the tomato juice beverage: the disease as domestic fixture — "Then my father handed me his…"

The alcoholism made invisible by being made ordinary. The father's drink is present in nearly every beat — mixed at noon, handed to the boy to hold, its "grains of pepperish material" and hardening residue fixated on by a child who worries where to set the tumbler down but never once registers what is in it. The theme's inheritance operates exactly here: the disease is transmitted not as an event but as an atmosphere, a domestic fixture the son learns to manage (holding the glass, finding a place for it) rather than to see. That JOI's anxious attention goes to the tumbler's placement and not its contents is the child of an alcoholic's whole training in one detail.