A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  Nothing.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go back indoors.”

  That was not acceptable either. Once the door shut behind him, he started barking again, and back out we went.

  Only when I was soaked through and Ketcham felt like a moist settee did anything in his demeanor shift. “Ah,” he seemed to say. “I remember now. There was something that I came out here to do.” He sniffed carefully through the bushes again with the air of a man skimming through a book for a particular passage that had spoken to him.

  “Ketcham, wee-wee,” I said. “Please? Please wee-wee? (Yes, kid. This is where we stand. Out in a rainstorm, remonstrating with a dog in English as though he spoke the language.)”

  He bolted for the dampest bush and squatted contemplatively under it. Then, his business at last complete, he went sprinting back indoors to dry himself by rubbing his wet haunches on whatever piece of furniture I valued most.

  It was our little ritual.

  I also walked him around the neighborhood.

  In theory, one of the advantages of walking a dog is that you get to make friends around the neighborhood. They see you out walking your dog in your glamorous yet practical dog-walking ensemble, the dog gives them a conversational opening, and things flow naturally from there. The next thing you know, true love has bitten you on the ankle. At any rate something has bitten you on the ankle. Or maybe the stranger’s leash gets tangled up with yours, and—wham! bam! thank you, sir/ma’am!—you have moved in together, Pongo and Perdita have hit it off, and you are raising enough Dalmatian puppies to make a really fetching coat. Basically the sky’s the limit. As a way of meeting people, dog-walking offers all the advantages of riding public transit and making excessive suggestive eye contact with the person across the aisle without any of the dread that, at the next stop, this person will be replaced by a large sweaty man in a mesh shirt while your thoughts are elsewhere.

  This would have been easier to pull off if I didn’t insist on keeping up a running dialogue with the dog. The dog didn’t know we were having a running dialogue. He thought I was just making more of those mouth-sounds with which he had come to associate me.

  “Great,” I would say. “Yes. Let’s stop and lick that gray substance off the sidewalk. That’s a great idea. Wonderful. Oh, a tree. Good. Wouldn’t want to pass a single tree without urinating on it, would we? No. Of course not. Great. Oh good, tinfoil. Yes. That does seem like it would be good to eat. No, I’m sorry. There was sarcasm in my tone just now. Please don’t eat the tinfoil, boy. Oh, come on. Oh, what good is it reasoning with you? You don’t understand any words that aren’t ‘dinner.’ No, I didn’t mean ‘dinner.’ Don’t give me that hopeful, trustful, reproachful look.”

  Oddly enough, few people came up to introduce themselves while this was going on.

  He was, by bulldog standards, cute. Which is to say that he looked like Disney Quasimodo, not Regular Quasimodo, so people were always stopping to pet him.

  “Oh yes,” I told them. “Go right ahead. He’s very friendly. Just loves people. Don’t you, boy?”

  They all petted him and let him lick their faces. I tried to look like this was what I was looking forward to doing when I got home.

  “Hello there,” I said, awkwardly poking the dog on the head in what I hoped looked like a companionable manner. “We sure get along, huh, buddy? What a lifelike interaction we’re having!” Surely they could see right through me. I felt like Mitt Romney.

  “What a great dog you have,” the petters said.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “The greatest.”

  I would try to make a tactical retreat at this point, but Ketcham wouldn’t budge. Sometimes, without warning, he would sit down in the middle of a walk and refuse to continue. You would have to pull him home by sheer force of will. Try dragging a bulldog eight blocks by his leash and see how tenderly you feel toward him afterward. It’s like trying to drag a drunk boulder out of a party, while the boulder whines that it was having a good time and didn’t want to leave yet.

  My mother referred to these moments of recalcitrance as “sit-down strikes.” To her, they were just another piece of evidence of Ketcham’s rich inner life.

  It was amazing what a rich inner life the dog had. “Look at him,” my mother said. (The dog had just farted and was staring behind him with an expression of horror and alarm.) “Look, he’s mortified.”

  If my mother was to be believed, the dog always had a lot on his mind. In fact, his thinking generally aligned itself pretty well with hers. “I don’t think it makes sense for you to drive all the way to Caroline’s,” she would say, as Ketcham pursued a blue soccer ball around the yard, panting contentedly. “Do you? You’ll have to turn right around, anyway.” At this point the ball rolled out of Ketcham’s reach behind a bush. He emitted a frustrated yelp.

  “Ketcham says he agrees.”

  “Why are we listening to him?” I asked, a little testily. “He’s a dog.”

  “Ketcham is an experienced traveler,” my mother said.

  • • •

  This was true. The one thing Ketcham really did well was travel by car. On car trips, I sat in the backseat, feet wedged on top of several bags of kibble, spare bowls for water, special bulldog powders and ointments, Ketcham’s favorite blankets, a spare bed that had some of the stuffing coming out at the seams, a squeaky rubber George W. Bush, some bitter spray we had purchased to dissuade him from eating wooden table legs—a spray that had had no impact whatsoever other than to make him look much less happy while he chewed through the same table legs as before—and several bottles of water in case he became dehydrated. Ketcham generally sat next to me, sprawled lavishly atop his favorite mat, or resting in his travel cage. We had tried putting him in the front, but he had interfered with steering.

  He was a good traveler. He barked only when he needed to go outside to do some business, and only just before, like the alarm on the dashboard that dings when you have twenty miles left to refuel. Other than that, all he did was sleep for hours and hours on end, snoring noisily, no matter who was at the wheel. This was more than could be said of any other member of the family.

  Even when I drove, he was unfazed. He slept placidly as I drove very slowly on the shoulder of the road, signaling the wrong way. I felt my frozen heart expand a little.

  “Ketcham has the right idea,” I told my mother, glowering at the passenger seat, where she perched up against the dashboard emitting loud shrieks. “Why can’t you be more like him?”

  Even when I almost barreled through an intersection and had to bring the car screeching to a halt, toppling him into the seat well, he barely complained.

  “Woorrrf,” he muttered, a little reproachfully, trying to heave his sizable hindquarters back up onto the seat.

  “Look what you’ve done!” my mother said. “The poor dog! Don’t you know he has sensitive hips?”

  “He’s fine,” I said.

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “Bulldogs never express pain. They suffer in silence. You never know that something’s wrong until it’s too late.”

  “Where are you reading this?” I asked. “Are you sure these are bulldogs and not the heroines of tragic Victorian novels?”

  “Pay attention to the road.”

  • • •

  The poet Hart Crane said that “some are twisted with the love of things irreconcilable” and this described pretty well how Ketcham felt about swimming. If anything could melt my frozen heart where the dog was concerned, it was watching his futile attempts at dog-paddling. He resembled a T. Rex trying to scratch its nose. Put him on a lake, and he bolted for the water within moments and plunged in. For a little while he would remain buoyant, kicking with all he had, and then his prow would dip lower and lower in the water and we would have to wade in and bring him back to shore before he was entirely submerged. That was the trouble w
ith being built like a bulldog. You were built like a bulldog: all head and wrinkles and protruding tongue and splayed, squat legs. No structural integrity. And not particularly streamlined or aerodynamic.

  Still, he had big dreams. I respected that.

  I was beginning to see what my mother saw in him.

  In theory, you can learn a lot about yourself from the empty-nest purchases your parents make to replace you. I knew a guy whose parents bought a grand piano and a car. But he’s now a law professor, so maybe they knew what they were doing.

  Mine just got the dog.

  And the dog got a kind of indulgence I hadn’t known was an option in my family. “Man,” I told my friends, “if I’d known this setting was available, I would have selected it years ago.”

  I watched as my mother tenderly rubbed ointment into the dog’s posterior as he chewed his way through her favorite shoes.

  “Don’t eat the shoe, Ketcham,” I said.

  “Leave him alone,” my mother said. “He’s had a rough day. Haven’t you, booger?”

  Ketcham panted amiably at her.

  “You know,” I said, unable to come up with anything else, “I never ate any of your shoes. Not a single one.”

  Ketcham farted and looked behind him to see what the terrifying noise was.

  My mother smiled. “He takes after your father.”

  • • •

  My mother was always worried that something was Horribly Wrong with the Dog.

  One of her favorite techniques of parenting was to sift through big books of Medical Ailments That Could Seize upon Your Family Members at Any Time. This was in the days before WebMD, which, naturally, she took to like a hypochondriac fish to water (hypochondriac fish need water too). The book had a handy flowchart that would tell you whether or not you were having a stroke. It didn’t have any immediate application, but I looked forward to running down several flights of stairs and turning to page six eighty-three if the moment ever did come.

  Before the dog, we had a cat. Whenever the cat stared at the wall too long, my mother would be overwhelmed with concern. “It’s kidney failure,” she said, sadly, shaking her head. “That’s what it means when a cat stares at the wall too long.”

  “I think she’s asleep,” I said.

  My father and I tried to allay her concerns when it came to the dog. We had different techniques. Neither was particularly effective.

  “Does Ketcham look unnaturally bloated to you?” she would ask, cocking her head nervously to one side.

  “No,” I said. The dog looked exactly the same as he ever looked. He was chewing pensively on a first edition of something. “If anything, he looks slimmer than usual.”

  My mother dismissed me with a wave. “You don’t pay attention,” she said. “How would you know?” She walked into the living room where my father was. “Does Ketcham look bloated to you, dear?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, not looking up from his crossword. “Hideously bloated.”

  “Thank you!” my mother said. “You see, Alexandra? Your father thinks—”

  “It’s monstrous, really,” my father went on, warming to his theme. “The poor creature. He looks about ready to croak to me. ‘I’m bloated,’ he said to me earlier. ‘I am not long for this world.’ He’s a blimp. He’s five times his original size. Horrible thing.”

  “De-ar,” my mother said, realizing what was going on. “That isn’t helpful.”

  She walked back into the sunroom and stared at the dog again, this time cocking her head to the other side. “I think he does look bloated,” she announced, to the room.

  “Well, good,” I said. “I’m glad we got to have this discussion.”

  “Ketcham,” my mother announced. “Car ride!”

  Ketcham perked right up. He loved car rides, regardless of destination.

  Then she would take him into the vet. “They said he didn’t seem bloated to them,” my mother would report, returning home with the bill. “But if he wants to have dog LASIK surgery or a dog spinal fusion, they gave us a brochure.”

  “Why don’t we just pay for the dog to have an Ivy League education instead?” my father asked, frowning at the receipt. “We might save some money, and afterward, he could support himself.”

  • • •

  When he finally did take a turn for the worse, we didn’t notice. His head grew a little larger, but I assumed that was just my mother’s praise finally taking effect. We took him to the vet a couple of times to see why he was just sitting around the house all the time looking, depending on whom you listened to, wistful and definitely sick in the kidney (my mother), completely fine, if anything better than usual (me), like he was definitely dying and probably setting his affairs in order with Bulldog God as we spoke (my father). They didn’t know what it was.

  And then he started going steadily downhill. The circuit of his walks contracted. His get-up-and-go got up and went.

  “Aw, c’mon, buddy,” I said, dragging him down the street. “You sure you don’t want to urinate on this tree? Hey, look, some tinfoil. Your favorite. You always did like a good piece of tinfoil.” He came to a halt near a tree, looking uncertainly at it. “Come on,” I said. “The neighbors won’t mind. Here. I’ll get into the tree box with you. It’ll be a party. See? Easy as snot off a doornail.” I squatted near the tree in question, raising my leg in an encouraging manner. “Hup, Ketcham! Hup!”

  (All the attractive men whom I had hoped to encounter on my walks before chose this precise moment to walk by.)

  Ketcham shot me a reproachful look, as if to say that such joys were now behind him.

  • • •

  He went fast. In retrospect we should have seen. But it’s hard to see from up close. Travel a year at the speed of light and you don’t change at all, but when you return home the whole planet’s full of strangers and your feet turn to dust when you touch shore.

  After graduating from college, I noticed things I hadn’t spotted when I lived at home, hiding my shoes just out of reach. My father favored one leg when he walked. My mother was getting her first gray hairs. She displayed them with excitement. (“Finally!” she crowed. “My hairdresser thought I was dyeing it in secret!”)

  The house was beginning to reshape itself so that you didn’t notice where the hole had been. Change. This was how change looked.

  Empty-nest dogs take the shapes of their containers.

  When you have a kid you get into the groove of asking—Are you eating enough? Are you warm enough? Are you getting enough fiber? Are you getting enough sleep? Worrying is a hard habit to break. They had done it for eighteen years. They were not about to stop now.

  They needed to give all this love to someone. I packed up and went to college. I packed up again and moved into my own apartment. They stood there with their hands full of all this love and nowhere to put it. There is nothing more awkward than love.

  And Ketcham was there, panting, more than happy to receive it. He was easy to please, uncomplaining, loved to ride in cars. He never asked to drive.

  I don’t wish I had a time machine to go back and tell anything to the girl getting into the car after taking her SAT, a little too self-serious and not kind enough, to whom eight years of a bulldog was an eternity. If I had a time machine I would certainly not waste it on that. But I do regret it, a little.

  I wish I’d understood what they were doing. They weren’t replacing anyone. The empty-nest dog is what you hold on to so you can let go.

  Regret is like a time machine you carry with you all the time that doesn’t work. It gives you perfect coordinates, though.

  • • •

  “I think the dog’s dying,” my mother said. “Could you come to the house and take a look at him?”

  I came by and found him lying under a large bush.

  “Do you think he seems like he’s dying
?” my mother asked, cocking her head to one side. “Your father seems to think so.”

  “Well,” I hedged, “who among us isn’t dying?” I frowned at the bush. “You okay in there?”

  The dog didn’t say anything. I don’t know why I had been expecting him to.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not an expert.”

  None of us were.

  He seemed to be getting worse. My mother feared the dog was going to die in the night. We sat there for hours listening to see if he was still breathing. Something was the matter but we didn’t know what.

  And then one afternoon when we were debating his status the dog heaved himself up from his favorite resting mat and began hyperventilating, lurching forward several feet, panting, gasping, and stumbling. We didn’t know what to do. We called the vet. They said to bring him in. He was a sizable dog and since it was only my mother and me, and getting him to the car would require going down several flights of stairs, we loaded him onto a makeshift stretcher and started the journey down. There is nothing heavier than a sick bulldog. I don’t know how we made it down.

  The car was in the driveway.

  “Hurry,” my mother said, as we loaded the dog into the back hatch. “Hurry.”

  My mother handed me the keys. “I’ll sit in the back with him,” she said. “You drive.”

  This was unusual.

  I stared down at the keys in my hand, trying to remember how to drive. It had something to do with the car, I reasoned, or we wouldn’t be standing next to the car. I got somewhat unsteadily into the driver’s seat.

  “Be sure to adjust the mirrors,” my mother said.

  In the back of the car, the bulldog wheezed.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, adjusting the mirror the wrong way, then putting it back the way it had been. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Quickly,” my mother said, “but safely. Drive smoothly.”