Summary
When Mommy tries to insult Grandma for her age, Grandma fires back, "Well, you got the rhythm, but you don't really have the quality. Besides, you're middle-aged." Grandma then insults Mommy more brutally than Mommy was able to insult her. Grandma then tells everyone that Mrs. Barker is not there for the boxes, and tries to give an explanation for why the boxes are there, but Mommy interrupts her and they argue. Mrs. Barker tells Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma that she's very busy and needs help, but Mommy has no interest in helping her. When Grandma makes some wisecracks, Mommy blames the fact that she has her own television, and tells Daddy to go break it. He dutifully gets up and leaves to break Grandma's television.
With Daddy gone, Mommy wants to have girl talk, but Mrs. Barker requests a glass of water. Mommy orders Grandma to fetch the water, but Grandma refuses and they continue to quibble. Mommy leaves the room.
Left alone with Mrs. Barker, Grandma asks her how she's doing. Mrs. Barker admits that she's confused, because she doesn't know why she's there, and "they say I was here before." Grandma seems to have the answer and tells a story about a time 20 years ago, in which a man very much like Daddy, a woman very much like Mommy, and another woman very much like Grandma, all lived in an apartment like this one together. She describes a woman very much like Mrs. Barker who worked for an adoption agency "very much like the Bye-Bye Adoption Service," who provided the couple with a "bumble of joy," meaning an adopted baby.
"Things didn't work out very well," Grandma says, continuing the story. Grandma tells Mrs. Barker that the adopted baby didn't look like its parents, and that one night, it cried its heart out. "Then it turned out it only had eyes for its Daddy," Grandma continues, to which Mrs. Barker exclaims, "...Any self-respecting woman would have gouged those eyes right out of its head." Grandma tells Mrs. Barker that this is exactly what the mother did, but the baby remained proud, and developed an interest in its "you-know-what." As a result, Grandma tells her, they cut off the baby's "you-know-what," then its hands. When the baby called its mother a dirty name, they cut the baby's tongue out. Grandma continues, "As it got bigger, they found out all sorts of terrible things about it, like: it didn't have a head on its shoulders, it had no guts, it was spineless, its feet were made of clay..." The baby soon died, and so the parents called up the woman who "sold them the bumble" and asked for their money back.
Mommy and Daddy call from the other room. They cannot find anything, not Grandma's television or her Pekinese or water, or even Grandma's room.
Analysis
In this section of the play, Mommy tries to strike out against Grandma. While she and Daddy have maintained a vaguer disrespect towards the older woman, she decides to really try and insult her mother at the beginning of this section. Unfortunately, she's out of her depth, as Grandma points out that she has the "rhythm," but not the "quality" down before launching into an insulting assessment of middle-aged people. She points out that "middle-aged people think they're special because they're like everybody else." This moment represents Grandma getting back at Mommy and Daddy, who have treated her so poorly so far. It shows that Grandma has some wisdom that others don't have access to.
The vagueness at the core of the action and meaning continues to puzzle in this section of the play, as the characters continue to try and piece together who Mrs. Barker is. Indeed, even Mrs. Barker has no idea what she's doing at the apartment. Grandma begins a kind of intimate and conspiratorial relationship with Mrs. Barker, telling her embarrassing details about Mommy's childhood. At one point, Grandma mentions that she knows why Mrs. Barker is there, even though Mrs. Barker alleges, "I know I'm here because you called us, but I'm such a busy girl, with this committee and that committee, and the Responsible Citizens Activities I indulge in." This moment seems to suggest that Mrs. Barker represents community involvement itself, standing in as a kind of archetypal representation of civic engagement. Then again, who can say for sure.
When they are left alone, Grandma continues to develop her individual relationship with Mrs. Barker. She tells her a story in which nearly every element has a correlate in reality. She talks about a couple "very much like Mommy and Daddy," and an apartment "very much like this one." This narrative world of Grandma's, in which everything is simultaneously fictive and real, adds to the absurd and confusing emotional landscape of the play. The audience can tell that Grandma is talking about Mommy and Daddy, but why won't she just say so? The fact that we must deduce facts through oblique references plays into the absurd tone of the play.
In Grandma's story, it comes out that Mrs. Barker (who also has a fictive correlate in the story) is not only an all-purpose committee member, but a worker at an adoption agency. She was tasked, many years ago, with finding a baby for Mommy and Daddy, a process which sounds more like a commerical transaction than an adoption. The baby she gave them was not up to snuff, as suggested by the fact that he was unusually attached to his father. As a result, Mommy and Daddy slowly disfigured the child, blinding it, then cutting off its sexual organs, then cutting off its hands, and finally, returning it to the adoption agency and demanding a new baby.
Grandma's story is like something out of a Greek tragedy: grotesque, heavily symbolic, and pregnant with family and psychological trauma. The story of Mommy and Daddy disfiguring their child for its homoerotic attachment to its father is explicitly Oedipal, not to mention that they proceeded to blind it, castrate it, and cut off its hands. The story of the doomed "bumble" is like a violent fantasy of Freudian impulses pushed to their limits. In Grandma's story, Oedipus doesn't have to blind himself; his parents do it for him. Likewise the Freudian notion of castration anxiety—a fear of emasculation—is dramatized as an actual castration.
