The Man From Glad and the mattress — "For Christ’s sake Jim just put…"

The father summons the boy to help and then has no use for him. Young Jim — taller than both parents, achingly careful — spends the whole chore unable to find a place to set his father's empty tomato-juice tumbler, terrified the residue will harden into precipitate, hovering with the glass while the man rants at the mother through him. The over-helpful son and the contemptuous father are the scene's engine: every attempt Jim makes to be useful ("Are you sure it isn't just the mattress?", "my bed squeaks, too") is swatted down, and even the father's rare warmth — clapping him on the back "in exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic cranial strap for my glasses" — is something the boy has learned to armor against. Conscripted into the father's obsession and wanted only as an instrument, Jim converts the whole afternoon into things he can measure and leave.