urine day — "Mario will be the only one…"

Mario is the family's exempted term, the one son standing entirely outside its achievement economy. Orin punts in the Show, Hal is climbing toward it, and Mario — too physically challenged to play recreational tennis — will be "the only one of the Incandenza children not wildly successful as a professional athlete," a gap that "could [never] even occur to him." His exemption is the system's photographic negative: in a family that sorts and ranks and monitors its members' promise (deLint tracking whether Hal's head stays "unswollen," C.T. forecasting burnouts), Mario is the member the ranking machinery has nothing to say about, and is therefore free of it. Avril's fondest praise even goes to him without a scoreboard attached — "you should see the boy with a convex lens… he's like a fish in brine," said "within Mario's hearing." The son who cannot compete is the only one loved outside the competition, which is the family's quiet confession that its love and its metrics are otherwise the same thing.