Status Updates From Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

sincere as a bird-call blown on a hunter's whistle,

[This speech should have torrential pace and fury.]

BIG DADDY: Ignorance--of mortality--is a comfort. A man don't have that comfort, he's the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing, which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it, and yet a pig squeals, . . .

BIG DADDY: You stood on the wrong side of the moon, it threw your shadow!

[Brick meets his father's hard, intent, grinning stare with a slow, vague smile that he offers all situations from behind the screen of his liquor.]

BIG DADDY [raising his voice]: You ever hear that expression all hawk and no spit? You bring that expression to mind with that little dry cough of yours, all hawk an' no spit....
[The pause is broken only by a short startled laugh from Margaret, the only one there who is conscious of and amused by the grotesque.]

. . . people like to do what they used to do, even after they've stopped being able to do it....

BIG MAMA: Fair or not fair I want to ask you a question, one question---D'you make Brick happy in bed?
MARGARET: Why don't you ask if he makes me happy in bed?
BIG MAMA: Because I know that--
MARGARET: It works both ways!
BIG MAMA: Something's not right! You're childless and my son drinks!

. . . you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.--You look so cool, . . .

[Margaret, back at the dressing-table, still doesn't see Brick. | He is watching her with a look that is not quite definable--Amused? shocked? contemptuous?--part of those and part of something else.]

[Her voice has range, and music; sometimes it drops low as a boy's and you have a sudden image of her playing boy's games as a child.]

[Water turns off and Brick calls out to her, but is still unseen. A tone of politely feigned interest, masking indifference, or worse, is characteristic of his speech with Margaret.]

It hasn't changed much since it was occupied by the original owners of the place, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a pair of old bachelors who shared this room all their lives together. In other words, the room must evoke some ghosts; it is gently and poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was uncommon.