Orin’s deposition to Steeply (pp. 1042–1043)

Orin's Rototiller set-piece is the primal Avril scene told from outside: the absurdly tall Moms wrestling a rented tiller through the Weston garden in surgery-bags and a pollution mask, phobic about the gas she's tricked her thirteen-year-old into pouring because "she doesn't even know she's phobic about gas," when four-year-old Hal toddles out in smile-face slippers holding a half-eaten patch of house-mold and announces "I ate this." The scene detonates every one of her phobias at once — "Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness," with the fourth kept hidden "till actual game-time" — and Avril runs "in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string" screaming "Help! My son ate this!" while Himself and Mario watch from behind the glass door, hands framing the tableau like a camera. It is the family system in a single image: the mother's control shattering at the exact point where filth and her child's body meet, the whole cosmos held together only by "heroic exercise of will" until a toddler eats mold and the border of order gives way.