Water by the Spoonful: Scene Five Summary & Analysis

Yaz sits in a flower shop reading brochures. Elliot arrives, his limp even more pronounced. Elliot tells her that he blew off some steam at a boxing gym before showing up. When Yaz asks if Odessa has called him yet, Elliot answers that she keeps herself shut away from the rest of the world. Yaz talks about the funeral preparations, the relatives arriving from Puerto Rico, and the family fighting over Mami Ginny’s possessions. To avoid it, Elliot suggests they just spend all day at the flower shop instead.

Together they deliberate on which floral arrangement to buy for the funeral, hoping for something that looks like Mami Ginny’s garden. Elliot refuses to have anything with carnations since it makes them look poor. Although Yaz has already found the perfect piece, she tries to hide it from Elliot since it is much more expensive. As they look at it, both Yaz and Elliot feel guilty that they did not take care of Mami Ginny’s garden, though Elliot was already serving as Ginny’s caretaker before she died.

Elliot wants Yaz to conduct the funeral, since she speaks publicly all the time as a teacher. Yaz remarks that she only has to talk about ideas as a teacher, which is easier, and comments that, “Ideas don’t fill the void, they just help you articulate it.” Elliot remarks that she is the new “elder” of the family now that Mami Ginny is gone, a thought which unnerves Yaz since she is only twenty-nine.

Yaz agrees to conduct the service, so long as Elliot will call her ex-husband and tell him not to come to the funeral, since in her eyes he’s lost the right to be involved with their family. She reflects that William has been to four of their family’s funerals and that she thinks he secretly saw her family as freaks for their odd Puerto Rican traditions, and she wonders if she also began to see her family that way. Elliot intentionally cuts her off from this line of thought, though, and Yaz tells him that she wants to go to Puerto Rico with Elliot to spread Mami Ginny’s ashes.

Yaz and Elliot sit in the flower shop, wondering how they will pay for the arrangement and watching the florist do his work. Yaz comments, “What do you think it’s like to be him? To be normal?” Although Elliot doubts that anyone is normal, Yaz guesses that his family rarely has funerals and that he’s never watched his young cousins be arrested or seen children drinking rum. She recounts the day she realized her adult cousin, who graduated high school, doesn’t even know how to read.

Yaz feels guilty about this, since she has college degrees and a seventeen-thousand-dollar piano with a mortgage on it. While she was married to William, he would tell her that every time she came back from visiting her family in the barrio, she seemed different. In contrast, “his family has Quaker Oats for DNA. They play Pictionary on New Year’s.”

At the time, her relationship with William and his family made Yaz wish that she could get rid of all her Puerto Rican blood. But now, she wishes she’d never been given the prep-school scholarship and left the barrio. Although Elliot thinks it is better that she left, she worries that now that Mami Ginny is gone, no one will be there to hold the extended family together. Elliot is not sure what he will do now, but disingenuously poses the possibility of moving to Los Angeles to be an actor. Yaz surmises that she might just come with him and leave Philadelphia behind. They order their flowers from the florist.