Pemulis catches Avril and Wayne

The sons' side of the liaison, stated as a fact they've been made to metabolize. Not that they like it — the footnote is quick to clarify that "'Accept' isn't the same as 'be crazy about,' of course" — but that the mother's continuing sexual magnetism is a household given the boys have "long since had to accept." It's the Hamlet son's exact predicament, the mother's desirability as an ongoing condition of one's life rather than a discrete event, and the flat clinical word "endocrinologically" is the accommodation: you can't feel your way to peace with it, so you file it under biology and move on. Set beside the cheerleader tableau it's the quiet aftershock — what it costs the sons to know, always, what Pemulis just walked in on.