#2 pick a scene

A scene I can relate to personally is when Sonny's mom starts asking Sonny to help her before Cloyd  and his client arrive. His mom gets really paranoid about Cloyd like she is always doing something wrong. She tries to hide that she didn't make the salsa and gets Sonny to help her out. She asks Sonny to take out the cans and hide them and offers him money so he can go out to eat instead of staying home while Cloyd an his client are there. Sonny teases and jokes with his mom by telling her that he will rat her out about how she didn't make the food (Gilb 76-82).
I can relate to this scene because I do the same thing with my mom. We could be doing something together or I'm just in the same room and I will spit out little comments to joke around with her. She will ask me to do little things sometimes when I'm in the kitchen with her. She will ask me to set the table, take out the trash, and many other little things and I'll ask her how much is she going to pay me for it or if my brother is in the room I'll say why don't you make him do it. Sometimes she doesn't care but other times she will take it the wrong way and get mad at me. I guess it depends on if its a good day or not. My brother will do the same thing and try to get her to make me do it.
I think the author is trying to show that Sonny's mother is very uptight because she wants to impress Cloyd and his client, she doesn't want to disappoint him. She starts to hide things from him because he keeps telling her that she uses too much toilet paper and that upsets her. I think she thinks that she doesn't fit with Cloyd, that she isn't good enough for him. So she tends to try to make everything peaceful by telling Sonny not to bug him about paying for the work he has done and telling Sonny that she will pay him if he really needs it. The relationship of these three people aren't very good. There is bad communication and it seems to be fake. The author wanted to show how their relationship affected Sonny and his mom. Throughout the novel its only going to get worse or better and its going to affect Sonny in some way.
The two interpretations are similar in a way because Sonny is really only trying to joke with him mom like he used to before she married Cloyd. It seems like he could be able to have that joke with her before but now he can't because she is so paranoid about not disappointing her new husband. With my mom she knows its a joke but sometimes gets annoyed with it. So both mothers take it in the same way at different times. It is different because my mom isn't trying to impress anyone while Sonny's mom is doing everything she can to make her marriage and family work.