Joelle cleans and remembers the Incandenza Thanksgiving (p. 744)
Hal and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include her. Orin’s brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed. There was a spotless doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog.
Context
Joelle's first interface with the whole sad family unit, rendered as a flat catalogue of table-observations: Mario's body arrives as one deadpan item between the seating chart and the dogless doggie-dish — the outsider's first sight of him, no comment permitted by the family's performance of ease. (Earlier in the same memory Orin had put it more brutally: "His retarded brother was stunted to about the size of a fire hydrant," pp. 737-738.)