Mario’s birth and defects (pp. 314–315)
who grows one side to girlish length and carefully combs it so it rides thinly up and over the gleaming yarmulke of bare gray-green-complected scalp on top and down over the other side where it hangs lank and fools no one and tends to flap back up over in any wind Charles Tavis forgets to carefully keep his left side to.
Context
The narrator sets out to describe Mario's thin lank hair and, mid-sentence, slides without warning into a full portrait of Charles Tavis's comb-over — the same girlish length grown long on one side, the same gray-green scalp, the same flap-up in any wind — as though the two heads were interchangeable. It's the paternity insinuation done entirely by prose: Mario's hair can only be described by describing his "possible half-uncle," and the reader is left holding a resemblance the text never quite asserts. A physical rhyme between the damaged son and the interloping uncle, planted where you'd least look for it.