A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  ANCIENT ATHENS

  User: Sarah

  3 Stars

  I’d heard a lot about Socrates and the Socratic method but he wouldn’t really engage with me because I was a woman. Would not recommend bringing your kids here because everyone seems a little iffy on the age of consent.

  User: Aaron

  5 Stars

  Love it. Love it. Great comedy. The chorus got old quickly, but the dude dressed as a giant penis totally stole the show. A+ would go again. Not recommended for the agoraphobic because lots of the most fun stuff happens literally inside an agora.

  Everyone seemed to belong to some kind of fraternity.

  BIBLICAL TIMES

  User: John

  1 Star

  Like Medieval Times but so so so much worse. My wife got stoned to death. Even if you think you like the Bible this is not your scene.

  ANCIENT ROME

  User: John

  3.5 Stars

  Everyone talks a lot about how great the Roman aqueducts were and how wonderful their sewer system was, but it wasn’t all that entertaining. Good if you’re into nonstop toga parties. Colosseum was cool. Very realistic violence.

  Also, Latin is not pronounced how we think it is pronounced.

  MEDIEVAL TIMES

  User: Amy

  1 Star

  I thought “Serf Experience” was misspelled. It wasn’t.

  Total downer. Would not recommend. Music is awful (unless you’re really into plainsong chanting). Everyone gets divided into four types based on the balance of humors in their body. It’s like being assigned Samantha, Miranda, Carrie, or Charlotte except it determines your medical care.

  Right of jus primae noctis is gross. Not much nightlife. Could not find a bathroom or for that matter a toilet or for that matter a bed or for that matter soap.

  I know “Medieval Times” is rated five stars by most Yelp users but honestly there was much less jousting and big turkey legs than I was led to believe and much more fleas and people dying of plague.

  User: Sarah

  2 Stars

  I went here on a Groupon. For what I paid, it was not bad. If you like drawbridges, torchlight, and believing everything that is wrong with your body is because of witchcraft.

  Just for future reference: if the selling point of your era is “once a bunch of serfs died of plague, life got a lot better for them,” your era is terrible.

  Bright side: cheap trip! I’ve taken cruises that were worse.

  User: John

  1 Star

  Worst Iron Maiden concert ever.

  RENAISSANCE

  User: Kathleen

  4.5 Stars

  LOVE IT. Music scene not the greatest, but if you like perspective in your art, this is the first stop. If there were any downsides I would say it was that Renaissance men not as well-rounded as I expected.

  As a general note to travelers: everyone’s teeth in every era are way, way worse than you want them to be.

  FRANCE FRANCE REVOLUTION

  User: Marie

  Zero stars would not recommend.

  WHERE’S THE CAKE?

  REGENCY ERA

  User: Katie

  3.5 Stars

  Fun to visit. Great era for a three-day trip. Would not stay longer because no penicillin and also childbirth and arranged marriages. If I have to hear one more person delight us with piano playing I will draw and quarter something.

  CIVIL WAR

  User: Johnny

  2 Stars

  Wow, I thought it was impossible for politics to be more angry and polarized than they are now.

  I was wrong.

  VICTORIAN ERA

  User: Yelp, Yelp, I’m Being Repressed

  3 Stars

  Not the biggest fan.

  People had put all these little frill things on the bottom of their table legs to keep from being attracted to them, which was weird—like, who sexualizes a table leg? Not this guy.

  This era puts the hip in hypocrisy, then removes the I and replaces it with a Y. (This is not a good slogan, but it is about what the era deserves.)

  WORLD WAR I

  User: Simon

  1 Star

  Not sure what’s so “great” about it. Fast-forwarded several years and everyone was still sitting in the same trenches only muddier and less hopeful-looking.

  1960S

  User: Kyle

  2 Stars

  Fine and everything. Was expecting more, given everything the Boomers have been saying about this era for decades and decades. Woodstock was just okay.

  1970S

  User: Ann

  2.5 Stars

  If you remember the seventies, you weren’t there.

  One thing I’ll say: very cheap trip.

  2015

  User: Jim

  4 Stars

  Basically okay. One of the last nice times before the Yellowstone Caldera exploded.

  2016

  User: Sarah

  1 Star

  Ugh. Between the presidential race and that volcano, this was a downer of a year. Probably more the volcano’s fault than the election’s, come to think of it.

  3038

  User: Dan

  4 Stars

  If you’re not really a “people person,” this is the vacation for you. Very quiet. I was able to get a lot of reading done. Recommended if you’re into silence and don’t mind inhaling a little drifting ash.

  We Are Not a Muse

  I.

  Being a muse isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

  Best-case scenario, you wind up with a statue of yourself in a museum, posed at an unflattering angle. Worst-case scenario, someone makes (500) Days of Summer about you.

  My situation was somewhere between the two. My ex-boyfriend wrote a play about me.

  Yup.

  It’s my go-to crazy ex story. “Yours keeps messaging you on Facebook?” I scoff. “Please. Mine literally wrote a play about me. With a Greek chorus.”

  His name was David. We’d been friends for years. We met right after arriving at college, at a prefrosh program for artsy people. It concluded with a pageant where I played a Robot King and he played a backpacker who was bad at picking up on social cues. We stayed friends because we kept getting rejected from the same things. It’s amazing what that will do to cement a friendship.

  When we did get together, it turned into one of those tumultuous relationships you hear about: on-again, off-again, like a defective lamp.

  It started cute. He spent a summer abroad. We talked. He missed me, which was . . . novel. I’d never had a guy miss me. I’d been overlooked, sure, but never missed. Every New Year’s, I’d spend a week with my grandparents listening to my male cousins call their girlfriends and murmur, “I MISS YOU! I LOVE YOU! NO, I LOVE YOU MORE,” into the phone. It seemed like a cruel joke they were playing on me, not an actual thing that happened to people.

  When David got back to campus, he informed me that I was the type of girl that he wanted not only to date, but also to cuddle with and take out to dinner in a respectful manner.

  I was on board. For once in my life, I really, you know, liked someone. I thought he was cute, and not just in the way that I think every Jewish guy is cute. (I don’t undress people with my eyes; I just picture them in yarmulkes.)

  For about a week, it went well. Then he realized that dating might ruin our friendship. Why this had not occurred to him before, I have no idea. At any rate, he broke up with me.

  No way was that happening.

  So I did all the things that you are supposed to do. I took him out for coffee and reasoned with him, using logic. “All relationships,” I explained, “end in breakups or in death.”

  Two months later he had a change of heart and asked me back. />
  After that he was on board, too.

  He listened to me. He laughed at my jokes. He made me watch Tootsie and The Ben Stiller Show and he recited monologues from Hamlet and asked for my feedback on his acting. We had long conversations about his friends and relatives and my friends and relatives and all those daily bits of news that seem so pressing. Shit was getting real.

  But when he told me he was in love with me, I was flummoxed.

  Everything I had heard about love was terrifying. Love sounded like a diabolical Santa. Love, they said, came for you when you least expected it. Love put all your secrets out in the open. You came home from work one day, and Love was waiting in your garage with a knife, breathing heavily.

  Well, I hadn’t experienced anything like that. I did give him a watermelon one time. He seemed to appreciate the Happy Administrative Professionals Day card that I bought him—for Valentine’s Day. And sure, I’d had the urge to write him a couple of sonnets, but they were casual, ABABCDCDEFEFGG sonnets, nothing formal or Petrarchan or anything. Surely that didn’t count.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Uh. Likewise.”

  Afterward I went back to my room, feeling both shaken and stirred, like a martini that James Bond would complain about.

  Was I supposed to be having feelings for him? I was Scandinavian. I came from a long line of emotionally frigid blond people. To say that we were in touch with our feelings would be a gross exaggeration. At most, they send us a postcard every six to eight years to say that they are enjoying life in the new country. What was I supposed to do with this?

  “All relationships,” I reminded myself, “end in breakups or in death.” I wasn’t ready to die!

  So I broke up with him.

  Turning him into my crazy ex-boyfriend was a snap. I’d barely referred to him as my boyfriend to begin with. To call someone my boyfriend would imply that I was someone’s girlfriend. I had gone to an all-girls’ school, and I knew better than that. A girlfriend was somebody with a purse who went to your sporting events. I wasn’t a purse. I was a PERSON.

  And when I read his play, that just sealed the deal.

  • • •

  A few weeks after our split, we were in playwriting class, the Big Fancy Playwriting Class where they perform your play at the end of the semester, and something seemed a little off.

  When we read one another’s drafts, I realized what it was. There I was, right there on his page.

  But he’d started revising me.

  Every draft came back with my character looking worse. She delivered extended monologues about how she had realized that she was missing out on a good thing. She cried more. David glanced hopefully across the classroom at me.

  Who was this girl? Why was she writing sonnets and showing up at his events with watermelon? Why was she telling him that all relationships end in breakups or in death?

  With every rewrite, it got worse. “That seems unrealistic, for the character to say a thing like that,” I would say, pointing out one of my best lines, transcribed verbatim from one of our GChats.

  “Does it?”

  “It wasn’t like that at all!” I glanced nervously around the classroom. “In this, er, fictional world of the play that you’ve created.”

  “Wasn’t it?” He frowned. “I think it was.”

  That’s the trouble with being a muse.

  It’s not what it’s cracked up to be at all.

  • • •

  And I hadn’t even set out to be a muse. I’d just been mistaken for one, a specific kind of muse: the manic pixie dream girl. Manic pixie dream girls, for the uninitiated—lucky you!—are the lazy man’s modern-day muse. They don’t have personalities. They have quirks. They wear rain boots and call coffeepots “elf beaneries” and talk about how the stars are God’s daisy chain. They descend on nebbishy male writers in search of muses the way seagulls descend on a French fry.

  Their hobbies include but are not limited to: running in the rain, dancing in the rain, listening to better bands than you in the rain, playing the ukulele in the rain (it sounds no worse), coming up with twee nicknames for household objects in the rain, and breaking up with nebbishy male writers for reasons that said writers find completely impenetrable, sometimes also in the rain. And then, as the writers sob over their departure, they realize that this heartbreak was just the impetus they needed to create That Elusive Masterwork That Was Always Lurking Just out of Reach.

  They’re catalysts. They are airy free spirits who, since the dawn of manuscript time, have come waltzing into the lives of nebbishy male writers to urge them to Get Out and Experience Life. They generate plots.

  Unfortunately, all the plots are about the same: A young girl sparkling with life, often but not always with erratically colored hair, comes pirouetting into your humdrum existence and teaches you how to feel, love, and throw away whatever medication is keeping you from alarming the neighbors. But then the relationship ends, and you transform your whimsical, credulity-straining romance into a classic work of fiction, and the plaudits come pouring in from all corners.

  I never thought of myself as one of them. I hate rain. I hate rain almost as much as I hate ukulele music. Also, they are fictional. So I thought I was safe. It was certainly not my intent to unload turdkilograms of whimsy into anyone’s life.

  And more than that, I always knew I wanted to tell stories. That’s something manic pixies never do. They’re not the protagonists of their own lives. They’re characters in yours.

  II.

  Yet David had come to think of me this way. I’m pretty sure it was because of the night I mentioned I was crashing the publication dinner for an International Textbook on Geriatric Care, which is, I confess, the sort of thing these pixie dream girls do in movies.

  But I was not motivated by whimsy. I was motivated by food. I have always prided myself on my ability to crash things. I viewed Wedding Crashers as a kind of life blueprint. Why would you not want to go and get free food among strangers? That’s the whole point of human existence: free food. I mean, art, and perpetuating the human race, and everything, but—come now. Tell me you don’t want finger cheese.

  I was always trying to expand my crash roster. Once, I accidentally wandered from a New York bar into a gallery opening for a Russian artist after someone gave me confusing directions to the bathroom. I walked through one door, then through another door, and—there I was, surrounded by people in fine array, sampling wine and cheese and staring at the art with awe written on their faces. Never one to pass up free champagne, I took a glass and wandered around, trying to look like just one more art appreciator in my natural art-appreciating habitat. I gradually became aware that most of the people around me were speaking Russian. This didn’t seem like a problem. I could do a Russian accent. I’d seen Borat.

  I got another glass of champagne and murmured appreciatively at the canvases. A couple approached me. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” they said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, trying my Russian accent. “The painting, it is beautiful. Most lovely, yes.”

  They nodded. Emboldened, I continued. “That, I hear, is the artist there, yes?”

  At this point the man began speaking to me in actual Russian. I struggled to maintain my composure. I had no idea what he was saying. This is it, I thought. There goes my cover. They would boot me out unceremoniously and I would not get to try any more of the finger cheeses. I cast desperately about me for a solution.

  “Ah ah ah,” I said, wagging a finger at him. “I wish to practice my English.”

  We switched back without incident. I grabbed another glass of champagne. By the time I had worked my way to the bottom of it I was shaking the artist by her gloved hand and repeating the word “beautiful, beautiful” in halting, accented tones. I still have her somewhat bewildered autograph.

  Leaving the reception with a belly full of champagne,
a guide to the exhibit, and a handful of postcards depicting the art in it, I quite justly felt that I could crash anything on Earth.

  Sadly, college life left few opportunities for me to test this hypothesis, until one day, walking through the Harvard Faculty Club, I spotted a sign for the Publication Dinner for an International Textbook on Geriatric Care.

  That sounded like a swank time. Nothing says “swank time” like “We’ve figured out how to care for elderly people so their hips stay intact when they fall over!”

  I put on a black dress and showed up during the cocktail hour. One of the nice things about being a white female in your twenties, apart from the VAST MOUNDS OF UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE, is that if you show up to a nice dinner in a nice cocktail dress, people generally assume you’re supposed to be there.

  I had a cover story, which was that my boyfriend worked for the publisher. Sadly, he hadn’t shown up yet! Oh well! Here I was anyway. Mm, canapés! How do you know Mr. International Textbook?

  This was perfect because it required me to have zero knowledge of or connection to the textbook, and it put the onus on my boyfriend for telling me to come to this dinner, then failing to show up himself. I wound up talking to the son of one of the scientists who had contributed a chapter. The scientist had flown in from Korea and his son spoke limited English, so we communicated mainly by gesturing and eating the hors d’oeuvres at each other.

  I managed to secure a seat at his table, away from the actual people who were responsible for the textbook, and figured I was safe.

  But then things started to go downhill. His father came over and insisted we join the high table. Tonight, he conveyed through words and gestures, was a great night of celebration, and we should spend it together.

  Then I got a text from David. “Where are you?” he said. “I thought we were hanging out.”

  “I’m crashing the Publication Dinner for the International Textbook on Geriatric Care,” I typed.

  A pause. “I’ll be right there!”

  I watched in terror as my cover story began collapsing in on itself like an ill-constructed cake. If he showed up, it would be clear that he did not work for the publisher and that in fact I knew zero people involved with this textbook, and then we would be rousted out of the dinner. And I was already three courses in! This could not pass. I wanted to make it to coffee, at least.