Hal, Mario, Coyle; the Weston memories (pp. 950–951)

Hal's memories of the Weston house are all Avril's control written into objects. The cans and tapes and books alphabetized, everything "painfully clean," the backyard shrubs "trimmed flat as tabletops by the Moms," the delfts dwindling as Mario knocks them off — and Hal's own memory correcting itself against her standard: a divan with cigarette burns "may have been a neighbor's," because "the Moms would never have had a divan with burns in it." This is the phobic control-signature in its pre-agoraphobic era, when Avril still went outdoors — the order-compulsion and filth-aversion (the mold-eating panic surfaces here too, via Orin) already total, expressed as a house so clean it edits the son's recollections. The enclosure that later swallows her began as a way of keeping a household immaculate.