Why I Don't Write

by Susan Minot

She was a good human being with a strong center of gravity, stern one moment, loving the next.

She thought, I don’t even need to tell him. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that way, not needing to explain herself—to him, to anyone.

dropped like a soufflé, vanishing before their eyes.

In her brain there was always a someone. For years it had been Nicky’s dad. Since their split—more than two years ago—the place where he’d been was a ripped hole.

She thought of his perspective and tried it on. It felt like a higher, more relevant one than hers. What would he have made of it here?

aware now that fathoming the man’s thoughts led her swiftly down a cul-de-sac to his indifference, obtuseness, and lack of love.

Then, as he became less forthright in his intentions, or more forthright in his lack of intentions, the girls, stalwart, married, squared away themselves in that department, lost their patience on Ivy’s behalf.

In the days after she saw him, everything she looked at would take on his perspective, or at least the perspective she imagined, as if his face were a mask on the inside of her skull.

She did feel he had a sharper way of looking at things than she did,

Taking on his perspective gave her a new and inspirin...

little stabs of his being somewhere that didn’t include her. He was, in each and every moment, choosing not to be with her. This sort of line of thought threw her very quickly into a state of pain.

She wasn’t prepared to present herself to anyone at the moment, not feeling particularly appealing: pale, wind whipped, drained.

She was the one person on earth looking out for him, and a loosening of that vigilance would result in who knows what manner of harm and recklessness.

responsibility. It felt familiar, the determination to ignore.

Fleming—for not being there, for having captured her interest, and then for keeping her so damn preoccupied.

She felt an odd relief. For a few moments at least she would not be required to do anything…she had only to tend to this, this accident. She was involuntarily occupied.

“It’s pointless to think about,” Tom said into her hair. “It’s not voluntary,” Fran murmured. “It’s a feeling.”

He rarely talked about what he did, treating it as something unconnected to his real life, something apart from him.

rosy afterglow of dinner.

A stack of papers she’d put on her desk had, after a couple of days, begun to look permanent, and it was harder to think about moving it.

The face meant to soften her, but she turned away from it and tried to think of something else. She’d been in a lovely slow dream and did not want it to end. But once a person became aware of being in a dream it was difficult to stay asleep. The thing that kept one asleep was not knowing that you were sleeping, and not thinking. She tried to block out any further disturbance, but a voice came, insistent, breaking

through the dream membrane.

Jerry is a jerk and I avoid him as much as I can, but if you want to keep your job you have to get along with people.

It’s the story with work, turns out; it keeps you from thinking. Instead you are occupied with fascinating details like which person wants onions on her coffin or how many more pieces of Daisy Pie are left in the fridge or which order got switched back from the Terminal Tortellini to the Cremated Shrimp.

The one in the middle, the boldest, talks for everyone.

“The point of life is love,” she says wide-eyed, apparently having just discovered it.

Pretty much across the board, the people’s lives, at least what we can see of them from our point of view, are filled with the same amount of pain and suffering and good fortune and bad, but some handle it more gracefully

Some things are harder to live with than others.

She has a strong, direct gaze. Sometimes you see truth in a face.

In the past five minutes I have not thought of my beloved at all. It’s a sort of record. He’s usually there in my head, like a shadow in front of every thought. I feel guilty. Then I realize the reason I wasn’t thinking of him was because I was thinking of someone else for

The woman in the nightgown made me wonder for a change about what she was going through. She seemed to be doing the same about me. That’s a new open feeling. A patch of warmth spreads below my collarbones, surprising me. I didn’t know I had even been cold.

It was something he’d liked about his mom then, that she was more like a kid, but now, getting older, he sort of wished she were more like a grown-up.

he had the sort of face that had been set like a mask years ago with creases in the forehead and a mouth pressed tight. It didn’t look as if his gaze wanted to take in anything new.

Matt didn’t look at him; he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of attention.

as brothers, they should carve out places of their own. Mrs.

Ned knew she could not and remained unconvinced that anyone else had the least idea of what it felt like to be him.

To look would somehow be to accept the ridiculous and yet rattling thing he’d just said.

He sang the praises of the beautiful sentence and the original stylist.

Her state of mind was so steeped in thoughts of loss and death that any depiction of its being remarkable or upsetting were tin in her ear.

she pretended she did not see, and therefore did not have to acknowledge. •

She had not, since then, shed a tear. Her body shut down; to allow feeling would sink her.

She remembered the classes with Mr. Tower because writing was something she cared about.

Bottom line, she learned that a girl alone should be on guard.

She did not feel herself in the world on the surface of things where life was happening. Her emotions had taken the form of a huge churning ball of adrenaline circulating through her, with her real self strangely still and hard at its center. The emotions waiting to accost her swirled outside the thick skin of her refusal to respond to this as a normal person would, to fall apart and to weep, to grieve whether it was listlessly or voluptuously. No, this was too big to respond to in any expected way. It was too big to respond to at all.

Let’s speak in a language any cat or dog could understand.

You feel then as if there will be no blow equal to that terrible blow, and you may be right. In a life of receiving blows, there must be, after all, one blow with the strongest impact.

In this way, rumination turns out to be an experience after all, revealing to us new layers in our past.

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.

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.

The graduates’ black board hats were like dull sequins making a hovering mosaic.