Mario and Avril; the Dean’s office
‘My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’
Context
Avril hands Mario the family's whole frozen-affect lineage as a piece of clinical folklore about strangers. The grandfather in St. Pamphile who picked Delaware Punch over Coca-Cola, lost the farm, and "showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn't" — frozen, feeling only when drunk, throwing his son through the window. Her own father, frozen in turn, telling the story only drunk, sitting in his chair reading the paper until "he fell out of the chair and didn't get up again." She narrates it as etiology, other people's dead pathology, "existential, Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky" — and never once turns the lens onto her own husband, who drank himself into a microwave, or the son standing in front of her whose emotions have gone dark. The frozen-father inheritance runs straight down into her marriage and her children, and she can describe it fluently precisely because she keeps it filed under family history, safely upstream of anyone at this table.