A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (13 page)

Most of my memories these days are like that—stashed on the outside, strewn carelessly in texts and GChats. “I can always search the archive,” I murmur. “It’s out there if I ever care to look for it.” But you know what happens the moment you say “I’m going to put this somewhere special, where I’ll remember it.” You might as well say, “I’m never going to see this again.”

But when you can take everything with you, you’re no longer forced to choose the things you cannot leave behind. You no longer have to carry anything with you, at all.

•   •   •

In theory this was the point of all this wonderful new technology: to store everything externally and free our minds to think great thoughts. Throw a stone in a high school or university and you hit someone who is pleased to say that We Have Moved Away from Rote Memorization of Facts Toward Frolicking Freely in the Fields of Pure Thought. You don’t have to learn what to think. You just have to learn How to Think. Then you will be prepared in the unlikely event that you ever run across a fact.

Maybe it’s time to let go, embrace the free mental space.

Been on
Jeopardy!
Done that. Better clean house and approach the future with an open mind. Maybe trivia is over and I need to accept it.

But that’s the trouble with trivia. You can’t get rid of it. It chooses you, not the other way around. You think I really want to know the names of all these
Law & Order
guest stars? I’d much rather remember the song we sang, or any of a myriad of moments that count.

Instead, I get these odds and ends. I can’t choose to remember
the hundreds of ordinary wonderful days when nothing much happened, the faces that I saw every day that didn’t change—it is only the moments that are out of the ordinary that stick their claws in, the nights spent in unfamiliar rooms, the jolt of a phone call with bad news that pulls you up gasping like a hook yanking you to the surface. Instead of saving the good parts, the ordinary warmth of days, I remember trivia. I have to go through my life constantly aware that starfish eat things with their anuses.

It seems unfair.

But maybe there’s a point, after all.

Ken Jennings thinks there is. “Even when machines are doing more of our thinking and remembering for us, it’ll be more useful to have the wealth of information,” he said. “To make informed decisions about anything in life, you need to have knowledge. If you need a Google search, you’re still at a disadvantage.”

The trouble with only learning how to think is that without the necessary roughage of fact you wind up backing into your opinions. You don’t start out with a healthy ballast of information and so you can assume that there is something optional about facts, that they can be produced or dredged up at a moment’s notice and made to agree with you. You go hunting for facts that support your case. “Why is this good?” you Google. “Why is this bad?” You induce instead of deducing. Facts become a kind of parsley garnish to your premade opinion.

Life with them is a pain. But life without them? Unthinkable.

•   •   •

At least, that’s what I tell myself.

You have to tell yourself something.

Once
Jeopardy!
is closed to you, a big life full of trivia night sliders and wings and nothing to do with your facts stretches out ahead. Losers can’t appear on it again until the host is gone.

So these are my alternatives. Accept my increasing irrelevance in a world where trivia is something you entrust to IBM’s Watson or your phone, where even the highest-level human beings can’t hope to compete.

Or try to find a way back in.

And as long as the host lives, what can I hope to do?

That’s why one of us has to go, Trebek.

It’s nothing personal.

“It’s not really a debutante ball.”

That was the first thing my grandmother said when she announced that I was going to have a debutante ball.

“Your mother had one. She knows. It’s more of a nice family party, a sort of coming out into society.”

“Okay” I said as I looked up from my Ancient Greek textbook. “I’ve always wanted to come out.”

My mother and grandmother exchanged a nervous look. This, the look said, was what came of sending me to an all-girls’ school. Our school motto was “Hey, a Few Years of Wondering Whether You Might Be Attracted to People of the Same Sex Is a Small Price to Pay for Confidence in Your Math Skills.” (I am pretty confident in my math skills.)

“You’ll need two male escorts,” my grandmother said, moving on quickly. “They’re going to need red sashes, and you’ll have to wear a floor-length white gown for the Presentation of the Daughters. Or your aunt can arrange escorts for you. I’ve got her on the lookout for smart young men.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a debutante ball at all.”

“And gloves,” my grandmother said. “You’re going to need long white gloves.”

I frowned back down at the Greek textbook. Truth be told, I had been waiting for this moment my whole life.

Everyone has one erroneous belief that gets him through the chilly February mornings of the soul. Some people think the Rapture’s bound to strike at any moment. Then your neighbors who wouldn’t hang out with you because you kept speaking in tongues will finally get what’s coming to them! Then all your hours chanting psalms and waving palms and avoiding shellfish and sex and sexy shellfish will let you blend straight in with the heavenly throng. Other people get really into Survivalism, operating under the assumption that civilization is hanging by a fragile thread that is liable to snap at any moment, and that when it does, only the people who have spent hours camping in the dank woods and learning how to identify poisonous mushrooms and dress a deer carcass while fighting zombies with one arm tied behind their back will make it out alive.

I have no delusions about my ability to make it through a Rapture or apocalypse of any kind. In disaster movies, I am the person getting mowed down by killer hornets in the very first frame. Survive in the wild? I can barely survive in the grocery store. Until this week, I thought that dressing a deer carcass meant putting it in a little outfit. The only way I can tell if a mushroom is edible or not is: If it is in the woods, it will kill you, and if it is in a Trader Joe’s in a little cardboard tub covered in plastic wrap, it is probably safe to eat. (This system would not hold up very well in a postapocalyptic wasteland.)

I know all this. My belief had nothing to do with that.

My sustaining conviction was that if I ever traveled back in time, I’d be cool.

I certainly wasn’t cool in the present. I was sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen, teaching myself Ancient Greek over the Christmas break. At social gatherings with people my own age, I stuck out like a sore thumb in a gathering of cool fingers with an unlimited command of pop culture. Crouched over a copy of
Jane Eyre
, I had missed all the basic cable moments that defined everyone else’s childhoods. Clarissa had explained nothing to me. Why was it always Degrassi that they wanted to talk about, and never Admiral de Grasse, the French fleet commander around the Battle of Yorktown? While people around me started debating the plot twists on
The O.C.
, I left lunch early to sit by myself reading
Moby-Dick
in the vestibule.

The past was my consolation. I knew with every fiber of my being that if I was ever seated at a dinner table next to Oscar Wilde, I’d be able to engage him in conversation for the whole evening. Or, heck, Dorothy Parker. I wasn’t picky.

I just had to make it back there. My vision of this heaven looked something like the wall pattern in the café at Barnes & Noble, where D. H. Lawrence is saying something to Thomas Hardy while James Joyce knocks knees with Virginia Woolf. Depending on time period, the exact combination varied. 1865 would give me Victor Hugo and Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, who’d once stayed at Dickens’ house for a few weeks (“which seemed to the family ages,” Dickens complained). Go back further, and I could grab a couch next to Plato and Alcibiades at the Symposium. My Greek wasn’t quite ready, but I bet I could pick up most of it from body language. Wherever it was, I’d sit down and, for once, be right at home.

Well, maybe not quite. The trouble with all my time travel dreams was that I was, well, female. Louis CK does a great bit about how impossible time traveling is if you’re anything but a white man. He has a point. Land pre-1900, and you’re bound to have a very
tough time of it, losing your rights to land and property and the vote and even pants.

But—wasn’t that a small price to pay for finally being with people who shared my base of reference?

So I became a time travel survivalist, prepping constantly for the moment when some benign anachronist would realize my distress and come spirit me away. After the house was dark, I lay awake under the covers reading my way through the collected works of Aristophanes, boning up on the Athenian politicians who had been the butts of fifth century BC jokes. (Get it together, Cleisthenes!) It wasn’t homework, in the traditional sense. But I knew I had to do it anyway. I had to be ready.

•   •   •

Outside, on my grandmother’s patio, my cousins were texting their girlfriends. How they had girlfriends already, I had no idea. We were barely into ninth grade. The ball was years away—not scheduled until college—and we clearly didn’t need to find dates yet. What were they doing? Evidently their middle school experiences had been vastly different from mine.

I was still recovering from middle school. My reading had offered few insights on how to navigate it. Captain Ahab, for instance, went to zero middle school dances. I supposed I could share a few of the numerous fun facts that I had learned about whale sperm in chapter ninety-four, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” but it was difficult to yell over 98 Degrees. Rudderless, I spent many a freighted hour in my bedroom pondering what I was going to wear. I didn’t own a pair of jeans, and I knew you could get impregnated up a skirt by mistake if you danced too close (or something). Fortunately, I had a lot of loose-fitting khakis that had been treated with Scotchgard, so the building blocks of a winning outfit were there. What revealing tank top or halter top, I pondered, would I wear over my khakis?
The blue one with stripes? The red one with flowers on it? Should I wear a pencil behind my ear, as was my custom on school days, or omit it?

Finally I decided on something (usually a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt) and pulled on my brown Merrell loafers, which added an extra inch to my height just in case any middle school boys were having doubts about not approaching me.

People tell you to “Leave room for Jesus” at these dances. To be safe, I gave Jesus the whole dance floor to himself, lurking in the corner as far away from the pounding strains of “Bye Bye Bye” as possible. If anyone was hardy enough to ask me to dance, I had prepared a series of talking points. “Gee, how ’bout this lighting! It’s like a reptile tank in here!” “Sorry, whenever I attend a dance it is as though someone flips a switch in my head to ‘boring’!” (I literally wrote this down in my diary at the time as a possible thing to say.)

Everyone else, it seemed, was going to a party afterward with People They Knew. There might be Alcohol there. Someone had even gotten a hotel room and it was going to be Crazy.

I got into the car with my mother and headed home to my books.

•   •   •

Let me pause and note that middle school is terrible. Middle school is when your friends on the softball team mysteriously decide to become your cold, distant acquaintances on the softball team and you spend your time squatting in left field feeling lonely and cold and wondering what you did wrong and tying the grass together into little grass knots. Middle school, in our case, was when we went from “An All-Girls’ School with Uniforms So Everyone Looks the Same Even if You Suspect That Danielle Has Slightly Cooler Shoes” to “An All-Girls’ School Without a Uniform Thereby Exposing the Fact That You Were Wearing Those Brown Men’s Docksides Not by Obligation but Because You Genuinely Thought They Were a
Quality Fashion Choice, and, If Given the Chance You Would Combine Them with Cargo Khakis. Also Sometimes You Wear Vests for No Reason, and Clearly the Abercrombie Crowd Was Correct in Excluding You.”

If I could grab middle schoolers by the ear (hey, you, reading this book—are you anywhere near a middle schooler? If so, grab him or her by the ear for me! Though I take no legal responsibility!), I would tell them this. No one who enjoys middle school is a good person.

Hope for a better experience somewhere else in time was what kept me going. I consoled myself with the thought that, hey, if this were not 2002 but 1902, my dance card would have been bursting at the seams. The past was my equivalent of Hogwarts. It was the fantasy world where all my dreams came true, all my jokes landed, and I could wear a festive tie.

Such visions are always the solace of the uncool. The best way of getting excited about Paradise is to have the worst existence possible. This also means that your idea of Eternal Bliss can be something vague involving harp-playing and chanting in a robe, two activities that seem somewhat lacking after the invention of AC and cable. But if you’re a medieval peasant whose life consists of carrying plague-infested rats from one dung heap to another, almost anything else sounds good!

And compared to middle school, carrying plague-infested rats from one dung heap to another sounded almost appealing. I knew smallpox was no picnic, garderobes would be gross, and I might die in childbirth, but if given the choice between middle school and the Middle Ages, I’d really have had to think it over.

In the meantime, I just had to prepare myself for all possible time jumps as best I could. That was why I was learning Greek.

I’d made some progress. My Ancient Greek was at the precise level where if someone dropped me back in time I would be able to
converse for a few seconds, and then it would just be embarrassing. The only phrase I knew off the top of my head was “Go to Hell, a single, specific time!” so I doubted I could form many lasting friendships.

I frowned down at the exercise. The textbook’s protagonist was an Athenian farmer named Dicaeopolis and he was sitting there on the receiving end of a strange verb.

I knew from studying French that the earliest chapters of a language textbook tended to have the most excitement. People in textbooks start off performing bold, dramatic actions and being very candid about their feelings and possessions. (“I am the king! I am strong!” “I am the queen! I am beautiful!” “You are happy!” “Yes, I am happy!” “We buy an ice cream in the park!” “Give me the big green book!”)

Confrontations are rather elliptical because of everyone’s limited vocabulary. Instead of telling Jean the Gardener that he is getting too close to the princess and he needs to back off, the villainous Corvax has to stride over menacingly and force him to count things.

Corvax: Jean!

Jean: Yes?

Corvax: Forks.

Jean: Forks?

Corvax: How many forks are there? Count them!

Jean: One, two, three, four, five.

Corvax: Plates. How many plates? Count them.

Jean: Two. Four. Six. Eight. Ten. Ten plates.

Corvax: How many cars are there?

Jean: Two. Four. Six. Eight. Eight cars.

Corvax: Nine.

Jean: Nine?

Corvax: You are in error. There are nine cars here. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Nine cars.

•   •   •

Love scenes, on the other hand, ran something like this:

Sylvie: I would like a grapefruit. I like grapefruits! Could you give me a grapefruit, please?

Jean: Here is your grapefruit. I love you.

Sylvie: Look what I have! I have a train ticket, a Walkman, a grapefruit, and a skeleton!

Jean: And me, I have a motorcar! I love you.

Sylvie: I also love you.

•   •   •

The more phrases you learn, the less exciting these people’s lives seem to get. Princesses fall out of the picture altogether and in their place (at least in my case, since our textbook had not been updated in a while), all you have are people dressed in eighties fashions who are having very specific problems with their magnetoscopes, a word I think means “Betamax player.” In the accompanying videos, everyone goes into slow, clearly enunciated hysterics over routine daily problems. “ARE WE GOING TO BREAK DOWN WITH RESPECT TO THE PEUGEOT CAR?” they ask. “UNFORTUNATELY, I BELIEVE THAT YES.” “I WAS SITTING PROGRESSIVELY IN THE BATH WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG. MICHAEL, WHEN
WILL WE GO TO THE DISCOTHEQUE FOR THE SURPRISE PARTY?”

Dicaeopolis in my Ancient Greek textbook never got invited to any discotheques, but he still had his share of adventures. His oxen broke down. He acquired a mule. He farmed. He went into, out of, and around places. Sometimes he went toward them. It was not the most riveting thing that had ever happened, but it was still better than the Latin textbooks, where my friends informed me that the protagonists had been sitting under, near, and around the same clump of trees for the past six months. “For a while,” my friend Marissa confided, “we thought we had gotten them out, but the next chapter they were right back where they started.” It was like
Groundhog Day
with verb forms.

Now I gritted my teeth and stared down at Dicaeopolis. I would learn these verbs, so help me. And when the call came, I’d be ready.

•   •   •

My debutante ball was scheduled for when I was a college sophomore. For years I could see it approaching slowly from a great distance, like one of those ominous lights at the end of long tunnels that they tell you not to walk toward.

I know why I thought it was a good idea: It was bound to be a strange, out-of-time experience that would be good fodder for tales.