Chapter 3
Blanche sits in the bedroom fanning herself while rereading a newly written, exaggerated letter to a man named Shep, laughing nervously at her own exaggerations. Stella enters, dresses, and asks why Blanche is laughing; Blanche replies that she is “a liar” and recites the false letter, which mentions summer flights and possible visits to Dallas.
A loud argument erupts upstairs between the invented characters Eunice and Steve; they shout accusations of infidelity and threaten to call the police. The disturbance draws Stanley, who arrives in a silk bowling shirt, questions the commotion, and engages in a terse, sarcastic dialogue with Blanche about astrological signs, guessing each other’s zodiac (Aries, Capricorn, Virgo) and mocking each other’s personalities. Stanley also probes Blanche about a “Shaw” and the Flamingo hotel, prompting Blanche to react with nervous laughter and to remark on the cheap perfume there.
Stella intermittently appears from the closet, offering Blanche a coke and later a shot of whiskey. Blanche’s emotional state oscillates between hysteria and melancholy; she clutches Stella’s hand, cries out about her fading beauty, laments her age, and expresses desperation for Mitch’s affection, fearing she is perceived as “over‑thirty” and fearing rejection. Stanley continues to taunt her, offering to count up to five hundred, while Blanche makes frantic notes in a notebook.
The scene shifts as a young man arrives collecting money for The Evening Star. Blanche, pretending to be a poor relative, engages him in absurd conversation about time, rain, and soda flavors, then flamboyantly kisses him before shooing him away, insisting she must keep “her hands off children.”
Finally, Mitch appears carrying a bouquet of roses. Blanche greets him exuberantly, calling him “my Rosenkavalier,” and presses the roses to her lips, ending the chaotic scene on a note of fragile hope.