Mario's Bolex circuit; Avril on sadness (p. 764)
Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there’d been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she’d come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke’s nerves, who’d been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves.
Context
Mid-conversation with the Moms about how you can tell whether somebody's sad, Mario's mind wanders to lunch gossip: an X of brooms glued to the E.T.A. kitchen wall overnight, "out of nowhere," no explanation ever offered. It arrives third-hand and deadpan, but it's a full-dress haunting event in the escalating object-phenomena series that runs from Stice's bed (084) through the tunnels (122/129) to the ceiling-bolted bunk (179). (The text spells the cook's name two ways inside one sentence — "Mrs. Clark… Mrs. Clarke's" — preserved as written.)