Pages 751–752
Half a page, still inside the same night of cleaning: the 5-Woman room, Charlotte Treat feverish and asleep, Joelle down to the room's last Kleenex. This is the coda to the Thanksgiving memory of pp. 736–747 — first its verdict, then a return to the present tense of the room, one bed of which is conspicuously unmade. Nothing happens; everything settles.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Michelob Dry (p. 752) — real beer brand; the wet T-shirt a fevered resident of a recovery house happens to be sweating through.
- katexia (p. 752) — as printed, for cachexia: bodily wasting; kin to p. 707's "catexic" — the book's recurring idiolect-spelling.
- Feeling Good (p. 752) — real book: David Burns's 1980 bestseller, the era's standard cognitive-therapy self-help for depression.
After you read: three things
1. The dinner gets its caption. "The whole family was lousy with secrets... From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all 'exactly as crazy as they seem' — the punter's phrase" (p. 751). If the Thanksgiving scene felt simultaneously warm and wrong — the unmentioned dog-dish, the unmentioned tennis, the tumbler nobody watched — this is the sentence that names why. And the aphorism that licenses the whole analysis: "We're all a lot more intuitive about our lovers' families than we are about our own."
2. Kate is characterized entirely by an object, and the irony is left unspoken. Her unmade bed holds "some yellow paperback called Feeling Good open face-down on the mattress and starting to curl" (p. 752) — a depressed person's self-help book, abandoned mid-effort, curling. Joelle's "weird fear" is that Kate will walk in and catch her cleaning. You know why she won't: at roughly this hour Kate is holding herself up against a lightpost on Prospect Street (pp. 714–716). The book lets the dread and the fact pass each other without comment.
3. Tenderness here is procedural. She dusts all five bedside tables "wiping in careful rings around objects she wasn't to touch" — House rules bounding even care — just as, back at p. 736, she left the YYY tapes off out of consideration for the sleeping Treat, who now looks "like a ravaged fowl." New sobriety's love is effortful, rule-shaped, and expressed in rings of clean dust around other people's property.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.