Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  “I DO!!” screams a woman in the audience. She jumps to her feet with a swiftness inconsistent with her age and hurries to the stage.

  The Composer giggles, turns on the CD player. He approaches the woman shyly, as if at an old-timey middle school dance, and suddenly she becomes shy, too. For the next few minutes the audience watches as The Composer waltzes robotically around the stage with an elderly woman. The woman beams up at him, glowing. The Composer never looks straight at her, choosing instead to stare out into the audience, his face contorted into a manic, rigid smile.

  For a long time, whenever I saw that smile on The Composer, I kept thinking he looked like someone famous, but I couldn’t place who it was. When he’s not doing his stage smile, one could say he resembles James Franco, or Jim Morrison, or even a very thin Clark Gable. But during concerts, his fake grin distorts his features. One night I look over at him waltzing with a middle-aged woman and it clicks: The rigid angles at which he holds his head and the unchanging toothiness of his expression give him—an otherwise handsome man—an uncanny resemblance to the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

  Years later, I will question this association between The Composer and a deadly yet comic beast. What about him and his musical charade did I fear might rip me apart?

  After the waltz, The Composer has one more announcement to make to the crowd before we finish the concert: “I just want you all to know I’m praying for you, praying for you all,” he says, smiling the velociraptor smile. “I want you all to stay safe.”

  Milli Violini

  New Hampshire, 2002

  “I’ve heard that they’re firing everyone,” Debbie says to Yevgeny over a lobster shack dinner on the shore of Alton Bay. “Am I going to be fired?”

  “I don’t think so,” Yevgeny says. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

  “They’re firing people?” you ask.

  “Why do you think they hired you?” Debbie asks incredulously, tossing her red hair. “They’re getting rid of all the old musicians. The Composer wants fresh young pretty ones like yourself. The old ones were asking too many questions, were starting to raise a stink with the union.”

  “The union?” you ask.

  “Jessica’s not in the musician’s union,” Yevgeny says. “She’s a college student.”

  “You’re not a professional musician?” Debbie asks.

  “No,” you confess, pleased she hadn’t been able to tell this about you before. “And I don’t even know what type of music we’re playing. Is it classical? New Age? Soundtrack music?”

  “The genre is called ‘Crap,’” Debbie says. “It’s got all the popularity of Rap with the respectability of Classical. People love Crap. Can’t get enough Crap. The Composer hit #1 on the Crap Billboard list.

  “But you’re asking the wrong question,” she continues, taking a sip of her margarita. “The question you should be asking is ‘What genre do the customers think it is?’ The answer to that question is classical. Any time a violin and a flute play together live on a stage—voila! It’s classical! And Yevgeny here is the perfect picture of a classical violinist—look at him! So Russian! And in his all-black outfit!”

  “No,” Yevgeny says, rolling his eyes. “Anyways, the customers think it’s the Titanic soundtrack.”

  “It is the Titanic soundtrack,” Debbie says. “They were almost sued for copyright infringement.”

  “Well, now they’re being more careful,” Yevgeny says. “They keep it just within the legal amount of notes. They just rereleased Oceans of April with the notes changed around a bit, just to be safe.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” you ask. “Don’t you mean The Composer?”

  “The Composer and his helpers,” Debbie says with a giggle. “They write the music.”

  You look at Yevgeny for an explanation but he is scowling at Debbie.

  “But doesn’t he perform with the New York Philharmonic and on PBS?”

  “Everything has a price,” Debbie says.

  “And the background track is so loud,” you say. “I can barely hear the actual sounds of your instruments, especially the violin. Does anyone in the audience ever care about that?”

  “Not many. A few,” Yevgeny says. “What does it matter? What are they going to do, report us to the music police?”

  “So we’re like Milli Vanilli,” you say. “Like a classical music version of Milli Vanilli.”

  “You’re not the first Ensemble musician to say that,” Yevgeny says.

  “Milli Violini?” you ask. Debbie laughs.

  “Listen,” Yevgeny says, annoyed. “Don’t ask too many questions on this gig. It’s fine with us—but not all the gigs are going to be like this. You’ll be with other people, other musicians, and if you say too much, you might not get called for a gig again.”

  “Okay,” you say. “But, do you think I’ll even be hired again? I mean, if they’re firing people, and I’m not really a professional musician . . .”

  “You’ll be hired again,” Yevgeny says. “Debbie and I will give you our highest recommendation.”

  Debbie nods. “You know,” she says, “you’re the perfect person for this job—an amateur posing as the real thing. You know who else is like that?”

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Portland, Maine

  The Composer is from New England, and the audience members filing into the performance room are his people—staunch Composer fans. Some even remember his very first gigs when he sold his CDs by himself at craft fairs and malls. Because of this, the local Maine PBS station has chosen a special concert venue: the Holden Frost House, a nineteenth-century mansion. Despite the festive atmosphere of a hometown star appearing in a historic venue, the audience members are grim-faced, as if about to attend jury duty instead of a concert.

  The Composer, on the other hand, is giddy. Perhaps this is because the flutist, Stephen, has been replaced on the tour by Kim—The Composer’s main pennywhistle star and muse. Kim missed the first week of the tour because she couldn’t leave her job as a church music director. Kim is petite with reddish-blond hair and the sort of broad, clean-scrubbed New England face that reminds me of the portraits of “The Pilgrims” in my high school history textbook. On the road, she spends her time alternating between The Composer’s bedroom and the RV’s sofa, where she reads books from the Left Behind series, the Evangelical thrillers in which the Rapture saves only the purest, most Protestant Christians while the rest of humanity is “left behind” to suffer hell. As she reads, her fingers trace the gold cross hanging from her neck. Every once in a while she looks up and sees me watching her from my seat in the kitchen, where I write in my journal and reread Lolita.

  I have never been this far north. The houses in Maine are thick and squat with fake deer and squirrels in the front yards, the road signs marking distances in both miles and kilometers, perhaps to comfort the Canadians who are almost home. The stubby trees hunch toward the gray sky. Some appear to be covered in green felt. They are nothing like the slim Georgia pines we passed a few days ago in Atlanta, their wide branches drinking the sun. Up here it is already autumn, and a few species of trees are spangled yellow and red. We stop at a grocery store and I buy fresh lobster dip and crackers. Everything in Maine feels sharper, crisper. Stark.

  By concert time, The Composer is bouncing around the mansion with excitement, greeting stern-faced elderly audience members, shoving fistfuls of Cap’n Crunch into his mouth, leaving a peanut butter-scented cloud of cereal dust in his wake. “Don’t forget to smile!” he chirps to me before we walk on stage. He is so excited that halfway through the concert he decides to deviate from his usual midconcert speech about the wonders of PBS and The Story About The Hollywood Celebrity.

  But first he lights a long white candle and grips it in his hand, as if at a vigil.

  “You know,” he begins, “being in this old house really reminds me of the olden times, and like, how romantic it is.”

  The audience looks back at him
, their faces blank.

  “In the olden times it was so romantic,” he continues. “There were candles.” He looks at the candle in his hand as if it will help him understand what he means.

  “And you know,” he continues, “there were horses and buggies. And slaves.”

  Harriet and I look at each other. Slaves? Kim shakes her head in embarrassment. But no one in the audience seems bothered that The Composer has just called slavery romantic.

  “So Kim and I are going to do something . . . um . . . special for you guys tonight,” The Composer continues, smiling the velociraptor. Harriet and I look at each other, having no idea what he’s talking about but glad that, whatever it is, we seem to have no role in it.

  What happens next is as unexpected as his proclamation about slavery being the good old days. For the first time in my career as a musician for The Composer, I witness a truly live performance.

  The Composer plays a few chords on his keyboard. He approaches the keys gingerly, making frequent and obvious mistakes with his own composition. It becomes clear why, in the PBS God Bless America special, the camera avoids The Composer’s hands.

  While The Composer bumbles around on the keyboard, Kim flawlessly toots the simple flute melody. When they are finished, the audience claps politely. But there is a palpable feeling of relief in the room when we return to our usual performance method: playing very softly while the clamor of the CD erases any trace of our real, imperfect sounds.

  After the concert, an elderly woman with pinkish hair greets me at the refreshment table where Harriet and I are filling paper cups with strawberry-orange punch.

  “You are so talented,” she says to me. “Where did you study?”

  “I didn’t really study,” I answer. “I mean, nothing other than lessons.”

  “But then how did you become a professional?”

  “Just a lucky audition,” I say.

  “You’re so modest!”

  And then she says something that reminds me of my own olden times: the 1990s.

  She says, “You have a real gift.”

  You Have a Real Gift

  Virginia, 1990s

  The adults always say this. “You have a real gift.” They say “real” like “reeyell.”

  The West Virginia teachers go on strike and school is canceled indefinitely. Your family responds to this crisis by moving a few mountains across the state line, into rural western Virginia. Your new town is only a few miles from the West Virginia border and is still within the Appalachian mountains, still a place where chicken processing is a top industry. But the culture of your new town is different, more Shenandoah Valley sunshine and southern hospitality than holler darkness and mountaintop isolation. With the move, the accents of the people around you change from hillbilly to Southern hillbilly. The conflict over slavery called the Civil War becomes the conflict over “states’ rights” called “The War between the States.” And your violin lessons, once hours and mountains away, are now just a thirty-minute cruise up the interstate. With your clothes no longer covered in chicken crumbs and baby vomit, the mountain fog of your early childhood receding into memory, your violin skills improve exponentially. The adults in your new town take note.

  They say, “You have a reeyell gift.”

  They say, “If you keep practicing, you’re going to be famous.”

  They say, “Don’t stop practicing like I did.”

  They say, “You’ll get a scholarship for college with a gift like that.” (The same line they use with the boys who are good at sports.)

  You are only eleven years old but you already know you don’t have a reeyell gift, at least not in the way that the townsfolk mean it. If you have a gift, it’s the gift of parents willing and able to pay for your violin and lessons and to drive you over the mountaintops to get them, a gift more practical than celestial, more akin to a Dodge minivan than to a fiery-winged angel of music. But you are not gifted. You are not a prodigy.

  Your parents know this, too. When people tell them, “Jessica has a reeyell gift,” your parents smile politely and respond, “Jessica works very hard.”

  It’s true. You work very hard. A teacher writes on your report card: “Jessica possesses an exceptional work ethic.” Years later, the writer Malcolm Harris will articulate the ways in which people of your generation were taught to value work as an end in itself, rather than a process through which something tangible is gained. “When students are working,” he writes of the typical millennial classroom experience, “what they’re working on is their own ability to work.”

  But at eleven years old you don’t pause to question the work ethic. You simply see what you need to do to be valued in the world around you—work hard—and decide that you will do it better than anyone else. Like any good worker, you have goals and benchmarks. Your goal is to be the best at everything and the most liked by everyone. You are one of the fastest runners in the fifth grade, one of the few girls who can do pull-ups. There isn’t a single school subject you don’t like. You have plenty of friends who invite you to birthday parties and sleepovers. You are voted vice president of the middle school student council. You’re the only kid in school who can play the violin. Fourteen boys ask you to the fifth-grade Valentine’s Day Dance, including a set of twins.

  You don’t know it, but these are the last moments of the brief courtship you get to have with yourself as a female human being in 1990s America, a courtship in which you do not “love yourself” or “hate yourself” (because those terms would not have made sense to you) but instead have a profound sense of satisfaction with the world around you and your apparent role in it.

  Then something happens to you.

  It’s not a single-event trauma. Your parents do not get divorced. No one dies. You are not abused.

  And yet. Something happens to you. And because you cannot trace what happens to you to a single, traumatic event, you struggle to explain it, struggle for years to admit that anything happened to you at all.

  But it did. It’s obvious, visible in your face, your posture. A friend in middle school tells you that her mom has asked her, “What happened to Jessica?”

  What happened to you? It’s a big fish of a question, large and slippery.

  When you are twelve years old, a book titled Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls becomes a national best-seller. The author, Mary Pipher, writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.” Pipher argues that while adolescence has always been a difficult transition for boys and girls alike, there is something in the cultural air of the early 1990s that has spawned an epidemic of depression, self-mutilation, and eating disorders.

  What’s curious about this epidemic is that its adolescent female victims are middle class. They come from stable, loving households and have attentive parents. Even stranger is that, as people say in the 1990s, It’s the nineties!, meaning, “women are equal now.” A teacher tells your class, “You can be anything you want if you work hard enough,” and then adds, “This is true for girls now, too.” What no one ever says during your entire upbringing is that there has been a cultural price to pay for equality, a counterattack aiming its weapons at your fast-developing female body. The counterattack goes by various names—Backlash by Susan Faludi or The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, who in 1991 writes, “These little girls, born around the time of Ronald Reagan’s first election, are showing third-generation mutations from the beauty backlash against the women’s movement. . . . This generation will have more trouble with life in the body than do daughters of the 1960s and 1970s.”

  What strikes you reading Wolf’s words now, as a person born two months after Reagan’s first inauguration, is Wolf’s phrase life in the body, a phrase that separates the theoretical potential of femaleness in the age of equality from the actual, lived reality of it. Born into the first generation of girls whose politi
cal and civic equality was already assumed, you are told from the earliest age that you can become an astronaut, a doctor, the president of the United States (if you work hard enough). The potential for your life supposedly has no bounds. But by your twelfth birthday, you have a sinking feeling. You can’t do life in this body. Not this body, the one that is appearing slowly, then suddenly before you in the mirror. This body is a stranger; you don’t know it, you don’t like it. It’s certainly not the body you would have ordered from a catalog. You have a new vision of yourself, a vision of what you are actually going to look like as a woman. And in that vision—a short-legged, big-thighed brunette with monstrous eyebrows and a crooked smile—you no longer see a place for yourself in the world.

  Indeed, you no longer see a place for yourself in the seventh grade. The talents that a short time ago won you admiration from your friends, the winsome qualities that led the fourteen boys including the set of twins to ask you to the dance, have become irrelevant. No matter how hard you work, you find yourself sliding down the social hierarchy, while other girls—quiet, skinny, pretty (impossibly pretty, a phrase from Teen magazine, which you have recently begun reading, devouring its beauty tips)—are making their ascent. By the middle of seventh grade you are friendless and under a daily torrent of teasing by a pack of boys. Several teachers notice your suffering and their response is universal: “Those boys just like you.” But even then you know that this is profoundly untrue. Those boys do not like you. Those boys have sniffed out your growing insecurity and have pounced on it. It’s the nineties! Those boys—victims of the backlash themselves—are becoming more aware by the day that girls are a commodity, like livestock, to be traded with other boys, and that your value is in a period of deflation.