"Her poor personal Daddy": his place in Joelle's farewell inventory on the day she means to die

texture · 7 Nov YDAU

• When: 7 Nov YDAU — Joelle's walk to Molly Notkin's party and the bathroom overdose, the day before the Interdependence Day revel
• What: On the day Joelle intends "Too Much Fun," her father is how the narration names her to us — "the daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky" (scene 058) — and he threads her whole last walk: the reel of "the absolute end of her life and beauty" runs "from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY" (scene 058); a stranger's windshield wipers call up "Her own personal Daddy's old car had wipers' controls on the turn-signal stalk by the wheel" (scene 060). In the locked bathroom he takes his place in her farewell inventory, with the epithet doing the emotional work: "The idea that she'll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal." (Scene 062 — the same passage that gives "his second wife" and the Locked-Ward stepmother; the wives puzzle is ledgered below, not resolved.)