Song for a Whale

Iris has a testy relationship with her teacher Ms. Conn, who handles Iris’s deafness insensitively. She tries to get Iris’s interpreter, Mr. Charles, to stop signing and make Iris lipread. In addition, Ms. Conn puts a girl named Nina, who has learned some patchy sign language, in charge of Iris’s learning. Nina has a patronizing attitude toward Iris and treats her like she’s stupid. However, Iris is academically able and finishes the assignment in time to start reading Antique Radio Magazine.

Mr. Charles interprets that Ms. Conn wants Iris to redo her poetry assignment because her poem doesn’t rhyme. Iris considers this untrue, as she invented the poem with Grandpa based on hand shapes that repeat throughout the story. Thus, it comprises a form of ASL rhyme. Iris feels especially hurt by Ms. Conn’s dismissal because Grandpa has since died. Although Iris wonders whether her grandfather can see her now that he has died, in that moment she wishes that “he was nowhere near me. I didn’t want him to see what Ms. Conn had done to our story. To us” (10). Iris flings the poem into the wastepaper basket.

Iris is in Ms. Alamilla’s science class when her teacher gives a lesson on hertz, which measures the frequency of sound. Ms. Alamilla tells the class about a whale called Blue 55, who swims around by himself and “not in a pod like most whales” (11). Blue 55 is a hybrid, who has a blue whale mother and a fin whale father. He’s distinctive for singing with a frequency of 55 Hz instead of the lower-frequency 35 Hz of other whales. In addition, his song has a unique pattern, which—combined with his song’s higher frequency—means that other whales struggle to hear and understand him. Iris finds herself tearing up as she relates to the whale’s isolation and inability to communicate with his peers.

This chapter uses in third-person voice, from the whale’s perspective. Blue 55 once belonged to a pod of whales. However, although the whales tried to accommodate him, changing their songs to match his, when he returned their calls, “his sounds meant nothing to them” (16). He wasn’t, for example, able to warn them of predators or food in the surrounding area. As a result, the others communicated with each other and ignored him. They eventually abandoned him. Pitifully, he wonders what he’ll do, knowing that his sounds “held meaning only for himself” (17).

Although Iris can read lips, she has difficulty keeping up with what people are saying at the lunch table, as too many sounds look similar. Communicating with others is difficult because their knowledge of sign language is rudimentary. Still, she’s dying to know what her classmates think about Blue 55. When Nina walks past and makes enthusiastic signs of wanting to communicate with Iris, she tries to tell Nina about the whale. However, Nina’s response is unintelligible because she’s signing too fast and making erratic shapes. As Nina commands more attention and begins “making a scene” (20), Iris finds—to her horror—that “everyone looked at me like I was the dumb one for not understanding” (21) even though Nina’s signs make no sense. Iris pushes Nina away and signs that she should leave her alone. Nina starts yelling, and Iris automatically goes to the principal’s office, knowing that she’ll be sent there anyway.

Iris and her interpreter, Mr. Charles, appear in the office of the principal, Ms. Shelton. When Ms. Shelton reminds Iris of the school’s no-fighting policy and that Nina was only trying to be friendly by asking Iris what she had for lunch, Iris finds it hard to communicate that Nina is “trying to show off and pretend she knows something she doesn’t” (23). Iris wishes that Nina would respect her personal space and keep her hands out of Iris’s face. Ms. Shelton punishes Iris with an in-school suspension, which means that she must do her work in a room separate from the other students. Iris is less concerned about separation from her peers than the “Serious Trouble” (25) that she’ll be in with her parents when she gets home (25).

Iris’s passion is repairing antique radios, and that morning she was late to school because she’d been repairing a 1950s mint-green Zenith radio for Mr. Gunnar. Iris stops by Moe’s Junk Emporium on the way home from school to find parts from a dead appliance and fix the radio. She finds a 1950s Admiral record player set and moves to text her grandfather, who would have picked up such a device for her. She forgets that because he’s dead, she can’t communicate with him. She asks Moe’s son, Jimmy Joe, to hold the appliance for her, writing her request instead of attempting to speak. Iris is happy that the appliance is almost hers, though she knows she’ll be in trouble with her parents when she gets home.

Iris has some time to spend with her radios before her parents get home. Although she can’t hear the radios, Iris can feel the vibrations of the sound, which “let me know if a radio was playing music or crackling with static or sitting there like a box of rocks” (30). Iris gets satisfaction from fixing the radios, and she collects electronics in her room that Mr. Gunnar, the owner of the local antique shop, is on the verge of throwing away.

To punishes Iris for getting into trouble at school, Mom confiscates her electronics and puts them in the garage for a few days. Mom insists that Iris needs to learn to get along better with people. Iris’s older brother, Tristan, comes to check up on her. Iris explains that Mom has grounded her from working on electronics, and he agrees to accompany her in his truck to pick up the Admiral radio from Moe’s junkyard. They hide the radio in the garage, planning to sneak it into Iris’s closet the next day.

The weekend when Iris is grounded from electronics drags by slowly because her friend Wendell is away. She looks up the whale Blue 55 online. Blue 55 is associated with a nature sanctuary for animals who’d struggle to make it on their own in the wild. The hope is that when the animals are strong and healed enough, the sanctuary staff can release them into the wild to make it on their own and find their families. However, Blue 55 is in the wild. On the website, Iris finds a failed attempt to tag Blue 55 and a picture of him taking a deep dive before the sanctuary staff can attach a tracking device.

Iris ponders how to reach out to the whale and wonders if those trying to tag him could “sing back to him and hold his attention with something that sounded a bit like himself” (43). She wonders if he’s like the sei whale on the beach at the time of her birth and writes in the website’s comments section that “maybe the whale is deaf” (44).

Iris is nervous about visiting her grandmother at her new residence, Oak Manor. Since Grandpa’s death, Iris’s relationship with her grandmother has become more distant. Bereaved, Grandma has become solitary and eccentric, taking solo trips such as a pilgrimage to the Gulf Coast, where she used to live with her husband. While Grandpa was still alive, Grandma was sociable, and the two of them met in a Deaf theater group in college.

While Mom asks the Oak Manor staff about Grandma’s progress, Grandma asks Dad why Iris doesn’t transfer to Bridgewood, a school where she could be around other Deaf students. While Mom likes the idea of Iris attending a regular neighborhood school, Grandma and Iris understand the need to be around other Deaf people. Dad, who had “never learned sign language very well” (49), struggles to keep up in conversation. While her father, unlike her mother, didn’t grow up with parents who were Deaf, Iris resents her father’s inaptitude as they can’t easily communicate.

Iris attempts to introduce Grandma to the handshape rhyming game she played with Grandpa. However, Grandma interprets all Iris’s signs pessimistically and Iris feels that she has “lost” (54).

When Iris gets home from Grandma’s, she has a reply from Andi Rivera, the woman who tried to tag Blue 55 the previous year. Andi hypothesizes that “Blue 55 wouldn’t sing at all if he were deaf” (56) and that he seems to be swimming around after other whales, following their sounds. Andi emphasizes that “it seems he keeps trying to communicate, but there’s nothing out there that understands his songs” (56). Andi adds that the biggest mystery is why Blue 55 continues to sing when no whale ever replies to him.

The school principal forces Iris to apologize to Nina before she re-enters the classroom. However, after school, Iris is delighted to be able to have some of her radios back. She puts on her thick leather gloves and gets to work on the Zenith radio, fitting it with new tubes. When she finishes her work, she stops to inhale the smell of old radio. Although she has read “that the smell was just radio parts and dust warmed up by electricity, to her it’s more than that. It’s “like the radio is remembering every home it had ever been in” (60). As she puts her hand on the speaker to test the vibrations, she wonders if it sounds like Blue 55.

She does more online research on the whale and finds that scientists trace whales’ migrations through their songs, as their “songs were like footprints they left in the ocean” (61). Blue 55 has an idiosyncratic map, traveling in the same waters as other whales but at different times, and sometimes his route had gaps where the scientists’ microphones were unable to pick up his songs. Below each map is a recording of each whale’s songs. Iris feels that the normal whales’ songs vibrate more strongly against her hand than Blue 55’s, but she doesn’t feel that it’s “a huge difference” (62) and wishes she could understand why he can’t talk to the other whales. Still, the feel of Blue 55’s song from the speaker differs from any sound Iris has felt through a radio speaker. When she finds a picture of Blue 55 taken with an underwater camera, she prints it out and keeps it.

Iris carries the fixed Zenith radio into Mr. Gunnar’s shop. He tests it for static and announces that Iris has done a good job. Mr. Gunnar tries to communicate with Iris, ensuring that he faces her so that she can see his mouth, using a few signs he has learned, and writing things down when he needs to.

Iris recalls that her radio fixation began when she and Grandpa used to go to antique shops picking up broken objects to fix. She learned to make things, such as an alarm clock for her deep-sleeping brother. Then, one day, she discovered the radios, and Mr. Gunnar gave her the challenge of fixing them.

On this visit, Iris looks around the store and is about to leave empty-handed until she spots a compass with a whale on it. She buys the compass as a good-luck charm, hoping that it will enable her to find a way to talk to Blue 55.

Iris bicycles over to her friend Wendell’s house. Wendell is Deaf too, and his whole family has learned fluent sign language. She asks Wendell to play the piano to check out what the frequencies of different whales feel like on the keys. She plays the 55 Hz key a few times, trying to get the feel of Blue 55’s vibration. Iris finds herself wishing that “I could lower the piano into the ocean and play that note for Blue 55” (74). When Wendell asks Iris why this is so important to her, she replies that it hurts her that Blue 55 sings his song “and everything in the ocean swims by him, as if he’s not there” (75). She wants to show the whale that someone understands him.

This chapter is from Blue 55’s perspective. A pod of humpback whales swims past him, and he tries to join them. He hopes that he’ll be allowed to stay even if they don’t understand his music. He finds that the pods that have recently lost a whale are the most welcoming, as they “swam with an empty space, carrying the shadow of a whale who used to be” (76).

Although Blue 55 creates music in the same manner as other whales, “forcing breath into the spaces in his body, circulating the air until breath and space turned into song” (76), the tone isn’t right. However, in this case, the pod has heard and glances back at him. He hopes that in time they’ll understand one sound, the smallest ripple of his song.

Iris dreams that Blue 55 sings to her and wakes up with her hand resting on her favorite Philco radio. She wonders whether the radio station has been playing songs at 55 Hz. She looks up whale songs online and finds that instead of showing black dots or circles, the pictures show splattered paint as “the colorful splotches covered more of the music scale than human music, with different notes flowing together in each part of the song” (79). Sheet music with Blue 55’s notes shows that they’re higher on the musical scale than other whales’ notes, appearing in a “blue-purple-and-red pattern, adding a part at the end of each section that looked like wavy lines on sheet music” (79). He always sings the wavy-line part before starting the pattern again. Iris makes an analogy to her Grandpa’s handshape poems: “the same handshapes but different signs. Blue 55’s own rhyme” (79).

Although Iris previously tried to avoid music lessons, that morning she asks to speak to Mr. Russell, the music teacher. She hands him the sheet music for Blue 55’s song and tells him that she wants to make a recording for a whale. As a result, Mr. Russell invites her to come to make the recording the next day after school, when some students are coming in with their instruments. He adds that while the song will sound odd to human ears, it’ll be fit for whales. At home, Iris asks Andi for a recording of all the sanctuary’s animals for a project she’s working on.

Iris joins Mr. Russell after school, where different students play their instruments, trying to reach Blue 55’s frequency. Iris wishes that the room didn’t have wall-to-wall carpeting so that she could have taken her shoes off to feel the vibrations of the music. Mr. Russell invites Iris to tap the piano key for the recording. The students participate enthusiastically, and Mr. Russell shows them an app on his phone that helps them ensure that they’re hitting the right notes. Iris finds that “it wasn’t so bad” working with others because “now that they knew about Blue 55 too, it was like he had more people listening to him” (88).

Later, at home, when she receives Mr. Russell’s recording, the vibrations remind her of Blue 55’s song. She does her best with the recordings, stretching out the notes to sound like a whale’s moans, chirps, or cries. The sounds of the sanctuary animals that Andi sent inspire her. She hopes that it builds a story for Blue 55. She then sits down to compose an email to Andi, telling her that she hasn’t been able to get Blue 55 out of her mind since hearing about him in science class. She suggests that Andi could play the song from a boat where Blue 55 will hear it and that it’ll cause him to hang around for a while. She imagines that he’ll be like a person who is Deaf saying a long goodbye because “if you don’t know when you’ll get to talk to someone like you again, you don’t want your time together to end” (93). She sends the message and hopes that Blue 55’s song is on its way.