A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  He wore suits to everything. Once, we were driving through Montana and got a flat tire and he sallied out to change it when a total stranger pulled up alongside. “Oh no,” the man said. “Don’t ruin your nice suit. I’ll do it.”

  “Nice suit?” my dad asked, sounding baffled. “This is my most casual outfit.”

  My father had the erroneous idea that he had grown up during the Great Depression. Sometimes we drove past a stand selling bags of potatoes for a dollar. “Dear, pull over!” he would shout to my mother. “This will feed us for a year!”

  He often came home from Dollar Stores with bags full of SPAM, cases of expired shampoo, and other bulk items that we did not want. “All set for winter!”

  He hoarded soaps from airplanes and hotels in a big basket in the bathroom. Whenever he flew, he would come home carrying the little single-serving pats of airplane butter in one pocket, partly melted.

  It’s not that he didn’t spend money, though. Every so often he would find some large household item that nobody needed and buy it, no questions asked. Once, we came home and discovered that he had installed gutter covers because a salesman had pointed out that they would stop things from getting in the gutters. “Isn’t that the point of gutters?” we asked, timidly. But there was no reasoning with him.

  Whenever my mother was out of town, the two of us went to a restaurant called Martin’s Tavern for dinner. We went there on 9/11 after he picked me up from school and drove slowly through an hours-long tangle of traffic with the horror blasting through the radio over and over again.

  “If it’s the end of the world,” he said, “we might as well have lunch.”

  Maybe he was doing it wrong.

  • • •

  Or maybe there’s never a there there. Maybe that’s the thing that is impossible to get people to believe. People expect that there’s a Great Something past the gate, that you get admission to fancy restaurants and tickets to galas and your picture in the paper all the time.

  You sit there with your family on your asteroid wondering whether you’re doing it right. The funny thing is that the fact that there is no “there” there in your particular case never quite stops you from believing that someone somewhere might have one. You just haven’t walked under the right velvet ropes yet.

  All you can see is the pictures people send, and those always look so perfect. The family beams out of the Christmas card in color-coordinated ensembles. Your friends pose with celebrities or at the tops of photogenic rock formations or stand proudly in front of home-cooked latticework pies. You begin to worry that everyone else’s life is an endless procession of these moments, strung together like colored lights on their Instagram-ready Christmas trees.

  “There” is like a stage set. It’s not a real place, but you can take pictures on it and send them home. You look at your own pictures and see: Well, that was the second before the cat got away, and the cake immediately collapsed, and those shoes were torture and none of us knew that old man standing in the back.

  With other people’s pictures you can never tell. Maybe they’re doing it right. Maybe for them the cat stood still and the cake held up.

  This shambolic reality always seems especially disappointing when it comes to politics. Politics is one of the last realms where the imagination runs free. Behind the curtain, you can conjure up whatever vision you like. Sinister puppet-masters, making deals, greasing palms, pulling strings. You want the people with whom you disagree to be hypocrites or idiots or monsters, a little less or more than real, so that you can hate them without guilt.

  But that would be too easy.

  Behind those curtains is just more of the same.

  If I’ve learned one thing growing up like this it’s that conspiracy theorists are full of hooey. (If I’ve learned two things it’s that the best place to be in a parade is in front of the horses and behind the band.)

  Spend even a little time behind the scenes and you realize that if something goes wrong, it’s almost always incompetence, never malice.

  You can see why these theories catch on, though. There’s something incredibly reassuring about the idea that behind the scenes, all our awkward fumbling is being guided by an invisible hand, even if that hand is sinister and comes out of a long dark sleeve. Don’t worry. Top men in wood-paneled rooms have got things Under Control. Go to sleep. The lidless eye of the Illuminati will keep watch.

  I once went to several days of hearings held by UFO enthusiasts who kept insisting that The Government Knew Things We Didn’t. They sounded upset, but, in a way, relieved. There were solutions to all the world’s problems—fossil fuels, the environment, sudden horrors that wipe out innocent people—it was just that the solutions came from alien technology that the government was Keeping from Us.

  I tried to argue with a woman who was so eager to hear this news that she had trekked across the country and was sleeping on a stranger’s couch. “Look, I mean,” I said, “does this strike you as likely? I really—just”—I spluttered, then recovered—“you’ve met people in your life. Have they ever struck you as exceptionally competent at keeping secrets? Could they really have seen a thing like this and kept it to themselves?”

  “Oh, no, they’re out there,” she said. “I’ve seen them myself. Out in the desert. There were lights moving in the sky.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Well. Good.”

  We sat in silence for a brief time. Quite brief. Conspiracy theorists tend not to allow very long gaps in the conversation.

  • • •

  But we’ve all seen them, if not to that degree. The lights in the sky that we read to mean what we wanted them to mean. The picture where it looked like everything was under control.

  I’m sorry to report that behind the small section of curtain I got to occupy there wasn’t much there, there. This was just the usual mess of a childhood, with parades and allegorical statues thrown in.

  There were undeniable perks. I got to tour a cheese factory and meet a man whose ENTIRE job was tasting wheels of cheese after they came off the line to see if they passed muster.

  I got to hear from a man in a clown costume who came pounding over in his big shoes to tell my father why Congress absolutely needed a backup plan against terrorism (why you would decide to share your policy preferences while still wearing full clown makeup and the shoes never quite made sense to me).

  I got to sit in the corner at fund-raisers plinking away at a dinky electric piano.

  I got to milk that cow.

  My father put up a picture of me staring at the udder in his office, next to the toddlers in overalls and the family squinting and the cheese paraphernalia.

  It wasn’t the greatest picture ever. No picture taken of you in eighth grade is. In the picture, if you squinted, it almost looked like I was doing it right.

  You know how pictures are.

  Self-Defense Tips for Fairy-Tale Girls

  Many things are awkward, but one of the most awkward, in my book, is the advice they give to young ladies about Avoiding Trouble. Also, fairy tales.

  To illustrate this point, I have combined the two. Here is what the crowd of advice givers and finger pointers and armchair quarterbacks would no doubt say the girls in these fairy tales should have done differently.

  Snow White

  What did I tell you? Never leave your apple unattended at a party.

  Little Red Riding Hood

  What were you wearing? Red? You should have known better than to go out in red like that. You know what red does to a wolf. You were basically a neon sign. A sign that said, “Eat Me and Then Eat My Grandmother.” He couldn’t help himself. That’s how wolves are. It’s a primal thing.

  Sleeping Beauty

  If you get in a position like that near a spindle, whose fault is it, really, if you fall into a sleep like death? You should have known better than to go u
pstairs with someone you didn’t know. And you were asking him to kiss you. Forest of thorn, guards, tower, dragon—try putting up some actual resistance next time.

  Gretel

  Kidnapped by a witch? Well, what did you think would happen when you started eating all those carbs? Gingerbread is a sometimes food, especially the kind you find in people’s walls. It’s full of the wrong kind of saturated fats. To be frank, the witch is really the least of your problems.

  The Little Mermaid

  You did good. You really get what appeals to men: legs, and a woman who can’t complain.

  Rapunzel

  Of course he climbed up your hair. What did you think would happen? That’s on you. You don’t want princes climbing your hair up to your tower, try not having hair. Or a tower, come to think of it. They seem to find their way there anyway.

  Belle

  What were you thinking? Why did you stay? If it’d been me, I’d have walked right out of there, you bet. Day one. He’s a monster, and furniture doesn’t talk.

  Cinderella

  You’re the one who left the shoe. What did you think would happen? A prince sees that, he sees an invitation to follow you to your house and force your family to try on footwear. Look, I didn’t make the rules. That’s just how the male brain works.

  Internet Bitch

  As a small child I used to keep a detailed mental list of naughty words. It was my personal version of Ariel’s chamber of Thingamabobs and Whatsits, carefully culled from conversational shipwrecks in the world above. I cobbled them together and ordered them based on the things that saying them made the people around me do. There was “damn,” which made my mother look sheepish, “ass,” which had gotten me a stern talking-to from my second-grade teacher, “shit,” which someone got into trouble for writing on a piece of our classroom furniture, “turd,” which got my mother to look disapprovingly at my aunt, “bitch,” “hell,” “dickcicle,” a word from a funny story about a man who had gone out to retrieve his newspaper on a cold morning without wearing enough layers, which my relatives had all laughed at and then, when they noticed me, insisted was a type of bird, and “krup,” which I thought was bad because of its placement in the West Side Story song “Gee, Officer Krupke.” I ran through these unsayable words in my head after bedtime, like counting black sheep. I ran through them until they were meaningless noises and I didn’t see what the trouble was at all.

  From there I branched out to a second collection: odd old expletives. Gadzooks! Egads! Dagnabbit! Odds bodkins! I came up with phrases and translated them into Norwegian online. “Dra liger tjaerliget til en sau. De erren sonnen au en moose!” (Go make love to a pig! You are the son of a moose!) Why, I thought, limit yourself to certain lumpy monosyllables when so many things were so much more fun to shout? My mother had a college roommate who had shouted something along the lines of “Grilled cheese that lands on the floor on the wrong side!” in moments of deep rage, so I knew there were levels beyond this that I could dream of attaining someday.

  You could mark sea changes in my life by the phrase that I used when I was upset. Blast! gave way to Uff da! gave way to Zounds! Once, some of these words had been fearsome. A century or three ago, if I’d gone downstairs grumpy and mumbled “Zounds” into my oatmeal, I would have been stuck spending the rest of my life in an oubliette without Wi-Fi. Now I could casually throw it around on the playground, and the only consequences were to my social life. These fangless words became my constant companions.

  Actual bad words, meanwhile, retained their incantatory power. To me, they were unsayable in a way my exclamations weren’t. When I finally came to use them, I found myself glancing around, nervous, for someone to crawl out of the woodwork and ask for my dollar for the swear jar. If not that, then something worse. A kraken, an octopus, a birthday clown. Something bad was bound to come. You couldn’t just say them and get away with it.

  • • •

  I’ve come to appreciate certain bad words. For the most part, bad words are funny. Just listen to them.

  Fuck has a jolly sound. It is the little black dress of curses. You can dress it up or down as the occasion requires. You can wear it discreetly at work under a tailored jacket and then bring it out at the end of the evening in a more private setting.

  Shit, on the other hand, I’ve never liked. It’s too close to Sith, and those folks were evil.

  Turd has a rotund companionableness to it. If you say it right, you get the sense that Turd meant something beautiful in its original language. Perhaps this is overstating Turd’s case. Let’s say, rather, you get the sense that the person bestowing the name had an old Auntie Turd whom he loved very much.

  Asshole always seems to be driving a fancy car.

  Dickcicle. Heh.

  • • •

  Now I know which words pack a punch and which don’t. I’ve been on the receiving end, and it’s different than you think.

  Take slut.

  Slut. It begins with the slick insidious “sl-” that launches a thousand insults: slippery, slimy, slough, slattern, slump, slithering, slug. Nothing good starts with that noise, that vigorous pursing of the lips. Lolita would not have gotten very far if her name started with a “sl.” It does not go trippingly off the tongue. You have to uproot it somewhere deep. It pulls itself out of your mouth like a layer of dead skin, like a condom being rolled off and chucked into a trash can. Slime. Slick. Slip. Slid. Slop. Slytherin. Slurp. Slut.

  It’s a discouraging word. A cowboy would never call another cowboy a slut.

  Slut. Say it enough times and it—never quite sounds pleasant, the way “fuck” and “turd” do, like things you would call your Viking comrades in the mead hall.

  Take bitch.

  Bitch never makes it into the merry Anglo-Saxon camaraderie of Turd and Fuck. Perhaps it’s the missing U. Perhaps it’s the unfortunate rhyme. (Witch? Itch? Fitch? Sandwich?)

  Of course bitch is fine on television. Shit’s a no-go, but bitch? Who’s that going to bother? Not even dogs. Just, you know, ladies.

  For half the Earth, we take a lot of guff.

  Guff’s another funny word. Not ugly, just funny.

  Cursing on the Internet has always struck me as a waste of time. Half the fun is saying the word out loud.

  But it has never stopped anyone.

  I spend my days writing on the Internet. Writing a column is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

  Most days, nothing.

  Some days, boom.

  The echoes go flapping around your head like bats, and when you wake up in the morning there’s guano everywhere.

  (Guano’s a funny word.)

  My most memorable encounter with “bitch” was in the middle of all that excitement with Sandra Fluke.

  In case you don’t remember this story, Sandra Fluke was a Georgetown law student who was supposed to testify before a Senate panel on the need for insurance plans to cover birth control, but the panel said no because she wasn’t an elderly clergyman, and when someone pointed out that it was weird that elderly clergymen were the only people being consulted about contraception, the answer was, “Hey, when was the last time you saw an elderly clergyman get pregnant? Something must be working.”

  Contraception might seem like an issue both men and women could get behind, but that’s a misconception. (Life, for lots of people, seems to begin at misconception.) When you’re a man, you are at a much greater risk of becoming a Supreme Court justice than of getting pregnant. Lightning will strike you—twice—and you will be elected president well before any such thing happens.

  By far the most effective method of contraception is carrying a Y chromosome around with you at all times. Failing that, I don’t know what to tell you. It was your fault for leaving home without it.

  Fluke testified to the Democrats on the panel anyway,
and then Rush Limbaugh called her a slut.

  I wrote a piece pointing out that the only advertisers who seemed eager to get themselves associated with Mr. Limbaugh’s program were advertisers who targeted the Jerk Market—Web sites for people seeking affairs and sugar daddies, which had all been eagerly putting out press releases saying “We’ll still advertise with you!”

  Limbaugh called me out about it on the air—they weren’t actually advertising with him, he said; they just wanted to. In the course of this—because one of the rules of criticizing female writers is that you can’t just disagree with what they’ve written; you have to personally insult them—he called me B-I-ITCHY.

  It really wasn’t that big a deal. He didn’t even say the whole word!

  Not being an avid talk-radio listener myself, I totally missed this. (I am a little outside the age sample. The average age of the Rush Limbaugh listener is deceased.)

  I’d gone to bed without giving it much thought, and then I woke up and there was guano everywhere.

  I knew it was bad when I got into the office and a colleague hugged me, unprompted. I had more voice mail than the characters in RENT.

  I made the mistake of answering one and somehow the conversation went off in the direction of AIDS and how many people had it because they wanted to have it.

  “That’s very interesting,” I said. “I’ve never heard that.”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “They’re called bug hunters. The lady who teaches health at my community center explained all about it.”

  “Fascinating.”

  At least I knew I didn’t have to pay attention. There are phrases like that. After you hear them, you can put the phone on mute. “Ah, good,” you can say. “I can be sure nothing you say from here on out matters.”

  • • •

  It was also International Women’s Day.

  Of course it would have been International Women’s Day. Think piece holidays always attract this kind of thing. I even wound up on cable news. I called my mom, who told me not to wiggle my arms too much. I called my old babysitter, who was old but still very much alive, which meant that I had to explain who Rush Limbaugh was. By the time I had finished, she was irate. “Don’t waste your time on him!” she told me. “He doesn’t like you? Who wouldn’t like you? The man must not be right in the head. Something’s wrong with him. Put him from your mind. A better one will come along.” “No, he’s on the radio,” I tried, worried that she thought he had broken up with me. “Don’t worry with him,” she repeated. “He must be a scamp.”