A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  Encouraged, I sat down in front of the camera.

  “I mean how do you feel on International Women’s Day being called and your work being referred to in such a manner by Rush Limbaugh?” Al Sharpton asked me.

  I swallowed. “I would say it’s a weird thing to be referred to as that on a Thursday,” I said.

  (It was also a Thursday.)

  I wrote a response, too, in which I offered Rush an olive branch and a sandwich. Speaking of rhyming words.

  (He has yet to take me up on that sandwich.)

  It was amazing, the response. People from all corners of the Internet came rushing to attack or defend. “I don’t know who you are or what you said,” they said, “but Rush despises you, so you’re okay in my book.” Or, alternatively, “I don’t know who you are or what you said, but Rush despises you, and that’s enough for me.”

  I’ve been called worse things by better people. And better things by worse people. And worse things by worse people. And better things by better people. And sometimes nobody calls at all.

  All I know is that if you want to know exactly what you are doing wrong in your life, just write something on the Internet and wait for the comments to roll in.

  Your nose is wrong.

  You look like a “female Mark Zuckerberg.”

  You look like a “turkey in heat.” (Never having seen or spent much time with any turkeys in heat myself, I had to take that person’s word for it.)

  Once, an angry commenter called me a “blond bimbo” and I was absolutely elated. “A bimbo!” I told my friends. “A blond bimbo! I didn’t think any of the online pictures of me were that good!”

  • • •

  It was not supposed to be like this.

  The Internet was where we were supposed to be brains in jars, communing on a level of pure thought. No longer did it matter what you looked like. You were words on a screen, thoughts transferred directly from mind to mind. But somehow before they can decide whether what you’ve said is valid, they have to decide if you’re attractive or not.

  Not if you’re male, though. Guys can go straight to “idiot” without passing through “bimbo” or stopping to pay a toll at “definitely wouldn’t fuck her.” (Why do we have to stop there, anyway? That’s a complex negotiation between two people. Probably your reason for concluding that you definitely wouldn’t fuck me would be that you had seen me doing a spastic dance move I call “inoculate the herd” and would have nothing to do with any of my opinions on the Internet.)

  Speaking of which, a Web site exists that began with the premise that a guy didn’t think I was fuckworthy, then finally concluded, after several pictures, that he would do so “grudgingly” and would probably not enjoy it. Thanks, guy! Did you ever consider whether I would fuck you? No, of course not.

  Of course you didn’t. That’s part of the problem.

  • • •

  If I can get on my high horse for a second here—whoa, a horse! This sentence is off to a dangerous start—I always knew I was a feminist. I didn’t know I needed to be a feminist.

  I had the erroneous idea that feminism was something that had been taken care of, already—if not in the first wave, then certainly in the second. All the obvious obstacles seemed to have passed from view. No hoop skirts. Whenever my parents said anything about arranging a marriage, it was safe to assume they were joking. Nobody was standing on the bridge to any professions saying, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” Tina Fey existed. So did Princess Leia.

  You could, I thought, just go out into the world with your eyes on exactly what you wanted to be and just BE the pants off whatever that was. Which was great news, because I had plans.

  But then I tried it. Try being a person when everyone keeps insisting that, no, no, you’re not a person, you’re a woman. And there are ways and words to shut you up.

  And I’ve still got it comparatively easy. If it weren’t for a certain “fe,” I’d be in the single most privileged American category, White Male, the category where your only problem is that you never knew what adversity was and you feel like if you had it would have made you a better writer.

  As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That’s it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that.

  I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds!

  I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I’d give a kidney to and best guy friends I’d ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That’s being a girl. That’s being a person. It’s the same damn thing.

  I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I’m happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh.

  Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome. (Try walking down a sidewalk at night when you’re a lady! Just try it. Try running for office as a woman! Look how nicely Michele Bachmann had to dress in order to NOT be taken seriously as a candidate. Try being blamed for the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.)

  I can’t wait until women writers are just writers and woman CEOs are just CEOs and women politicians are just more double-dealing spawn of darkness.

  I like the Rush Limbaugh story because there’s a sandwich in it, but I have others. We all do. And if you don’t believe me, just ask, especially if your day has been going too well and you feel that, all things considered, you have more hope and confidence in humanity than you would like. I can tell you about the night I was walking home from work and a stranger told me I was pretty and I said thanks and he grabbed me and tried to kiss me and I had to fend him off with an umbrella and fortunately other people were coming down the sidewalk so I didn’t have to find out what happened next. I was fine. I apologized to him. (“Sorry!” I said. “I’m really sorry.”)

  That part was only almost funny. “Sorry!” I’m sure it put a damper on his evening. I’m sure he had plans.

  But I don’t like to tell that story. I prefer stories where I’m the protagonist. I prefer stories that might end in a sandwich.

  • • •

  Words are just words. And yet. If I were world president (as if we’d ever elect a lady world president!) I’d ditch certain words. I’d retire them to a farm upstate with turkeys in heat and the little red A’s that you sew on your bodice when you adulter. I want them to be a MUTE button that works only on the person who utters them. Like that guy with his AIDS bug hunters, or one of those trilby hats—a way of flagging people you don’t have to keep listening to.

  Take slut. Take bitch. Please.

  Right now they survive, thanks to deft handling.

  You know those people who think they can talk to large predatory animals—tigers, bears, overindulged cats? (“Pumpkin gets me. Pumpkin would never hurt me. We understand each other, don’t we, Pumpkin?”)

  Maybe it won’t bite you. But you’re keeping it around.

  Words can be like that, if you let them.

  You can seize them. You can appropriate them. You can sing them. You can dress them up and make the best of them. You can bedazzle them onto your velour tracksuits. You can Take Them Back, set them off on purpose like fireworks instead of waiting for them to be shot at you. But that’s because they still pack such a wallop. You don’t see people having to appropriate “tree” or “delight.” (“Hot Delight in Charge.” “Yeah, I’m a total tree.”)

  Send them to the country and let them stay there. Release them next to “cuckold,” safely defanged and retired on whatever the opposite of a stud farm is for centuries now, with th
e occasional appearance among consenting adults. Let it roam free with “bawd” and “ribald” and “Uranian” the noun.

  I’m not saying we round up the words and tear them out of sentences and put them into a van and send them away with sirens blaring. That doesn’t work with words. I’m not even saying we stop using them when we want to.

  Words are an atlas to our thought. They map out our understanding of the world. They mean less only when we stop spending time in the places they denote. Ancient Greek insults are remote, not just because they’re Greek to us but because the things they thought of to insult would not be the things that would leap instantly to our minds. “FEW-CATTLE-HAVING MAN!” “INSUFFICIENTLY OILY WRESTLER!” “HUBRIS GUY!”

  “Zounds” lost its blasphemy when we stopped swearing by God’s Wounds. I haven’t heard a Polish joke in years. It ceased to be a distinction that mattered. Suddenly you looked and just saw people and the word seemed pointless. The word pointed to a place that no longer existed in your mind.

  And that kind of change is harder. Time does it, and effort. The way out of it is simple: You have to stop thinking that it’s an insult. (“Yeah, all right, I’m not an oily wrestler and I have zero cattle, but actually I think this is progress.”)

  It’s possible. It happens all the time. It happens with the names of people—first you say “John” like it has a foul aftertaste, and then you meet him for drinks a time or two and it’s just “John,” flat, and then gradually he’s your good friend “John!” and the word comes to occupy a new position with regard to your thoughts, not by any particular virtue in the word but because your thoughts have shifted around it.

  These things happen slowly. You can’t legislate it. You can’t do anything other than leave the words to fight it out, gruelingly, painfully, until people know which way it really points, that it silences the speaker and not the target.

  You can’t call someone a “slattern” and expect it to sting.

  I wonder who was the last person to say “slattern” and mean it. Or “zounds.”

  I wonder who the last person will be to say “bitch” that way. Or “slut.” When they will settle fangless in the back of the dictionary with the other retirees, blankets over their knees, reminiscing about when they used to shut people right up. When they will be harmless enough to turn up on the second list, edges sanded off, safe for the playground.

  “People used to call one another that,” other Word-Ariels will marvel. “And it used to hurt. But that was a long time ago.”

  The Dog in the Manger

  Right after I turned sixteen, two awful things happened. I got my driver’s license. And we got a dog.

  I don’t like dogs.

  Maybe this is too strong. Put it this way: I hate all dogs, except yours. Yours is fine. It’s other people’s dogs that are the problem. (This goes for your baby as well. Yours is nice and smart and just bursting with potential. Other people’s create disturbances on public transit.)

  I was not one of those kids who saw puppies and lit up.

  I knew that such kids existed. I carpooled with them: first a family with a van and a big gray wolfish dog that matched the gray fuzzy seats; then a family with a gangly golden retriever that clashed with their Volvo’s faux-leather interior and left it stippled with fine long hairs. Both cars smelled about the same, one “dog with undertones of crushed Cheerios,” the other “dog with leather and a hint of something sweet.”

  I don’t have a good sense of smell, but you don’t need a strong sense of smell to know a place smells like dog, just as you don’t need to be a wine expert to successfully identify rubbing alcohol. There is no way of describing that smell except to say “dog.” It’s one of the primary colors of smells—clean laundry, grass, new car, silent fart, dead body, dog, wet dog. There are smells that are tastes—funnel cake, lemon, barbecue—but of the smells that are just smells, dog is primary, like “red.” Say it, and you know.

  I didn’t like the smell. I never wanted a dog.

  • • •

  On the day I took the SAT, we got a dog. I got into the car, and there was a bulldog in it.

  It sat in the back panting ominously, like an unidentified caller late at night.

  I knew, in theory, that we were planning to get a dog. We had voted on a name for the putative puppy over Christmas vacation. But I had been secretly hoping nothing would come of it. I hated change. A dog meant change.

  I suspected that the dog was supposed to fill my parents’ impending empty nest. This was just the tiniest bit awkward, since I was still in the nest. “Hi,” I said. “Remember me? I have not gotten into college yet, and I still live here.”

  “Oh, good!” my mother said. “Another householder! I was wondering who would feed the dog in the evenings if I was running late from work!”

  I grumbled to myself. This had not been the point of my remark.

  • • •

  The puppy was brown and white and wrinkled and stumpy-tailed, like a cheerful egg roll covered in hair.

  Of course the puppy seemed to like me. Dogs always seem to like me. It is because I am not comfortable around them. Dogs and nudists (my experience with nudists is more limited, but I think the rule holds) flock toward you the instant they sense discomfort. It seems to be a matter of principle. “You’re uncomfortable?” they ask, stepping closer and looking guilelessly up at you. “Well, that’s on you. That’s something you have to work through on your own. I’m just being me, and I want to share my love and acceptance with you.” (Dogs sometimes emphasize this point by humping your leg, although nudists don’t.)

  • • •

  The dog’s name was Ketcham.

  This was the result of a family vote. The winner was “Humphrey.” A close second was “Tape Recorder.” This name was my suggestion. I figured that as long as we were going to bring a dog into the family, we might as well look as crazy as possible when we tried to call it. “Think of it!” I told my grandfather. “We’ll say, ‘Hey, Tape Recorder! Sit, Tape Recorder! Come, Tape Recorder!’ And everyone around us will be confused and alarmed!”

  My grandfather appreciated the fine logic of this suggestion, so Tape Recorder got two votes. Humphrey just narrowly edged it out.

  Ketcham, my mother’s suggestion, got just one vote: my mother. But that was the vote that counted. Still, it was nice to feel that we’d had a hand in the process. “Tape Recorder can be his middle name,” she suggested, placatingly.

  Probably the only thing weirder than a dog named Tape Recorder Petri is a dog named Ketcham Tape Recorder Petri, but that was the name that wound up on the dog’s certificate, helpfully abbreviated to Ketcham T. R. for future vet visits.

  • • •

  When Ketcham (Tape Recorder) arrived, my mother suddenly pulled out a big pile of books on the Care and Maintenance of Bulldogs that dated back to 1987. “Wait a second,” I said. “1987. I was born in 1988. Were you deciding between me or a bulldog?”

  “Of course not,” my mother said. This would have been more reassuring if she had not continued, “Anyway, your father didn’t want a dog.”

  I frowned. Replacing me, were they? Not if I had anything to say about it. I stalked off to my room.

  The puppy made a point of systematically chewing his way through everything we owned. Nothing was safe. Not shoes, not chairs. Not legs. Not pieces of wood. The only things he didn’t want to chew were the chew toys we bought him expressly for that purpose. It was no good trying to explain the situation. There was no reasoning with him. The only words he understood were “dinner,” “walk,” and “car ride.” You couldn’t really assemble a good sentence out of those.

  “No” was outside of his vocabulary.

  We tried training him, of course. At least, my mother took him to a trainer for a summer, and he emerged with a certificate of participation. That seemed good enough. He learned
how to sit if he felt like it, stay when he was in the mood, and shake spontaneously when you had not instructed him to. My mother was especially proud of having taught him to “spin around.”

  “Ketcham,” she said, holding a treat directly overhead and moving it in a counterclockwise fashion, “spin around!” Ketcham obediently followed the treat in an enthusiastic semicircle. “Good boy!”

  I don’t think it helped, training-wise, that he was probably never sure what his actual name was. We got pretty nickname-happy, pretty quickly. “Hey there, Bonzo!” “Hiya, pooper!” “Hello, fatso!” “Stay, booger-bear.”

  I don’t blame him for not answering to booger-bear. I certainly wouldn’t have.

  • • •

  I spent most of his first year with us secluding myself in my room and typing up manifestos against The Bulldog As an Institution. “First,” I wrote, “bulldogs must be born by caesarean section! Were there no humans, bulldogs would cease to exist. (Indeed, this is the best argument for the annihilation of humanity.) Bulldogs are abominations who have persisted too long!”

  My friends generally agreed. The other dogs in our friend circle put Ketcham to shame. They had self-control. Ketcham, on the other hand, turned into a star-struck Romeo the second he spotted an unfamiliar leg, bounding across a crowded room on winged feet. “Hey, leg,” he would say, sidling nearer and positioning himself. “This is crazy, but I feel like I’ve known you my whole life, and we should go all the way! We may never see each other again, right? Who knows what the morrow may hold? Gather ye roses while ye may! That’s right. Just like that.”