They devote most of their time and energy petitioning for zoning laws to maintain the social and ethnic exclusivity of their largely WASP community.
Set in Shady Hill, one of the dreams concerns a phantasmagoric mercy killing, in which Irene attempts to administer poison to Dolly as radioactive fallout descends on their house.
Donald's oddness manifests itself in his baking of cakes and cookies, a skill he learned as a boy from his mother, a grass widow.
"[7] Literary critic Samuel Coales comments on the characters as social types: The oddities the couple have just discovered about each other must quickly be suppressed to keep their suburban vision of order and "normalcy" intact.
[8]Donald and Irene Wrysons "suburban fear of change" is conveyed by Cheever's stylistic handling of the story.
"[10] Coale offers this caveat: It almost seems as though to Cheever the horrible reality of the [atomic] bomb is no more frightening than the benignly eccentric habit of baking a cake in the middle of the night.
We are left wondering whether or not the questions raised in the story and the anxieties revealed have not been too gracefully shaped and too easily passed over by the very style that has created them.