Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none.

Those are the facts. Now I lie in the sun and play solitaire and listen to the sea (the sea is down the cliff but I am not allowed to swim, only on Sundays when we are accompanied) and watch a hummingbird.

I try not to think of dead things and plumbing. I try not to hear the air conditioner in that bedroom in Encino. I try not to live in Silver Wells or in New York or with Carter.

try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was ...

She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.

Sometimes at night the dread would overtake her, bathe her in sweat, flood her mind with sharp flash images of Les Goodwin in New York and Carter out there on the desert with BZ and Helene and the irrevocability of what seemed already to have happened, but she never thought about that on the freeway.

The reception room was full of glossy plants in chinoiserie pots and Maria had an abrupt conviction that the plants were consuming the oxygen she needed to breathe.

Failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants.

Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.

Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women,

She knew a lot of things about disaster. She could manage. Carter could never manage but she could.

Two minutes in Silver Wells, two minutes here, two minutes there, it was going to be over in this bedroom in Encino, it could not last forever.