taken ill after coming home to relax: the euphemized father
It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill.
Context
The inherited disease at its source, rendered entirely in the son's uncomprehending deadpan. JOI's father, drunk, vomits into the dust and faints across the bed frame, and the adolescent narrator processes it in the family's euphemistic grammar — "taken ill... after coming home from work to relax," a formulation so routine ("not too uncommon") that it names the alcoholism precisely by refusing to. The near-miss horror of "mostly gastric blood until I recalled the tomato juice" is the whole theme's method in one clause: the boy almost sees his father hemorrhaging, then corrects to the Bloody-Mary mixer, the correction itself the measure of how normalized the drinking is. This is the disease JOI will die inside, seeded here as a language the child has already learned not to name.