Chapters 7-8 Summary

Twenty-six-year-old Sam recalls his childhood fascination over his father's broken gramophone. The orchard suffered a parasite causing loss of half of the crop when Sam was fourteen. He comforted himself by learning electronics. He wondered if fixing the gramophone would make it play big band music and other music of the 1940s. He took over the family orchard at age twenty when his parents moved to Florida. He had the gramophone repaired and it played garbled Madonna music.

Emotionally repressed Oliver attempts to get back to work by drafting an article on humpback whales for the Journal of Mammology. His scholarly report is written in cold, scientific language about the timing of changes in the whale song from season to season. Bubbling up through the paragraphs of his report are the self-justifying arguments he tells himself to blame Jane for all...