A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  Gregor smiled and pointed. “Ian McDiarmid signed it,” he said.

  “But—” Hank said.

  “I’ll just show it to the guy at the door,” Gregor said. “It’s my trump card. He’ll understand.”

  “Will he, though?” Hank asked.

  “He’ll take it and in exchange, he’ll let us in.”

  “Unless he’s a big Star Wars collector,” Hank said, “I don’t see how this will happen. He will just say, ‘What is this? This is not a ticket. This is a piece of paper with the autograph of someone I have never heard of on it. Why are you giving me this?’ And then he will not let us in.”

  Gregor shook his head. “He’ll understand,” he said. “Just watch.”

  We stood in the line some more. If Star Wars fans excel at anything, it is standing in lines. Gregor glanced nervously at his watch. It was eleven thirty. “My uncle is coming at midnight to pick me up,” he reiterated.

  “That’s a whole half hour,” I said, reassuringly.

  He cheered up a little. “That’s enough time for, like, six orgasms.”

  Hank had been growing increasingly nervous the longer this interaction went on. Now he said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and vanished into the night. As it turns out, he was never to return. Later he sent me an apologetic e-mail. (“After being perfectly fine in the Carrie Fisher line, Gregor kept getting stranger by the minute and I’d had enough. I was going to let him use my badge on Sunday, on the condition he mailed it back to me, but he turned and became untrustworthy. I am very sorry I left you there in his company with no explanation until now.”)

  We arrived at the front of the line with a couple of minutes to spare and Gregor sallied forth, brandishing his postcard with Ian McDiarmid’s signature in shiny silver ink. The bouncer took it with a quizzical nod and walked away into the VIP area.

  I gazed agog at Gregor through the mesh of my Jabba suit. Had he actually done this? Had all his spittle-spewing bravado paid off? Were we going to get to interact with the embittered Jake Lloyd after all?

  The bouncer returned. “I don’t know what this is,” he said. “Are you Ian McDiarmid?”

  “No,” Gregor said. The clock struck midnight. He handed me the postcard and made a sudden dive toward me.

  It turned out that, in Gregor’s mind, this had been a romantic evening.

  I don’t know if someone has ever attempted to kiss you through the mesh of a Jabba the Hutt suit, but it is definitely a unique experience. Let’s just say it’s impossible to make any headway. For better results, you could try to tongue-kiss a fully dressed beekeeper. Depending on how soon the other party notices this, it can give you a lot of time to marvel at his tenacity. “Huh?” you think. “I’m alarmed, but at the same time, I’m kind of impressed. Is impressed the word? Maybe it’s the word. Should I move? Or just stand here until it’s over?”

  Several more security personnel appeared. “Sir,” they said, “please stop. Please leave.”

  Outside, a white car with a tired-looking white-haired man in it pulled up. It was Gregor’s uncle. Gregor climbed in, still protesting faintly, leaving me with the Ian McDiarmid autograph.

  “You okay?” the bouncer asked.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Hey, at least I got a free Ian McDiarmid autograph out of it this time.” (Usually, when a guy does something like this, you get nothing! Or blamed.) I handed him my ten dollars and oozed into the regular afterparty.

  In the dark bar, the Sexy Twi’lek Dancers gyrated and the beer flowed. If I had actually been Jabba the Hutt, this would have been exactly my jam. As it was, I was about partied out.

  Hutts, I reflected, trooping back to my room, were supposed to be asexual anyway. Gregor surely knew that. What did he think he was doing?

  Gregor went on to send me hundreds of messages, operating under the misapprehension that, as a fellow pundit, I might be able to get him into the GOP convention in Tampa.

  He still follows me on Twitter. (Hi, “Gregor”! Don’t kill me!)

  So much for meeting people at conventions.

  (I feel a little bad for theming this chapter around Nerd Dating, because now it will be impossible to convince Some Nameless Nerds that I am legit. To these fools and trolls, the only real nerd is a male nerd, and lady nerds are dabblers and dilettantes whose passion is skin-deep, and they just pretend to like these things to lure in Eligible Basement-Dwelling Males. This is a slight generalization, but only a slight one.)

  • • •

  I had hoped, in a vague way, that Star Wars would perform the office of a mutual friend and set me up with someone. But this wasn’t panning out at all. Maybe it was my fault for trying to mix the two.

  After all, Star Wars was forever. That was even a convention motto.

  Things could change in the world. But Star Wars endured (even if George Lucas kept doing unspeakable things to the original trilogy in the course of transferring it to DVD, inserting Hayden Christensen where he had no business being and adding more wipes and dissolves.) Star Wars was constant.

  I always used to recoil when fans marched down the aisle to the evocative strains of “The Imperial March.” “Fools,” I thought. “What if your marriage ends in divorce and ruins The Empire Strikes Back for you? You can’t let Star Wars, which is unchanging and permanent, get mixed up in something potentially temporary like a lifelong commitment to another person!”

  I didn’t ever want anything to change things between Star Wars and me. I hate change. I hate kumquats and change. And Star Wars is my longest relationship to date.

  It’s had its ups and downs. We fans talk about Star Wars the way old sailors talk about the sea—as a harsh mistress whom you cannot help but love, but who mostly has been a lot of trouble and expense.

  I think. I’m not, in fact, super tight with any old sailors, but I feel like they squint wistfully out to sea and say, “Ah, aye, all in all, she’s been kind, but he who loves her had better watch where he treads, oh, aye.”

  Star Wars is the only thing that can make us suffer this much. Our love is why some of us were so devastated when we saw Jar Jar for the first time, or heard the tomfoolery about midi-chlorians, or stormed out of the feature-length animated preview of The Clone Wars when Jabba the Hutt turned out to have a purple uncle whom George had decided would sound “like Truman Capote.” Besides waiting in line, another thing that Star Wars fans have an affinity for is dealing with disappointment.

  I remember sitting in the dark before Episode III began. Please, I murmured, please don’t let this ruin it.

  There’s something terrifying about having that much of yourself invested in anything you can’t control. It’s weird enough when it’s another human being. And it’s especially weird when the thing that’s capable of doing that to you is something imaginary that a large bearded man came up with in the 1970s.

  But I’m less worried about that than I used to be.

  Star Wars grew with me, like initials etched into a sapling, or Darth Vader’s face carved into a baby pumpkin.

  The things we love weave themselves into the framework of our being. They are the trellises on which our thoughts grow; we shape ourselves, our habits, our vocabularies, to accommodate them. If someone asks, “Why do you love this?” the question is as impossible to answer as “Why are you?” You cannot isolate the part of you that loves from the rest of you, or mark its beginning and ending. Old couples grow to look like each other. Old ruins blur into their ivy. Star Wars fans name their kids Luke and Leia and show up at conventions dressed as Jabba the Hutt. At first we loved the Millennium Falcon, so we wanted to build a scale replica in our basement. Now we love the Millennium Falcon because of the scale replica in our basement.

  Every time I watched Star Wars I used to hold my breath to see if it felt the same. But now I know it won’t. It hasn’t moved, but I have.

  It’s
always there. It’s magic, still, but a different magic every time.

  I turn off all the lights in the house so there’s no reflection or glare, shut all the doors and windows, and settle in a chair with my arms folded over my knees and wait for takeoff.

  • • •

  And then it happened.

  Not at a convention, of course.

  I met a guy who could recite the entire opening credits of Return of the Jedi. I mean, among other qualities, obviously. Liking Star Wars is not the be-all and end-all in relationships for me. Never mind the fact that every time a friend has met someone she intends to marry, she introduces him to me by saying, “Petri, you’ll like him! He loves Star Wars.” (Seriously, this has happened three times now. People know that I can’t disapprove of anyone who likes Star Wars. Not entirely. If you told me that Satan was a big Star Wars fan I would have to reevaluate eternal damnation. They might have something good showing on the big screen.)

  Being in an actual relationship with another Star Wars fan still terrifies me a little. On the one hand it’s great to have someone who picks up, line by line, what I’m putting down, countering my “Is that legal?”s with “I will MAKE IT legal”s. But on the other hand, when you start sharing the things you love with somebody else, there’s a danger. It’s no longer private. It’s no longer secure. Someone else can walk through and leave muddy footprints on your soul. You get back to your sanctum sanctorum and there are someone else’s stray shoes and socks and phone chargers. Once you disclose the actual location of your secret rebel base, you can’t retreat there if anything goes wrong. And bases like this are hard to come by.

  But that’s the whole point of loving something: It means you carry it around with you, and it gets marked and dented and banged up like the rest of you. There’s a reason “well-loved” is a euphemism for “looks like crap.” You’re supposed to Open Yourself Up and Be Vulnerable and Embrace Life, with all the scuffing that entails.

  I’m trying to let down my guard, but old habits take a while to die, like someone being shot at by a stormtrooper. We haven’t watched it together yet. I don’t think we’re ready. The new trilogy, the J. J. Abrams effort? Sure. The originals? Maybe later, if this relationship keeps up—say, in a decade or two, after the kids are out of the house. I really don’t think we should rush into all of this, as Threepio says.

  Dietary Restrictions

  As a general rule, don’t let your five-year-old self make too many of your life decisions. Otherwise you wind up as a fairy princess who is also a vet, whose entire portfolio is invested in Lisa Frank stickers.

  For the most part, I have broken out from under the iron yoke of my five-year-old self. For the most part. She wanted to be surrounded by cats. I am not surrounded by cats. She thought ballet was a good investment of time and energy. I have gotten clear of that. She wanted to be a writer. That one I’m stuck with.

  But the toughest pronouncement of hers took me years to wiggle out of. All of elementary school, in fact.

  “Chocolate makes me grumpy.”

  I remember when this resolution formed. It was well after my bedtime one evening. I had just eaten some M&M’s, and I was in a foul humor. Perhaps, I pondered, this was not correlation, but causation.

  “Chocolate,” I announced, “makes me grumpy.”

  And something clicked.

  This was the beginning of a deeply regrettable phase. You think your gluten-free friend is hard to put up with? She might have an actual medical complaint. I had nothing to go on but my intuition.

  But I insisted.

  I forswore chocolate. Whenever anyone served chocolate at school, I objected. Obstreperously.

  They served us chocolate ice-cream bars at lunch.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I can’t eat this. Chocolate”—I paused ominously—“makes me grumpy.”

  My teacher frowned at me. She seemed to be searching for some sort of justification. Dogs, she was probably thinking, had problems with chocolate. Maybe I was secretly a dog. You never knew with these private-school kids. They always were coming up with strange ailments. “Okay,” she said. It seemed hardly worth the time to argue with a seven-year-old. Maybe this was a real dietary restriction that existed. “Fine.” She sent me to the cafeteria kitchens. I explained myself to the cafeteria lady, my confidence swelling. She reached into the depths of the freezer and produced a blue-flavored Popsicle. (“Blue” is a flavor.)

  I sucked on it in triumph.

  It turned out that if you were firm enough about your preference, people genuinely thought you had a dietary issue.

  This became a pattern. Someone would present me with chocolate birthday cupcakes and I would wave them away with all the dismissive authority of a tiny teetotaler. “No,” I said. “I can’t. My system can’t handle the stuff. I know how I get. It’s an ugly, ugly sight, and one I wouldn’t wish on you—certainly not on a festive occasion like your seventh birthday, Nell.”

  At Halloween, I sifted moodily through piles and piles of Hershey kisses. I had worked hard to earn them. My costumes were always homemade and, as a consequence, it was hard to tell who I was supposed to be. Part of the Halloween ritual at the Petri house every year was making me practice the spiel I would deliver on the doorstep of each house.

  “Don’t be fooled by the face paint that makes me resemble the victim of an elevator accident! I am in fact a hobbit, and this is my trusty sword, Sting!”

  “Good day, fellow American! I am John Adams, and I am most pleased to make your acquaintance this fine eve!”

  “You might be surprised to hear that I am Winston Churchill, but I am.”

  “I’m Garfield. The cat, not the president.”

  It was hard going, and at the end of it I felt that I was entitled to the spoils. But most of the spoils were chocolate. This tended to spoil the spoils.

  “Here,” I said, pouring them out. “I can’t eat this. I’ve been clean three years now. The thought of putting this stuff in your body—” I scowled. “I’m glad I’m not a grump.”

  “Yeah,” said my friend John, who had been trick-or-treating with me, scooping up several handfuls of chocolate, “you’re definitely not.”

  • • •

  And then came the incident.

  I had been so firm for so long. The logic of not eating chocolate became a nightmare creature that ate its own tail, like an ouroboros, which I believe is just a word for a nightmare creature that eats its own tail. (I get a fifty-dollar cut from SAT makers for every word like that I keep in circulation!)

  Jane brought chocolate birthday somethings.

  “Don’t you want one, Alexandra?” she asked.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Chocolate makes me grumpy.”

  “Are you allergic?”

  “No,” I said. I was used to this line of questioning. “It makes me grumpy.”

  Jane’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe you.”

  This blunt response took the wind out of me. I had never needed to defend myself before. Everyone took it on faith.

  “You can give it to me,” I said. “But I warn you, you will not like what you see. Chocolate makes me grumpy. I know.”

  “Really?”

  This could not pass. I would not abide this questioning.

  Resolute, I took a bite. And another bite. I ate the whole thing.

  I sat there like Jekyll about to turn into Hyde, waiting for the change to come upon me. At this point I had swallowed my own press releases, hook, line, and sinker, like a credulous fish. I was convinced that something horrible was about to happen. I would go rampaging through the countryside and eat a villager. There was no telling. Years of not building up any tolerance to the stuff had probably taken their toll. I would be a menace to myself and everyone I loved. They would have to put me down like a rabid dog who had also eaten chocolate.

 
Everyone else watched nervously, expecting something similar.

  And waited.

  “Stay back,” I warned.

  I didn’t feel anything. That couldn’t be right. I had to feel something. I was in too deep. I had to feel something. I had been so committed for so long. Maybe you had to let yourself feel it.

  This set the pattern for all of my experiences with controlled substances. Years later, the first time I tried beer, I drank a tiny Dixie cup full and convinced myself that I was inebriated. This is what it feels like! I told myself. “Kid, don’t you feel your coordination leaving you and your confidence building? That is what drinking does.” To prove a point to myself, I walked a zigzag down the sidewalk, singing an old drinking song. (It turns out that this was not actually what being drunk was like at all, as I discovered to my chagrin a few weeks later, kneeling over a toilet, having consumed four beers in quick succession.) The same thing my first time with marijuana. I failed to inhale properly (Bill Clinton would have been proud) but nonetheless spent the rest of the night insisting that I had “the munchies” and that “man, time’s just, just so deep, right, man?” When I actually figured out how to inhale correctly, I spent the entire evening convinced that my soul was leaving my body and frantically bargaining with God.

  No, I thought. This was what grumpy felt like. I just hadn’t felt grumpy in so long that I didn’t remember.

  Everyone was still looking at me, waiting for me to make a move, the way we looked at ants in the science classroom after someone placed a big obstacle in their paths.

  I had to do something.

  I climbed up unsteadily onto a chair. I climbed from the chair onto the table. “I’m grumpy!” I announced. “I’m grumpy!” I stamped my foot for emphasis. “I’m grumpy!”

  • • •

  Apparently this incident left more of an impression on those who witnessed it than I thought. In eighth grade, when I went to my elementary school reunion (yes, it was the kind of elementary school that had a reunion), I stood there in a skirt trying to look approachable and cool.