Summary

While Sheila changes clothes, Bri delivers a monologue. First, he addresses Joe, telling her Sheila is upstairs. He tells Joe her mother is probably naked, critiquing her figure in the mirror. Bri says he will not beg her to stay home and make love with him. He is unwilling to compromise his dignity. Since Joe is unable to understand him or respond to him, Bri says that, while talking with her, he “might as well be talking to a wall” (13). Unfulfilled, Bri turns his attention to the audience. Bri tells the audience that his wife, “embraces all living things” (14), regardless of their responsiveness to her nursing—dying plants, messy birds, hungry goldfish, flea infested cats, and the most tenderly nursed, most unresponsive person in the household, Joe. Bri, by contrast, says he has lost the ability to form genuine emotional attachments, and he...