I tried to pass as quickly as possible. Every Key Food in the city had the same horse and the same whale in the front of their store. And every kid in the city loved the horse and hated the whale. But I loved the whale. He was so round and blue and happy. I worried that since he wasn’t making enough money for Key Food, they’d take down the whales and replace them with something else-machines with a claw-grabber and toy prizes, maybe, the ones toddlers always climbed inside. And then where would the whales go? To some warehouse? To a junkyard, to be destroyed for scrap? As I passed, I imagined finding a ceramic shard of a whale’s smile in some dumpster somewhere. It would be heartbreaking.
The party was in a high-ceilinged, crumbling brownstone. By the time I got there, the place was already humidly stuffed with people. Nadine had moved her rickety, thriftstore furniture to one wall and set up a couple of folding tables for plastic bowls of chips and jugs of liquor. Nadine’s black miniature poodle, his coat clipped so low you could see its black skin shining through, yapped from behind a baby gate.
I sat on the back of the couch and mixed equal amounts of rum and Pepsi into my cup. Then it became a splash more rum, and then hardly any cola at all. As I talked to people, a strange, soothing calmness came over me. So this is what drunk feels like, I thought. So this was why people got drunk so often. It felt like sliding into a pool on a hot summer day. So I drank more.
And then, it began to turn. At one point, I talked to Nadine herself. I’d always thought Nadine was kind of dorky-she’d entered NYU as an English major, and had part of a Yeats poem tattooed on her stomach. Our conversation started out normal, but then the whale ride popped into my head. While I was at this party, the whale was sitting in front of the grocery store, unused, unwanted, alone. My father was alone, too, sitting in the apartment in Brooklyn. He’d encouraged me to go to this party, saying I should get out more. I pictured him staring into an empty microwave, looking out the window, picking up a book and putting it down again. My eyes began to fill.
Nadine stopped mid-monologue. ‘Summer,’ she whispered, ‘are you OK?’
‘The whale…’ I said. ‘No one wants to ride him.’
She paused for a moment and lit another cigarette. ‘Did you take those pills Randall was handing out? I swear to God, they were laced with something freaky.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not on anything. It’s just that, the whale’s all alone, and I don’t know what to do.’
Nadine looked away uncomfortably. Then she smiled and laughed at some guy break dancing in the middle of the carpet, and moved toward him, done with me. I pushed my way past her and ran for her bedroom, knowing I’d given away too much.
Nadine’s bedroom was empty. I climbed into her canopy bed, which was piled high with everyone’s coats, and pulled the curtains around the sides to conceal me completely. I had never been on a bed like this before. It reminded me of Ebenezer Scrooge’s bed, the one he sleeps in when the various ghosts of Christmas visit.
I burrowed under the coats, inhaling their owners’ separate smells-cloying perfume, cigarettes, shawarma. The rum zoomed through my veins and my skin heaved, rising and falling like the bellows of an accordion. I heard the doorknob to the bedroom turn once, but someone said ‘oh’ and quickly shut it.
And then I didn’t want to be under the pile of coats anymore. I slid out and opened the canopy’s curtains. The sound was everywhere again. I considered climbing out the window, but there was no fire escape. I opened the door a crack and peeked out. Everyone had gathered in the main room. I had an easy shot to the door. I wouldn’t have to say goodbye.
I did one more thing before I left: I looked back at the pile of coats and picked one off the top. It was a fringy poncho with tribal designs, jagged edges, and a drawstring neck. I didn’t know whose it was; I couldn’t imagine anyone at this party wearing something like this.
I put it on and cinched it tight. I wasn’t me anymore. I was someone who wore ponchos. I was Native American. I slid out of the room and dove for the door. No one said anything. No one was looking.
The ECT clinic was also at New York Presbyterian, a few buildings down from Dr North’s office. The waiting room wasn’t nearly as plushy or nice, though, but instead trapped in the Seventies, with gold patterned carpets and green, fakeleather couches.
A thin, pasty doctor motioned me into the hallway behind a door. His name was Dr Frum, which I immediately changed to Dr Frown, due to his humorless expression. ‘This won’t be too long,’ he said. He went through the same thing Dr North had told me last week: they would give my dad a sedative to put him to sleep, attach electrodes to his head and one to his foot, and then put over a hundred volts of electricity into his brain. They tracked the seizure’s progress by the twitching of his big toe. When the twitching stopped, the seizure was done. Then they just waited for him to wake up from the anesthetic.
‘We make a printout of the brain activity during the seizure,’ Dr Frown said.
‘Can I have it?’ my father asked hopefully, listening too. As if it were something he’d hang next to his diploma from the Pennsylvania State University medical school.
Dr Frown looked alarmed, then said no. He turned back to me. ‘He’ll be in and out in no time.’
A nurse took my father’s arm. My father pumped a closed fist in the air, like he was pulling on a tugboat horn. Toot toot, I’m off.
‘Can I watch?’ I called after them.