Play It as It Lays

16

THE NEXT MORNING in the dry still heat she woke crying for her mother. She had not cried for her mother since the bad season in New York, the season when she had done nothing but walk and cry and lose so much weight that the agency refused to book her. She had not been able to eat that year because every time she looked at food the food would seem to arrange itself into ominous coils. She had known that there was no rattlesnake on her plate but once the image had seized her there was no eating the food. 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. She imagined her mother having a doctor's appointment in Tonopah, and the doctor saying cancer, and her mother cracking up the car on purpose. She imagined her mother trying to call her from a pay phone in Tonopah, standing in a booth with all her quarters and dimes and nickels spread on the shelf and getting the operator and getting New York and then the answering service picking up the call. Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailable in the Eastern dark. She would imagine the quarters and dimes and nickels spread out on the shelf and the light in the cottonwoods and she would wonder what she was doing in the dark. What time is it there, her mother would have asked had she gotten Maria. What's the weather. She might never have said what was on her mind but she would have left a coded message, said goodbye. One time Maria had saved enough money to give her mother a trip around the world, but instead she had lent the money to Ivan Costello, and then her mother was dead.

"I'm not crying," Maria said when Carter called from the desert at 8 a.m. "I'm perfectly all right."

"You don't sound perfectly all right."

“I had a bad dream."

There was a silence. "You called the doctor?"

"Yes. I called the doctor." She spoke very rapidly and distantly.

"Everything's arranged. Everything's perfectly taken care of."

"What did—"

"I have to go now. I have to hang up. I have to see somebody about a job."

"Just hold on a minute, Maria, I want to know what the doctor said."

She was staring into a hand mirror, picking out her mother's features. Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

"I said what did they say, Maria."

"They said they'd call me up some day and on the day they called me up I'd meet them some place with a pad and a belt and $1,000 in cash. All right, Carter? All right?"