Mario and Millicent Kent (pp. 123–124)
had spent just about all her off-court time as a little girl practicing in a leotard in front of a double-width mirror in her room at home in suburban Montclair NJ […] to the best of her recall he was almost three meters tall and morbidly obese, which had been why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width. […] In the dining room he’d moved all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror, in a grotesquely tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering. […] The Old Man didn’t hear her come in and he capered and jetéed for several more minutes until she happened to catch his simpering eye in the mirror, she said. That’s when she knew she had to get away, she said.
Context
Every stage of the Kent family grotesque is mirror-mounted: her secret dance practice at the double-width glass, the house's mirrors sized to the Old Man's bulk, his capering in her leotard before the really wide dining-room mirror, and the recognition-moment itself — she catches his simpering eye in the mirror, not in the room, and that reflected meeting of eyes is what sends her to E.T.A. The mirror as the instrument of unwanted self-revelation, a domestic small-scale of the book's mirror-ambush logic, is our framing (inferred); the raw supplies the mirrors at each beat.