Barbara sabotages the large library cabinet

Barbara sabotages the large library cabinet as part of her effort to drive Oliver out of their shared home. She alters the armoire in secret, and when it finally falls on him, the furniture becomes something more than a symbol of their domestic war: its weight physically pins him and leaves him injured. The episode marks a sharp escalation from damage to possessions to danger to a body, while Barbara’s disappointment at the result makes clear that, for her, the attack is only a beginning.

The Armoire as a Target

Barbara had always hated the library armoire. To her, its bulk and commanding presence embodied a compensating masculine appetite for size. Her sabotage was practical as well as expressive: she sawed through the front legs where they met the cabinet and cemented the front doors. The object that had once stood as imposing furniture was thus altered into a trap, though its danger remained concealed until Oliver tried to use it.

Her preparation carried the intimacy of an act she had dwelt on: working on the legs and doors had been, in the narrator’s account, almost a labor of love. That detail complicates any picture of the collapse as a sudden impulse. Barbara had selected an object she loathed and deliberately changed its structure. The armoire’s appearance mattered to her, but so did its physical vulnerability: its height and weight, previously part of what made it oppressive, would make its fall consequential.

The Collapse

The danger emerged on a night when Oliver returned to a silent, unpowered house. In the summer humidity, he understood that the electricity had been shut off. Using matches and then flashlights, he made his way through the dark; preoccupied with the rise in temperature in his wine collection, he went toward the library for a drink. The armoire’s wooden knobs seemed stuck. He blamed the moisture-swollen wood, set down his flashlight, braced one hand against a door, and tugged again.

The cabinet began to tip. Its nine-foot mass pressed toward him, and the bottles inside crashed against one another as he tried to hold it up. He managed briefly to push it back, but this left him trapped beneath its weight, using his shoulders and legs as a human brace. His muscles hurt and weakened; sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes. He shifted the burden when he could, but each position became unbearable. He knew that if his strength failed, the armoire would fall on him, and he doubted he could jump clear.

As the cabinet descended, Oliver’s knees gave way. He could not summon the strength for the leap he had prepared to make, and the thought that his injury or death would give Barbara the victory sharpened his effort to escape. He lurched forward at the last moment, but did not get away completely: the falling armoire caught the sole of his shoe and badly twisted his ankle. In pain, he contorted himself, untied the shoelace, and pulled his foot free of the trapped shoe. Whiskey seeped from under the cabinet, soaking his clothes and filling the room with its acrid smell.

Barbara’s Intention and the Aftermath

Barbara had wanted a larger crash. She considered the result disappointing, and thought she might not have applied the energy and zeal Oliver had brought to booby-trapping her kitchen and ruining her food. She had dismissed the destruction of Oliver’s Ferrari as a moment of compulsive inspiration; now she decided to become more deliberately and completely committed to the struggle. She no longer expected Harry Thurmont to do the work for her, believing he was chiefly interested in enriching himself. With the children away at camp and the house empty, she was free to maneuver, and resolved to drive Oliver out or die trying.

From her window, Barbara saw Oliver hobble to a waiting taxi with what seemed to her a comparatively minor injury. She then heard him return and limp upstairs. The disparity between the small injury she observed and the danger he had faced in the library underscores how little she knew of the trap’s immediate consequences. She had expected a more dramatic impact, but did not treat the attempt as a failure: she understood the armoire tactic as a warning of what might follow.

The scene also changes the meaning of the house’s ordinary objects. A cabinet door that Oliver assumes is merely stuck by damp wood conceals Barbara’s intervention; its height and weight turn the familiar room into a place of bodily peril. After the collapse, Oliver crawls across the library floor, where Benny, startled awake by the noise, greets him. Oliver embraces the dog, whose presence offers him comfort amid the whiskey and perspiration. Later, after stumbling against a bathroom wall on his injured ankle, he sees his situation with a new clarity and regards the conflict as an open war. Barbara’s sabotage has therefore produced more than an injury: it helps make the danger between the spouses unmistakable to Oliver, even as she regards it as only an initial warning.

Significance in the Conflict

The attack reverses the usual relation between a person and a household possession. The armoire is not merely damaged property or a passive emblem of Barbara’s resentment; altered by her, it acts upon Oliver with a force its everyday function had hidden. Yet the result is not wholly under her control. She hopes for a larger crash, while the actual sequence depends on Oliver’s strength, his attempt to brace the cabinet, and his last effort to wrench himself away. The episode makes their struggle material: resentment is built into furniture, and a domestic object becomes a weapon whose consequences are real but not precisely governed by the person who set the trap.