"A Spool of Blue Thread"

[fiefoe]

I haven't read Anne Tyler in years. Was it always about brothers and sisters? As an only child (and a fairly detached home owner,) I can't say that these are my people.

• Then, “We should have that whatsit—caller ID.” She leaned forward and gazed fiercely at the phone. “Oh, God, I want caller ID this instant!”
• it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.
• “The thing about caller ID is,” Red said, more or less to himself, “it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.
• Well, of course they did hear from him again. The Whitshanks weren’t a melodramatic family.
• remarked on his looks did so belatedly, in a tone of surprise, as if they were congratulating themselves on their powers of discernment.
• (Parents of people like Denny develop the wiles of secret agents.)
• But most of all, Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.”
• When Abby asked him questions—though she tried her best to ration them—he made an effort to answer. He wasn’t what you’d call chatty, but he answered.
• Yet he did provide something that they counted on, somehow. He did leave a hole when he was absent.
• But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house.
• they were properly cared for there was nothing handsomer than a wide set of varnished treads (a bit of fine sand mixed into the varnish for traction) rising to a wooden porch floor as solid as a ship’s deck. Such steps took work, took money, took vigilance. Such steps signified.
• Like a love-struck groomsman who hangs around the bride long after the wedding, he kept inventing excuses to pop in.
• It was downright comical, the number of his sentences that started off with “In this house.” ... So “this house” really meant “this family,” it seemed.
• 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?)
• 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.
• another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn’t a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.
• And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration. “Oh, poor you!” she would say. “You’re looking so tired!” Or “You must be feeling so lonely!” Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity.
• And Stem was that kind of person, that mild, accepting kind of person who just seemed to take it for granted that life wasn’t always going to go exactly as he’d planned it.
• I need this! I have to do this! I cannot see that little stem of a neck and let him go on alone in this world. I can’t!
• “Because Nora, my wife, she belongs to a church, and they’ve got a whole committee just to welcome new arrivals.” “I will not be joining a church,” Atta said. A silence fell. Red finally said, “I didn’t quite catch that last bit.”
• “Red had a heart attack?” “You knew that. You sent him a fruit basket in the hospital.” “Oh,” Merrick said. “Yes, maybe I did.”
• Sammy leaning forward in his stroller like a sea captain watching for landfall
• and Denny had told her (offhandedly, when she marveled at Susan’s brown eyes) that Susan was not his.
• One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?
• “Who said, ‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ” she’d asked Ree
• But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”
• The other day I all at once recalled the exact turn of the wrist that I used to give the handle of the CorningWare saucepan I got for a wedding present.
• folks lived long enough to see aluminum-frame window screens, and clip-on fake mullions and flush doors and fiberglass bathtubs.”
• What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth.
• “Come on,” Denny said. “She thought even the back of your neck was special. If she hadn’t, you’d have led a very different life, believe me. You’d have been shunted around who knows where, rootless, homeless, stuck in foster care someplace, and you’d probably have turned into one of those misfit guys who have trouble keeping a job, or staying married, or hanging on to their friends. You’d have felt out of place wherever you went; there’d be nowhere you belonged.”
• it appeared to be a question of imagination. Red’s imagination: he had none. He just seemed glad that someone else had arranged things so he wouldn’t need to.
• Lord, isn’t it strange how life sort of … closes up again over a death.”
• Stuck in his family, trapped. Ingrown, like a toenail.