Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread

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.

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.