A Spool of Blue Thread (18 page)

None of the dogs came. They were all boarding at Penpals.

The house the Whitshanks rented every summer stood right on
the beach—a comparatively uncrowded stretch of the Delaware coast—but it wasn’t what you’d call luxurious. The walls were tongue-and-groove, painted a depressing pea-soup green; the floorboards were so splintery no one dared go barefoot; the kitchen dated from the 1940s. But it was big enough for all of them, and far homier than the glittering new mansions with giant Palladian windows that had popped up elsewhere along the shore. Besides, Red could always use a few fix-it jobs to keep him occupied. (He wasn’t a natural vacationer.) Even before Abby and Nora had unpacked the food, he had happily catalogued half a dozen minor household emergencies. “Will you look at this outlet!” he said. “Practically dangling by a thread!” And off he went to the truck for his tools, with Jeannie’s Hugh not far behind.

“The next-door people are back,” Jeannie called, stepping in from the screen porch.

Next door was almost the only house as unassuming as theirs was, and the people she was referring to had been renting it for at least as long as the Whitshanks had been renting theirs. Oddly enough, though, the two families never socialized. They smiled at each other if they happened to be out on the beach at the same time, but they didn’t speak. And although Abby had once or twice debated inviting them over for drinks, Red always voted her down. Leave things as they were, he told her: less chance of any unwelcome intrusions in the future. Even Amanda and Jeannie, on the lookout during the early days for playmates, had hung back shyly, because the next-door people’s two daughters always brought friends of their own, and besides, they were slightly older.

So for all these years—thirty-six, now—the Whitshanks had watched from a distance while the slender young parents next door grew thicker through the middle and their hair turned gray, and their daughters changed from children to young women. One summer in the late nineties, when the daughters were still in their teens, it was noticed that the father of the family never once went
down to the water, spending the week instead lying under a blanket in a chaise longue on their deck, and the summer after that, he was no longer with them. A muted, sad little group the next-door people had been that year, when always before they had seemed to enjoy themselves so; but they did come, and they continued to come, the mother taking her early-morning walks along the beach alone now, the daughters in the company of boyfriends who metamorphosed into husbands, by and by, and then a little boy appearing and later a little girl.

“The grandson has brought a friend this year,” Jeannie reported. “Oh, that makes me want to cry.”

“Cry! What for?” Hugh asked her.

“It’s the … circularity, I guess. When we first saw the next-door people the daughters were the ones bringing friends, and now the grandson is, and it starts all over again.”

“You sure have given these folks a lot of thought,” Hugh said.

“Well, they’re
us
, in a way,” Jeannie said.

But you could see Hugh found that hard to understand.

On the Friday that the Whitshanks arrived, only the men and the children went down to the water. The women were busy unpacking and making beds and organizing supper. But by Saturday, when Amanda and her family showed up, they’d all settled into their routine of a full morning on the beach, and lunch at the house in their sandy swimsuits, and then afternoon on the beach again. The canvas canopy sheltered the white-skinned Whitshank grown-ups, but the in-laws sat brazenly in the sun. Stem’s three little boys challenged the breakers to bowl them over but then ran away at the last minute, shrieking with laughter, while Stem stood guard at the water’s edge with his arms folded. Amanda’s Elise, storky and pale in a tutu-like swimsuit, stayed high and dry on a corner of the blanket underneath the canopy, but Susan and Deb spent most of their time diving through the waves. Susan was fourteen this summer—Elise’s age, but she seemed to have more in common with thirteen-year-old
Deb. Both she and Deb were children still, although Deb was a skinny little thing while Susan was more solidly built, waistless and nearly flat-chested but with something almost voluptuous about her full lips and her large brown eyes. The two of them had a bedroom to themselves this year. Elise used to bunk with them rather than in her parents’ cottage, but not any longer. (She’d gotten stuck up, Deb and Susan claimed.) Alexander was mostly on his own as well—too young for the girls and too sedentary for Stem’s boys. Mostly he stayed seated at the water’s edge, letting the surf froth up and then ebb around his soft white legs, except for when his father coaxed him into a game of paddle ball or a ride on a raft.

Elsewhere on the beach, teenagers built giant sand castles, and mothers dipped their babies’ bare feet in the foam, and fathers threw Frisbees to their children. Seagulls screamed overhead, and a little plane flew up and down the coastline, trailing a banner that advertised all-you-can-eat crabs.

Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh didn’t seem to be getting along. Or Amanda wasn’t getting along; Hugh appeared cheerfully unaware. Anything he said to her she answered shortly, and when he invited her to take a walk on the beach, she said, “No, thanks,” and turned the corners of her mouth down as she watched him set off on his own.

Abby, sitting next to Amanda but outside the canopy, under the sun, said, “Oh, poor Hugh! Don’t you think you should go with him?” (She was eternally monitoring her daughters’ marriages.) But Amanda didn’t answer, and Abby gave up and went back to her reading. A stack of trashy magazines had been discovered beneath the TV, no doubt left behind by a previous renter, and they had passed through the hands of her granddaughters and then her daughters and ended up with Abby herself, who was leafing through one now and tsk-ing over the silliness. “All this excitement about could so-and-so be pregnant,” she told her daughters, “and I don’t even know who so-and-so
is
! I’ve never heard of her.” In her skirted
pinkswimsuit, her plump shoulders glistening with suntan lotion and her legs lightly dusted with sand, she looked something like a cupcake. She hadn’t ventured into the water at all so far, and neither had Red. In fact, Red was wearing his work shoes and dark socks. Evidently this was the year when the two of them were declaring themselves to be officially old.

“I remember when I first met him, I thought he was a jerk,” Amanda told Denny. She must have been referring to Hugh. “I had that apartment on Chase Street with a garbage chute at the end of the hall, and I kept finding bags of garbage just sitting on the floor around the chute, not sent down the way they should have been. And poking out of the bag I’d see beer bottles and chili cans, things that should have been put in the recycling bin. It made me furious! So one day I taped a sign to a bag:
WHOEVER DID THIS IS A PIG
.”

“Oh, Amanda! Honestly,” Abby said, but Amanda didn’t seem to hear her. “I don’t know how he knew it was me,” she told Denny, “but he must have. He knocked on my door and he was holding my sign. ‘Did you write this?’ he said, and I said, ‘I most certainly did.’ Well, he put on this big charm act. Said he was terribly sorry, it wouldn’t happen again, he didn’t know the recycling rules and he hadn’t sent the bag down the chute because it wouldn’t fit, blah blah—as if that were any excuse. But I admit, he won me over. You know what, though? I should have paid attention. There it was, all spelled out for me from the beginning: This is a man who thinks he’s the only person on the planet. How much clearer could it have been?”

“So,
now
does he recycle?” Denny asked.

“You’re missing the point,” Amanda said. “I’m talking about his nature, the very nature of the man. It’s all about what’s expedient, for him. He’s just arranged to sell the restaurant to someone for next to nothing, for a song, merely because he’s bored and he wants to go into something new. Can you believe it?”

“I thought you approved of the something new,” Denny said. “I thought you said it was brilliant.”

“Oh, I was just being supportive. Besides, it’s not the something new I mind; it’s the way he goes about getting rid of the old. He didn’t even consult me! Just took the very first offer he got, because he wants what he wants when he wants it.”

Abby touched Amanda’s arm. She sent a meaningful glance toward Elise, but Amanda said, “
What
,” and turned away again. And Elise just then stood up in one long graceful movement and began walking toward the water, as if nothing the grown-ups said could have anything to do with her.

“
I
didn’t know that was how you met,” Abby said. “That’s kind of like a movie! Like a Rock Hudson–Doris Day movie where they start out hating each other. I thought you met in the elevator or something.”

“The man is impossible,” Amanda said, as if Abby hadn’t spoken.

“You can see why he’d jump at the chance to sell, though,” Denny said. “I don’t guess it’s easy unloading a place that serves nothing but turkey.”

“Well, it’s not
married
to turkey. It could serve other things. And it’s got tons of equipment, ovens and such, that are worth a lot of money.”

“Oh,” Abby said, “poor Hugh. Men don’t handle failure well at all.”

“Mom. Please. Enough with the ‘poor Hugh.’ ”

“Want to take a walk, Ab?” Red asked suddenly. It wasn’t clear whether he’d been listening to what was being said. Maybe he really did feel like a walk just then. At any rate, he heaved himself to his feet and stepped over to give Abby a hand up. She was still shaking her head as they started off down the beach.

“Now they’ll have a long talk about what a bad wife I am,” Amanda said, watching them go.

“Dad walks so slowly these days,” Jeannie said. “Look at him. He’s so stiff.”

“How does he manage at work?” Denny asked her.

“I don’t notice it so much at work. It’s not as if he does anything physically demanding there anymore.”

They watched their parents meet up with Nora, who was returning from a walk of her own. She exchanged a few words with them and then continued toward Stem and her children, floating ethereally through a group of teenage boys tossing a football at the water’s edge. A black tie-on skirt fluttered and parted over her modest one-piece swimsuit, and her dark hair lifted from her shoulders in the breeze. The teenage boys halted their game to follow her with their eyes, one of them cradling the football under his arm.

“The unwitting femme fatale,” Denny murmured, and Amanda gave a little hiss of amusement.

“Is Elise having any fun?” Jeannie asked Amanda. “It doesn’t seem she’s joining in much this year.”

“I have no idea,” Amanda said. “I’m only her mother.”

“I guess ballet has kind of taken her away from things.”

Amanda didn’t answer. The three of them were silent a moment, their gazes fixed on a nearby toddler in a swim diaper who was pursuing a committee of gulls. The gulls strutted ahead of him at a dignified pace, gradually speeding up although they pretended not to notice him.

“How about Susan?” Jeannie asked Denny. “Is she having a good time?”

“She’s having a great time,” he said. “She really likes coming here. These are the only cousins she’s got.”

“Oh, does Carla not have any siblings?”

“Just an unmarried brother.”

Jeannie and Amanda raised their eyebrows at each other.

“How
is
Carla these days?” Amanda asked after a moment.

“Fine as far as I know.”

“Do you see much of her?”

“No.”

“Do you see
anybody
?”

“Do I see anybody?”

“You know what I mean. Any women.”

“Not really,” Denny said. And then, just when it seemed the conversation was finished, he added, “Face it, I’m hardly a catch.”

“Why not?” Jeannie asked.

“Well, I kind of come across as a deadbeat. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been blazing an impressive career path all these years.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous.
Lots
of women would fall for you.”

“No,” Denny said, “when you think about it, things haven’t changed much since the days when parents were trying to marry their daughters off to guys with titles and estates. Women still want to know what you
do
when they meet you. It’s the first question out of their mouths.”

“So? You’re a teacher! Or a substitute teacher, at least.”

“Right,” Denny said.

A little girl ran past them toward the water—the granddaughter of the next-door people. Reflexively, Denny and his sisters half turned to watch the next-door people threading from their house to the beach, carrying towels and folding chairs and a Styrofoam cooler. They arrived at a spot some twenty feet distant from the Whitshanks. The grown-ups unfolded their chairs and settled in a straight row facing the ocean, while the grandson and his friend went down to where the little girl was bounding into the surf.

“Have we ever found out for sure that they come for just the one week?” Amanda asked. “Maybe they’re here all summer.”

“No,” Jeannie said, “we saw them arrive that time, remember? With their suitcases and their beach equipment.”

“Maybe they stay on, then, after we leave.”

“Well, maybe. I guess they could. But I like to think that they go when we do. They have the same conversation we always have:
next year, should they make it
two
weeks? But by the end of their vacation they say, ‘Oh, one week is enough, really.’ And so they come for the same week year after year, and fifty years from now we’ll be saying”—here Jeannie’s voice changed to an old-lady whine—“ ‘Oh, look, it’s the next-door people, and the grandson’s got a grandson now!’ ”

“They’ve brought their lunch today,” Denny said. “We could check out their menu.”

Jeannie said, “What if we marched over there, right this minute, and introduced ourselves?”

“It would be a disappointment,” Amanda said.

“How come?”

“They would turn out to have some boring name, like Smith or Brown. They’d work in, let’s say, advertising, or computer sales or consulting.
Whatever
they worked in, it would be a letdown. They’d say, ‘Oh, how nice to meet you; we’ve always wondered about you,’ and then we’d have to give
our
boring names, and our boring occupations.”