “Did you ever hear the story of the ancient wrestler Antaeus?” I would ask. “Hercules had to hold him aloft so he wouldn’t gain strength from his native soil.”

  “Huh.”

  “Gotta watch out for that soil.”

  “Speaking of watching out for, guess who I just saw? Davy! Crazy Eyes Davy! From sophomore year!”

  “NOT DAVY!”

  “Oh,” I would say, mostly to myself, “Davy! Sure!”

  “You know him?”

  “Davy from sophomore year! With the crazy eyes!”

  Understanding then breaks slowly over everyone’s faces. “Oh, ha-ha, very funny.”

  After that, the conversation is gone and you can’t get it back ever.

  That was what was happening now. As I forked down ruminative mouthfuls of salad, I felt myself slowly evaporating from the room.

  It wasn’t the past after all. Not the real past. Not the past I’d prepared for and expected. It was just middle school all over again, in a big fancy venue that looked like a luminous doughnut.

  • • •

  The way the debutante ball worked, as the instructress had drummed it into us, was that you lined up in the hallway and then proceeded out onto the dance floor in a stately manner, escorted by your father and followed by your two escorts, both in red sashes. As you walked, someone intoned your name and where you and your escorts were going to college. Then you curtsied to the hosts of the evening and took your place in the lineup next to the other debutantes. You just had to avoid falling over. I could do that, I thought. I’d spent most of my life not falling over.

  “Now, wait a second,” you are probably saying. “So you just stood there and took it? You were being handed off from your father like a piece of property. What do you have to say for yourself? Susan B. Anthony didn’t die fighting in the snows of Mount Rushmore so you could get presented to society like a piece of vintage meat. Think of the patriarchy!”

  What can I possibly say? Er. “Does it count as patriarchy if it was your grandmother’s idea?”

  Yes? Okay. Fair. Shhhhh.

  Which was why my grandmother was so eager to deny that this was a debutante ball. She was a feminist, herself. “That was not a deb ball,” she repeated, when she heard I was writing this. “It was a nice family party.”

  “Yes,” I thought. “A nice family party, like all nice family parties, where I have to wear a long white dress, curtsy, and get introduced into Indiana society along with my two escorts. Typical Tuesday, really.”

  But it wasn’t a debutante ball like I’d pictured, either. Debutante balls were supposed to be packed with high drama. Midway through the evening one of the debutantes would reveal that she had an impoverished fiancé and he would come bursting through the door dressed in his humble gamekeeper’s suit, and then he and her father would fight, and one of them would be flung onto the buffet table and send all the silver dishes crashing to the ground. At least that’s what happened on one episode of The O.C. I’d heard. I hadn’t actually had time to see it. Too busy time-travel prepping.

  • • •

  After the handoff came pictures. Then the dance with the father, dance with Escort One, dance with Escort Two. Between the venue, the white dress and the father-daughter dance, it was like the world’s most efficient wedding. Once we had finished dancing with our escorts, the people who actually had been drinking came flooding onto the dance floor like a drunk dam breaking. I perked up immediately. In the vanguard was a man with a neat white beard, dressed as a ship’s captain, who insisted on being called the Admiral. He shoved jauntily through the throng toward his daughter. She looked completely mortified.

  “Don’t worry, Sweet Potato,” he bellowed. “I’ve got you covered.”

  The Admiral winked. His nautical livery was quite something. I have no idea where you would purchase it. “I would like formal wear that makes me look like a drunk sea captain,” he must have said to someone. “Think Popeye, but maybe—and I’m just spitballing here—maybe a kilt, to go with?” Whoever he said this to had delivered in spades. The Admiral was holding up his end by appearing as drunk as possible, lurching around trying to help the debutantes obtain alcohol.

  Sweet Potato rolled her eyes.

  It didn’t take long for mayhem to break loose. The live band sang some covers of popular songs and pretty soon my cousins’ dad was out on the dance floor doing a great impression of what looked like a spider about to vanish down a drain. I did what I always did at dances (how had I expected anything different? Who are these people who go to summer camp and suddenly become other people?) and stood in the corner yelling about the music and trying to work my talking points into the conversation. (“This place is like a reptile tank!” “WHEN WILL WE GO TO THE DISCOTHEQUE FOR THE SURPRISE PARTY?”)

  • • •

  My grandmother smiled at me.

  “Isn’t this all silly?” she said. “I think it’s a bit silly.”

  I looked around for someone to make eye contact with.

  Grandma, I wanted to say, this was YOUR idea. If you think it’s silly, why are we doing it? Did we Gift-of-the-Magi ourselves by mistake, where we all thought we were doing what somebody else wanted? Because that can only end in unflattering haircuts and tears.

  This was right about when someone should have come dashing in dressed as a stable boy, overturned a table, and shouted, “NO, OLLIE HAMLISH! YOU MAY NOT HAVE HER!”

  Nothing, of course. The dancers continued to dance.

  “You look lovely,” my grandmother added.

  And another horrible thought struck me.

  It was always like this.

  Yes, the black-and-white debutantes of yore looked prim and proper and decorous and calm—like a row of carnations in white silk.

  But so did we, in our picture.

  In actual life there are no sepia tones.

  Call it the Unified Tastelessness Theory of History. In historic homes, people are always uncovering hidden layers of really hideous paint; James Madison’s bedroom was a wince-making teal. That statue was not the tasteful white you see; it used to look like Liberace on a bad day. There was a time when no yard in Ancient Athens was considered complete without a cheery stone phallus; they were like rude garden gnomes.

  Why would it have been any different in the ballrooms of a century ago? No one notices she’s living in a golden age. Probably if I’d been around then, I’d have spent most of my time lurking in the powder room, admiring the fractal patterns in the woodwork, catching up on my reading. If I were stuck at a dinner table next to Oscar Wilde, I would have sighed and wished myself back in time, next to Samuel Johnson. And so on, back and back and back until I ran into Dicaeopolis.

  In a strange way, that was comforting.

  • • •

  The dance floor slowly emptied.

  Afterward, Drew said, everyone was going to a party with People They Knew. There was going to 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.

  That was where I did most of my best time traveling, anyway: between the covers of a book. That was where I found the people whose jokes convulsed me with laughter, whose lives enveloped and extended outward from mine, who welcomed me instantly into their worlds without question. And I didn’t even need gloves.

  Time Traveler’s Yelp

  Given my luck traveling in space, it is probably naive of me to think that traveling in time would be any less awkward. But what can I say? We all have o
ur fantasies.

  With space, the stakes are fairly low. You might wind up at a bad restaurant. But traveling in time poses infinitely more risks. You might wind up on the menu. Talk about awkward!

  So as an aspiring time traveler, I found these Yelp reviews super helpful.

  That’s right, the same guide that tells you to avoid restaurants where they were rude to User Karen (Average Rating, 4.3 Stars) is now urging you to steer clear of 1830 altogether. Among other eras.

  PALEOLITHIC

  User: John

  5 Stars

  Fun! Great diet! Killed a mammoth with my bare hands! Great if you like camping and the outdoors—lots of fresh food and water, great vistas.

  User: Kate

  1 Star

  Hate it hate it hate it hate it

  Guys went out clubbing and dragged a bunch of women back to cave. Nobody is really sure about what’s edible. Nobody in this era can draw. Lots of peer pressure to wear fur, which I didn’t appreciate.

  Still not worse than 1812 though.

  User: Ann

  0 Stars

  Guy asked me, using hand signals, to come back to his cave to see his etchings. He offered to etch me like one of his French mammoths. It looked nothing like me. Then he made me stay in the cave and cook his meat and tend his fire.

  ANCIENT EGYPT

  User: Jim

  3 Stars

  Fun, but not what I was expecting. Pyramids, which I thought would be a big attraction, weren’t finished yet. Egyptians just walked like regular people. Most information we have about this time is not correct.

  User: Sarah

  2 Stars

  Ancient Egypt was okay. Drinks menu was limited. Not the best place to meet people. Reminded me a lot of the Internet in the sense that it was full of pictures of cats and people seemed pretty excited about them. Also lots of fun emoji. Still not sure what “Feather Squiggly Line Bird” means.