Aging and Deafness (Symbol)
Grandma blames her deafness and the deafness of old people in general on the fact that the younger generation refuses to listen to them and speaks to them in a rude manner. At one point she tells us that old people only become deaf as they get older because they get so sick of people speaking to them "like that," that is, in a condescending manner. For Grandma, deafness is just a natural response to the indifference of the world. Thus, deafness and the aging of the body is not just a physical process, but also a symbol for the ways that older people get mistreated by society. Deafness is a symbol for the last shred of agency that an older person can muster in an unforgiving world.
''Van people'' (Motif)
As a way of always keeping Grandma a little on her toes, Mommy and Daddy devise the vague threat of the "van people," a group of people that will take Grandma away to an old people's home. When they wait for the mysterious guests in the house, they allude to the fact that the "van people" may come to whisk Grandma away.
The threat of the "van people" is an unseen motif throughout the play, and represents a larger force, something that threatens the way Daddy, Mommy and Grandma live. The "van people" represent unseen, unknown danger, the ominous threat of something that might break apart a family.
At the end of the play, Mommy and Daddy admit that they made up the "van people" in order to keep Grandma intimidated. When Grandma does disappear at the end (by choice), Mommy is surprised to find her gone and admits, "There's no such thing as the van man. There is no van man. We...we made him up." The van people, therefore, are specters, invisible threats, representing loss itself.
The Young Man (Symbol)
The Young Man himself is characterized by Grandma as being "the American Dream." When they first meet and she examines his attractive face and his wholesome attitude, she says, "You're the American Dream, that's what you are. All those other people, they don't know what they're talking about. You...you are the American Dream." Grandma doesn't explicitly outline what she means by this, but insinuates that the young man, in all of his wholesome American-ness, represents an optimism and a hope that exists in the United States, a belief in equality, happiness, and opportunity. As it turns out, the Young Man is "incomplete," incapable of love, and torn away from a twin brother who was disfigured in a most violent way. Thus, as a symbol for the "American Dream," the Young Man represents all its beauty and hope, its surface-level promise, but also its emptiness and impossibility.
Boxes (Motif)
Another motif in the play is Grandma's well-wrapped boxes. When she first enters, Grandma brings in a number of boxes and Mommy remarks on how nicely the boxes are wrapped. Even when Mommy decides to ignore Grandma and sends her to sleep, she is still interested in the boxes’ fate and their purpose. Mommy tells Daddy that Grandma has been wrapping boxes beautifully since Mommy was a little girl, that she always sent Mommy to school with a perfectly wrapped box of food, and that Mommy wouldn't even open the box and eat her lunch because she didn't want to mess up the perfectly-wrapped boxes. In this story, the boxes represent Grandma's care and attention to detail, but also Mommy's inability to accept Grandma's affection and love.
At the end, Grandma takes her boxes with her. We never learn what was inside them, but their removal is part of Grandma's vacating Mommy and Daddy's house. Perhaps this represents the fact that she takes her maternal care with her when she leaves.
Vagueness (Motif)
There is a vagueness and confusion that permeates the tone of the entire play. While a few relationships and characters are fully defined and delineated, much of the action and conversation serves to confuse our understanding of the plot, rather than advance and clarify it. Despite the fact that Mrs. Barker was invited into Mommy and Daddy’s apartment, no one seems to know who she is. Even though she was a guest in Mommy and Daddy’s house in the past, they can’t seem to remember her. What is more, Mrs. Barker seems to have an important role in Mommy’s women’s club, about which she seems to care greatly, but despite this Mommy doesn’t remember who Mrs. Barker is.
Later, Grandma tells a story about a couple very much like Mommy and Daddy and an adoption worker very much like Mrs. Barker, but does not go so far as to say that she is talking about them directly. This only adds to the motif of confusion, vagueness, and a blurred reality. This confusion is both comic and melancholic, as though everyone in the play has selective memory.
