Oliver and Barbara confront each other in the dining room

Oliver and Barbara confront each other in the dining room at the point when their divorce has become a domestic war fought through food, treasured possessions, and the structure of the house itself. Barbara arrives with a settlement offer and the cleaver concealed beside her; Oliver rejects the bargain and answers with a crowbar. Their meeting does not resolve who owns the home. Instead, it turns the dining room into another contested space and drives the conflict toward a new round of danger inside the house.

Causes and Preparation

The confrontation follows a series of retaliations that have made ordinary household objects instruments of injury. After finding that Barbara has destroyed his orchids, Oliver alters seven meat loaves prepared for her customers, mixing in large quantities of different spices and, in one, substituting sugar for salt. His revenge targets her catering work as well as her anger: he anticipates that her customers will argue over what has spoiled the food. The episode establishes the pattern that governs the later meeting—an injury to one spouse is answered by an attack on something the other values.

That pattern escalates beyond food and plants. Barbara wedges a chisel into the redwood sauna door while Oliver is inside, trapping him. In retaliation, Oliver uses the chisel to cut up Barbara’s African violets and Boston ferns, then puts them in a stock pot of water on the stove. His recognition that the act is pointless does not stop it; carrying out the destruction makes him feel better. The conflict has moved from grievances to deliberately damaging the other person’s possessions, with each act making a peaceful settlement harder to imagine.

The house’s appliances and machinery further complicate this struggle. While Barbara is preparing food, the Cuisinart continues running after she switches it off, its blade flies into the range hood, and other kitchen equipment begins operating amid hot burners and sharp objects. Later, Barbara adjusts the garage-door mechanism and repeatedly lowers the heavy door onto Oliver’s Ferrari, crushing its bodywork and breaking parts of the car. The meeting in the dining room takes place against this accumulating record of sabotage and destruction, rather than as an isolated disagreement about property.

Barbara prepares the room as both host and adversary. She lights candles in all ten sockets of the silver rococo candelabrum, a first for her, and sets out silver goblets and plates on the polished mahogany table. On Oliver’s plate she places freshly made pâté with melba toast. She has chosen the dining room because it is her domain, but she also waits with a cleaver in a shopping bag beside her foot. The carefully arranged meal and the concealed weapon make the contradiction plain: she has staged a formal conversation in a home where neither spouse feels safe.

The Offer and the Competing Claims

Barbara begins by making clear that she will not retreat. Oliver initially thinks her invitation is meant only to declare that resolve, but she has a specific proposal. She will let him choose half the things in the house, including books, paintings, and Staffordshire figurines, while keeping the house. Her first exclusions include the dining room and kitchen, as well as the furniture in the children’s rooms. When Oliver gestures to the dining room and insists on including it, she accepts that it, too, can fall within the offer. She presents the deal as generous and says they need no lawyers: he can take his share and leave.

Oliver treats the offer sarcastically rather than as a way out. He maintains that the house is his because he paid for it and says that, even if the courts rule against him, he will find a way to get it. Barbara’s counterclaim rests on both labor and sacrifice: she wants compensation for what she has given up and refuses to remain in a family arrangement she says she hates. Their dispute is not simply over the value of household goods. Each treats the house as proof of a different account of their shared life, and neither accepts the other’s account as a reason to surrender it.

The argument sharpens when Oliver credits himself with having put Barbara in the house, bought the things in it, and supported her development as a gourmet cook. Barbara answers with bitter gratitude, rejecting the idea that his support settles what she is owed. Oliver says that nothing will be divided except the two of them; Barbara tells him he no longer matters to her and that she loathes him. For a moment, she feels pity as well as hatred, recognizing them both as victims of a love that has cheated them. The moment does not restore intimacy or change her position: she continues to insist that she will fight for the house.

From Negotiation to Violence

The candlelit meal gives the exchange an appearance of civility, but its physical details steadily undo that appearance. Oliver drinks wine and eats the pâté while Barbara repeats that she can resist forever. The candles make the room unbearably hot; sweat shines on Oliver’s face, and he removes his robe. Their talk returns to ownership, rights, and the possibility of leaving, but neither accepts the other’s terms. Oliver calls the house his place and argues that he loves it more; Barbara refuses to accept his claim as a right.

As the argument breaks down, Oliver drains the bottle and staggers toward the door. He thanks Barbara for the pâté. She tells him to thank Benny. The exchange is followed by Oliver leaning against the wall and then raising a crowbar. Barbara has anticipated danger: she grabs the shopping bag containing the cleaver and rises, overturning her chair. Oliver’s sweeping blow knocks the candelabrum from the table. He methodically steps on the candles, plunging the room into darkness.

Barbara keeps hold of the cleaver, prepared to defend herself, but Oliver does not immediately come at her. Instead, she hears the crowbar striking the Duncan Phyfe table. The damage to the wood feels to her like pain transferred into her own body. Under cover of the dark, she backs through the hall and goes upstairs to Josh Rose’s room, where she curls up in the closet with the shopping bag in her lap and her fist around the cleaver handle. She is no longer negotiating over the house; for the moment, she is hiding inside it from Oliver’s destructive rage.

Aftermath and Escalation

Oliver’s attack on the table becomes the next stage of the struggle rather than its conclusion. Later, carrying a candle and crowbar, he encounters a broken Staffordshire figure, Garibaldi, and reads Barbara’s lipstick message on a door: ‘I’ll break some every day.’ He responds by making the house more dangerous. He removes bolts from hinges throughout the house, except on his own door and the doors to the outside, arranging the other doors so that even slight movement will make them fall. He loosens furniture supports and screws and bolts in the kitchen, leaving objects poised to collapse or drop.

The confrontation therefore changes the immediate balance of the conflict without producing a settlement. Barbara’s proposal briefly makes division of the possessions imaginable, but Oliver’s refusal and attack replace bargaining with a physical contest over the home. Her retreat into a closet and his methodical rigging of doors, furniture, shelves, and cabinets show the consequence: the house that both claim has become a trap-laden extension of their hostility, where the ordinary objects of shared domestic life can no longer be trusted.