The veil / P.G.O.A.T.-deformity crux: the acid-incident full story

pivotal · 24 Nov YTMP per Notkin; reported ? Nov YDAU

• When: the Thanksgiving events dated 24 Nov YTMP (2003) by Notkin; reported ? Nov YDAU
• What: Notkin's secondhand account of how Joelle came by her deformity. On Joelle's third Thanksgiving home with Orin (KY, 24 Nov YTMP), her low-pH-chemist father — who had regressed the pubescent Joelle (child-rated films, interdicted brassieres/Pap smears, baby-talk diminutives, a nightly urge to drill a peephole over the bathroom sink) — erupts at the dinner table confessing a lifelong "pure," impossible, unconsummated love for her; the mother's denial-system then blows (she reveals her own childhood incest history) and she bolts to the cellar acid-lab, uncaps a world-class low-pH acid, and hurls the flask at the father, who ducks; Orin, "a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes," instinctively ducks too; the dazed, bradykinetic Joelle takes the direct facial hit — "the traumatic deformity." Notkin insists the deformity and Joelle's U.H.I.D. membership are "no kind of metaphor or ruse." Flag: this is the hearsay origin of the veil/deformity; unresolved against the novel's competing hints that Joelle's face may be unmarred (the P.G.O.A.T. / U.H.I.D. deformity-or-perfection enigma) and against Joelle's own oblique tellings — record as testimony, resolve nothing. (Cross-ref: Joelle's timeline (event 23), same disputed tellings.)