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Chapter 32
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Play It As It Lays, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Meaninglessness
Gender Inequality and Identity
Loss and Recovery
Superficiality
Summary
Analysis
Maria starts to have strange dreams a few nights later. In one recurring dream, she’s in contact with someone connected to “a shadowy Syndicate.” Sometimes the contact is Freddy Chaikin. Whoever the man is, he always talks about “a business proposition’” that involves her house in Beverly Hills before asking about the condition of the house’s plumbing.
Expelling the placenta doesn’t bring Maria closure, and the abortion continues to haunt her. In Maria’s dream, the “shadowy Syndicate” represents the secretive process required to schedule the abortion. When they ask about the house’s plumbing, they are referring to the condition of her reproductive organs, just as the man in white asked Maria how advanced her “problem” was when they were scheduling the operation over the phone.
Themes
The man dressed in white and the doctor appear next. At this point, Maria always tries (unsuccessfully) to wake herself. Next, the plumbing becomes clogged, the pipes burst, and gray water fills the sinks. In her dream, Maria knows she can’t call a plumber, since she knows “what would be found in the pipes, what hacked pieces of human flesh.”
Themes
