“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (part 3): Maria is estranged from husband Carter and visits daughter Kate, but Maria appears to have memory gaps

“She looked at Carter sitting in the living room…

“ ‘You going to stay here?’ she said…

“ ‘All my things are here, aren’t they?…

“ ‘I mean I thought we were kind of separated…

“ ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

“ ‘It wasn’t me. I mean was it me?’

“ ‘Never, Maria. Never you.’

“There was a silence. 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…

“ ‘I was going out to see Kate,’ she said finally.

“ ‘How many times you been out there lately?…

“ ‘Hardly at all,’ she said, and then: ‘In the past few weeks, maybe a couple of times.’

“ ‘You’ve been there four times since Sunday…They called me,’ Carter said… ‘They called me to point out that unscheduled parental appearances tend to disturb the child’s adjustment…We’ve been through this, Maria. We’ve done this number about fifty times’” (1, pp. 40-42).

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Maria is not sure what has been going on in her marital relationship or how often she has been visiting her daughter. “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…”

Carter doesn’t know if his wife is devious, scatterbrained, or mentally ill. All he knows is that she continually acts this way: “We’ve done this number about fifty times.”

Maria appears to have a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: memory gaps.

1. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.