A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (14 page)

I don’t know why my family thought it was a good idea. It was 2008 and having a debutante ball was a horrible way to meet anyone, unless the person in question was a visitor from 1830 who had yet to assimilate. Then again, we had strange hobbies. My mother was a big history buff who had the house set up so that if George Washington ever happened to drop by he would feel perfectly at home, if a little creeped out by all the pictures of him everywhere. She had chairs like he would have sat on and green felt tablecloths like he would have seen at Colonial Williamsburg (I guess to him it
was just “Williamsburg”) and decanters of whiskey that had been made at a replica of the distillery where he used to make whiskey himself. She also had bought me a complete set of Colonial attire so that I could spend weekends at a historic farm pretending to be an eighteenth-century farmer’s daughter. We tried to get this to count toward my high school’s community service requirement, but the effort fell through pretty quickly.

“What is it that your volunteer work consists of?” Ms. Deaver asked.

“Um,” I said, “well, I go to the Colonial Farm and I get into colonial garb and I spend three to nine hours there doing farm chores, you know, hoeing and also making the root vegetables comfortable and such, so if anyone visits the farm that day, they can see somebody hoeing like they would have hoed back a few centuries ago.”

“I don’t understand,” Ms. Deaver said. “How is this helping people?”

“Well, nothing helps someone as much as seeing how people lived in the eighteenth century,” I ventured. “As they say.”

She fixed me with a flat stare. “What about making sandwiches?”

“I’m not feeding the body!” I said. “I’m feeding the soul! Nothing feeds the soul like people in sweaty linen outfits and bonnets pretending not to know what airplanes are.”

“Yeah, no,” Ms. Deaver said. “I think you’d better find something else.”

Sometimes we got into heated family discussions in which my mother and my grandmother loudly agreed that arranged marriages weren’t so bad while my father and I maintained aggressive silences. (“It worked for centuries! Why mess with it? And I think it’s good that the family’s involved in the choice. The family SHOULD be
involved. Hey, Alexandra, you know who you should consider? That nice Pederson boy!”)

So maybe the ball was no surprise.

Having a debutante ball in spite of yourself was a long tradition on my mother’s side of the family. “I was really into feminism,” my mother said, wistfully. “But your grandmother insisted.”

My grandmother seldom insisted on anything. She and my grandfather were the fun side of the family. They liked to crack jokes, wrote funny toasts for their friends’ birthdays, and referred to lunch as “Beer and Wine Time.”

They had been retired long enough that they found going to the grocery store almost painfully exciting, deserving the kind of excruciatingly detailed attention other people reserve for attempts to scale Mount Everest.

They spent most of their TV viewing time alternating between FOX News and The Weather Channel, which put them in an almost constant state of panic, either about Something Ominous and Red That Is Sweeping into the Country to Devour Your Cattle in a Funnel of Wind, or Something Ominous and Blue That Is Sweeping into the Country to Make Your Children Dependent on Government Handouts.

Like my mother, they were proud Hoosiers. Of course, if I were to come out into any society, it would be
Indiana
society. Thanks to their years of lavish praise, I had come to view Indiana as a place almost as magical as the past—a state with no equal in the world.

Whenever we drove across the Indiana border, my mother insisted that we roll the window down so she could inhale deep lungfuls of Indiana air.

“Mm,” she would shout over the rushing wind. “Doesn’t the air just smell sweeter here?”

It smelled okay. It smelled like air. If I had to describe it at an air tasting I would probably say “distinguished, yet approachable” or “like air” or sneeze uncontrollably so that you would skip me.

My mother’s family has always believed that all good things come from Indiana. Indiana people are superior to other people. Indiana corn is the best corn. Indiana dogs are better behaved than dogs from other places. Indiana writers are the best writers. Hoosiers play the best basketball. Films about Hoosiers are more stirring than films about other people from other places. Hoosiers, Hoosiers, now and forever!

My father was from Wisconsin. But who did Wisconsin have? Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Joseph McCarthy, and Liberace. That, my mother said, was Wisconsin in a nutshell. Indiana had Benjamin Harrison. James Whitcombe Riley. Kurt Vonnegut. (I knew from reading
Cat’s Cradle
that Kurt Vonnegut considered the group of people bound by the simple fact of being from Indiana a “granfalloon”—that is to say, a superficial grouping that signified nothing. “If you wish to study a granfalloon,” Vonnegut had written, “just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” Somehow this never came up in conversation.)

I thought Indiana was cool, but only because Indiana had produced my two male cousins. I idolized them. They were by far the cool half of the family. In middle school they wore hemp necklaces, and followed sports as avidly as I didn’t. They addressed me as “Z” and used terms like “dece.” “That’s dece, Z,” they would tell me.

For several years after they let the word drop casually at a family get-together, I worked hard to incorporate it into my conversation. (“Yes, seeing
Lord of the Rings
sounds like it will be totes dece, yo!” “
Macbeth
is my favorite Shakespeare play, but
Hamlet
is also pretty dece.”)

While I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen counter dragging
Dicaeopolis through his paces, they read books with titles like
K-Dawg: Rize from the Streets
and
365 Days of Andy Roddick
. My aunt thought it was good that they were reading something. But I knew better. They were as cool in the present as I was going to be as soon as someone came along to whisk me back to 1919. What did they need to escape into books for?

Drew was my age and Scott was three years younger, which, when you’re little, is a lot. To a seven-year-old, a four-year-old might as well be a side table. As a consequence of this mismatch, whenever we put on family skits, I forced Scott to play inanimate objects like Turkey and Barrel.

It never ceased to amaze me as a child that people would simply clump you together willy-nilly with anyone else who fell under the heading “child”—as though you had anything in common with someone who still believed in the tooth fairy and had yet to arrive at any awareness of death. This is hard to explain to grown-ups, as they have lost all sense of how rude and arbitrary it is to be expected to make hours of conversation with people you have nothing in common with but age. “How would you like it if I said to you: Mr. Miller is also over forty, and even though you have never seen one another before and have nothing in common but your age, I expect you to spend two hours together without throwing mashed potatoes at one another or stomping on Mr. Miller’s toy truck?” you say. “That’s how I spend most of my evenings,” your parents respond.

The other thing my cousins excelled at, apart from sports and life, was chess, which left me utterly flummoxed. It seemed wildly unjust that people who could actually have a good time at a middle school dance without taking any breaks to curl up and read Faulkner in the bathroom should also be lords of the ultimate nerd’s game. I spent a summer as the only girl at chess camp desperately trying to rectify the situation, but got nowhere. I won zero games. If
you didn’t win many games, they had a prize for most improved, but I couldn’t win that because I hadn’t improved. There was no prize for Most Stagnant. I couldn’t even get a trophy for best sportsmanship because my sportsmanship was terrible.

Even though they were the only people I knew, we thought it might be a little too Osmond-y for my cousins to double as my escorts at the ball. Besides, Drew was already escorting someone else.

I pitched the idea to my college friends but got no bites. I think they thought I was joking. “Hey,” I told them, “want to come to a debutante ball? I need two of you.”

“What?” they said. “Where?”

“INDIANA!”

“Are you even from there?”

“NOPE!”

“Isn’t that a little retro?”

“A LITTLE? It’s literally feminist hell! For the afterparty, I bet we burn Betty Friedan in effigy. I assume there’s a big ice sculpture of a glass ceiling.”

“And you’re going?”

“Duh I’m going! ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT A DEBUTANTE BALL! It’s like an all-expenses-paid vacation to 1876! DEBUTANTE BALLS TO THE WALLS! Maybe they’ll marry me off to a TOTAL STRANGER from a NEIGHBORING COUNTY!”

“Why are you speaking in all caps?”

“BECAUSE I’VE BECOME HYSTERICAL! I’M PRACTICING MY HYSTERICS!”

Instead, we had to fall back on my aunt. But she delivered. “Don’t worry,” she told my parents. “She’ll like them. They’re intellectual.”

•   •   •

The debutante ball was organized by something called the Indianapolis Performance Society. Once or twice a year, they got together
and put on an amateur production of something that had gotten big laughs in 1890. One year my aunt played someone who was bitten by a penguin, which allowed her to display a lot of range.

The party fell right around Christmas. I flew to Indiana from college, my excitement mounting. This was it. My big, time-traveling break.

That was where all my skill sets lay. I’d been studying hard and reading up. I could curtsy. I had passable skill on the pianoforte. I couldn’t swoon, but I did occasionally get light-headed if I locked my knees by accident. My Greek was in line. I had all my drawing room quips locked and loaded. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” I could even dance, although not well enough to attract a Gentleman with Tracts of Land. At least, not very much land.

My time machine was set to 1890, my dance card was open, and my giant white dress and gloves were on their way in the car with my parents. I was good to go.

•   •   •

The place where we went to rehearse for the ball was located at the top of a large warehouselike building that was full of vintage cars. The whole top floor was packed with shiny chrome and big fins and front seats that went all the way across and those pointy hood ornaments that you could use to impale unsuspecting pedestrians in crosswalks. It seemed like an appropriate place to begin your voyage back in time.

We waited among the vintage cars to receive etiquette and basic dance instruction from a woman in a dress large enough to slipcover New Jersey. She told us to keep good posture, make eye contact, and not disgrace our families. Then we went slowly through the motions of learning how to waltz.

Immediately on arrival I was introduced to my two escorts. I
could see right away what my aunt meant. Russell was attending Stanford. Nick had just gotten back from a mission to South America and had a lot of feelings about it. In order to demonstrate that my aunt had been correct in selecting him, Russell spent the whole evening talking earnestly to me about eigenvectors. I kept leaving the conversation and crossing the room and returning and he was still there, a little bit farther along, like an instructional video through which you could not fast-forward.

•   •   •

Next there was a luncheon for honored grandmothers, because of course there was. I don’t know where they sent the dishonored grandmothers. Maybe they had a separate buffet.

As I walked to my table, I overheard someone’s mother speaking to an Honored Grandmother in an urgent tone.

“Her father would be escorting her but he recently died of a brain tumor so my brother is,” she said, sounding apologetic. Yes, I thought. How DARE he? You SHOULD apologize. He must have done it deliberately, to spite everyone and sour his daughter’s prospects. What a whimsical, self-centered act, to die of a brain tumor, when you were wanted at a debutante ball!

I sat down at the table full of debutantes. They were all skinny and had lovely glossy hair, the one trait that most intimidates me in women, apart from an ability to walk confidently in heels. They looked like they’d been poured into their dresses and said “when” way, way too early. Not that I blamed them. One of my fellow debutantes was still smarting after trying on a dress in front of her Honored Grandmother.

There had been a long pause. “Well, clearly you’re not anorexic anymore,” her grandmother said.

“Who’s doing your hair?” one of them asked.

“Me?” I said. I tried to pronounce it in such a way that if you
didn’t know, you might think that Miiiii? with a rising intonation was the name of a sought-after hairstylist.

“Who’s doing your makeup?”

“Evian Plump is doing
my
makeup,” someone else said. (I do not actually remember the name of this person, but I remember that it started off sounding somewhat exotic and wound up with a good Hoosier surname.)

I thought it might sound suspicious for Miiii to be doing all my beauty maintenance, so I maintained a respectful silence. My makeup regimen at the time consisted of seeing if I found a tube of CVS mascara in one of my coat pockets and, if I did, applying a painstaking single coat to my lashes, getting just a little bit on my nose in the process. I looked like a Dalmatian who was bad at applying eye makeup. If this were the eighteenth century I could probably have passed it off as a beauty spot, but even then it would be a bit suspect.

Glancing around the table, I began to worry a little bit about my concept of how the evening was supposed to go. These girls didn’t seem to know that we were in the past. My watch was all set to the Gilded Age but . . . they were talking about pedicures. This felt suspiciously like middle school.

Come now! Bring up the dance cards!

I already felt like a sore thumb—in flats, in a dress I’d purchased online from a disgruntled bride and had already worn to my high school graduation, no hairstyle, less makeup, and no friends in the crowd. And the night hadn’t even started.