the professional conversationalist

The family's private nomenclature, laid out by the ten-year-old as if reciting a system's rules: the father is "Himself," "the man Himself"; the mother is "the Moms," a name Orin coined; there is a moniker for Hal too that he refuses to give. Hal insists this is ordinary — "most more or less normal families address each other internally by means of pet names and terms and monikers" — and the insistence is the tell. These aren't affectionate diminutives so much as role-titles: the father elevated to a capitalized third person, the mother pluralized into an institution ("the Moms"). The family has its own internal language, minted by the eldest son, and it encodes hierarchy and distance as much as intimacy. The naming system is itself a small map of how this family holds one another at a designed remove.