Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

She was staring into a hand mirror, picking out her mother’s features. Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed a family.

By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get.

“Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.” He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. “To find out if you’re alive.”

Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.