Orin’s first call

The family written on the body. Mario — who "didn't drill and couldn't play," who sits up asleep and "succumb[s] to gravity" back onto the bed — is introduced as a physical fact needing four pillows to prop his outsized head, "a small hunched shape with a big head against the gray light of the window." The oversized skull is the anthology's recurring token of Mario's difference within the family system, the sibling whose body marks him as categorically apart from his tennis-playing brothers, the one the others move quietly around. It is a family measured out in unequal bodies, and Mario's is the one the household is built to accommodate.