Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Author:Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

DECEMBER 2002

“West Virginia!” the therapist at Psychological Services exclaims. “You are a real country girl! You actually grew up there? Like with cows?”

You have made an appointment in an attempt to confess your troubles, specifically your drug abuse, to someone, anyone. But you want to ease into it. You don’t want to be mistaken for someone you’re not (party girl!). But before you can tell her anything, about the drugs or the need for tuition money, the isolation or the feelings of failure in the midst of seeming success, she becomes distracted by geography.

“West Virginia!”

She is a native New Yorker, upper class, most likely the granddaughter of immigrants—though whether Italian or Jewish or some other extraction you cannot tell, and it doesn’t matter, because the main ethnicity, the defining characteristic, is native New Yorker. Perhaps your ancestors were on the same boat as hers, but upon reaching Ellis Island they disembarked to different planets—hers to a factory on the Lower East Side, yours to the West Virginia mines. Now, decades later, their descendants struggle to comprehend one another. You have learned to spot and identify them, the native New Yorkers, by their accents, their words trumpeting out of their nasal cavities, their sentences a brassy scale. It’s also her shoes, which you would have once thought of as plain, but which you can now identify as expensive.

“West Virginia!” she exclaims again, shaking her head in amazement. And you love her for thinking this is interesting. You love her even more for thinking this makes you interesting, a standout among her usual patients. But you also realize she’s not going to be able to help you.

Yes, you say. And you spend the rest of your time describing the landscape, the geography of mountains and luck, the border between West Virginia and western Virginia that determined your destiny, the mountain shadows and the sun-spackled valleys. And the cows.

A few days later you find yourself shaking in bed at dawn, coked-up to the rafters. Despite not sleeping for the past two nights, you are awake. Too awake. Terrified. You haven’t told a soul that you are afraid you’re on the verge of a heart attack or stroke or whatever bad fate happens to young stupid college girls from the country (cows!). But now you call the person in your life who you trust the most, who you have spent the most time with over the past six months, on long car rides and at fast-food restaurants and watching bad hotel TV. A person who fixes problems better and faster than anyone you have ever met, from a lost hotel reservation to a flat tire to a broken violin string. A person who navigates America the way that only a foreigner can, with an eye to its nuances, its foot-scented stickers, its strange music, its abundance of pocket money for relaxing CDs. A person who, even though he never went to college and just learned to speak English a few years ago, seems infinitely more capable of helping you than anyone at school.

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