Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving (pp. 745–746)

At Joelle's first Thanksgiving with the whole family, Jim enacts his own paternity as a slow fade: he drinks alone from a tumbler of something that makes the air above it shimmer, gets up again and again to freshen it in the kitchen, and finally simply leaves and doesn't come back — "his absence from the table went unmentioned, almost unnoticed." Joelle registers the thing no one else does, that "nobody seemed to look directly at Dr. Incandenza except her": the father is a presence the family has trained itself not to see, so his physical disappearance barely changes the room. Read against Orin's "fifth wall" and Jim's own confession of muteness, the vanishing at the table is the dyad's absence made literal — a father who removes himself by degrees, drink by drink, until he is gone and the meal closes over the space "in a kind of explosion of goodwill."