Hal eats the mold (pp. 10–11)
in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out
Context
Avril's whole psychic architecture in a single frozen gesture. Little Hal comes running with a patch of gnawed basement mold smeared around his mouth, and the Moms — the woman for whom "spoilage and filth" are the two most loathed things in the world — bends way down and reaches to take it, because the maternal reflex to receive whatever her child offers overrides even the governing phobia of her life. The book's opening portrait of the mother is this collision: her deepest love and her deepest terror aimed at the same object in the same instant, the hand still reaching as the face begins to identify what it is reaching for. It establishes the Avril signature the whole anthology will chase — a maternity that is real and a control-need that is total, forever at war inside the same body. (That she "refused ever even to go into the damp basement" that grew the mold makes the enclosure literal: whole rooms of the family home sealed off by her dread.)