A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  Ketcham wheezed.

  “Ohh,” my mother said. “Ohhh.”

  I thought it had something to do with my driving and braked instinctively, then realized we were still parked in the driveway.

  I turned the car on and put it in drive. We oozed slowly out into traffic, like nervous molasses.

  “Smoothly,” my mother said. I tried to imagine what driving smoothly would be like, in the hopes that I might just start doing it spontaneously. This was a technique I had. It had never worked before, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Hold on, Ketcham.”

  Ketcham wheezed.

  “Ketcham loves a car ride,” I said, encouragingly.

  “He’s going,” my mother said. “Ohhhh.”

  I glanced nervously from left to right in case any cars were coming. We were driving down a side street and were not yet near the intersection, but it was important to be safe. What if cars started spontaneously shooting out of houses?

  There was a stop sign. I stopped just in time. Ketcham and my mother lurched a little.

  “Smoothly,” my mother said.

  “I am!” I said.

  Ketcham wheezed. He did love a good car ride.

  “Just keep driving smoothly. Ohhhh. Buddy. Ohhh Ketcham. Ketcham old buddy, it’s all right.”

  The route we had chosen had something like sixteen stop signs along it. I have never driven more slowly in my life. We oozed from stop sign to stop sign. Drive well, I thought. Drive with urgency, but with caution. We progressed very slowly to the top of the hill, where this road intersected the main road.

  Given that I was driving, everyone seemed remarkably calm. Ketcham had stopped wheezing.

  “Ohhhh,” said my mother. “I think he’s dead.”

  At this, my foot sprang almost spontaneously onto the gas and we shot through a red light.

  “Sorry!” I said, coming to a rapid halt. “Sorry. My foot hit the wrong pedal.”

  “He’s dead,” my mother said. “He’s not breathing.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “We’re almost there. Is it possible he’s just relaxed?”

  We arrived at the vet’s office and I began attempting to park. I was agitated. It was not easy as snot off a doornail. After a couple of halfhearted spins of the wheel, I gave it up.

  “I will park,” my mother said. “You go inside.”

  I went in to tell the vet what had happened. They went to the car and took him out and did all the official things you do to a dog when the dog’s time is up. Yes, they agreed, Ketcham was no longer with us. They supposed dog eye surgery was out of the question now, which was a shame because the procedure would have been so expensive. But did we want to get a commemorative plaster mold of his paw? That would be plenty costly, and would last longer.

  “Sure,” we said.

  We paid the bill. Ketcham T. R.? they asked. Yes, Ketcham T. R., we said. Of course the joke was the last thing to go.

  • • •

  We got back to the car and there wasn’t a bulldog in it.

  The ride home was quiet.

  “I will drive,” my mother said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “I can.”

  “It’s fine.”

  The car felt empty. Her eyes were damp. Air whistled past the window.

  “It was my driving that did him in,” I suggested, trying to get her to smile. “I frightened him to death.”

  “No,” she said. “You were fine.”

  So Far, So Good

  “When we got into office,” John F. Kennedy said, “the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.”

  That sums up how I feel about adulthood pretty nicely. All the things that I thought they had made up to lend excitement to romantic comedies turned out to be real.

  Weddings, it turns out, are real. All of it is real.

  For instance, if you are at a David’s Bridal, and a bride there finds a dress, they will actually ring a bell. This terrifies me. There is a certain special kind of horror reserved for the realization that the things that happen in reality shows also happen in reality. If all the bell-ringing and fervent saying “yes yes I will yes” to the dress is real, then nothing is impossible. Honey Boo Boo must exist.

  You actually see registries for hundred-dollar toilet brushes—which is a lot to ask for something that you will definitely put into the toilet. Most hundred-dollar purchases are things you desperately try to keep out of the toilet.

  • • •

  I was standing at a David’s Bridal in Chicago, wondering how we’d come to this. Here was the gang—well, a number of us, anyway—trying on bridesmaid dresses. This seemed far too adult a thing to be happening to us.

  But my friend Joan was getting married, so there we were.

  “They seem to be letting me,” she joked.

  I had known these girls for a grotesque amount of time. As far as having embarrassing stories to tell, it was mutually assured destruction all the way around. The only trouble was that most of the stories implicated all of us.

  There were a few that implicated just me. The first time my friend Hannah met any of us was when I’d gone up to her and said, “Greetings, Earthling!” (This was during my “greetings, Earthling” phase. Come on. Everyone had one of those.) Later I met her at the airport in Wisconsin holding an accordion, wearing a cow hat (complete with udders), and playing a polka. Look, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

  In sixth grade, we all got really into the Trojan War. We had read about it for class, and something in it had spoken to us. That year, for Halloween, a number of us dressed up as Trojans. We turned our old school uniforms into white chitons, donned crested helmets, and carried swords. I was unable to understand why everyone who came to the door was laughing and making references to condoms. “Is your friend a Durex?” some teenagers shouted, running past.

  “My friend is the warrior Hector after Achilles dragged him around the walls of Troy!” I yelled after them. (This was in fact true, but she just looked like a ghost who had gotten into a fight on the way over.)

  Then there was Menelaus.

  I don’t think most people give Menelaus any thought. Why would you? He’s a minor character in Greek mythology, the husband of Helen of Troy back when she was Helen of Sparta, before the Trojan prince Paris abducted her and started that whole Trojan War thing.

  He’s a footnote to history, really. A footnote to mythology. Okay, he was in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but he wasn’t really the person you came away with strong feelings about.

  The gang did, though. We came away with strong feelings about everyone.

  And we had an ongoing feud about Menelaus’ weight. “Menelaus,” I insisted, “was fat.”

  “He was not,” my friend Angie said. “He was big-boned.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  I even went so far as to create a “Trojan War Homework Help Web Site” to add weight to my claims. The only tangible result of this was that a fourteen-year-old Canadian boy began e-mailing me requests for homework help on topics ranging from “Write a story about Achilles” to “Feminism in King Lear.” I haven’t heard from him since graduating from high school. I hope he’s figured out how to write papers on his own, or his life’s going to be difficult!

  We were the ones who liked books and Monty Python and (to our chagrin) LiveJournal and (even more to our chagrin) Hot Topic. One year we performed the Monty Python sketch “How Do You Tell a Witch” on the class camping trip. Nobody laughed. We realized, after we sat down, that this was because anyone in our class who would have enjoyed this skit was onstage performing it.

  One night, completely sober, we were transfixed by an ad for a milk shake called
a SONIC Cookie Dough Blast. We had to have one, we decided. At all costs. The nearest SONIC was in Delaware? Fine. We would drive to Delaware. We would drive to Delaware right now.

  (We drove all the way to Delaware.)

  When we arrived it was midnight and they were just closing up, but we patiently explained that we had driven across several state lines on this mission, so the employee took pity on us and prepared our Cookie Dough Blasts. We sipped them, in triumph, at a picnic table, feeling that we’d gotten away with something.

  • • •

  We went to the high school that Mean Girls was based on. (Well, one of the many high schools that claim this title. High schools like to claim this title because it makes you imagine that our dialogue was much snappier than it in fact was. And I was quoted in the book Queen Bees and Wannabes, so I think our case had merit.)

  The gang was girls. But we weren’t mean. Not on purpose, anyway. We expanded or contracted as the years went by and people came or went, insta-friends joined the circle, old friends migrated off to join the Cool Girls or the Girls Who Cooked. We were sort of a bro-y, eclectic gaggle of theater geeks and regular geeks and sci-fi nuts and regular nuts. When we made it to high school we took up residence in an area of school called the Pit. It was formerly the Sex Pit, but when we got there, any sexual activity ceased, unless you counted putting up a big poster of Orlando Bloom.

  We watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “Stay sane inside insanity,” we sang. The gang covered for me.

  “What’s the Rocky Mountain Horror Show?” my mother asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Joan said. “It’s definitely wholesome.”

  We went to see RENT.

  “What’s this?” my mother asked.

  “It’s a musical,” I told her. “It’s based on La Bohème, by Puccini.”

  My friends tried not to snicker too loudly.

  Even by then we knew our function: We were there to Talk About It in the Car. Everything around us was ridiculous. But at least we were there to make eye contact with one another and say—“Yes. I notice it too.”

  We spent a lot of time together in our parents’ cars, not just driving to Delaware. There was the Black Pearl, a Volvo so named because “What a car is . . . what the Black Pearl is . . . is freedom.” There was the Purple Eggplant, a large purple minivan with sliding doors. There were others, mainly minivans, but those had the best names.

  “Shotgun,” everyone shouted, always a beat before me.

  “Backseat,” I would shout, lamely, as we approached the car—or “Bitch seat,” if there were five of us—just to make it clear that if I always got the worst seat in the car, it was because I had planned it all along. At this point it was an assumption, just as it was assumed that I would not be the one in the driver’s seat (they had paid dearly for this knowledge) or the one controlling the music (no one else was quite as eager to rock out to Songs of World War I.)

  • • •

  The summer after ninth grade, on the lake in Wisconsin, three of us were out in a canoe lighting sparklers. A voice shouted across the lake, “Hey!”

  “Hey!” we said.

  “How old are you?”

  We paused. “Seventeen,” we said. This was a lie. Clearly. It was both untrue and completely pointless. There was nothing you could do at seventeen that you could not do at fourteen, except, oh, have a driver’s license and see R-rated movies. But that wasn’t exactly relevant in the middle of a lake.

  Still, we paddled giddily back to the shore, feeling as if we’d gotten away with something.

  • • •

  We ate Ethiopian food together, visited one another at college, moved from couches to air mattresses and back again.

  “I love all of you and I’m glad we’re friends,” Hannah remarked, sagaciously, as we drove from someone’s house to someone else’s house one winter break from college, “but you’re not the same girls I became friends with.”

  We went from bar mitzvahs to bars.

  We started figuring out how to drink. There were dates with people who weren’t one another. Slumber parties where we played Risk and The Sims and stayed up talking for hours turned into slumber parties where we played beer pong and trekked out to the nearest diner in the wee hours of the morning to coat our stomachs liberally with grease.

  We left town. We came back again.

  We went to Atlantic City and I won a hundred dollars playing blackjack and a seagull pooped on me.

  For a while we got into the habit of ringing in the New Year, too, in clumps. The exact composition of the clumps varied. Friendship is an island but sometimes people catch ships to the mainland and aren’t seen for years, then wash back up onshore as though nothing happened. There were pictures of all of us on one another’s walls, in varying combinations. It took three or four pictures before you pieced the whole gang together, so those same three or four pictures showed up on everyone’s walls.

  Sophomore year of college we drove up to New York City for New Year’s Eve and crashed in Amy’s dorm, because we were convinced you could drink there. We went to an Irish pub where they couldn’t have cared less, but we were absolutely wild with excitement. We were getting away with it!

  We glanced significantly at one another, as if to say as much.

  The next year it was one of the usual basements. Then it was Philadelphia. Then it was a basement again. I joked that every year we wound up somewhere worse. At the rate we were going we would be ringing in 2016 in Detroit in an abandoned warehouse.

  It is very hard to describe something that has never been more than an arm’s length away. It’s like when the machine to test your vision is on the wrong setting: Everything’s large and blurry and just that little bit too close that makes it impossible to see what it is. You know that something is there. At some point along the line the person whose locker was next to yours and had the same bowl cut for years and liked Star Wars as much as you sprouted up taller and started to wear jewelry and you watched as her bangs grew out slowly.

  • • •

  We grew older.

  The scariest moment is not when they card you that first time and say, sorry, not you, not yet. The scariest moment is when they check the card and the card is real and you’re actually allowed to be drinking.

  • • •

  Like the people in The Hunger Games, we heard the engagement cannons sound and watched as the names and pictures of our married classmates were plastered across the Facebook sky. They fell one by one, with dignity.

  We’d been expecting Joan to fall for a while.

  “Dave’s a college graduate,” she told us.

  “Wow, Joan!” I said. “That’s great!”

  Ice formed on her upper slopes.

  “Whoa. There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “No, Joan, that was my sincere voice. I’m genuinely excited.”

  She gave me a look. This was a problem I’d had for years. It reared its head at the worst times, like when I was trying to give Amy a sincere compliment at the stage door.

  “You were just great in that show,” I would say. “I loved when you walked off the stage.” (I had heard somewhere that more specific compliments were better.) “Not in the sense that I was glad you left the stage,” I would add, hastily. “I just thought you did a really good job with that exit. And also with everything else, of course. Actually. You were great. No. Really. There are bad performances, but this was not a bad performance. Sometimes you see a performance and you’re like, that was awful, but that was not how I felt at all this time. Not to say that I felt that way at other times.”

  This got less and less reassuring the longer it went.

  “My dad’s sick,” someone would say.

  “Oh no,” I’d say. “That’s AWFUL.”

  “Whoa, Zandra.”


  “Haven’t you noticed I’m NEVER sarcastic?” I would plead, looking desperately from one friend to another. “Guys, come on. You know me.”

  And fortunately they did. Joan shook her head and we moved on to what kind of ring Dave would probably get her.

  • • •

  And now we were standing in a David’s Bridal, shopping for dresses like Real People. Didn’t they know this was the gang? Didn’t they know how recently we’d been standing in our uniform dresses with the sleeves cut off, insisting we were Trojans with no irony whatsoever? Why were they letting us do this whole Adult thing?

  What you want, David’s Bridal, is a real wedding party of real, official bridesmaids and a fire-breathing bridezilla. Do I look like a real adult to you?

  • • •

  It was a beautiful wedding.

  They broke a glass and signed the ketubah. There’s a picture of us standing there with our bouquets in hand, with the happiest expression any of our faces knew how to make. This is how As Happy As Possible looks on me. There’s how it looks on Angie. It’s like watching the same tune played on different instruments, moving from tuba to cello to zither. (If any of you are reading this, I am not saying that anyone looks like a tuba or a zither, I swear. I picked bad instruments.)

  As a frequent wedding guest—if I go to one more, I’m entitled to a free soda!—I can state for a fact that weddings are intensely one-size-fits-all.

  The rituals are potent.

  Everything you have ever heard about weddings is true. Everyone cries when you expect. The bride looks beautiful. Everyone dances, especially the drunk uncle.

  All these tropes are tropes for a reason.

  Things you only played at when you were a kid are actually suddenly acutely real. You know the person gently forking a large hunk of cake into a new spouse’s face. You know these people. Death and birth are things that happen to people you’ve met. You start to recognize names in the wedding announcements in the paper.

  That is what is so terrifying.

  Apparently this is legit.

  This is one of those perennial surprises of twentysomething life. You are always operating under the unstated assumption that this is some kind of enormous joke that everyone is in on. My friends, whom I remember as the people trying to get out of class on the grounds that The O.C. said it was Chrismukkah, are actually having babies or practicing law or instructing other people’s children. How is this okay?