Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

Maria would say that they were not her friends, but Maria has never understood friendship, conversation, the normal amenities of social exchange. Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping.

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.

It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.

Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.

The charge was mental cruelty, uncontested. This Mrs. Maria Lang to whom the lawyers referred seemed to Maria someone other than herself, an aggrieved wife she might see interviewed on television.

In a sense the day they ate spare ribs and drove to McCarran had ceased to exist, had never happened at all: she was the only one left who remembered it.

“All right,” he said. “Fight me. You’ll like it better that way anyway.”

“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.”

In the heat some mornings she would wake with her eyes swollen and heavy and she would wonder if she had been crying.