The Thanksgiving eruption and the acid — Notkin's account, with Joelle's oblique counter-frame; resolves nothing

pivotal · 24 Nov Y.T.M.P. (midday), per Notkin only

• When: Thanksgiving Dinner, "at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P." — Orin's junior-year Thanksgiving, on Joelle's third visit home with him, per Notkin's telling; Joelle's own chapters give the day no date and no direct narration
• What: Notkin's account (told secondhand to the U.S.O.U.S. technical interviewers, in itemized indirect discourse, under the lamp — the only carrier that narrates the day): on the third visit home with Orin, at Thanksgiving Dinner, "the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis's plate's turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork," and Joelle finally aired the unspoken question of why her own personal Daddy seemed to feel she needed help to chew. The Daddy's "enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table": "the confession that he'd been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn't, nor ogle" — with the regression of events 5 read, in his own confessed account per Notkin, as the only available compensation, down to the trembling-will restraint at a bathroom peephole he says he never drilled. Then the mother's denial-system blew: she announced that "she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated"; that her own father — an itinerant camp-meeting preacher — had molested her and her sister all through childhood, and that she'd married at just sixteen to escape; "that she'd married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter"; then that maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster — and she reeled from her place, hurdled three pointers, and ran down to "the Daddy's acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid." The Daddy, then Orin, then a shock-slowed Joelle ran after her and hit the cellar as she unstoppered a Pyrex flask with a half-eaten-away skull on the side and flaming scarlet litmus afloat in it; "the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who'd reflexively ducked" — Orin, superb reflexes, ducked too — leaving Joelle open for a direct facial hit, "resulting in the traumatic deformity" (the phrase is Notkin's). Joelle's side: her own chapters never narrate any of this; the nearest her focalized memory comes is the epithet for Orin — "punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire" (scene 060) — which attests flung acid and Orin's duck in her frame and nothing more. What the acid did or did not do to her face — deformity, untouched beauty, or anything between — is the archive's open joelle-veil question and is NOT resolved here; both accounts stand as printed, unmerged. Notkin's account also renames the family for this whole history: "Madame Psychosis's name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy's name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY" — flatly at odds with every other carrier's van Dyne / Shiny Prize / western-Kentucky fabric; recorded, not adjudicated (Dating notes).