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. Where is the Darwinian logic there.

From my mother I inherited my looks and a tendency to migraine. From my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently.

I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.

I might as well lay it on the line, I have trouble with as it was.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

I 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 holding all the aces, but what was the game?

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

She was always a very selfish girl, it was first last and always Maria.

Maria would say that they were not her friends, but Maria has never understood friendship, conversation, the normal amenities of social exchange.

The girl on the screen in that first picture had no knack for anything.

Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.

On the way back into the city the traffic was heavy and the hot wind blew sand through the windows and the radio got on her nerves and after that Maria did not go back to the freeway except as a way of getting somewhere.

“Everybody got what he came for.” “Don’t you ever get tired of doing favors for people?” There was a long silence. “You don’t know how tired,” BZ said.

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 wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.

“What about the test.”

“I just never called back about it.”

“You were afraid to call back about it.”

“You thought if you didn’t call back it would...

She had a remote sense that everything was happening exactly the way it was supposed to happen.

Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

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.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children.

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

The bits of paper kept floating back into the toilet bowl and by the time she finally got rid of them it was light, and all the daisies in the garden had been snapped by the wind, and the concrete around the swimming pool was littered with fallen palm fronds.

She would do what he wanted. She would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again.

All that day Maria thought of fetuses in the East River, translucent as jellyfish, floating past the big sewage outfalls with the orange peels. She did not go to New York.

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

She cried because she was humiliated and she cried for her mother and she cried for Kate and she cried because something had just come through to her,

she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born.

She liked his not knowing her. She did not much like him but she liked his not knowing her.

“I mean there’s something in your behavior, Maria, I would almost go so far as to call it . . .”

Almost go so far as to call it a very self-destructive personality structure.”

Maria was listening to someone talk and every now and then she would hear herself making what she thought was an appropriate response but mostly she was just swaying slightly with the music and wondering where her drink was

She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.

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.

I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter.

I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.

The fan was broken and the door open and the woman swatted listlessly at flies. “I’ve lived in worse.” “So have I,” Maria said.

“I don’t like any of you,” she said. “You are all making me sick.”

“If it’s not funny don’t say it, Maria.”

“You know it doesn’t. If you thought things like that mattered you’d be gone already. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.”

“To find out if you’re alive.”

In the heat some mornings she would wake with her eyes swollen and heavy and she would won...

My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.

Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane.

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.