Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Over the course of the summer, Red heard long recitals of Pookie’s tribulations with Queen Eula. Pookie was summoned to excruciating family dinners, to stiff old-lady teas, to Queen Eula’s own beautician to do something about her eyebrows. She was chided for her failure to write bread-and-butter notes, or for writing bread-and-butter notes that weren’t enthusiastic enough. Her choice of silver pattern was reversed without her say-so. She was urged to consider a wedding gown that would hide her chubby shoulders.

Over and over, Merrick gasped, like somebody on stage. “No! I can’t believe it!” she would say. “Why doesn’t Trey stick up for you?”

“Oh, Trey ,” Pookie said in disgust. “Trey thinks she hung the moon.”

Not only that: Trey was inconsiderate, and selfish, and given to hypochondria. He forgot Pookie existed any time he ran into his buddies. And for once, just once in her life, she would like to see him make it through an evening without drinking his weight in gin.

“He’d better watch out, or he’ll lose you,” Merrick said. “You could have anyone! You don’t have to settle for Trey. Look at Tucky Bennett: he just about shot himself when he heard you’d gotten engaged.”

Often, Pookie delivered her recitals even though Red was present. (Red didn’t count, in that group.) Then Red would ask, “How come you put up with it?” Or “You said yes to this guy?”

“I know. I’m a fool,” she would say. But not as if she meant it.

That fall, when they were all back in college, Merrick fell into a pattern of coming home every weekend. This was unlike her. Red came home a lot himself, since College Park was so close, but gradually he realized that she was there even more often. She went with the family to church on Sunday, and afterwards she would stop out front to say hello to Eula Barrister. Even when Trey was not standing at his mother’s elbow (which generally he was), Merrick would be eagerly nodding her head in her demure new pillbox hat, giving a liquid laugh that any brother would know to be false, hanging on to every one of Eula Barrister’s prune-faced remarks. And in the evening, if Trey stopped by for a visit — as was only natural! Merrick said. He was marrying her best friend, after all! — the two of them sat out on the porch, although it was too cold for that now. The smell of their cigarette smoke floated through Red’s open window. (But if it was so cold, his children would wonder years later, why was his window open?) “I’ve had it with her. I tell you,” Trey said. “Nothing I do makes her happy. Everything’s pick, pick, pick.”

“She doesn’t properly value you, it sounds like to me,” Merrick said.

“And you should see how she acts with Mother. She claimed she couldn’t help Mother sample the rehearsal-dinner menus because she had a term paper due. A term paper! When it’s her wedding!”

“Oh, your poor mother,” Merrick said. “She was only trying to make her feel included.”

“How come you understand that, Bean, and Pookie doesn’t?”

Red slammed his window shut.

Junior told Red he was imagining things. After the situation blew up, after the truth came bursting out and nearly all of Baltimore stopped speaking to Trey and Merrick, Red said, “I knew this would happen! I saw it coming. Merrick planned it from the start; she stole him.”

But Junior said, “Boy, what are you talking about? Human beings can’t be stolen. Not unless they want to be.”

“I swear, she started plotting last summer and damned if she didn’t go through with it. She flattered Trey to his face and she ran him down to Pookie behind his back and she curtsied and kowtowed to his mother till I thought I was going to puke.”

“Well, it’s not like he was Pookie’s property,” Junior said.

Then he said, “And anyhow, he’s Merrick’s now.”

And two lines deepened at the corners of his mouth, the way they always did when he had settled some piece of business exactly to his liking.

An outside observer might say that these weren’t stories at all. Somebody buys a house he’s admired when it finally comes on the market. Somebody marries a man who was once engaged to her friend. It happens all the time.

Maybe it was just that the Whitshanks were such a recent family, so short on family history. They didn’t have that many stories to choose from. They had to make the most of what they could get.

Clearly they couldn’t look to Red for stories. Red just went ahead and married Abby Dalton, whom he had known since she was twelve — a Hampden girl, coincidentally, from the neighborhood where the Whitshanks used to live. In fact, he and she lived in Hampden themselves, during the early days of their marriage. (“Why’d we even bother moving,” his father asked him, “if you were going to head back down there the very first chance you got?”) Then after his parents died — killed by a freight train in ’67 when their car stalled on the railroad tracks — Red took over the house on Bouton Road. Certainly Merrick didn’t want it. She and Trey had a much better place of their own, not to mention their Sarasota property, and besides, she said, she had never really liked that house. It didn’t have en suite bathrooms, and when Junior had finally added one to the master bedroom, reconfiguring the giant cedar-lined storeroom back in the 1950s, she’d complained that she was jolted awake every time the toilet flushed. So there Red was, in the house he’d grown up in, where he planned to die one day. Not much of a story in that.

The neighborhood referred to it as “the Whitshank house” now. Junior would have been happy to know that. One of his major annoyances was that from time to time he’d been introduced as “Mr. Whitshank, who lives in the Brill house.”

There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks. None of them was famous. None of them could claim exceptional intelligence. And in looks, they were no more than average. Their leanness was the rawboned kind, not the lithe, elastic slenderness of people in magazine ads, and something a little too sharp in their faces suggested that while they themselves were eating just fine, perhaps their forefathers had not. As they aged, they developed sagging folds beneath their eyes, which anyway drooped at the outer corners, giving them a faintly sorrowful expression.

Their family firm was well thought of, but then so were many others, and the low number on their home-improvement license testified to nothing more than mere longevity, so why make such a fuss about it? Staying put: they appeared to view it as a virtue. Three of Red and Abby’s four children lived within twenty minutes of them. Nothing so notable about that!

But like most families, they imagined they were special. They took great pride, for instance, in their fix-it skills. Calling in a repairman — even one of their own employees — was looked upon as a sign of defeat. All of them had inherited Junior’s allergy to ostentation, and all of them were convinced that they had better taste than the rest of the world. At times they made a little too much of the family quirks — of both Amanda and Jeannie marrying men named Hugh, for instance, so that their husbands were referred to as “Amanda’s Hugh” and “Jeannie’s Hugh”; or their genetic predisposition for lying awake two hours in the middle of every night; or their uncanny ability to keep their dogs alive for eons. With the exception of Amanda they paid far too little attention to what clothes they put on in the morning, and yet they fiercely disapproved of any adult they saw wearing blue jeans. They shifted uneasily in their chairs during any talk of religion. They liked to say that they didn’t care for sweets, although there was some evidence that they weren’t as averse as they claimed. To varying degrees they tolerated each other’s spouses, but they made no particular effort with the spouses’ families, whom they generally felt to be not quite as close and kindred-spirited as their own family was. And they spoke with the unhurried drawl of people who work with their hands, even though not all of them did work with their hands. This gave them an air of good-natured patience that was not entirely deserved.