Amanda’s Mother
from Unseen Character
(AMANDA’S MOTHER stands at the front door of the apartment. She throws a bouquet of flowers on the entry table.)
You must be drunk on jonquils! I never heard of a soul so uniformly obsessed with jonquils. What is it about a jonquil that makes your fingers cry out, “Give me more, give me more, give me more jonquils!”
When I was a schoolgirl, my mother told me to avoid jonquils at all costs! She told me the real name for these flowers have their own predetermined destiny. These flowers are called Narcissus jonquilla. Gentlemen callers do not want to compete with a Narcissus. The very name insinuates that one is so pretty that she herself knows she is so pretty and is so proud she is so pretty, and like her namesake, just might spend hours staring into her own reflection and falling in love with her own countenance in epic proportions. She doesn’t have time for gentlemen callers! She’s only got time for herself. So we don’t want any more jonquils!
We don’t have room for any more jonquils anyway! Every vase in the house is filled with jonquils. The white porcelain flower vase that I received on my wedding day, that vase holds three dozen long-stemmed roses in its most generous capacity. And you have shoved the jonquils in so tightly, I bet there’s eighty, ninety, maybe more. You even put jonquils in the lemonade pitcher! Jonquils in the fish bowl, jonquils in the bathtub, jonquils in the glass of water beside your daddy’s nightstand. You know what that glass of water is reserved for? Your daddy’s teeth! He puts his teeth in there when we go to sleep. What you think he’s going to think when he sees jonquils soaking up his teeth water? There is not room for another jonquil in this house!
And in addition to this jonquil madness, you still have got your interminable fever. One hundred degrees! Hottest forehead in all of Mississippi! Girls with hot foreheads should not be receiving gentlemen callers—not with a fever so high! We should cancel all these visitations right now and focus on your health.
I’ll give you an alcohol rub. Strip down to your bloomers! Where are you going? Don’t you dare run out the door on me! Amanda! Amanda! I demand you to strip down to your bloomers this instant!
Oh, dear Lord, what will become of her? I do not know. I do not know. 
Unseen Character (part 2): Introduction and Menu
Review | My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams by William Jay Smith