Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.

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 didn’t know about it for a couple of weeks because the coyotes tore her up before anybody found her and my father couldn’t tell me.

Another scene: she is playing on the lawn with the baby, tossing up drops of water from a clear plastic hose. “Watch out she doesn’t get chilled,” I say from the terrace; Maria looks up, drops the hose, and walks away from the baby toward the poolhouse. She turns, and looks back at the baby. “Your father wants to talk to you,” she says. Her voice is neutral.

She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body)

Carter took her to BZ and Helene’s one night when BZ was running the picture and she had to leave the house after the titles, had to sit outside on the beach smoking cigarettes and fighting nausea for seventy-two of the seventy-four minutes. “Why does he run it so often,” she had said to Carter later. “Why do you let him keep a print out there, he keeps a print in the house.” “He owns it, Maria. He owns all the prints.” “That’s not what I mean. I said why does he run it so often.” “He wants Helene to see it.” “Helene’s seen it a dozen times. Helene doesn’t even like it, she told me so.” “You don’t understand anything,” Carter had said finally, and they had gone to bed that night without speaking. Maria did not want to understand why BZ ran that first picture so often or what it had to do with Helene. The girl on the screen in that first picture had no knack for anything.

!!!!!! Make them all the manic dream

“You can’t call this a bad place,” the woman who ran the coffee shop told Maria. 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. The woman shrugged.

Slaughterhouse 5

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

“What do you think about it,” Maria asked Carter. “About what.” “What I just told you. About the man at the trailer camp who told his wife he was going out for a walk in order to talk to God.” “I wasn’t listening, Maria. Just give me the punch line.” “There isn’t any punch line, the highway patrol just found him dead, bitten by a rattlesnake.” “I’ll say there isn’t any punch line.” “Do you think he talked to God?” Carter looked at her. “I mean do you think God answered? Or don’t you?” Carter walked out of the room.

<3

When he lay down beside her the Seconal capsules rolled on the sheet. In the bar across the road somebody punched King of the Road on the jukebox again, and there was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking. Maria held onto BZ’s hand. “Listen to that,” he said. “Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.” “It would be very pretty,” Maria said. “Go to sleep.”