Free Play It as It Lays: A Novel by Joan Didion Page A

not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

44
    THE LETTER from the hypnotist was mimeographed, and came to Maria in care of the studio that had released Angel Beach.
    "YOUR WORRIES MAY DATE FROM WHEN YOU WERE A BABY," the letter began, and then, after a space, were the words "IN
    YOUR MOTHER'S WOMB." Maria read the letter very carefully.
    The hypnotist had found that many people could be regressed not only to infancy but to the very instant of their conception. The hypnotist would receive a few interested clients in the privacy of his Silverlake home. With a sense that she was about to confirm a nightmare, Maria telephoned the number he gave.

45
    "YOU'VE BEEN BRUSHING IT wet," the hairdresser said, lifting a strand of Maria's hair and letting it drop with distaste.
    "I guess so." Maria could never keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers.
    "I told you before, you split the ends," he said with no real interest, and then transferred his attention to a thin girl who had just come up and kissed the back of his neck. "How are you, babe."
    "I had an operation."
    "No kidding."
    "Pelvic abscess." The girl loosened her wrapper and absently stroked her collarbone. "All through my tubes."
    "Listen, I hear his new act is just lying there," the hairdresser said.
    "Bibi Markel was just over there and she heard they were trying to transfer his contract to the lounge."
    "Macht nicht to me," the girl said. "Except maybe I'll have to go to court for the separate maintenance." She slipped one big roller away from her scalp and touched the hair to see if it was dry.
    "Listen," she said suddenly. "Finish her and then comb me out and come up for a drink on your way home."
    "Where you living now."
    "Off Coldwater, same place. O.K.? Promise?"
    "I'll think about it."
    "Please. Promise."
    He ignored her, and handed Maria a mirror. "You want to use a drier, Maria honey?"
    But Maria only shook her head and took the fifteen dollars from her bag and walked very fast toward the dressing room.
    "Maybe I can get Sandy to come up." Even from the dressing room Maria could hear the girl wheedling, the thin beautiful girl with the pelvic abscess and the separate maintenance and her hair all done and nobody to drink with. She fixed her attention on the mounds of used wrappers and damp towels and tried not to hear whatever it was the girl would say next. The girl was a presentiment of something. " Listen," the girl said then. "Maybe I can get Bibi Markel."

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    SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time,
    their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness
    around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.

47
    "YOU'RE LYING IN WATER," the hypnotist said. "You're lying in water and it's warm and you hear your mother's voice."

    "No," Maria said. "I don't."
    The hypnotist stood up. He always seemed cold and he was always sipping Pernod and water and his house was dusty and cluttered with torn newspaper clippings and stained file folders.
    "What do you hear," he said finally. "What do you hear and see in your mind right now.