Play It As It Lays

“In the place where Kate is they put electrodes on her head and needles in her spine and try to figure what went wrong.”

Maria also resists interpretation when it comes to her four-year-old daughter, Kate, who has a serious neurological condition. Maria’s goal is to take Kate out of the hospital into which Carter has placed her. Over the course of the novel, the hope of being with Kate becomes Maria’s only reason to live.

“My mother thought being an actress was a nice idea, […] and my father said not to be afraid to go because if certain deals worked out as anticipated he and my mother would be regular airline passengers between Las Vegas and New York City, so I went.”

Maria never intended to become permanently separated from her parents while she pursued acting. After her mother died, Maria wondered if she should have stayed in Nevada, thinking that she might have avoided her mother’s death and her own difficult experiences. 

“Not that I blame Maria for anything that happened to me, although I’m the one who suffered, I’m the one who should be ‘resting,’ I’m the one who lost BZ through her carelessness, her selfishness, but I blame her only on Carter’s behalf.”

Speaking in the resentful, passive-aggressive tone that defines her as a character, Helene sees herself as a martyr and the real victim of BZ’s suicide. 

“Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping.” 

Maria’s ex-husband Carter blames Maria’s character flaws for their divorce, BZ’s death, and Kate’s institutionalization.

“Why don’t you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it. Why don’t you die.”

During their arguments, Carter takes his anger out on Maria by taunting her to commit suicide. This passage shows Maria and Carter’s abusive relationship and foreshadows BZ’s suicide. It also highlights the theme of self-medicating to avoid pain, which Maria does throughout the novel.

“Quite often with Carter she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, another frivolous thought.”

The term “gaslight,” derived from the film’s plot, means to condition someone to believe things that are not true and doubt their own sanity. By ending Maria’s observation about her abuse with a dismissal, the passage suggests that Maria’s refusal to take any of her own insights seriously is the effect of Carter’s abusive gaslighting.

“She was consumed that year by questions. Exactly what time had it happened, precisely what had she been doing in New York at the instant her mother lost control of the car outside Tonopah. What was her mother wearing, thinking. What was she doing in Tonopah anyway.”

Unlike Maria’s present mindset, which rejects looking for reasons or asking questions, here she desperately wants to know of any detail that might help her find meaning in her mother’s death. 

“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.”

Though Maria asserts that things have no meaning, she has a very clear sense of moral cause and effect. The examples in this passage apply to her own life; she is in a loveless marriage with Carter and has become pregnant while having an affair. Her belief in catastrophic outcomes represents her fatalism, which is the other aspect of her nihilistic worldview. 

“‘This is just induced menstruation,’ she could hear the doctor saying. ‘Nothing to have any emotional difficulties about.’”

The doctor says this to Maria while he is performing her abortion in a motel room, without any anesthetic. These lines encapsulate how the outside world views Maria’s pain, especially pain that comes from her experiences as a woman. 

“All that night the two of them held each other with a dumb protective ferocity but the next day at the hospital, parting, only Maria cried.”

This passage highlights Maria’s complicated relationship with Kate. The fact that only Maria cries when she drops Kate off at the hospital raises the question of whether Kate would, in fact, be better off living with her mother. It is difficult to draw conclusions from Kate’s behavior, because Kate does not express emotions in a predictable way. This uncertainty adds tension to the narrative and provides another example of the impossibility of ascribing meaning. 

“Maria swore and Helene confirmed that the defendant, Carter Lang, had repeatedly struck and in other ways humiliated the plaintiff, Mrs. Maria Lang. The charge was mental cruelty, uncontested.”

Maria divorces Carter on the grounds of physical and emotional abuse. Helene confirms the behavior before the court, which proves ironic because later, Helene will begin an affair with Carter.

“Every morning in that house she would make the bed with fresh sheets. Every day in the house she would cook while Kate did her lessons. Kate would sit in a shaft of sunlight, her head bent over a pine table […]. But by dawn she was always back in the house in Beverly Hills, uneasy in the queer early light, plagued by her own and his own and Kate’s own manifold histories.”

Throughout the novel, Maria fantasizes about living an idyllic life with Kate. The man she is with changes— it is always either Ivan, Carter, or Les—but the constant is her desire for Kate. In all of the fantasies, Kate is a normally functioning child. Although Maria says, “Kate is Kate,” suggesting that she does not care that Kate has a neurological condition, her fantasies reveal that, just as she wishes the men in her life were caring and supportive, she wishes her daughter did not have behavioral problems.

“Instead of calling Les Goodwin she bought a silver vinyl dress, and tried to stop thinking about what had he done with the baby. The tissue. The living dead thing, whatever you called it.”

Maria seeks instant gratification to avoid emotional vulnerability. Didion’s sentence structure is important here. Although distraction is Maria’s goal, the decision to not call Les and to buy the silver dress lead to horrific flashbacks about the abortion.

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

Film is a metaphor for life; it is the means by which most characters frame their interactions with one another. Unwilling or unable to process her unfolding reality, Maria often reverts to fantasies of happy family life with Carter and Kate. The dramatic timing of these lines is important because Maria knows Carter is about to go to Paris, where he will have an affair. 

“Somehow she had never expected to see Benny Austin again: In her mind he was always in her father’s pickup, or standing with her mother and father on the tarmac at McCarran waving at the wrong window.” 

When she meets Benny in Las Vegas, Maria’s two world collide, and she escapes before he can ask for too many details about her current life. Maria is about to fall to her lowest point in the narrative. When she calls Benny after their meeting, he does not recall the memory Maria holds most dear, the moment where Benny and her parents saw her plane off when she left for New York. 

“If you can’t deal with the morning, get out of the game.”

BZ says this to Helene after a night of drunken partying that has left Helene with a black eye. The line resonates with the themes of risk and gambling at the heart of the narrative and foreshadows BZ’s own decision to “get out of the game” when he takes his own life.

“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.”

As Maria lingers in Las Vegas, isolating herself and self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, she increasingly loses touch with reality. Her feeling of disintegrating the boundaries of her physical self represents the disintegration of her spiritual and emotional self.

“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.” 

As Maria looks back on her marriage to Carter, when her life became the subject of tabloids, she reveals that her worldview is bottom-up, rather than top-down. This could account for—or be the result of—her fragmented view of herself and the events she experiences.  

“It goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a craps game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child.” 

This sentence references the novel’s title. “It goes as it lays,” or “play it as it lays,” is a means to play the cards that one has been dealt. Applied to life, this means that Maria takes facts and events at face value without looking for hidden meaning. The line also suggests how important Maria’s parents were to the formation of her worldview.

“‘Tell me what matters,’ BZ said. ‘Nothing,’ Maria said.” 

BZ has just told Maria that Carter and Helene are having an affair. BZ is surprised when Maria does not react because he knows that even though she and Carter are divorced, the news upsets Maria. The sentence also speaks to BZ’s existential crisis and pain. More than asking Maria what matters to her, he is asking for a lifeline. In characteristic fashion, Maria says “nothing,” which offers little hope. 

“An underground nuclear device was detonated where Silver Wells had once been, and Maria got up before dawn to feel the blast. She felt nothing.

Throughout the novel, Maria thinks nostalgically of home. At the same time she realizes that “home” was never something objective, rather a construct in her mind. These lines symbolize her ambivalence toward home and the futility of trying to recapture the past. Maria’s hometown had been built on a testing range. With only 28 residents, the area soon emptied and reverted to its original use.

“You will note that after everything I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth’s daughter and Benny Austin’s godchild.”

Maria thinks about her future. Instead of thinking about restarting her career as an actress, she wants to live with Kate and “do some canning. Damson plums, apricot preserves.” This statement reveals the tragedy of her life: Getting caught up in Hollywood took her away from the things that were important to her. On one hand, it is reassuring that through all her traumas, Maria has maintained a sense of her roots. On the other hand, she may never achieve this ideal simple life because she has no home or family left.

“‘You’re still playing.’ BZ did not take his eyes from hers. ‘Some day you’ll wake up and you just won’t feel like playing anymore.’”

This exchange occurs after BZ has overdosed on pills that will lead to his death. He and Maria have experienced betrayal in a superficial world that does not understand or accept them. BZ has internalized his own version of nihilism, which has led him to the conclusion that his life is not worth living.