“ One thing. You know when she wakes up at night she says ‘oise, oise,’ it means she’s…” Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriages 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. “It means she’s having a nightmare,” she said finally.
— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
