Nora nodded, just to herself, and Denny returned to looking out his side window. “That thing about the French horn,” he said to a passing bus. “What was that, do you know?”
Nora said, “I have no idea.”
“I hope he’s not losing it.”
“He’ll be all right,” Nora said. “We’ll make sure to keep an eye on him.”
They had reached the top of St. Paul Street now. It would be a straight shot south to Penn Station. Nora sat back in her seat, her fingers loose on the bottom of the wheel. Even driving, she gave the impression of floating. She said, “I would just like to say, Denny—Douglas and I would both like to say—that we appreciate your coming to help out. It meant a lot to your mom and dad. I hope you know that.”
He looked her way again. “Thanks,” he said. “I mean, you’re welcome. Well, thank you both, too.”
“And it was nice of you not to tell about his mother.”
“Oh, well, it’s nobody’s business, really.”
“Not to tell Douglas, I mean. When he was younger.”
“Oh.”
There was another silence.
“You know what happened?” he asked suddenly. There was something startled in his tone, as if he hadn’t intended to speak until that instant. “You know when I was mending Dad’s shirt?”
“Yes.”
“His dashiki kind of thing?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I was thinking I would never find the right shade of blue, because it was such a bright blue. But I went to the linen closet where Mom always kept her sewing box, and I opened the door, and before I could even reach for the box this spool of bright-blue thread rolled out from the rear of the shelf. I just cupped my hand beneath the shelf and this spool of thread dropped into it.”
They were stopped for a red light now. Nora sent him a thoughtful, remote look.
“Well, of course that can be explained,” he said. “First of all, Mom would have that shade, because she was the one who had made the dashiki in the first place, and you don’t toss a spool of thread just because it’s old. As for why it was out of the box like that … well, I did spill a bunch of stuff out earlier when I was sewing on a button. And I guess the rolling had to do with how I opened the closet door. I set up a whoosh of air or something; I don’t know.”
The light turned green, and Nora resumed driving.
“But in the split second before I realized that,” he said, “I almost imagined that she was handing it to me. Like some kind of, like, secret sign. Stupid, right?”
Nora said, “No.”
“I thought, ‘It’s like she’s telling me she forgives me,’ ” Denny said. “And then I took the dashiki to my room and I sat down on my bed to mend it, and out of nowhere this other thought came. I thought, ‘Or she’s telling me she knows that I forgive her.’ And all at once I got this huge, like, feeling of relief.”
Nora nodded and signaled for a turn.
“Oh, well, who can figure these things?” Denny asked the row houses slipping past.
“I think you’ve figured it just right,” Nora told him.
She turned into Penn Station.
In the passenger drop-off lane, she shifted into park and popped her trunk. “Don’t forget to keep in touch,” she told him.
“Oh, sure. I’d never just disappear; they need me around for the drama.”
She smiled; her two dimples deepened. “They probably do,” she said. “I really think they do.” And she accepted his peck on her cheek and then gave him a languid wave as he stepped out of the car.
The clouds overhead were a deep gray now, churning like muddy waters stirred up from the bottom of a lake, and inside the station, the skylight—ordinarily a kaleidoscope of pale, translucent aquas—had an opaque look. Denny bypassed the ticket machines, which had lines that wound back through the lobby, and went to stand in the line for the agents. Even there some ten or twelve people were waiting ahead of him, so he set down his bags and shoved them along with his foot as the line progressed. He could sense the anxiety of the crowd. A middle-aged couple standing behind him had apparently not thought to reserve, and the wife kept saying, “Oh, God, oh, God, they’re not going to have any seats left, are they?”
“Sure they are,” her husband told her. “Quit your fussing.”
“I knew we should have called ahead. Everybody’s trying to beat the hurricane.”
“Hurkeen,” she pronounced it. She had a wiry, elastic Baltimore accent and a smoker’s rusty voice.
“If there’s not any seats for this one we’ll catch the next one,” her husband told her.
“Next one! Watch there not be a next one. They’ll stop running them after this one.”
The husband made an exasperated huffing sound, but Denny sympathized with the wife. Even with his own reserved seat, he didn’t feel entirely confident. What if they shut down the trains before his train arrived? What if he had to turn around and go back to Bouton Road? Stuck in his family, trapped. Ingrown, like a toenail.
The man in front of him was called to a window, and Denny shoved his bags farther up. He was going to get the elderly agent with the disapproving face; he just knew it. “Sorry, sir …” the agent would say, not sounding sorry in the least.
But no, he got the cheery-looking African-American lady, and her first words when he gave her his confirmation number were “Aren’t you the lucky one!” He signed for his ticket gladly, without his usual muttering at the price. He thanked her and lugged his bags to the Dunkin’ Donuts to buy coffee and, on second thought, a pastry as well, to celebrate. He was going to make it out of here after all.
The few tables outside the Dunkin’ Donuts were occupied, and so were all the benches in the waiting room. He had to eat standing against a pillar with his bags piled at his feet. More passengers were milling around than at Christmas or Thanksgiving, even, all wearing frazzled expressions. “No, you can’t buy a candy bar,” a mother snapped at her little boy. “Stick close to me or you’ll get lost.”
A mellifluous female voice on the loudspeaker announced the arrival of a southbound train at gate B. “That’s B as in Bubba,” the voice said, which Denny found slightly odd. So did the young woman next to him, apparently—an attractive redhead with that golden tan skin that was always such an unexpected pleasure to see in a redhead. She quirked her eyebrows at him, inviting him to share her amusement.
Sometimes you glance toward a woman and she glances toward you and there is this subtle recognition, this moment of complicity, and anything might happen after that. Or not. Denny turned away and dropped his paper cup in the waste bin.
The train at gate B-for-Bubba was traveling to D.C., where nobody seemed to want to go, but when Denny’s northbound train was announced there was a general surge toward the stairs. Denny thought of what Jeannie’s Hugh had said the night before; shouldn’t all these people be heading away from the hurricane? But north was where home was, he’d be willing to bet—drawing them irresistibly, as if they were migratory birds. They pressed him forward, down the stairs, and when he reached the platform he felt a twinge of vertigo as they steered him too close to the tracks. He pulled ahead, making his way to where the forward cars would board. But he didn’t want the quiet car. Quiet cars made him edgy. He liked to sit surrounded by a sea of anonymous chatter; he liked the living-room-like coziness of mixed and mingled cell-phone conversations.
The train curved toward them from a distance, almost the same shade of gray as the darkened air it moved through, and a number of cars flashed past before it shrieked to a stop. There didn’t appear to be a quiet car, as far as Denny could tell. He boarded through the nearest door and chose the first empty seat, next to a teenage boy in a leather jacket, because he knew he had no hope of sitting by himself. First he heaved his luggage into the overhead rack, and only then did he ask, “This seat taken?” The boy shrugged and looked away from him, out the window. Denny dropped into his seat and slipped his ticket from his
inside breast pocket.
Always that “Ahh” feeling when you settle into place, finally. Always followed, in a matter of minutes, by “How soon can I get out of here?” But for now, he felt completely, gratefully at rest.
People were having trouble finding seats. They were jamming the aisle, bumbling past with their knobby backpacks, calling to each other in frantic-sounding voices. “Dina? Where’d you go?” “Over here, Mom.” “There’s room up ahead, folks!” a conductor shouted from the forward end.
The train started moving, and those who were still standing lurched and grabbed for support. A woman arguably old enough to be offered a seat loomed above Denny for a full minute, and he studied his ticket with deep concentration till another woman called to her and she moved away.
Row houses passed in a slow, dismal stream—their rear windows drably curtained or blanked out with curling paper shades, their back porches crammed with barbecue grills and garbage cans, their yards a jumble of rusty cast-off appliances. Inside the car, the hubbub gradually settled down. Denny’s seatmate leaned his head against the window and stared out. As imperceptibly as possible, Denny slid his phone from his pocket. He hit the memory dial and then bent forward till he was almost doubled up. He didn’t want this conversation overheard.
“Hey, there. It’s Alison,” the recording said. “I’m either out or unavailable, but you can always leave me a message.”
“Pick up, Allie,” he said. “It’s me.”
There was a pause, and then a click.
“You act like saying ‘It’s me’ will make me drop everything and come running,” she said.
Another time, he might have asked, “And didn’t it?” Three months ago he might have asked that. But now he said, “Well, a guy can always hope.”
She said nothing.
“What’re you up to?” he asked finally.
“I’m trying to get ready for Sandy.”
“Who’s Sandy?”
“What is Sandy, idiot. Sandy the hurricane; where have you been?”
“Ah.”
“On the news they’re showing people laying sandbags across their doorways, but where on earth do you buy those?”
“I’ll see to that,” he told her. “I’m already on the train.”
Another pause, during which he held very still. But in the end, all she said was “Denny.”
“What.”
“I have not said yes to that yet.”
“I realize you haven’t,” he said. He said it a bit too quickly, so she wouldn’t retract the word “yet.” “But I’m hoping that the sight of my irresistible self will work its magic.”
“Is that right,” she said flatly.
He squinched his eyes almost shut, and waited.
“We’ve already talked about this,” she told him. “Nothing’s changed. No way am I going to let things go on like they were before.”
“I know that.”
“I’m tired. I’m worn out. I’m thirty-three years old.”
The conductor was standing over him. Denny sat up straight and thrust his ticket at him blindly.
“I need somebody I can depend on,” she said. “I need a guy who won’t change jobs more often than most people change gym memberships, or take off on a road trip without any notice, or sit around all day in sweat pants smoking weed. And most of all, someone who’s not moody, moody, moody. Just moody for no reason! Moody!”
Denny leaned forward again.
“Listen,” he said. “Allie. You’re always asking what on earth is wrong with me, but don’t you think I wonder too? I’ve been asking it all my life; I wake up in the middle of the night and I ask, ‘What’s the matter with me? How could I screw up like this?’ I look at how I act sometimes and I just can’t explain it.”
The silence at the other end was so profound that he wondered if she had hung up. He said, “Al?”
“What.”
“Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
He said, “My dad says he remembers my mom’s gone even while he’s asleep.”
“That’s sad,” Allie said after a moment.
“But I do, too,” he said. “I remember you’re gone, every second I’ve been away.”
All he heard was silence.
“So I want to come back,” he said. “I want to do things differently this time.”
More silence.
“Allie?”
“Well,” she said, “we could take it day by day, I guess.”
He let out his breath. He said, “You won’t regret it.”
“I probably will, in fact.”
“You won’t, I swear to God.”
“But this is a trial run, understand? You’re only here on approval.”
“Absolutely. No question,” he said. “You can kick me out the first mistake I make.”
“Oh, Lord. I don’t know why I’m such a pushover.”
He said, “Are my things still in your garage?”
“They were the last time I looked.”
“So … I can move them back into the house?”
When she didn’t answer immediately, he took a tighter grip on the phone. “I’m not saying I have to,” he said. “I mean, if you tell me I have to live above the garage again, just to start with, I would understand.”
Allie said, “Well, I don’t know that we would need to go that far.”
He relaxed his grip on the phone.
The two young girls just behind him could not stop laughing. They kept dissolving in cascades of giggles, sputtering and squeaking. What did girls that age find so funny? The other passengers were reading, or listening to their music, or typing away on their computers, but these two were saying “Oh, oh, oh” and gasping for breath and then going off in more gales of laughter.
Denny glanced toward his seatmate, half expecting to exchange a look of bafflement, but to his horror, he discovered that the boy was crying. He wasn’t just teary; he was shaking with sobs, his mouth stretched wide in agony, his hands convulsively clutching his kneecaps. Denny couldn’t think what to do. Offer sympathy? Ignore him? But ignoring him seemed callous. And when someone showed his grief so openly, wasn’t he asking for help? Denny looked around, but none of the other passengers seemed aware of the situation. He transferred his gaze to the seat back in front of him and willed the moment to pass.
It was like when Stem first came to stay, when he slept in Denny’s room and cried himself to sleep every night and Denny lay silent and rigid, staring up at the dark, trying not to hear.
Or like when he himself, years later in boarding school, longed all day for bedtime just so he could let the tears slide secretly down the sides of his face to his pillow, although not for any good reason, because God knows he was glad to get away from his family and they were glad to see him go. Thank heaven the other boys never realized.
It was this last thought that told him what to do about his seatmate: nothing. Pretend not to notice. Look past him out the rain-spattered window. Focus purely on the scenery, which had changed to open countryside now, leaving behind the blighted row houses, leaving behind the station under its weight of roiling dark clouds, and the empty city streets around it, and the narrower streets farther north with the trees turning inside out in the wind, and the house on Bouton Road where the filmy-skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with nobody left to watch.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
An. A.A. Knopf Reading Group Guide
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to
enhance your reading group’s discussion of A Spool of Blue-Thread, the enthralling twentieth novel from Anne Tyler, one of America’s most celebrated authors.
Discussion Questions
1. What are the main themes of the novel? Which did you find most thought-provoking?
2. The novel opens and closes with Denny. Do you think he’s the main character? If not, who is?
3. We don’t learn the full significance of the title until nearly the end of the novel (on this page). How did this delay make the metaphor more powerful? What is the metaphor?
4. On this page, Tyler writes, “Well, of course they did hear from him again. The Whitshanks weren’t a melodramatic family.” What type of family are they? Compare the way you see them with the way they see themselves.
5. Chapter 2 begins with the Whitshank family stories: “These stories were viewed as quintessential—as defining, in some way—and every family member, including Stem’s three-year-old, had heard them told and retold and embroidered and conjectured upon any number of times.” (this page) Why are these two stories so important? Why is the story of Red’s sister important to Red’s family?
6. “Patience, in fact, was what the Whitshanks imagined to be the theme of their two stories—patiently lying in wait for what they believed should come to them.” (this page) Others might say it was envy or disappointment. Which interpretation makes the most sense to you? Can you think of another linking theme?
7. How does Abby’s story about the day she fell in love with Red fit into the Whitshank family history? Why isn’t it one of the family’s two defining stories?
8. Much is made of Abby’s “orphans,” which we learn also include Stem. What does her welcoming of strangers into her home say about her character? How do the others’ responses set up a subtle contrast?
9. Discuss the character Denny. Why is he so resentful of Stem? Why is he so secretive about his life?
10. Do Red and Abby have favorite children and grandchildren? Who do you think each one favors?
11. On this page, Tyler writes about Abby: “She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain.” Do you think Abby’s family sees her as uncertain or lacking in confidence? Why?