Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving (pp. 738–739)
He kind of trailed her around from room to room, kind of pathetically, talking batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real present at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there.
Context
Joelle's own personal Daddy is the theme's photographic negative of Jim Incandenza, and the raw all but frames them as a matched pair: Jim was so absent that "Orin's absence... emptied the co-op out," while Joelle's Daddy was so present he saturated the house, trailing his Pokie room to room talking batons and the low-pH chemistry that will later curdle into something much darker. Here it registers only as a too-muchness, pathetic and suffocating rather than sinister — a father whose love has no exits, set against a father who is nothing but exit. Father-daughter texture, kept below the male-line spine, but load- bearing for the anthology's range: absence and engulfment are the two ways this book knows how to fail a child.