Why I Don't Write

by Susan Minot

  * * *

  —

  Few of those things did Sophie consider at the time.

  She was simply there: frozen in the fish tank of his littered car, an image which remained intact for forty years.

  * * *

  —

  And for those next forty years every time Sophie thought of that moment, it would be the same clip that played. Only when she thought longer about it did she uncover parts which had been there all along. It was as if a fog blew off the scenes nearby, revealing them, and her attention brought other moments back to her. Think of all the moments that remain unrecovered, she marveled now, and how strange that a new experience can come from only revisiting an unremembered thing. Nothing new happens, yet if our mind looks again, it can find a new experience in something old. In this way, rumination turns out to be an experience after all, revealing to us new layers in our past.

  * * *

  —

  He must have driven her home.

  She couldn’t remember though. She remembered nothing after the swig from the flask and what he said.

  Or probably not all the way home. She would have asked to be let out as soon as the streets looked familiar. They would have gotten close to the college’s Main Street with the bookstores and corner bars and House of Pancakes and spider-plant sandwich places and banks. She would have gotten out of the car as soon as possible.

  * * *

  —

  The next memory she had was of either that afternoon or maybe the next day being in the kitchen in the house she rented with some of her other housemates, with its wide wooden floor, and of the airy feeling of classes being over and of spring and people starting to pack, and of telling the story to whoever happened to be in there, getting tea or smoking butts. Her friend Alison was there. Alison had been in her class with Mr. Tower the year before and had come over to discuss what happened. Alison was saying Sophie had to do something. One of her housemates, Tom, a gangly guy who kept track of the telephone and electric bills, said that she should report Tower. No one else agreed this would be effective. It would only involve Sophie more, and it was not, as another housemate, Melanie, said, twisting at her dreadlocks, in any way cool. How the hell could the administration help?

  Alison suggested Sophie write Tower an angry letter. Sophie repeated she really didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. Alison reminded her of the arrow incident, and Sophie told everyone that story and people laughed—it was the first time she made people laugh with the story, as she would continue to do over the next forty years—and Sophie admitted she still had the stupid arrow. She didn’t know why she’d kept it, because it had been so embarrassing, but perhaps that was why. Tom wondered what was Sophie taking a class with Tower anyway when she knew the guy was a sleaze and Alison rolled her eyes, indicating he had no idea what he was talking about. Melanie explained, Because if that was a consideration you wouldn’t take half of the classes taught by guys.

  That’s interesting, said another housemate, Mark, who had majored in linguistics, because traditionally an arrow is a symbol of protection. He was bobbing a tea bag in a mug of steaming water.

  Right, said Melanie. Except when it’s violence?

  The general consensus then was that Sophie should return the arrow. She could leave it in Tower’s faculty box and not have to see him. It was something, at least.

  So a few days later, on the weekend when teachers were scarce, Sophie took the snapped-off arrow to Watson House, a maroon sandstone building with a depressed archway, which housed the English department. She walked stealthily down an empty hall to the wooden grid of cubbyholes, each labeled with a faculty member’s name. Instead of placing the arrow down in the cubby, she stuck its point into the wooden side. It looked as if a sprite might have launched it there from some magical forest—a make-believe forest, no doubt—and she had a small satisfaction at how out of place it looked there.

  Two days later she got a letter in her own PO box with her address typed, and inside on small white stationery with R. M. Tower engraved at the top, the following message, also typed:

  Dear Sophie,

  At least your spoiled stricken frigid little hand had enough gumption to spear the arrow into my box. Perhaps a good sign. I hope that one day you may forgive your parents for having failed you.

  Sincerely,

  …and the scrawl indicating his name.

  * * *

  •

  Her family would be arriving the morning of graduation, and the night before, her last night at college, Sophie went to a string of blowout parties dotted across campus. At some point she ended up randomly paired with a pale boy who was a friend of a friend of the boy she liked, Curtis. The pale boy went to another college and was not someone she was particularly attracted to, but he focused on her on the dance floor at one of the last parties and surprised her by twirling her around like a lassoing cowboy, making her laugh inside with embarrassment. They ended up crashing on the floor of an empty apartment with a dozen other people also crashing around them. Drunkenly at 3:00 a.m. in the dark and among the quiet strangers, the pale boy kissed her. She was not repelled, but not compelled either. She felt it blankly. He untied the halter string at her neck.

  “You have nice breasts,” he said in a formal way. After not too long she let him push aside the flounces of her peasant skirt and pull off her underpants and try to enter her. Her body was unreceptive. She felt the nerves in him fluttering and tried to channel some of that energy since he was so close, but they did not know each other and their bodies did not understand each other. She was dry and felt blocked. It’s not going to work, she thought, tired and loosely drunk, but he persevered and kept pushing and he got halfway in and she helped him to all the way. The magic transport she was so enchanted by stirred in her hips and she felt a swoon distantly, but it did not seem as real, or as important as it usually was. Trying to keep his breath quiet, the pale boy sounded as if he was gasping in frozen air. It crossed her mind they might be heard, but all the bodies around them were oddly still, sleeping or passed out.

  She lay there as a deep blue light appeared in the windows, and thought how she was more sophisticated now having had sex which was not important to her. After dozing awhile she sat up, shook the boy’s shoulder, and said goodbye. She walked home in the shadowless dawn and felt the vast mystery, as one did in the dawn light. She thought how usually you just slept through it, this most magic moment of the day, and how it was perhaps like our existence, little noticing the vast mystery. She marveled too how dawn was also, in fact, something which happened monotonously by rote without interruption every twenty-four hours—hardly unusual—and had done so for thousands, if not millions, of years.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning her family was there.

  * * *

  —

  Three of Sophie’s six siblings had made it, with her father and her aunt, all driving the two hours from home. With them, she wove through the vast plots of gray metal foldout chairs to find them seats out of the unrelenting sun. She steered them to the back since Aunt Mimi, her mother’s sister, preferred shade, despite wearing a navy brimmed hat, a perfect match to her navy Chanel suit with the white piped lapel and pockets. Her father wore his eternal gray work suit with its short pants and incessantly jiggled change in his pocket as he gazed over the heads of his children with an expression that said it did not expect to find anything of interest in the distance either. Everyone felt the austerity of the occasion in the heavy absence of Mum, who had been a particular appreciator of ceremonies. She would dress up in something cheerful and stylish and have her hair done and bring presents for not just her child being celebrated, but for a few of the child’s friends, too. Minnie, now eight, was her uncomplaining soldier-self in short pigtails, having conceded to wearing a dress, but being allowed, something their mother would
not have, to wear sneakers. Chase, at thirteen, had dressed up in a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt, one shirttail tucked in, one flapping out. The hair in his eyes was long, perhaps in need of a haircut.

  Her sister Caitlin, her thick hair looped in a part with two barrettes, wore a cream-colored dress with shoulder pads. Caitlin made a show of glaring fiercely when Sophie pointed out R. M. Tower sitting with the other eminent English faculty members on the makeshift stage in front of Watson Hall where the English majors were to receive their diplomas.

  * * *

  —

  The graduates sat in the front rows, dressed in the black full-armed robes. Sophie had a red band around one upper arm to indicate her protest of the university’s investments in South Africa and its apartheid rule. Underneath she wore her lilac dress. The graduates’ black board hats were like dull sequins making a hovering mosaic. Sophie had her usual feeling in a crowd, of everyone somehow belonging there but herself. She found her alphabetical spot with her class near the back.

  Sitting waiting to be called, Sophie felt the buzz of lack of sleep, once again having been up all night, and not yet the need, which could strike anytime, of the desire to nod off. She also felt the pleasant blur of after-sex, that thing you could never feel on your own. It was something you got only after physically communing with another body. The blurred state was something she could value as something only hers, private, despite its not being particularly meaningful, but it had been a version of connecting to something more than only herself.

  * * *

  —

  Her row of chairs stood and turned to the right. Filing into a line snaking up to the stage, they advanced toward the steps. She glanced back to where her family sat and saw Aunt Mimi’s blue-and-white hat and Caitlin’s white dress. Where was Dad? Probably deeper in the shadows, having removed himself to smoke.

  At the far end of the platform the dean, a woman with springy gray hair and a receding chin, was announcing the graduates’ names into a microphone. Then it was her turn—the dean said her name, Sophie Paine Vincent. Sophie stepped up and moved across the stage, feeling the eyes of her family on her like pallbearers. Her red band of protest was on the stage side and she regretted it didn’t show. At the time, she believed she would continue, after graduation, to protest and fiercely fight and defend the rights of living things, humans and animals both. First she had planned to spend the summer driving the perimeter of the country. Other friends were headed to Europe, but she felt she should see her own country first. Alone, she would end up driving for a month clockwise from New England, down through the South, up the western coast and back along through all the northern states, ending up at Niagara Falls, sleeping in the back of the car and writing in a journal, beginning the first direct acquaintance with being alone out in the world for an extended period of time which ended up being a kind of arrow indicating the career she would eventually make for herself, as a writer.

  She crossed the stage and shook hands with Mr. Weinstock who had taught her a truly inspiring class on Proust, then shook hands with Ms. Havercloss, the feminist with her feather earrings whom she’d never studied with, and, when she came to R. M. Tower, in his robe with a green-and-yellow capelet over the shoulders, she walked purposefully by, refusing to look at him, even if it made her feel weirdly disoriented. After getting her diploma, one of the last on the table, she descended the stairs and moved the tassel dangling off her square hat from the right side to the left. In the distance despite the massive crowd she could pick out Caitlin’s face and her reliable knowing smile.

  * * *

  —

  Forty years later she still remembered being in the car and the language of cats and dogs. She remembered the lilac dress and the flask, remembered the arrow and the note and refusing the offered hand.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, whenever she was alone with a man, particularly one older, she would feel the usual animal trepidation. For the rest of her life, in fact, pretty much every time she was one-on-one with a man, she would find herself wary and untrusting and on guard.

  But that was simply how things were. After all, the truth of it was, if he wanted to, a man could snap her arm in half.

  Acknowledgments

  Warmest thanks to Georges and Anne Bonchandt for their decades of devoted service.

  Thanks to my early readers, cherished friends, Lucy Winton, Jackie Sohier, Sarah Paley, Sara Goodman, Sasha Wade, Hope Pingree, Nancy Lemann, Tamara Weiss, Dorothy Gallagher; thanks to my students who teach me, noting core members Jimmy Jung, Cat Greenman, Chloe Malle; thanks to beloved sisters Carrie, Eliza, and Dinah for extra reinforcements.

  Thanks for further help from Jean and Gordon Douglas, Jay Anania, Jean Pagliuso, Caio Fonseca, brothers George and Chris, Lily Thorne, Mott Hupfel, Carolyn Roumeguère, Brian Sawyer, Francesca Marciano, Caroline Kennedy, Al Styron, Elizabeth Kling, Jonathan Ames, Huger Foote, Elvis Perkins, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Evan Young, George Bell, ex-husbands Charlie and Davis, and Pingrees Hannah, Cecily, and Asa.

  Thanks to the cracker team at Knopf, amazing in a time of amazement.

  Thanks to daughter, Ava, who helped type some of these babies into the twenty-first century; and not least thanks to my incomparable editor, Jordan Pavlin, to whom this book is with love dedicated.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She lives in New York City where she teaches writing and on North Haven Island in Maine.

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