A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  “Ketcham, please, stop humping Caro’s leg,” I bellowed.

  He ignored me.

  We had had a falling-out after he had gotten wise that the “invisible treats” I kept throwing him weren’t actually treats. It had come as quite a blow to him. His entire portfolio was wrapped up in invisible treats. He kept expecting to find one under the carpet any day now. Then my mother caught wind of it. “That’s cruel, Alexandra,” she said. “The poor dog doesn’t know any better!”

  My father shrugged. “Look at the savings,” he said. The only way you could get Ketcham to obey you was by bribing him heavily with treats, and these were starting to run into the double digits.

  Other dogs understood such commands as “stay” and “sit” and “don’t jump up on the sofa when Mrs. Vangilderstern from the garden club is there.” But Ketcham was not other dogs. Ketcham understood these commands only when you had a treat in your hand. And sometimes not even then.

  My mother still insisted on having dinner parties. For years she had complained that the house was bad for dinner parties because of its lack of “flow.” This seemed like less of a problem than the fact that there was a bulldog trying to mate with the legs of the guests and tables, barking when he was denied immediate access to food.

  In typical Petri style, she figured that if we could not avoid the problem of a large dog who would make it impossible to hear what the speaker was saying by barking the whole meal, the next best thing was to insist that this was part of the plan.

  “We are lucky tonight to have a tableau vivant!” she said, pointing to the dog, who yipped and jumped against the thin dog barrier that was the only thing between him and steak. “A chorus, if you will! A Greek chorus!”

  (I apologize to anyone who had to eat dinner at our house between 2005 and 2013.)

  “If you had indulged me like this,” I informed my mother, icily, after the guests left, “I would not have turned out well at all. I would be lying on the carpet drooling and eating your shoes.”

  The dog glanced up from where he lay on the carpet, drooling and eating a shoe.

  “Perhaps,” my mother said. “But we held you to a higher standard.”

  Maybe pets resemble their people. In that case we are exuberant, overfriendly, just a little out of shape, and very, very, well potty-trained. (He had that going for him, at least.)

  “How could you say no to a face like that?” my mother asked, ruffling his fur while he woofled contentedly.

  “Easily,” I said, removing my shoes and placing them on the window ledge where he could not get at them. “He looks like Winston Churchill under a terrible enchantment.”

  • • •

  My father and I felt some solidarity in this. Ketcham was clearly my mom’s dog. We were both never quite sure where we stood. My father approached him like a constituent. “Hello, hound. Good to be seeing you,” he said, thumping his hand on the dog’s bewildered head. “Good to be seeing you.”

  “Hi, pooper,” I addressed Ketcham, putting his food and concatenation of pills (all carefully concealed in cream cheese) into his bowl. I had read a story once by James Thurber that said if you looked into a dog’s eyes for too long, you would deprogram the dog and it would attack you with everything it had, so I addressed most of my remarks to the dog’s lower left flank. “Hi. There’s your food. Too bad you don’t speak English and it makes no sense for me to converse with you.” (Our chats tended to get pretty meta pretty quickly.)

  “All you understand is tone, anyway,” I added, moving my voice into the pitch reserved for baby talk and greetings to dogs. “Aw, yes, boy, I really, really resent your presence in this house! Who’s-outstayed-his-welcome? Who’s-outstayed-his-welcome! You have! That’s right, boy! You have!”

  • • •

  Just before Ketcham came to join us, I got something else. My driver’s license.

  This was also a change for the worse.

  I learned to drive in Wisconsin, which was an experience.

  The driver’s ed instructor had lots of homey wisdom to share. “This trick for parallel parking is easy as snot off a doornail,” he informed us.

  Never having removed snot from a doornail, I was not sure what this meant.

  Based on my skill at parallel parking, I assume he meant “a long involved process that generally does not result in the outcome you want and gets a lot of people to yell at you.”

  “The trick about deer crossing signs,” he said, “is that’s a great place to go and set up your blind.”

  Everyone else in the class nodded.

  We watched an instructional video about the dangers of drunk driving. The central incident of this video was an encounter between Sister Ruth Ann (“Sister Ruth Ann was an angel of mercy to those who knew her. When she was not taking food to nursing homes, she was suckling orphans in her bosom and healing the sick with her gentle touch.”) and someone the video described only as “Pacho, the illegal immigrant.” (“It was Sister Ruth Ann’s birthday, and she was having a wonderful day. She was just driving home after sharing her cake with some orphans. But Pacho, the illegal immigrant, was not having a wonderful day. Pacho was drunk. He hit Sister Ruth Ann, killing her instantly.”)

  Fortunately this did not come up on the road test.

  Which I passed. I’m not sure how.

  They should have known something was up when I spectacularly failed to yield to oncoming traffic, slowly parked my way two feet up onto a curb, and left my bright headlights on for the entire drive even though it was eight in the morning. But I passed. I think it was because I always meticulously covered the brake at train crossings, and there were a lot of train crossings on our route. You could rack up points that way.

  I haven’t improved much since then. I am in no way exaggerating when I say that sometimes, simply watching me try to park a car has summoned total strangers out of buildings to offer pointers and shout encouragement. (“Turn the wheel the other way! No! The other way! Here, I’ll do it.”)

  I have dented cars by wrapping them very slowly around concrete pillars when there are no other cars nearby.

  I am at the awkward phase between your teens (when it is clear that you are just learning) and your mid-eighties (when someone finally, FINALLY comes and takes the car keys away) when no one knows quite what to do about your tendency to screech to a halt at intersections, turn your entire head to see if someone is coming from an abandoned field where no cars are, then speed out into six lanes of oncoming traffic without looking at all.

  My friends do not let me drive, not since the time two of them got stuck in the backseat as I drove with my mother. This was calculated to bring out the worst in me as a driver. My mother liked to scream and clutch the upholstery and strike the dashboard with her hands, emitting loud cries, like a woman in a Shakespeare tragedy who had just received terrible news. “Ohhhhh,” she wailed. “Slow dooooooown! Do you see the stoplight?”

  “Of course I see it,” I said, noticing the stoplight for the first time and screeching to a halt. “Please, stop yelling. You are making me nervous and jittery.”

  “Do you see that pedestrian?”

  “YES I SEE THE PEDESTRIAN!” I said. “HE’S ALL THE WAY UP ON THE SIDEWALK! STOP YELLING!”

  “Stay in the middle of the lane,” my mother added. “You’re all the way in the middle of the road.”

  “I am in the middle of the lane,” I said, swerving quickly back into the lane.

  “There’s a stop sign.”

  “YES!” I yelled. (This time I had seen the stop sign.) We screeched to another halt. “I SEE THE STOP SIGN! I SEE ALL THE STOP SIGNS!”

  I was a defensive driver, all right. Very defensive.

  “DRIVE MORE SMOOTHLY AND CALMLY!” my mother yelled.

  “I CAN’T!” I yelled, swerving wildly around. “YOU ARE MAKING ME UPSET AND I AM UNABLE TO CON
CENTRATE! IF I HIT ANYTHING, IT IS ON YOUR HEAD!”

  My friends in the backseat exchanged a terrified look. (I could tell because I had not adjusted the rearview mirror properly.) If they made it out of this alive, their glances seemed to say, they would amend their lives. Primarily they would be certain never to travel in the same car with me again—and to make certain no one else we knew did, either.

  My trouble wasn’t that I was just a bad driver. If only. I knew plenty of people who were bad drivers and always made it where they were going very rapidly and with minimal incident. What they had that I lacked was a certain confidence, the unswerving belief (unlike their driving, which involved a great deal of swerving) that all the other cars on the road would somehow get out of their way. And somehow the other cars did. When you got into my friend Haley’s car it was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, but at the end you were several hours early and the experience was fairly pleasant, if you had not lost your lunch.

  No, my trouble was that I knew that I was bad. I was the world’s most timid driver. Like Gatsby, I could spend hours staring at a green light in complete bewilderment. Then, like Daisy, I could speed carelessly through an intersection and strike a pedestrian. Even when the light was green and everyone behind me was honking, I was never quite sure it was for me. I knew that my tendency was to look the wrong way at intersections, so to compensate I swiveled my head all the way around, like a thoughtful owl.

  My parents did little to make matters better. “You are a terrible driver,” they told me. “Also, remember, you are our sole reproductive investment. Are you sure you need to drive there? Are you sure you need to go there at all? Why not stay here, where it’s safe, and we can have fun laying some more Styrofoam padding at the foot of the stairs?”

  “I need the car to drive to a comedy show near Baltimore,” I told my mother.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Sure. Fine. Do you mind if I crouch in the backseat? I won’t even come inside to watch the show.” She clutched my wrist. “I just want you to live.”

  And she did, too. I could not dissuade her. I was, at the time, twenty-two years old.

  It was around that time that I decided I should perhaps sign up for a Zipcar. The monthly fee was steep, but it seemed cheap in comparison to the price I was currently paying every time I wanted to borrow the car.

  • • •

  The Zipcars were great. There was no one in the car but me, my crippling self-doubt, and my poor sense of direction. With the combination of these three things, I was always certain to make it where I was going, usually sometime within the same day that I set out, seldom more than five hours late, often with my brights on the whole way.

  The whole country was my oyster, at least in the sense that an oyster is not a thing you should be driving on.

  I’m not going to say that I overused the Zipcar service. But once, on Valentine’s Day, I got a bouquet of flowers delivered to my office.

  “Aw,” I told my boyfriend. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  I opened the card on the flowers. They were addressed to me from a Zipcar I had once driven all the way to North Carolina, thinking it would be cheaper than renting a car. Evidently it had not been. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten flowers from something you’ve left a half-eaten slice of quiche inside? It makes you feel a little odd.

  • • •

  My parents always reminded me not to drive with the radio on so that I would be better able to concentrate on the road. This did not work out quite as they hoped. I would get behind the wheel. For the first several minutes, I focused admirably on the road. There were cars! I was careful not to hit the other cars. There were trees! I was careful not to hit the trees. There were pedestrians! I stopped to let them pass. There were lights and signs. I was careful to be aware of the lights and signs! This driving thing, I felt, was a cinch. One could do it in one’s sleep.

  Not that I would sleep while driving. Of course not. I began to think about my Sunday school teacher, who said that she had nearly fallen asleep at the wheel and had only managed to stay awake the whole drive through the power of prayer. God, I reflected, seemed to visit lots of people while they drove from place to place. Someone my parents knew said he’d been visited by God while driving. God had a book idea for him. The book, God said, was going to explain once and for all what God had really meant by starting all those different religions. Was now, God wondered, a good time to share this idea? Sure! the guy said, pulling the car over to the side of the road. Now was great. Nothing else too pressing. (You couldn’t really tell God that you had plans to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and could God come back later when you had a pen handy?) It seemed a little odd that God would not choose someone with a bigger social media presence to share this revelation, I mused, but God had always moved in mysterious ways. Or maybe the guy just had a brain tumor—

  At this point, honking and swerving drew me from my reverie and I realized I had barreled through a red light.

  I berated myself. This, kid, I told myself—I always address myself as “kid.” I take a pretty avuncular tone when I talk to myself, more so if I have been drinking—is exactly what your parents feared. This is why you don’t drive. Because you might die. You will get distracted while driving and die. Look at you, getting distracted.

  What if I die, I began to worry. What if I die right now? I haven’t finished writing anything! I haven’t even designated a literary executor. Maybe I should stop at this red light and text my friend Martin to designate him my literary executor. But he might think that was weird. I mean, you can’t not talk to somebody for months and text him suddenly out of the blue that he’s your literary executor. He might worry that something was up. Anyway, your laptop isn’t password protected. Your mom can be your literary executor. She will be able to read everything. Oh God. Everything. Maybe I can stop at this red light and text my mother that, in the event of my death, she should disregard everything in the folder labeled “Erotic Fanfiction” because that folder was put there as a joke by a stranger. (Gee, kid, that folder’s a little on the nose, huh? Maybe you should just relabel the folder when you get home. But that assumes you live.)

  While you’re at it you should probably erase your browser history.

  Man, if you die right now on this car trip, you’re never going to write that series about a magical high school in space that was going to be this generation’s Harry Potter. That’s going to be sad. The world will never know what you had in you. Sure, you had made a couple of notes but they will be completely indecipherable to anyone but you and people will just think your mind was going.

  Also you’ll, you know, never find love, and stuff. And George Lucas will never meet you and shake you by the hand and look into your eyes and say that he really respects you as a creator and thinks of you as a peer.

  Damn, that’s sad. If you had only lived. The things that were inside you! The things you had to say! To George Lucas particularly.

  (More honking. I screeched to a halt, narrowly avoiding several pedestrians who had just entered a crosswalk directly ahead of me. A woman slapped the hood of the car and shouted something rude.)

  This is it for you, I thought, my knuckles whitening on the steering wheel at ten and four. What a shame. What a waste. What a shaste. (Wame?) If you’d known you were going to die, you would definitely have made it a priority this morning to write a poignant and tear-jerking essay about how beautiful life was and how much you still hoped to share with the world. With dew in it, probably. Dew and the warmth of people’s eyes and smiles. Well, not that. That didn’t sound like the kind of thing that people would read and regret your premature passing. “All things considered,” people would say, “she was only a moderate talent, and the world is no worse off.”

  No, you should have said something really powerful. Something that would really get people in the gut. Somethi
ng with insight in it. Real, genuine, heart-jerking insight into the world that you had wrung out of your own rich life experience. You would have titled it—Think, kid! Think!—“Nobody’s Literally Hitler (Except, of Course, Hitler).” No, not that. Dammit. It would serve you right if you did die just now.

  Well, you would come up with something. And it would be meaningful. And also you would have left a note on your secret online fanfiction account explaining that you were probably never going to finish that story where the Romantic poets could control metal with their minds, but very sexily.

  How much you had left unfinished. And the world would never know what it had lost!

  Dagfuckit.

  (At this point you discovered that you had driven the car up several feet onto the curb and overturned a trash can.)

  • • •

  So you see my difficulty.

  This is why I am not a good driver. I think too much. Well, “think” might be generous. I—get distracted.

  Instead, I started turning the radio on. The worst that would happen while the radio was on would be that I would thump the brake cheerily in time with the rhythm. And that seldom led to any deaths.

  • • •

  Which brings me back to the dog.

  When I came back from college, he was still there and seemed pleased to see me. I took him on more walks.

  I had not really warmed to him. “Warmed” would be strong. I lukewarmed to him. I grew tepid. I tolerated him exactly the way that the posters in my school counselor’s office warned me didn’t count as real tolerance. That is to say, I disapproved of him, but silently, and if he’d sought to marry my daughter, we would have had words.

  He had, I noticed, retained his old habit of barking urgently at the door in the middle of rainstorms so that you would take him out. Once out, he browsed leisurely around the yard as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He squinted at the sky. He sniffed each tree and bush. “DO YOUR BUSINESS, POOPER!” I shouted, to no avail. “Go wee-wee! Do whatever it is you came for! Pee! Urinate! Use the facilities! Go see a man about a dog! Whatever the verb is! Do it!”