Young Jim, his father, and the mattress — "My father seemed frozen in place…"
My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed frame.
Context
The memoir keeps auditing its own faculty, and the audit reveals its shape: the boy's incomprehension of the father is preserved verbatim, while the mother simply drops out of the record at the scene's stillest moment — in a memoir about the parents' bed. The gaps are as composed as the retentions.