Scene 164: gately dreams mrs waite death

• pp. 846-847: the EAT-motel dream — high Southern summer, ceiling fan at a second-hand's rate, four-poster bed; newcomer Joelle licks sweat from his lids, undresses ("a body like something you'd win in a raffle"), a fifth post forms on the four-poster; the unveiling: "the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls"; the rigid shock wakes him into a blast of pain.
• pp. 847-848: Mrs. Waite introduced — the indifferently maintained house, the dire unnamed something "the little poor neighborhood's psyche throbbed with"; kids' witch-mythology (jarred viscous vegetoid stuff, milk-carton-kid juice), bag-of-dogshit gags, her never complaining as further indictment; Mrs. Gately's unenforceable forbiddings; Gately's scare at her face in the weight-garage window; the gradual slight relationship — kitchen interfaces, no pointy hat, mildewed Globes, the radiated "mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability... that made you want to be cruel."
• pp. 848-849: her hanging, found weeks later by a meter-reader, after Gately's eighth or ninth birthday; the shared neighborhood birthday parties (Hats and Twister, Chinette plates; the retrospective realization the parents felt sorry for him).
• p. 849: the cake — Mrs. Waite, who'd given up cigarettes for weeks to afford it (the mayonnaise jar of quarters Gately wrestled with himself over promoting, and won), brings a tilted dark-chocolate cake with four cursive names ("Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was."); the sober Mom takes it at the door without inviting her in; Mrs. Waite recrosses the street "slowly but very straightly and dignified and upright"; the cake sits quarantined in the garage corner, nine unmatched candles burning down to a smell of burnt frosting; Gately neither eats a piece nor argues with the poisoning-talk.
• pp. 849-850: the Mom sneaks the cake to the kitchen wastebasket (it lands unfrosted-side-up; Gately sneaks in and looks); days later Gately promotes two packs of Benson & Hedges 100s from a Store 24 and leaves them in her piling-up mailbox; rings the buzzer, never sees her again; her death becomes more dark myth; "Everybody had their own private troubles, Mrs. Gately had explained"; he never consciously mourned or thought of her for years.
• pp. 850-851: the second dream — Mrs. Waite's kitchen in great detail (light-fixture of dried bugs, the bar-graph of stacked Globes, arrhythmic sink-drip, mildew-and-putrid-fruit smell), Gately in the broken-rung ladder-back chair but with adult-length legs; Mrs. Waite "played by" Joelle on the hemorrhoid pillow — unveiled, naked, the body again inhuman but the face "a total female angel... like all the world's light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face," a face that looks like somebody he can't place; understood without being said: she is Death incarnate.
• pp. 850-851: Death's doctrine — many lives; at each one's end "a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life"; the killer, knowing or involuntary, is always someone you love and is always your next life's mother; mothers' obsessive love, its "slight, like, twinge of selfishness," is amends "for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams"; remedial-patient delivery ("like he'd missed that day in school"); the sadder Gately gets the more the vision blurs into "a milky filter that's the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib"; he cries, asks Death to set him free and be his mother; "Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait."

Backward

• The Death-as-next-life's-mother doctrine is, nearly verbatim, what Molly Notkin reports the Entertainment contains (scene 159, pp. 788-795: Madame Psychosis as Death explaining to the viewer-as-infant that Death is the mother) — Gately, who has never seen the Entertainment, dreams its content with Joelle in the Death role her own self played for JOI's camera; strongly implies wraith-transmission (the wraith-interface is the immediately preceding scene 162) and fuses Gately into the film's apology-circuit.
• The M.P. household (scene 162, pp. 836-843) is the standing context: Mrs. Waite's kitchen was where Gately went when the M.P. was canning chowder and his mother lay passed out — the two kitchens, abuser's and witch's, are this childhood's complete map.
• Reincarnation-mother material refracts the book's mother-studies: Avril's obsessive "amends"-shaped love (n.269's indictment-proof smothering; see scenes/scene n269) reads differently in Death's lights.

Forward

• "It looks like somebody, Joelle's face, but Gately can't for the life of him place who" — the unplaceable resemblance gestures at the maternal/Death composite (and, for the reader, at Joelle's actual face under the veil, deformed or perfect — deliberately undecidable; cf. n.350 in scene 166).
• The terminal "Wait." answers and rhymes with the dead neighbor's name (Mrs. Waite) — and is honored: Joelle appears in the flesh at his bedside at the top of scene 166 (p. 854), the dream's effulgent face becoming the boiled-white ceiling.
• Churchill-faced Joelle returns as a worry inside Gately's marriage fantasies in scene 166 (p. 863 and n.350); the "staple in its navel" raffle-body idiom recurs there too.
• Mrs. Waite's hoarded jars and dire reputation echo the feral-domestic uncanny of the book's other shunned-house material; her cake-and-suicide is the Gately-side panel of the novel's failed-gift series (cf. Mario's unanswered radio devotion; Barry Loach's outstretched hand, pp. 967, scene 183ff).
• Gately's mother's cirrhosis-trajectory and Gately's unasked questions (why did she love the M.P.?) continue into scenes 169ff (the L.T.I. visits memory).

• p. 847: "and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill" — the veil's two-faced terror; anchor passage for disability-deformity.
• p. 848: "she hung herself, eventually, Mrs. Waite—as in eliminated her own map" — Eschaton idiom on a real corpse; maps-territory crossover.
• p. 849: "Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was." — the gift's whole tragedy in two sentences.
• pp. 850-851: Death's doctrine ("the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she's always your next life's mother... trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams") — the Entertainment's content dreamed secondhand; essential anthology passage.
• p. 851: "he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait." — the crib-blur, the ambiguous answer, the name-pun; scene's last line.