Barbara's dinner party descends into chaos after a laxative prank

Barbara Rose’s dinner party turns from a polished display of hospitality into a public humiliation when Oliver Rose secretly laces its chocolate sauce with Ex-Lax. The prank makes the house’s bathrooms the focus of the evening, strips Barbara’s carefully maintained social triumph of its composure, and provokes her to retaliate against Oliver’s Ferrari. The episode is both a party’s collapse and a sharp escalation in the Roses’ domestic war: Oliver has made the gathering a weapon, and Barbara answers by using knowledge he gave her about one of his prized possessions.

A Carefully Staged Success

Barbara’s confidence is still vulnerable as dessert is served. She has just surveyed the kitchen and returned to the table, where seeing her guests helps reassure her. The wife of the Thai ambassador whispers that everything is perfect, and the approval of Mr. White of The Washington Post further calms Barbara: he makes a round sign with his fingers after tasting the eclair and warm chocolate sauce. Its chocolate is thicker than she would have liked, but its custard filling is right. At that moment, the meal appears to confirm the elegance and competence she has worked to display.

The Greek ambassador’s toast gives that success a public form. Barbara sees him as a symbol of the elegant home she wants to make tangible: dressed in black tie, sustained by the food and wine, and visibly impressed, even if he barely knows her. His compliments to her beauty, taste, and hosting are followed by other guests rising to echo him. Afterward, the room settles into the comfortable divisions of the party, with men discussing politics, women talking about other matters, and cigars being passed. Barbara takes the steady buzz of conversation as evidence that the evening is going well. That atmosphere makes the first signs of trouble especially jarring: a frown, a whisper to a waiter, and a guest hurrying away from the room.

The Bathrooms Take Over

The Greek ambassador’s wife rises and looks toward Barbara, who understands what she needs and directs her to a bathroom on the first floor. The woman’s departure carries an unspoken, pleading quality. Soon Mr. White leaves with unusual speed. Barbara hears quick knocking at the occupied hall toilet and goes to the foyer, where the food editor appears pale and tense. He asks whether she is all right, then manages to tell her that someone is upstairs in the master bedroom before racing up the stairs himself.

As the Thai ambassador approaches with a pained expression, Barbara’s recognition of the crisis sharpens. She cries that another person is on the third floor. A woman calls for Jacques while knocking at the closed hall-toilet door; from inside comes a muffled torrent of French invective, including a word Barbara can hear clearly. More guests converge, their raised voices blending into a discordant crowd. Barbara tries to explain that she is not responsible. The house, previously a stage for orderly service and diplomatic approval, now seems to operate through flushing toilets, opening and closing doors, and hurried footsteps. Guests brush past her through the front door, while she apologizes and feels the same physical distress overtaking her.

Barbara runs through the kitchen, past the startled waiters, who are busy cleaning up. She loses any conscious sense of direction and ends up in the garden, squatting among azaleas beside the garage wall. There she discovers the Greek ambassador in a similarly exposed predicament, his bare bottom illuminated by the full moon. His face turns toward her with an expression she experiences as almost disembodied; he addresses her with a smile that she cannot make sense of. She asks for help, looks away, and remains hidden among the azaleas until she is certain the guests have left. Her party has not simply lost its order: the ambassador whose toast embodied its social success is now part of the humiliating disorder she cannot escape.

The Prank and Its Retaliation

Once alone, Barbara’s mortification gives way to anger. She enters the garage through the garden door, removes the cover from Oliver’s Ferrari, and lifts off its fiberglass top. Oliver had shown her how to do this when he first bought the car and let her drive it, though she had taken no pleasure in the experience, regarding it as a man’s toy. She then uses a screwdriver from a toolbox to open the mechanism that operates the garage door and adjusts its fail-safe. The car’s vulnerability depends on a specific piece of shared knowledge: Oliver had previously explained what went wrong with the mechanism after the heavy door nearly crushed Mercedes, who escaped in time. Barbara now turns that explanation into a means of retaliation.

The next morning, Oliver reflects on the dinner and the destroyed car from his office, over coffee and a doughnut supplied by Miss Harlow. He had expected the damage he did to the kitchen to stop Barbara’s party. When she proceeded anyway, he hid in the sunroom and waited until the right moment to drop Ex-Lax into the chocolate sauce, adding an extra piece for good measure. He regarded the party as an affront because Barbara had gone ahead against his wishes and used money from what he considered stolen possessions. His retrospective account changes the dinner’s apparent misfortune into a deliberate act: the contaminated dessert was not an accident, but Oliver’s calculated sabotage.

Oliver learns that the sabotage has not left him in control. He believes that leaving for the movies may have cost him the chance to save the Ferrari, though he doubts he could have prevented Barbara’s response. Seeing the car the next morning, he wants to cry but cannot. He puts the loss at fifty thousand dollars and recognizes the irony that Barbara used a weapon whose operation he had taught her. His grudging acknowledgment of her resourcefulness accompanies his resentment at what he sees as her humiliation of him. The sequence therefore closes not with the restoration of the party’s order, but with the prank’s reversal: Oliver’s attack on Barbara’s public achievement produces a counterattack against a possession he values, and each spouse reads the other’s action as justification for the next.