A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  “Third grade,” I murmured, to Jane. “Whoa, can you believe how LONG ago that was? Like a lifetime. How are you? You still studying to be a vet-princess?”

  “Ha-ha,” Jane laughed. Her claws came out. “Does chocolate still make you grumpy?”

  “Ha-ha,” I laughed, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “That was so long ago. We’ve all changed so much. We’re totally unrecognizable.”

  “Did you say grumpy?” someone else said, joining the conversation. “I remember the time you were so grumpy you stood on a chair.”

  “I don’t remember that at all,” I lied, unconvincingly.

  “Because you had chocolate!” Jane added.

  “Are you still grumpy?” someone else asked, joining the circle.

  I swallowed. “Well, I haven’t had chocolate in so long, who can really say?”

  Then I made up an excuse to leave the room and sat in the bathroom for a very long time.

  Reputations are hard to keep up.

  Under the Dome

  I don’t usually tell people this, but we’ve been getting to know each other for two hundred pages now (unless you’re skimming!), and I think you’re ready to hear it. My dad was a congressman.

  I was never someone who walked around announcing this fact. “Do you know who my father is?” are words that have never left my lips. “What does your dad do?” people would ask. “Um,” I would say. “He’s a civil servant. Works in government.”

  I tried to make sure that people had some idea of who I was before they figured out who he was. Because not only was my father in Congress—he was a Republican. A moderate, admittedly. But for most people in places like College Campuses and Coastal Cities and Hip Hangouts of the Young, the word “Republican” came wrapped in a horrifying miasma. I might as well have walked in and announced that my family liked to grill and eat kittens. “You were raised by Republicans?” people asked. “Poor girl. If it had been wolves, you might have had a chance.”

  “No,” I tried to explain. “He’s a moderate. He’s okay. You don’t need to start the reparative therapy on me. Please, put away those prongs and flashcards.” It took some time to subdue them, during which I would have to insist repeatedly that we believed in history and women, understood that science was real, and did not conduct pagan sacrifices to Ronald Reagan under the light of the full moon.

  Once I had satisfied them on this front, they kept circling. “Well,” they asked, eyes sparkling, closing in, “what’s it like?”

  • • •

  I think when people ask, “What’s it like being a congressman’s daughter?” they picture something like this.

  A large black SUV pulls up outside a building. A woman in perfect designer clothes gets out of it.

  She approaches a man with a big flag pin and expensive shoes. He is wearing a suit jacket lined with the broken dreams of the American people that was given to him by The Sinister Billionaire Who Owns the Senate.

  “Hello, Harold dear,” she says. She is calling him “dear” only in case there are cameras around. For the past eight years he has been leading a secret double life in a relationship with a flight attendant named Dave Hypocrisy. Everyone knows this except the American people, who are having the wool pulled over their eyes.

  Harold’s Most Trusted Staffer, Marley, approaches. Marley is a short, sinister-looking bald man in a robotic headpiece who resembles Lando Calrissian’s assistant Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back.

  Marley has just killed a rabbit with his bare hands for no good reason. He wipes his bloody hands on a wad of dollar bills from Big Oil.

  “Thank God we have our connections to Big Oil,” one of the other staffers says. This staffer has been walking and talking in the background the whole time. “Did you know that six pigeons die by flying into oil rigs every week?”

  (The staff can only communicate by referencing obscure and dubious facts that Aaron Sorkin found on the Internet somewhere. Staff members are also required to walk up and down hallways whenever they speak.)

  Marley gets an important e-mail on all nine of his BlackBerrys. “Sir,” he says, “the press are closing in on the trail of that prostitute you killed.”

  “I don’t have time for this!” Harold yells.

  His wife stiffens. “Marley, go take the big black SUV with tinted windows and pick up our daughter from cheerleading practice.”

  It turns out that this daughter is nowhere to be found. She is running amok because she was always expected to be perfect and now she is sick of it. She sees her father only once a year, when the family Christmas card photo is taken, but has gotten a dim sense of her father’s personality from his publicity materials. (“I think he is very into shaking hands with hopeful-looking elderly people, and also combating wasteful government projects.”)

  Now she has numerous piercings, one for each important school event that Harold missed during her formative years. “I’m becoming a terrorist,” she recently informed him. “I’m doing it just to hurt you, because you used me as a prop in all your campaigns, and I never had my freedom.”

  “Over my dead body,” Harold responded. “Now smile for the camera.”

  I regret to say that this was not my experience.

  There was no staffer picking me up in a black SUV with tinted windows.

  My dad rolled up outside school in a big green ’77 Chevy Zephyr.

  When we replaced the Zephyr, instead of getting a car from a year when I had actually been alive, we got another Chevy, a ’79. It was giant, blue, and had only two doors.

  My mother gave it a long, hard look. “I guess it’ll build character,” she said.

  It didn’t have air-conditioning that worked either. It did, however, have a functioning AM radio.

  By the time we finally replaced it with a used Malibu, which was when I was in about eighth grade, I was just overflowing with character. I had so much character I was basically an entire Dickens novel.

  • • •

  The difficulty with telling people what it was like to be the daughter of a congressman is that I don’t know what it was like to be the daughter of anyone else.

  Childhood, especially when you’re an only child, is like being plunked down on an isolated human outpost in deep space for the first eighteen years of your life. Everything you know of Earth and its customs you hear from the humans charged with your rearing, or pick up by chance from the TV. “We’ll have a nice traditional Fourth of July,” my parents informed me, “where we all pretend we’re Founding Fathers and discuss the course we hope the nation will take.”

  “But,” I said timidly, “I don’t think that’s what other people do on the Fourth. At least, that wasn’t what the people in the Home Depot commercial looked like they were doing. Shouldn’t we be repainting a room very confidently?”

  “Don’t worry,” they reassured me, as I donned my vest and ruffled shirt, “this is completely normal.”

  And then one day you make the mistake of asking if this is what other people do, and it turns out that, no, this is not what other people do at all.

  It’s like learning you’ve been pronouncing a word wrong half your life. You now have to question everything. It’s suddenly possible that your normal is strange. You have to go back over your whole life, underlining relevant passages from your diary and scrawling question marks in the margin.

  “Giving your pets middle names is a thing, right? Ginger Growltiger Petri? Ketcham Tape-Recorder Petri?”

  “Did you have to play electric piano in a corner at your dad’s fund-raisers?” you ask, nervously.

  “Everyone else’s mom was extremely fond of George Washington, right? And every Christmas, your family rewatched the 1984 George Washington miniseries starring Barry Bostwick, and your mother got very emotional about it?”

  “No,” everyone says, “that is not what you s
o glibly term ‘a thing.’ In fact, most people don’t do that at all.”

  • • •

  But as a child I thought all of it was normal.

  To me, the Capitol was just a place I sometimes hung out in after school. It might have been a little heavy on the marble and the symbolism compared to other dads’ offices, but who was I to judge?

  If you like allegorical paintings or sculptures at all, hoo boy, this is the building for you. George Washington in a toga, being taken up into Heaven? Check. Big statues of Vague Nouns like Freedom? Heck yes. Paintings of people surveying new lands or generals dying on battlefields or oddly contented-looking Native Americans signing over large tracts of land? Look no further.

  Sometimes when there was a vote well into the night, my mother and I would drive to the Capitol and eat a family dinner in the House Dining Room, with its big gold plush chairs, blue and gold carpet and a large waitress with blond hair pulled back into a too-tight bun, who brought me my thick-cut fries.

  I thought this was just what you did.

  I even voted.

  Fun fact: Until you’re twelve, they let you vote. (At least they used to.)

  Members of the House voted by selecting the appropriate button and then swiping their voting cards, and until you were twelve you were allowed to walk onto the floor with your mother or father and press the vote button. There were four buttons: green for yes, red for no, yellow for abstain, blue for present, if memory serves.

  They were a lot of fun to push. I’d cycle through the colors, watching the vote change color on the wall. “Stop on ‘Yes,’” my dad would say, looking a little uneasy.

  Sometimes, I just waited in the cloakroom until he was done. I was fascinated by the congressional pages, college students in fancy blue jackets who looked so grown-up and worldly and important as they filed in and out. The cloakroom had raspberry Popsicles with little seeds and large comfortable chairs, and there were plenty of members who would shake my hand and ask me when I planned to run. (If you like being asked when you plan to run, being a congressional kid is definitely for you!)

  I would tell them in an authoritative eight-year-old manner that “I would only touch politics with a long-handled spoon” (a line that got some bewildered laughs) or tell them fun facts about cats. Cats, I assured them, were my passion, not public policy.

  My dad’s office was in the Rayburn Building. Like most congressional offices, it had a big American flag, a big state flag, and lots of pictures of the Wonders of the District, such as the OshKosh B’gosh headquarters, which was represented by a poster of two toddlers in fetching overalls sharing a watermelon. There were posters from wildlife preserves. There was cheese paraphernalia.

  There were Christmas cards. Every year on the squintiest, brightest day of summer, my family went and stood in front of a scenic Wisconsin landmark and took a picture in which only one of the three of us (two at the absolute most) ever looked good. This became our Christmas card, which my dad then mailed out to everyone he could. Framed versions of these cards sat all around the office. Whenever I visited, I could see myself as a plump baby, propped on my mother’s lap in holiday colors; then as a toddler; then sitting in a swing; then indoors in my holiday best, trying to hold the squirming family cat long enough for the picture to take.

  How long ago that had been, eight-year-old me mused, rising up on tiptoe to peer over the top of the desk. I barely recognized myself.

  In the picture it looked so orderly, but I knew that the moment after the flash had gone off the cat had gotten away and it had been mayhem. Pictures were funny like that.

  • • •

  My favorite place in the Capitol was Statuary Hall.

  Everyone who was anyone was there—or standing in bronze or marble just down the hall. My dad pointed them out. There was Father Marquette, one of Wisconsin’s own, and Bob La Follette, just getting up from his chair to say hello. There was Will Rogers. “Will Rogers,” my dad told me, “said he never met a man he didn’t like.”

  I frowned. Will Rogers, I thought, must not have met a lot of people. By age nine I’d already met several people I disliked. Some of them were men. Some of them were girls my age. Some of them were just people who didn’t want to hear fun facts about cats.

  Apart from Will and Bob, my favorites were the statues from Hawaii—the big statue of King Kamehameha with gold trim that was always garlanded in leis, and the big boxy statue of someone called Father Damien who looked like a deranged refrigerator.

  There was even a place in Statuary Hall where you could stand and make your words echo across the chamber, if you whispered just right. This had been a big advantage to John Quincy Adams, back when Congress used to meet in this room. He would lie on his desk pretending to be asleep, but secretly, he would hear everything.

  I liked the Rotunda too, but not as much as Statuary Hall. It was a little too heavy on the allegory, even for me, and I got a crick in my neck from staring up at the ceiling where George Washington sat wrapped in a sheet communing with similarly draped symbolic figures. What was it, I wondered, about symbolic figures and sheets? Couldn’t you be symbolic while keeping your pants on?

  • • •

  The other great thing about Capitol Hill was how many things there were to ride.

  Under the Capitol ran a variety of trains. On the Senate side, an automatic train opened and closed its doors every few minutes in exactly the orderly manner that trains under fascist regimes are supposed to.

  It filled with people in sensible black suits or pantsuits. Spewed them back out. Filled again. Spewed them back out.

  There was also another train that was old-fashioned and upholstered in brown leather. It had no ceiling and resembled two restaurant booths settled back to back on a rolling track. In it a conductor sat all day pushing the lever. Push, and the train went from the House Floor to the office buildings. Pull, and it went back from the office buildings to the House Floor.

  There was also an elevator, complete with attendant. She sat smiling in the elevator, pushing the buttons for everyone, like a very personable vestigial limb.

  I thought that was just what you did.

  • • •

  Elections came and went.

  I was in a couple of ads. I was always annoyed that I didn’t get to say much of anything during them. “That’s why I’d like your vote,” my dad would say, as the camera rolled, and from my mother’s lap in my Sunday best I would murmur, “I’d definitely vote for him!” and then they’d have to tape the whole thing over.

  And in summer, there were parades.

  We pulled a big metal sign out from the trunk and attached it to the roof of the car. PETRI FOR CONGRESS, the sign read. Like all our campaign materials, it was half blue and half green and said PETRI in big white letters.

  It had suction cups on the bottom, and four strings with a little hook at the end that we secured at the top of each of the car’s windows by rolling the window up to keep it in place.

  My dad and I walked to the front of the parade to see what we could see.

  I could never make up my mind whether my dad was good at hobnobbing or not. He carried a pocketful of Packer schedules with his face on them, printed out in blue ink. He would sidle up to a fire truck.

  “Rah rah!” he’d say, waving a fist.

  “Hello, Congressman,” the fire truck driver would say.

  “Looking good up there,” my dad would say. He would extend a hand with a Packer schedule in it. “Have a thing.”

  Then we would walk away from the truck. He would turn to me, looking authoritative.

  “I always find that if you say ‘Have a thing,’ they don’t know what it is, so they take it!”

  I nodded, absorbing this information. I never said “Have a thing.” Sometimes I would say “There you go!” just to spice things up, but usually my spiel went, “
Have a Packer schedule! Have a Packer football schedule! Have a Packer schedule! Have a Packer schedule from my dad!” I started adding “from my dad” because people tended not to yell at you as much if they knew you were personally connected to the politician peddling the schedules. Usually. The other trick was not to make it a question, because if you asked, people could say, “No.”

  • • •

  There were a lot of parades. A lot of parades. Parades with Shriners and Lions and Rotarians and Elks riding motor scooters in their little maroon fezzes, tassels floating in the wind. Parades with clubs dressed up as slightly dingy Peanuts characters. Parades where it rained. Parades where it didn’t. Parades where you were allowed to throw candy and parades where throwing candy was absolutely forbidden. Parades where everyone watching was drunk and had been so since approximately nine in the morning. Parades that went past convents at the tops of hills, where you could sit with the nuns in the shade.

  Some parades had one guy dressed up in an inflatable suit to look like an ice-cream cone. It always rained on those parades. There is nothing sadder than a man dressed as a giant inflatable ice-cream cone walking slowly through the rain, deflating a little with every step.

  Some parades had someone dressed in a plush pig suit, pushing a shopping cart, to represent Piggly Wiggly. The parades with the heaviest plush suits were always on the hottest days.

  There were generally a couple of big floats—the county Republicans, say, with a large plaster elephant statue on it—or a local church with all the Sunday school kids dressed up as animals who did or did not make it onto the Ark.

  There was a dance team that was good. There was a dance team that was not so good, doing exuberant choreography to “Black Hole Sun” all the way home.

  There were singers with microphones and speakers blasting country rock, riding behind a truck in a big cage.

  There was a beer float playing “Spirit in the Sky” on loop.

  There were bagpipers.

  There was a long line of fire trucks with sirens going slow and loud, tossing handfuls of Tootsie Rolls out the window onto the hot sidewalk.