the Headmaster’s waiting room (pp. 521–522)
The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight.
Context
Avril's gravitational field, given its E.T.A. name. She installs herself at the exact center of any room, in everyone's sightline from every angle; when she enters, Hal's pacing stops being pacing and "reduced to orbiting." Orin's term for her, coined in a late-night round of Family Trivia, is "The Black Hole of Human Attention" — the mass so dense it bends every trajectory in the room toward itself. It's the same pull the theme keeps logging from the outside (the choreographer who cottons to her, the older men who fall over sideways), here diagrammed as physics: the mother as the point all attention falls into, warmly and helplessly, whether she's speaking or silent. The image is dear to Hal and unsettling to him in exactly equal measure, which is the correct response to a black hole you love.