supper at the E.T.A. dining hall (pp. 628–629)

Stice's parents are the theme's cleanest anti-Incandenza control. The Kansas Stices fell in love playing a bar-game that leaves cigarette-burn scars up both forearms, divorced and remarried four or five times, lock themselves in the bedroom for days of squeaking springs or hurl warm pots of food at the kitchen walls — a marriage conducted entirely out loud, in scars and shouts and thrown dinners. And Stice "loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly," and openly regales the whole table with their battles. Everything the Incandenza system buries — conflict, appetite, the marriage's actual temperature — the Stices display, and their son loves them clear-eyed and talks about them freely. It's the exact inverse of Hal's creaky-machine blankness about his own kin: a boy who can hold his loud broken parents in full view and adore them, set against a family whose love is all silence, concealment, and things that can't be said.