A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (25 page)

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 the 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.”

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.”

“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!”