A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (2 page)

They asked us to tell a video camera the craziest thing we’d ever done to win a contest. I told them about the time I had crashed a dog show and run the agility course myself. “It wasn’t really about winning the contest,” I admitted, “but it certainly seemed to unnerve the other dogs.” (This had occurred in Bermuda and had, I realized, been good practice for making an idiot of myself. As a general note, if you ever want to run a dog agility course, just tell the organizer that you need to do it in honor of your deceased dog, “Topanga.” This was what I did, and to my total surprise, they cleared the dogs off the course and let me run it. It may have helped that I was wearing a helmet at the time. I had recently gotten off a moped, but the organizer had no way of knowing that and it probably looked to her as though something ominous was the matter with me. P.S. Dog agility courses are hard, especially if you are not entirely sober.)

They seemed pleased by the story, but months passed, and I heard only silence. They get in touch with you only if you make the show. Otherwise, you just find yourself on several e-mail lists of Style Products and Promotions. I still get e-mails from time to time with New Way to Add Volume to Your Hair and New People Eager to Judge Your Outfits.

But I was getting pretty good at this whole rejection thing.

•   •   •

Finally my moment arrived: the auditions for
America’s Got Talent
.

I signed up to audition with a spring in my step and a slight
twinge of remorse at having to use my own name. This was something for which I had not been entirely prepared.

Most of my practice (
America’s Next Top Model
auditions aside) had been under the guise that I was someone else. One of the advantages of this system was that I got to weather rejection after rejection, flop after flop, without ever feeling the sting of actual failure. Every time, I was venturing out under a protective shell. Everyone else was climbing out of trenches to face the barrage unprotected, but I was neatly secluded in the turret of a tank.

I was putting myself out there, all the time, without actually putting myself out there at all. I was, in fact, putting someone else out there. She had her own name and e-mail address and everything. And if I failed, well, that was because I was trying to fail. Not because I wasn’t good enough. It was a neat system, really.

None of these baffled judges had ever seen me trying my best. They had no conception of what that would look like. So I could preserve the illusion of myself intact.

I don’t think I’m alone in believing that I secretly carry a really wonderful person around inside me at all times. This person is genuinely good and smart and talented and kind enough to do all the things that real me fails at. This person is a bang-up performer and stays in touch with all her friends and puts together coordinated outfits and when she writes the sentences that sound perfect in her head land on the page just right and she uses the correct bins for glass recyclables and doesn’t say “uh” or wave her arms around when talking.

You would think I would be a little concerned that she has never once appeared in twenty-six years, but I feel convinced she’s in there somewhere, just waiting for her moment. The only difference between her and Failure Gloria is that people have actually seen Gloria.

It had seemed courageous, before, this bold determination to fail,
as splashily as possible. Now it felt a little cowardly. What if my worst wasn’t bad enough? Then I’d just be on record as an actual failure.

What if, all this time, I should have been trying to be my best instead?

•   •   •

No. I was prepared. My training would pay off. I was going to be so wincingly bad that I’d make it on the air. I was going to join my idols. All I had to do was seem sincere. As the saying goes, if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

I pondered my shtick. I would be a performance artist, I decided. Gloria had tried this once before at a Christian talent agency, offering a triple-threat combination of mediocre monologues, bad song, and worse dance. “Come back to Earth, Gloria,” the organizers had gently urged as I aimlessly roved the stage, staring off into the middle distance. This approach seemed ripe for a broader audience.

I would rap and mutter and speak in tongues and shout the names of the Founders and sing snippets of “I Dreamed a Dream.” I drilled myself into the wee hours of the morning, then waited in line all day, going over the routine.

It was almost, a nagging voice suggested, as much work as developing a real skill.

I smothered this voice quickly.

•   •   •

I glanced around the roomful of hopeful people waiting to audition at the Ronald Reagan Convention Center. Either they were serious, or they had taken the pursuit of rejection to a whole new level.

A young man with a melon-shaped head and diminished interpersonal skills approached me and sang a few snippets of Usher, spitting into my face. Old men plied their banjos, ineptly. A girl and her entire family waited in front of me, humming “Grenade” by Bruno
Mars, thumbing her iPod in flagrant defiance of the rule against singing to recorded accompaniment. A tiny young rapper got stage fright after the organizers formed a circle around him and tried to make him rap for the camera. One man cornered me and told me about his plans for an evangelical book set on another planet where everyone had more than five senses.

They had glanced over my application form and decided, for some reason, that I belonged with the Vocalists. I saw myself as more of an all-around threat, i.e., Russia rather than North Korea, but I dutifully joined the line.

When I got into the audition room, I gave it my worst. I sang. I twitched. I shouted. I turned in what would have been the performance of Gloria Nichols’ lifetime.

I didn’t stand a chance.

As I flailed and gyrated—“I dreamed a dream in time gone byeeee . . . Aaron Burr Aaron Burr”—I caught the woman judge looking at me. We made eye contact, and I could tell she knew.

•   •   •

So
that
was what actual rejection felt like.

My worst wasn’t bad enough.

All this time, working hard to be terrible, and—nothing.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned from this afternoon,” I typed on my phone, after Melon-headed Spit-Singer asked for my number and offered to pray over me, “it’s that no amount of concerted effort can make you seem weirder than people who are just being themselves.”

I’d been overlooking one thing, I realized. The best bad movies aren’t the ones that try to be bad. They’re the ones that try to be good.

If I really wanted to fail spectacularly, I should have been trying to succeed. For the most spectacular rejections of all, you have to
believe. You have to go out there and give the performance of your life.

Only then does the ax really fall.

Failing, it turns out, is easy. You don’t have to be
trying
to fail. It’s a part of life. It sucks. It will come and find you whether you seek it out or not, like women who want to talk to you on long airplane flights.

I’d always thought I’d be all right because I was a writer. Words were a bright thread that could lead me out of any labyrinth; I just had to keep them pinched carefully in my fingers as I walked. Nothing could hurt me as long as I kept hold of the thread. I could seek out anything—awkward, odd, novel, even a little dangerous—and cage it up in sentences, put it on display, its teeth still sharp, maybe, but the bars too thick to bite through. But in trying not to be hurt, I was missing the real story. I was still afraid of jumping. I didn’t want to fail for real. I wanted to be a secret success.

All this time I thought I was becoming a master of flops, I’d been safe inside my turret. Where was the adventure in that?

I knew rejection was supposed to be a part of life. Failure, rejection, flopping, embarrassment, all of this.

So why was it so frightening?

Easy.

Historically speaking, I have no problems. We have no problems. We live long lives surrounded by indoor toilets, penicillin, air-conditioning, birth control, smartphones. Everyone has great teeth. Consider that everything that George Washington accomplished in his life, he accomplished while experiencing horrible tooth decay. I have had toothaches once or twice in my life and they left me completely incapacitated for
days
. I could barely do laundry. Meanwhile George lost all his teeth and managed to win a war and start a country.

You would think that this lack of actual complaints would make us happier and more confident. But no. Instead, we have become allergic to things that didn’t used to bother us at all. We’re acutely focused on minor inconveniences. We’re terrified of commitment the way our ancestors used to be terrified of mammoths. I have never seen commitment spear anyone on a tusk and leave him to bleed out slowly in a corner of the cave while wind howls around him. No matter. It scares us just the same. Embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers is literally one of the worst things that can happen to us. It’s in the slot where polio used to be. Awkwardness, rejection, missing out. We’ve conquered everything else and these constants of human life are all that remain to bedevil us.

Once you get rid of all the biggest problems, once you realize you can avoid them, you start to think you can inoculate yourself against the minor ones too. Phone calls are awkward? Just text all the time. Going up to people and asking them on dates is mortifying? Don’t worry—now there’s an app for that! Not only don’t we have to deal with scurvy on a daily basis, but we don’t have to actually speak to another human in order to order a pizza.

No wonder we think there must be some way to get out of life’s inherent awkwardness, scot-free.

But how do you vaccinate yourself against failure?

One way is to court it. Use irony. Try without really trying.

I’m not the only one I know who grew up doing this. Dancing around awkwardness is something we do. We are vigorously, painfully self-aware princesses waiting to call out the pea under the mattress. Look at all those earnest people throughout history! Hippies, flappers, Napoleon! Look how idiotic they were! We would never look so stupid, unless it was on purpose.

We call attention to awkwardness as soon as it flares up so we can’t be accused of being oblivious. We keep announcing to the
world how little we’ve studied so we can’t be called dumb. We put ourselves down before others can get the chance. Whenever anything seems like it’s on the verge of becoming earnest, we come blasting out with snark.

Don’t be too earnest. Don’t look like you care. Then you’re vulnerable. Life is full of opportunities for rejection, and if you start really trying, you’re going to start really failing. Hard. And it’ll hurt.

So we put on dopey glasses and grimace so no one can tell us we’re not pretty. We drink lousy beer so no one can accuse us of having bad taste. We look stupid on purpose out of fear of looking stupid by accident. We don’t even
try
to dance. Anything to postpone the moment when we are actually going to have to stand up, put ourselves out there, and be told it’s not good enough.

The result of all these carefully assembled layers of irony?

We get to feel that, if we look like idiots, it’s because we meant to. That we never failed, because we never actually tried. They never saw the real us, lurking inside, the ones who could have done it, if they’d wanted to.

But after a point that’s a pretty thin satisfaction.

And the trade-off is brutal. You never get to know if you would have made it or not. Maybe you wouldn’t have looked stupid. Maybe you’d have been incredible.

So why not take the leap? We’re all weird. We’re all awkward. We’re all bound to fail from time to time. It’s in our DNA as human beings . . . along with a certain innate wariness of mammoths.

Some are born awkward. Some achieve awkwardness. Some have awkwardness thrust upon them.

In my case, it was all three.

I am not boasting when I say this. I am simply stating a fact.

Just to give you a general sense of my Supreme Capacity for Awkwardness, here is a casebook of five of the most awkward things that I have ever done. What strikes me about these, in retrospect, is that in every case I was genuinely trying to
avoid
awkwardness. I remember looking at each of these situations, as it began. “This is going to be awkward,” I said to myself each time. “I had better think of a clever way around this.”

That was the key to all of these scenarios. I really thought I was making it better.

I was not.

Problem: Couple having public fight directly in front of me.

Awkwardness Level: 3

Solution: Pretend to be insane.

I was standing in line to get frozen yogurt. There was a couple fighting. Loudly. I couldn’t help noticing them. Possibly I was staring, just a little.

The man noticed me. “You see?” he said. “People are staring.”

“I don’t care if they
are
staring,” the woman said.

“I’m so sorry you have to witness this,” the man said, turning to me directly.

I froze. Well, I thought. I have two options. I can engage with them, or I can pretend to be an insane person.

I fixed my eyes on the middle distance. “Reuben,” I said, distinctly, “Reuben, send the cattle home.”

It was at this point that I realized that they were in line in front of me and we would be stuck together for some time. I could not, I reasoned, abandon ship now. I spent the next ten minutes repeating, at intervals, “Reuben, Reuben, send the cattle home.”

I was committed. There was clearly no other option. I could not simply return things to the pre-Reuben-send-the-cattle-home status quo. So I went with it.

It was a very long ten minutes.

Problem: Want to ask someone out.

Awkwardness Level: 7

Solution: Have a robot do it.

In high school, I took it into my head to invite my friend Mark to a dance. Too intimidated to call him in person, I decided it would be easier to use text-to-speech software to ask for me. All I’d have to do was hold the phone up next to the computer, and a reassuring mechanical voice would request Mark’s presence at the winter formal.

I figured there was no way that this plan could possibly go wrong.

The one thing I had not planned for was that Mark’s father would answer the phone instead of Mark. The instant someone picked up, I hit
PLAY
.

“Greetings. This is an automated message on behalf of Alexandra Petri to request Mark’s presence at the National Cathedral School winter formal—”

“What’s going on?” Mr. Parker said into the phone. “Hello? Hello?”

“—dance on Saturday, December the—”

“Hello? Who is this? Hello?”

“Please indicate your acceptance or refusal by saying—”

“Who are you? What is this?”

This was not going as I had intended. I allowed the message to conclude, then hung up the phone, in disarray. I steeled myself to call back to explain what was going on.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Parker,” I said. “That creepy machine you just heard was actually me! It’s Alexandra, from youth group! I just thought it might be a more efficient way of asking Mark to the formal. You know, like you do.”

It took me a while to explain my logic. I kept stressing the “convenience” and “efficiency” of my technique. There was less risk for everyone! If anyone got rejected, it wouldn’t be me! It would be the robotic Dance Invite voice. That made perfect sense. Nobody’s feelings would get hurt if a robot intermediary was used!

Mark wound up attending the dance, but only after I had apologized to his parents for having a robotic voice call their house to demand their son’s presence, something I now realize is a total hostage nightmare that gets visited only on Liam Neeson characters in movies.

Problem: Want to
avoid
going out with someone.

Awkwardness Level: 8

Solution: Sabotage date.

A guy on whom I was not particularly keen had invited me on a second date. Just saying no seemed rude, somehow. And I’d heard the Gradual Contact Fade was frowned on. How to avoid this?

“I know!” I said. “I should go on this date, and I should just be as awkward as possible, so he’ll be able to reject me instead! No hard feelings for anyone!”

I put it in my calendar as Sabotage Date.

“That is a terrible idea,” my friends said, not for the first time. “Just say ‘I’d prefer not to go on a second date with you, but I would like to be friends.’”

“NO!” I said. “This will be easier. Trust me.”

I showed up at the Thai restaurant an hour late.

“It’s okay,” he said brightly. “I read Wikipedia in the car.”

My plan of attack was simple. I would demonstrate enough nervous tics to alarm a yak. “Who is this strange, gesticulating bundle of terror?” he would murmur to himself. “Check, please!”

I began adjusting the silverware and tapping everything. Adjust place mat. Tap. Move plate. Move plate back. Tap. Tap. Avoid eye contact. Mumble frequently about badgers.

He seemed unfazed. He remained unfazed. We were almost done with the meal and he’d barely batted an eye.

“This is probably a good time to tell you,” he said. “I have Asperger’s.”

“Ah,” I said. My strategy of using social awkwardness as a wedge between us was clearly backfiring. Plan collapsing in ruins around me, I darted into the restroom to regroup.

“You can quit now,” I told my reflection. “Or you can level up.”

I looked around for props. There was nothing but hand soap. I dabbed a healthy portion on my face and did not wipe it off, strolling back into the restaurant with a pearlescent smear on my cheek and as much nonchalance as I could manage.

He seemed unfazed. “Let’s get ice cream,” he suggested.

We strolled out into the street. Pearlescent white liquid trickled slowly down my face. Upon arriving at the Häagen-Dazs, I again darted into the restroom to regroup. I wiped the soap off my face and stared, again, at my reflection.

“You can quit,” I murmured, “or you can level up.”

I cast about me for anything that might prove useful.

Finally I landed on it, and came darting out of the restroom with a plunger clutched in my hand. “I must have this plunger!” I shouted. “We’ve made the bond! Quick! To the exit!”

The man behind the Häagen-Dazs counter shot me a strange look.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Give me the plunger.”

Because I am, fundamentally, law-abiding, I handed it over to him. It is always at moments like this when my nerve deserts me. “Er,” I said, “I will pay you good money for this plunger. I feel as though we’ve really bonded.”

“That’s all right, ma’am,” he said. I got the sense he wanted me to leave.

When I got to the sidewalk, my date was waiting. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll buy you a plunger of your very own.”

I was about ready to give up. But never let it be said that a Petri gave up without a fight.

“I can quit,” I thought to myself, “or I can level up.”

I frowned. What did men find off-putting? Weird sex things, right? Men traditionally disliked strange sex things, I bet. That
would scare him off immediately. (Dazed by my prior failures, I was not, I confess, thinking entirely clearly.)

“Gee,” I said out loud, “you’re nice, but—I am only capable of erotic attraction to badgers. And members of the Beatles. You know, in tandem. Doing, you know. Doing . . .” I struggled to elaborate. My explanation quickly devolved into a series of nervous hand gestures, which looked sort of like reaching into a jar where you think there might be spiders.

Finally I lapsed into silence.

He walked away. I’d done it! I thought. He had rejected me! I’d made it! We’d all go home feeling better about ourselves.

Then I saw him looping back around. He stopped right in front of me. “That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard,” he breathed.

I was defeated. There was nothing for it.

I bowed to him and darted away.

Afterward, I ignored his calls. “I should have done that in the first place,” I told my friends.

“No,” they said, wincing. “No, that’s not really a good strategy either.”

Problem: The world is full of injustice.

Awkwardness Level: 5? This is not really “awkward” so much as “unjust” or “bad.”

Solution: Become a one-woman vigilante.

Growing up I watched
America’s Most Wanted
religiously each week, hoping I would see a fugitive and be able to make a difference. Saturday nights at nine were sacrosanct.

COPS
would end. The “Bad Boys” credit music would start to
play. (“Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?”) and then—whoosh! Zoom! Onomatopoeic noises!—a Big Shield with an Eagle on It would come flying in.

“Welcome to
America’s Most Wanted
,” John Walsh would say, dignified in his leather jacket and gray hair. “Tonight we’re continuing our fight. We’re on the MANhunt for some wanted sex traffickers.”

“Eeugh,” my mother would say. “Eeugh, how do you watch this?”

“Shh,” I said.

On the screen, a naked tearful woman was running down a highway as cars swerved and honked. She had just escaped from a kidnapper’s van, using courage and ingenuity. (Never, John Walsh reminded us, try to sell your wedding dress in the classified ads. This is what will happen.)

“I hate this,” my mother put in. “This is awful.”

“No,” I would say. “This is REAL LIFE. This is AMAZING. We are going to make a difference.”

On the TV, John Walsh talked compassionately to a man who was convinced that his vanished daughter had become a stripper. The man now spent all his days walking down the Vegas streets handing out flyers. Some footage of this followed. The passersby seemed somewhat baffled.

“Please,” the father said into the camera. “Crystal, just come home. We don’t care what you’ve done.”

“You realize this is Saturday night at nine,” my mom said. “Are you sure there isn’t a high school party with alcohol and boys you would rather be attending? I could drive you.”

“That’s not the POINT,” I said, folding my arms. “I’m going to make a difference. Like that hotel clerk last week who identified the bank robber.”

We fell silent as the screen showed us a reenactment of an elderly Indian mother being mowed down by a white van on the morning
of her son’s wedding. Much of
America’s Most Wanted
is basically anti-van propaganda.

“I can’t stand this,” my mother would say for the sixth time.

“Then why are you watching?”

“We’re bonding.” To be fair, this was how bonding worked in our family. We would find some activity that only one of us enjoyed and all three of us would do it. Bonding was not supposed to be fun.

“Shh,” I said, “they’re doing the Fifteen Seconds of Shame, profiles of wanted fugitives. I’ve got to commit their vital statistics to memory so I can call them in.”

That was the dream. I wanted to be on
America’s Most Wanted
. Not as a criminal, of course. I used to prison tutor and I am positive I could not make it behind bars, because my tattoos would all support concepts like “grammar” and “the Oxford comma,” and those don’t really bring much gang backing. (“Nice tear tattoo!” “Actually, it’s a comma.”)

No. I wanted to make a difference. I would spot a criminal, like that vigilant hotel clerk had, and I would call 1-800-Crime-TV. Remember, John Walsh said, you CAN remain anonymous!

As we drove down to visit my grandparents in Florida that Christmas, I checked out all the wanted fugitives along our route on the
America’s Most Wanted
Web site. “Could we stop in Miami?” I suggested, timidly. “There’s a bouncer with prominent barbed wire tattoos that I think I’ve got a very good visual handle on.”

My father shrugged at my mother, who gave him the parental look that translates to “What’s going to happen when she gets out of the house?”

I knew what would happen. I was going to get my man.

When I got to college up in Boston, I soon fell into my groove, watching
America’s Most Wanted
on the dorm TV on Saturday nights, staying sharp and vigilant, like a knife that is also vigilant.

And then, one afternoon, I saw him.

He was walking down the cobbled street looking for all the world like another law-abiding citizen among dozens of other law-abiding citizens. But I knew who he was. I knew what he had done.

I can still remember the reenactment footage of him going on a murderous rampage, putting his daughter into a plastic bag and tossing her in the river. There he was with that toothy smile, the thinning brown hair that looked sort of like the top of an eggplant, that corrugated wrinkly forehead.

I followed a few steps behind him, hoping he wouldn’t notice, but he gave me a look, casually, like a “You following me?” sort of look. I tried to give him a look back that said, “Hell yeah, I followed you because of your raw sexual magnetism,” instead of the Inspector Javert–like Glower of Justice I was currently sporting.

I looked forward to calling the hotline to announce: “I have seen the man—what’s his name—the murder guy—with the bag—and the face—and I’m a tipster and a hero now!” And they would totally know who I was talking about. And they would tip off the local police department, where a rugged old sergeant with a mustache who was all but retired except he couldn’t let this one case go would sit bolt upright at his desk and he would say PARTNER, CALL THE TEAM. WE’VE GOT A REAL 3-9, and they would show up outside the dorm and surround it and take out the creepy man in handcuffs and everyone would say “What’s all this commotion? Was it really him? He seemed so quiet! We never suspected!” and I’d shrug and say, “Yeah, just a little thing I like to call Making a Difference,” and then
America’s Most Wanted
would call me up and I’d get to be on the air (but with my face obscured in case the guy came busting out later seeking vengeance) and John Walsh would shake my hand and say, “Tell me about your courage,” and I’d say, “Well, John, I have
been watching
America’s Most Wanted
for the better part of my life, and I just knew I could make a difference.” And then I could go off somewhere and die contented, and all those nights I’d spent watching
America’s Most Wanted
instead of familiarizing myself with nineties culture like everyone else wouldn’t have been a big old waste because I’d brought CLOSURE to a FAMILY.