Marlon Bain’s letters (pp. 1051–1052)

Bain closes with the image that renders Avril's love as engulfment. Orin's old party-piece impression of the Moms was to "assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and your breaths mingle" — and the horror of it, Bain notes, is that you can't tell which is worse, "the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with which it's effected." He offers it to Steeply as a warning about Orin-as-lover, but it is really the family's founding gesture: maternal love as a warm smiling advance that does not stop at the boundary of the self, arms open wide until there's no air left. The smile is genuine, which is exactly what makes it inescapable.