Joelle cleans; the Thanksgiving audit (p. 738)
his skulking in and dragging a wastebasket over and inverting it next to his infant brother’s special crib, holding a heavy box of Quaker Oats high above his head, preparing to brain the needy infant.
Context
Sibling rivalry over the Moms as the family's earliest recorded violence. Late one night Orin recalls to Joelle creeping to baby Mario's crib with a heavy box of Quaker Oats raised overhead, "preparing to brain the needy infant" — the firstborn so threatened by a specially-challenged brother arriving to draw off "even more maternal attention than Orin" that his first impulse toward the newcomer is murder. The memory sits inside Joelle's Thanksgiving audit as the deep-background datum that explains Orin: the later architecture of his estrangement and his serial seductions of young mothers begins here, in a toddler's rage at having to share the mother's gravity. Sibling dynamics as pure system-product — the competition for the Black Hole's attention turned homicidal at the crib. (Mario's character spine carries the same beat, Mario's timeline event 11.)