A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (11 page)

He wasn’t dead or from 1830, but I was willing to overlook these deficiencies because he looked like Haley Joel Osment. He had almond eyes, which is something I have always wanted to be able to write in a sentence describing a real human being. Now I just need to meet someone with “bedroom eyes” or “roseleaf lips” and I will be all set to go.

We were sitting by the campfire one night under the pines, watching the flames die, poking with a stick at the glass bottle someone had allowed to fall in among the piled logs. Over at the bandstand, music started up. There was a dance. Fiddle tunes wafted over to us as the light leached slowly out of the sky and the fireflies sparked to life in the pine trees.

I smiled at Winfield in what I thought was a winning manner and flexed my personality sensually. Given that I was wearing a man’s full Civil War uniform, white shirt tucked into giant baggy pants with suspenders and a cap covering my hair, I had to rely a lot more on my personality and a lot less on my raw physical magnetism than usual. I fidgeted with my suspenders. The pants were much too large for me. They hung baggily off my hips. Even under the hat you could tell I was a girl. My growth spurt had showed up early and decisively, like Buford’s cavalry at Gettysburg. I was wearing a training bra by fifth grade, and I got to stand at the back of all the class photos. By middle school we had begun to sort our heights out, unlike the boys who were just getting the uneven growth spurts that made them look like they came from different breeds—clumps of dachshunds standing between gangly greyhounds and the occasional malamute, yet all technically classed under the heading “dog.”

But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was lost in Winfield’s eyes, like certain parts of the Army of Northern Virginia had been lost during critical portions of the Battle of the Wilderness.

“Let’s go check out the dance,” Winfield suggested.

I acquiesced.

I began to feel the kind of nervous, electric excitement that people liken to butterflies taking off and landing and beating around your stomach. I felt the way cannons surely felt when you had packed them with powder and canister according to specifications and a man was standing next to them holding the string that would ignite the fuse.

I felt the way Atlanta felt after Sherman got through with it, by which I mean “my entire body was on fire,” not “deeply resentful of all Northerners now and forever and hey whoops there go all my landmarks.”

I felt the way a torpedo cracker probably felt right before Christmas morning, if you had to put a fine point on it.

•   •   •

We neared the bandstand, talking of this and that. The moon was up. Damn, I thought, glancing up at it. I began to see what all those poets had been getting at.

Maybe we would dance.

No, that was stupid. Dancing was stupid. At dances, I was always the person who stood flush against the clammy auditorium wall shouting what I took to be insightful remarks over the blasts of *NSYNC. (“GETTYSBURG WAS LONGSTREET’S FAULT!” “Who?” “LONGSTREET!”) I couldn’t dance. I especially couldn’t Virginia Reel. It looked intricate and impossible, like knitting but with humans.

“You don’t want to
dance
, do you?” Winfield said. He said the word like it was something unpleasant you had to pick up with tweezers.

“No!” I said. “No, sir. No, thank you.”

The music continued to waft up from the bandstand. The dancers completed their reel and began to drift to and fro in the moonlight, couples dotting the grass, their shadows mingling. A firefly flickered on and off.

We stopped under a tree, and as we talked I became aware that we were gradually moving closer, like the Union and Confederate armies converging on Gettysburg in June of 1863, clumsily and without the usual cavalry reconnaissance.

“Alexandra,” Winfield said. He leaned toward me.

“Yes?” I leaned in as well, making certain that my feet were pointing toward him. I had read that pointing your feet toward someone was a sign of interest. The moonlight caught on his upturned face. This is how it’s going to go, I thought. This is how it’s going to go! Was this, I wondered, how General Pickett felt at the
start of his fateful two-mile walk? A little nervous, sure, but at least confident that his hair looked good.
*

He leaned closer. I leaned closer.

“What do you think about world politics?” he asked.

“Ahmrrgh,” I managed, swallowing. I began the long lean backward. No,
that
was how General Pickett felt.

•   •   •

The battle itself was uneventful. Marching and more marching through buggy dry grass with an authentic nineteenth-century fabric-covered canteen clanking against your thigh. Plenty of time to ponder exactly what had gone wrong.

For me the essence of reenacting is those moments when things could have gone differently. If the troops had just swept over the crest of the hill. If. If. If only Ewell had moved. If only I had moved. If only someone had moved.

But no one did, and that was just the way it went.

The funny thing about this embarrassing piece of my past is that it coincides with an embarrassing piece of
America’s
past—that ill-advised fixation with the Lost Cause, the One That Got Away, historically speaking, the abusive ex who suddenly became the sum of his politest moments and most dashing cavalry maneuvers because you didn’t actually have to live with him.

•   •   •

Winfield was just the first in what would be a long series of romantic anticlimaxes; I’d reach what George W. Bush in his memoir calls a Decision Point, and—nothing.

“You’re intimidating,” my mother reassured me. “I think guys find you intimidating.” She made me sound like a heavily fortified
position with lots of Napoleon cannons peering over my battlements. Like Vicksburg, I thought. Of course even Vicksburg had fallen eventually. I just needed to wait for Union troops to blockade my harbor as part of the Anaconda Plan.

Anaconda Plan. That sounded like it could be a way in. “Hey,” you could say to a guy, “is that your Anaconda plan or are you just happy to see me?” This was a lot better than the other Civil War–related pickup lines I had come up with. (“Hey, are you the fire that killed General Stonewall Jackson? Because you seem friendly!” “He’s a total John Brown—crazy, bearded, but definitely hung.”)

•   •   •

With time, the passion faded. Every so often a trapping of my former life would flare up unexpectedly, like an appendix.

“Don’t send your college application from THAT e-mail address,” my mother said, as I fired up RELee.

“Why not?” I asked.

She gave me a look. “They’ll think you’re some kind of horrible racist.”

“I’m not!” I said. “And Robert E. Lee wasn—”

She gave me another look.

“Oh my God,” I said. “You’re right.”

•   •   •

I got a new e-mail address. Robert E. Lee faded back into the past, in my life if not in our nation’s history.

I went to college, made new friends. We were all grown-up, we assured one another. Not like then.

“I had
such
embarrassing celebrity crushes in middle school,” my new friends said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “We’ve all been there.”

God, that first infatuation is embarrassing. Even the ones that
aren’t
doomed from the start.

It’s all so much worse now, with the Internet there. The Internet is like having an elephant for a drinking buddy. It knows all your most mortifying secrets—and it
never
forgets.
You know that somewhere out there, always, lumbering along the savanna, is a record of every embarrassing thing you have ever done or thought, unless you’ve had the presence of mind to mortify yourself exclusively in longhand.

But you never think like that at the time. This is your first love. You
have
to carve it into your screen names and tattoo it on your Tumblr. You don’t even care how it looks.

When you love it, you love it so much that all you can see are the bright spots. You love it so much because you have filled it up with little pieces of yourself, all the brightest bits, because that is what love means, that first, that most shocking, that most unrequited love—when you first find yourself in someone else, or think you do.

This is the thing that comes burning out of you, this is the thing you have to talk about again and again and again, it is the song you never tire of playing, the count creeping up into the thousands of thousands, the page you keep turning back to read over again.

But anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it. That is love’s curse and power—you miss all the parts that drive everyone else bonkers. Then one day it’s over and you notice: He gurgles when he talks. She’s not as funny as you thought. He’s a Confederate general.

For example.

One of these days, I’m going to kill Alex Trebek.

I mean it.

Jeopardy!
has a rule that prevents you from returning as a contestant so long as Trebek remains the host.

I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it. But one morning he’s going to wake up and there I’ll be, perched over him. Looming. Ominous. “This is FINAL Jeopardy!” I will say.

“Put the knife down,” he’ll say.

“No!” I’ll bellow. “In the form of a question!”

“Would you kindly put the knife down?”

“Less supercilious,” I will hiss.

This will go on for some time. I want to make him suffer.

It’s not that I’m bitter. Not exactly.

But let me start at the beginning.

Once, I was on
Jeopardy!

The process for getting on
Jeopardy!
is simple but heavy on the nail-biting. First, you take an online test. Then you wait. Then, if you pass, and you’re lucky, you get invited to audition.

I was lucky. The e-mail told me to show up at the St. Regis hotel, a swank-ish spot in downtown DC. The auditions took place inside
a conference room deep in the windowless bowels of the hotel. (If I have learned one thing in my comparatively brief time on Earth it is that every conference room in every hotel in the world looks completely identical. The hotels can be on opposite ends of the earth, but the second you walk through the conference room doors, you are at the same folding table (circular or rectangular) on the same carpet under the same lights on the same metal chairs staring at the same PowerPoint, and someone is offering you the same ice water in the same squat goblet that looks like a wineglass that let itself go.) In this particular conference room, the tables were rectangular and arranged in rows so we could take a test at them.

Everyone else there was an actual adult and looked much more nervous than I felt. I had the total unshakable confidence of someone with absolutely no idea of what she was getting into. (There is a microscopically thin line between being unintimidated by anything you encounter and not having stopped to Google it first.)

The audition consists of another written test and a live practice round of play, during which they determine if you have enough personality to be on television. I didn’t know exactly how much personality they wanted. Given that you frequently see people on air with all the vigor and charm of cakes that have been left out in the rain, I wondered what the bar was.

They asked each of us the same two questions: What are your hobbies, and what would you do with the prize money.

The man ahead of me was middle-aged, with receding hair.

“What are your hobbies?” they asked.

“I collect kidney stones,” he informed them.

“Ah,” they said. “And, uh, what—what would you do with the prize money?”

“If I won, I would use the money to pay for a lysterectomy on my ninth kidney stone, which I postponed to come here to audition.”

Compared to him, I seemed completely ready for television.

“I am a
Star Wars
buff,” I told them. “And I play the accordion and I do stand-up, and if I won I would probably waste the money on one of those life-size breathing statues of Darth Vader.”

This was true. I had seen it at the Sharper Image in the mall, and I had fallen for it instantly. It was far out of my price range, but that didn’t stop me from salivating in its general direction as I waited for them to kick me off the free massage chairs.

“Or college,” I added, a bit lamely.

It didn’t matter. They called me a few months later and informed me that I was on.

I would like to say that I spent the months between getting the call and my taping date intensely preparing.

But why study? As a trivia buff, my
entire life
was preparation for my appearance on
Jeopardy!

A love of trivia is not something you decide to pursue. Miscellanea simply cling to you like burrs. You find them in your socks after long walks. You wander into bookstores and come out hours later with stray facts clutching at your elbow.

My mind is a disaster zone full of a great mess of facts. I know when Oscar Wilde was born (October 16, 1854) and when he died (November 30, 1900) and what he allegedly had to say about it (“Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.”) I know that the working title of
Gone With The Wind
was
Tote the Weary Load
. I know that Ernest Hemingway’s penis was larger than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, at least according to Ernest Hemingway. I know that the painter James Whistler failed out of West Point because he began his final examination with the words “Silicon is a gas.” I can tell you that there was a guy named Colonel Jasper who distinguished himself in the defense of Fort Moultrie on June 28, 1776, at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, although I mistrust this fact because I heard it from a place mat.

A better way of putting this might be that I’m a fact-hoarder. If there were some sort of physical external manifestation of all the stray quotations and bizarre bits of trivia that go banging around my memory, my family would be staging an intervention. They would come to the house with a big bin and several specialists from cable.

“You don’t really need to know anything about Rutherford B. Hayes’ wife,” they would say reasonably, loading that fact into a garbage bag.

“They called her Lemonade Lucy!” I would yell, clinging to it. “She was a teetotaler who served nonalcoholic drinks at White House functions!”

To love trivia is to be a hoarder. “You never know when this might come in handy,” we insist, holding up the factual equivalent of a dead cat impaled on a plastic fork. “See? Fuliginous. It’s a word meaning ‘sooty.’”

Maybe our quality of life would be higher if we didn’t have to step around these facts on our way out in the evenings. But in the meantime, we can go on
Jeopardy!
That’s the golden carrot shining at the end of the tunnel, to mix some metaphors into a nice fine hash.

•   •   •

Some people say you can’t study for
Jeopardy!
If you don’t already know a given piece of information, there is absolutely no way you will know it on the instinctual level that’s required in order to succeed on the show. Your brain will clank around trying to remember Edgar Allan Poe’s minor works and eventually produce a few names that turn out to be Lifetime movies, and meanwhile everyone else will have buzzed in.

Other people say that you should, in fact, study. I split the difference by not studying and feeling vaguely guilty about it.

I tried, a couple of times, to restore my instinctual familiarity with broad general topics. I went to the grocery store and wandered through the produce aisle, carefully reading the names of all the brands of apple. But I knew what my true blind spot was. Sports.

Sports were my Achilles’ heel. I was the captain of my school’s trivia team and every time we showed up at a tournament and the category turned to sports, we sighed and sagged into our seats. The only thing I knew about sports was that something existed called the Dick Butkus Award. I was not sure what it was for. “For most unintentionally homoerotic sports moment of the year?” I suggested. “For being the tightest end?”

After the sixth or seventh repetition this remark ceased to amuse.

It’s not that I don’t know sports because I’m a girl. I don’t know sports AND I’m a girl. I know about plenty of Historically Male subjects. Give me a napkin and a pencil and I can reconstruct the Battle of Gettsyburg for you, with fishhooks of troop placements and side cavalry movements and everything. Sports just never sang to me, except for one time when I saw a musical about baseball. But none of the information in
Damn Yankees!
was current. The Senators no longer existed, and “sell your soul to Satan in song and then sort of stand there during a big dance sequence” is not actually how you get to the World Series.

It wasn’t that I had no sports experience. I’d played volleyball. Well, “played” was strong. I’d provided some very strong support from the bench. “Spike!” I would yell. “Did we just complete the Transcontinental Railroad? Because that was a GOLDEN SPIKE!”

“Stop,” our coach said.

“That serve must be World War I pilot Manfred von Richthofen! Because it was an ACE!”

“Please stop.”

But they never asked about volleyball, anyway.

Sports, as far as I could tell, were just a way to feel really manly while wearing colorful socks.

Even after studying several books with names like Mad Dog Lists the Most Athletic Sport Truths, the most I could say about baseball was that you could get up during a game to go get snacks and then run into someone you hadn’t seen in a long time, talk to him, hit it off, share your hopes and dreams, decide to start a life together, walk down the aisle after a reasonable courtship, give birth to a son, watch that son grow into a man you could be proud of, and then go back to your seat and nothing would have changed. Possibly someone would have one or two more balls. Football I had no grip on at all. You could tell me almost anything about it and I would believe you. “That’s a first down,” you could say, “and he got that because of nepotism.” “Sure,” I would say.

Soccer was like that, but the people who got angry about it were thinner.

That was as far as my studies went.

The same “They” who said that you could not study for
Jeopardy!
also said that it all came down to buzzer technique. Corner a disgruntled
Jeopardy!
loser in a bar and he will maintain that he knew all the answers, he just couldn’t get the dang buzzer to work the way Ken Jennings did.
Jeopardy!
contestants have penned numerous books on this subject, with titles like
Buzzer Zen
and
You Know the Buzzer, but Does the Buzzer Know You?
and
What Ken Knew
. For the next few months, I stood in front of the television watching
Jeopardy!
and practicing with a retractable pen. Click-click. Click-click-click-click-click. It was like having an angry cricket in the room.

The trick was that Trebek’s contract mandated that he got to finish reading the question before anyone buzzed in. If you buzzed in before he stopped talking, your buzzer locked for several critical fractions of a second.
Buzzer Zen
said you needed those seconds.

I knew this would be a problem. I’d been on a local quiz show called
It’s Academic
where my strategy was to buzz in as early as I possibly could, as soon as I had a vague inkling of what the question might be. Sometimes this worked. More often, it did not. But it was my only weapon.

I had appeared on the show yearly ever since I was a freshman, but the teetering elderly host, Mac McGarry, who looked like an amiable rectangle, still had difficulty pronouncing my name. “Pea-try,” I reminded him. “Like a vegetable that’s making an effort.”

“Ah,” he said.

I wondered how Trebek would like that mnemonic.

•   •   •

My biggest fear was that I would show up at the studio in California and the Kidney Stone guy from auditions would be there too, with a little jar. “I brought my lucky one,” he would whisper.

But when I got there, there was no one carrying a kidney stone. Openly, anyway.

All the contestants for the week are directed to the same hotel in Culver City. It was like summer camp, if your summer camp was full of people who muttered threatening facts at you in the elevator. (“Henry VIII beheaded both his second and fifth wives.”)

The actual day of the taping dawned bright and clear. All the
Jeopardy!
contestants boarded a very tense shuttle to ride to the taping and back. It was like being in one of those tumbrels that carted people to the guillotine during the French Revolution, except you had to ride back with them afterward.

On the shuttle with me and my mother (who had come along for the ride) was a one-armed man who had booked an entire week’s stay in LA on the assumption that he would win. “I don’t want to have the hassle of travel,” he explained.

My mother, on the safer assumption that I would not win—or, at
least, that I certainly would win no more games than could be taped in a day—had bought us flights back for that same weekend.

The ride to the taping offered the nerdiest one-upmanship I had ever heard in my life. Obviously I don’t remember any of the dialogue exactly (even Thucydides said that the best you could do was come up with words that seemed appropriate to the occasion) but here is my general sense of how it went.

Person A: I’ve been studying types of trees.

Person B: Sure, types of trees. Larch. Poplar. Chestnut.

Person A: Maple.

Person B: Willow.

Person A:
Sophora japonica
.

Person B: Of course. That’s basic. Mistletoe.

Person C: (who has been waiting for this chance) Isn’t that more of an EPIPHYTE?

Person D: (hastily) Frankly I think we’re better served by not studying. I’ve been focusing on my buzzer Zen.

Person E: Absolutely.

Person D: (unable to stop himself) Although I did look over all the flags of all the countries past and present and fictional and dreamed-of and certain insignias floated but not approved by the UN.

Person F: And don’t forget ESPERANTO!

Person C: (says something in Esperanto, a nonexistent language that some guy made up in the 1880s)

Person F: (says something obscene and hurtful in Esperanto, to which Person C has no idea how to respond)

Person G, who has said nothing up to this point and is desperate to make his mark: (starts speaking Elvish)

(Everyone turns to glower at him.)

Person A: That’s not Esperanto.

Person B: That’s
Elvish.

Person C: This isn’t
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
!

(Dismissive laughter)

Person G: (recedes from the conversation in shame, pretending to be suddenly very interested in something that is going on outside the window)

Me: So how about this LA weather, huh?

Person A: I was on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
, but I thought the caliber of question was frankly beneath me.