Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Now came the tears, full-throttle makeup blowout. Willa’s kindness had landed harder than cruelty on this poor girl, puncturing the facade, letting vulnerability bleed out in arterial spurts. Maybe her story was mostly true: car problems, imperiled workstudy, the honor society kid from Vineland High, shining light of her working-class family fighting her way into college. Probably she needed all that armor just to show up every day and endure the scrutiny of privilege. Guessing that the tissue supply was extinct, Willa handed over her kitchen towel, regretting the kohl damage in advance.

  Gwen scrubbed at her face briefly, then made an effort to gather her mess. And still she didn’t get up to leave. She flipped the steel ring in her eyebrow up, down, up, down. Willa traded a worried glance with Tig.

  “It’s not just me,” she finally squeaked out, struggling for dignity. “Half the girls I know are trying to make it with their professors. Not just for the grades. It might be true what you said, but older men seem so, just, safe, you know? Like they already know all the stuff you’re trying to figure out.”

  Willa smiled. “Oh honey, they don’t. You have to start where you are and learn what’s going to work for the world you’re getting into. The only stuff people my age have figured out is what was going to work for us.”

  Out of kindness, or maybe to save face, Willa didn’t tell either of them the rest of the story: that it hadn’t.

  *

  Vineland could have been anytown, of any industrial era. Christopher the historian liked to say these old houses with their ornate trim and bay windows were holding the confidences of centuries. If so, Willa felt they were giving in to the modern custom of blurting out all secrets: satellite dishes perched conspicuously on the Victorian gables and banks of gas meters clamped on exterior walls betrayed internal divisions where many different families now lived on separate checks. A handwritten sign in a yard advertised diabetes supplies cheap, leading Willa to wonder how that worked: Had the patient died, leaving the family an inheritance of insulin and needles? Did people now use underground markets to trade around leftover prescription drugs, and if so, could she tap in?

  On Landis she passed Lulu’s All You Can Eat, Martini Shoes, the brutalist architecture of the welfare office (on the very spot where Charles Landis’s office once stood, according to Christopher), and the tumble-jumble storefronts of shops selling secondhand clothes. A hand-painted arch advised her to Keep Vineland Beautiful. Most of these businesses had people living above them, judging from the laundry and other signs of domesticity hanging from the second stories. A lot of those apartments had an oddly tilted-out window she recognized as a cheap enclosure of the balcony space, the simplest replacement for ornate bay windows long gone. She was learning to see Vineland’s architecture through the lens of her new friend Chris Hawk, in which certain historical rules held sway. One was that complexity gives way to the simple.

  Willa could see how this law applied to life in general. In the last three weeks she’d been forced to replace any oversize personal or professional ambitions with a few simple ones: First, to take care of Dusty. Since Nick’s stroke, coincidentally the same day she figured out how to use the infant carrier, the infant had hardly been out of it, and he was turning by degrees into a happier baby. At this moment he nestled against Willa’s chest wearing a brown hat with ears, knitted by Tig, designed to make him resemble a bear cub. Willa’s next worry was to get a medical release in case of a baby emergency, since Zeke had been called back to Boston by prospective clients. It was just for a few weeks—Tig’s charge of absentee dad was predictably overstated—but they probably did need to get something on paper. The words in loco parentis kept ringing in Willa’s ears, emphasis on the loco. She’d left Zeke a voice mail and was waiting to hear back.

  Her other new goal, which she couldn’t quite talk about yet, was to get the family on Medicaid. She’d learned of this possibility from the hospital social worker who talked her down from a panic attack. The bills from Nick’s hospitalization were staggering: after surgery and rehab, in the same ballpark as Zeke’s student loans. The social worker, Clara Petrofaccio—not Pete’s daughter but some kind of cousin, third or fourth—had handed Willa tissues while she cried and tried to breathe. Then asked her some polite personal questions, and written down the link to a website.

  Willa was approaching the historical society building when Zeke rang her back. She turned and walked the other direction so she could have this conversation in the privacy of open air among passing strangers.

  “Hi Mom, sorry, I’ve been in meetings all morning. What’s up?”

  “Nothing big, just the home team checking in. It must be hard to be in Boston, seeing all your old friends, without Helene. A lot of reminders.”

  “Not really. I mean yes, seeing friends. But it’s not harder here than being there. I don’t think there’s anyplace in the world I’m going to feel good in, to be honest.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It feels like you keep waking up in the wrong life.”

  “Yep.”

  “It will get better. I promise.”

  He was quiet.

  “What helps? When do you feel a little bit okay?”

  “When I’m doing something. Not thinking but, like, accomplishing.”

  “Well then, it’s good for you to be in Boston. Accomplish money. Send checks home to your ma and pa. Save the farm!”

  Zeke laughed. But she wasn’t exactly kidding.

  “So is it going well? You’re bringing down the evildoers?”

  “You have to be in charge of some actual money first, before you can divest it.”

  “So, when apartheid fell in South Africa, you were in elementary school.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “I was just thinking about it. You were arguing with Tig one time about how international economic boycotts helped end that regime. How do you even know things like that?”

  “Mom, seriously. How do you know who won the Civil War?”

  “Well okay. But the history of investment activism is a bit more obscure.”

  “Not to me. I did a whole presentation on it in Model UN.”

  In seventh grade, the boy was underpinning Cry, the Beloved Country with a cost-benefit analysis. He really did need to be where he was, there among the movers and shakers of the money trees. “So it’s looking good? With your would-be clients?”

  “I think so. Hard to tell with these guys. In meetings they’re all game, talking basketball teams, bullshitting like you’ve sealed the deal and they’re your boys. Then an hour later the secretary calls to tell you they’re going with Merrill Lynch.”

  “Oh. That’s disappointing.”

  “It’s the business. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  “Well, okay. Mainly I called because I had a question about Dusty.”

  “Yeah? He okay?”

  “He’s fine.” Willa could not help feeling he should have asked sooner. A parent worries, that is the rule: seeing her name in his missed calls, Zeke’s heart should have lurched a little. “He’s still not much of a napper, but he’s been crying less in the daytime since we started carrying him all the time. I think he needed more physical contact.”

  “Okay. That all sounds good.”

  “So it’s kind of important. Do you have another minute to talk about this?”

  He hesitated. “Sure.”

  “Okay, we’re dealing with all this hospital stuff for Nick and I realized we also might need paperwork that would allow me to make medical decisions for Dusty, if that came up. I know it’s hard to talk about. I don’t want to scare you. It could just be an ear infection, some little thing. But I’m not sure I’m authorized to take him to the doctor.”

  “Sure, that makes sense.” Zeke was not finding this hard to talk about. “I’ll ask my lawyer friends what route we should go. Medical power of attorney, or some kind of shared guardianship thing.”

  “Thanks. I’m kind of gifted at imagining emergency scenarios. As you kn
ow.”

  He laughed. “You’re the mom.”

  “I’ve had some practice, you’re right about that.”

  “So is that it?”

  “It is. Your little fellow’s good. We’re doing okay here.”

  “Thanks, Mom. You’re a true American hero. Super Grandma.”

  “Don’t sell the movie rights. I’m just muddling through. Tig is actually a huge help, she’s got the knack somehow.”

  “Great. She’ll teach him all the useful skills. Weed smoking, Dumpster diving.”

  “We’re a few years out from those hazards. And your sister has grown up a lot since high school. You haven’t been around to see it.”

  “So was that it?”

  “You’ve got to go. Go build Rome.”

  “Will do.”

  Willa was surprised to find she’d traveled many blocks from her destination, and now turned back toward the historical society. The mélange of personal artifacts there no longer oppressed but now consoled her, proof of many eccentric individualities surviving against the long odds of being erased by time. She was determined to get to the bottom of the Mary Treat question; namely, whether the famous scientist had lived in their house. If so, possibilities might arise. Meantime, Iano had to knock it off about the grant.

  She’d come to depend on Christopher Hawk, who had taken Willa under his wing with the zeal of a man who’d spent years without very much to do. Now he sifted through boxes of unlabeled photos and reams of spotty public records, and had even come by to check out the house so he’d know what he was looking for. He texted Willa updates with the attentiveness of a new boyfriend. Iano, in fact, called him “your new boyfriend.”

  But the object of her desire was Mary Treat. Willa was working her way through every word written by or about this woman, admittedly one of the more eccentric individualities in the collection. Reading between some lines, Willa wondered if maybe Mary was on the spectrum. But so lovable! Not a Disney princess but a kind of natural-history savant, seemingly able to forget human cravings and immerse herself in the nonhuman lives around her. Willa remained alert for clues about street address whenever these immersions occurred in or around Mary’s house, as they often did. Might the yew shrubs mentioned be those scraggly old evergreens in Willa’s backyard? Was the so-called piazza their dilapidated porch? Could the ants colonizing Mary’s yard be ancestors of the ones presently driving Jorge and José Luis mad when they worked on their cars?

  She called it research, but was dipping a whole lot farther than necessary into the Mary Treat well. Willa had spent decades making short work of researching articles, priding herself on how efficiently she could skim primary resources or get in and out of an interview. “Take only pictures, and for God’s sake don’t leave footprints” summed up her lifelong relationship to her material, as an officer of the press. And now she found herself breaking and entering, pulling open closets, trying on Mary Treat’s clothes and wishing she could sleep over. Willa had no explanation for why she felt herself so eager to inhabit another woman’s life. This was not exactly her own bucket list—tramping through the Pine Barrens In All Seasons, or comparing notes on pond creatures with Charlie Darwin—but it sure as hell beat fighting with the insurance company. Mary had been free to examine the world as she saw it. Willa burrowed into that freedom as if reading a trashy romance, and it made her happy for hours at a stretch. It wasn’t fiction, it was real. If Willa was living in Mary’s house—if that shelter had stood while the world fell apart and reassembled in its crazy ways—then her family could be sheltered there too. If this didn’t all make perfect sense, it was working for now, to the extent that Willa had stopped obsessing about her last two Xanax.

  Today she would get only a couple of hours at the historical society, and she already felt wistful about it. Too much of this morning had gone to the drop-in caller from Gothland, and Willa had to be at the hospital by noon to take over the vigil from Iano. He would drive straight to Philly and teach class, no doubt looking sexy and rumpled in the clothes he’d worn all night. Since Nick had been moved out of ICU he’d needed a family member on hand to negotiate his care while the medical people seemed to be running in place. Hours could pass with no one coming to check on him while urine bags filled, pain meds wore off, and orders got mixed up, so the family was trying to keep up the daily vigil. Sometimes Nick became violent and hard to manage, in which case Iano would reward his bad behavior (“just saying,” Willa just said) by staying overnight. Willa was grateful to have Dusty duty to keep her mostly out of the fray.

  But Iano had classes to teach, Zeke was away now, and Tig had been socked with double shifts at work because a coworker (not Jorge) broke his pelvis in a motorcycle accident. Willa felt like a soldier ant in the complex colony of her family and village; they were still working out who would take the larva this afternoon. She would try to get Dusty past the nurses’ station into Nick’s room, and if not, would pass him off to Iano at the changing of the guard. Iano could strap him on and take him to class, and wouldn’t that just about finish off the besotted lasses.

  Willa wouldn’t mention the carpool hopeful when she and Iano switched off at the hospital: not the time or the place. But the longer she waited, the more she would think about it, and this was not a happy prospect. Iano’s record wasn’t perfect. There had been plenty of these coed dramas, all smoke and no fire, which Willa bore with the patience of the chosen, but there had also been affairs. One anyway, shortly after Tig was born. Iano was a postdoc doing what postdocs do, trying to please everybody, awfully young and guileless, and a spiky-haired go-getter anthropology professor had bowled him over with her go-getting, from the sound of it. Willa was in babyland just then, wandering around bleary-eyed in blouses all stiff and stinky-sweet with dried milk, having not quite rallied to the joy of sex for an unspecified little while. She was shaken of course, but Iano’s remorse was out of all proportion to the crime. He wept, Willa forgave, and that was that, except for her outraged friends, who accused Willa of lacking the newly discovered resource of the era known as self-esteem.

  Willa knew her deficit. It was the several hundred consecutive days without delta sleep. She and Iano had started their family as grad students, when other academics were dutifully postponing family for career, so Willa and Iano were ahead of their crowd. Her girlfriends had no inkling of life with two kids in diapers: that on a good day Willa got to take a shower; once a week she might get as far as socks and shoes. To leave a husband, it stood to reason, one would need the whole outfit plus combed hair. And then what? You’re doing this to yourself, said her friends, and they were right. How typical, they said, that a man would stray right then while she was up to her ears in his babies, and they were right about that too, she gathered. They were living a mammalian cliché. She forgave Iano because he was so sincerely sorry. She adored him and the genes they’d combined in their tedious, utterly charming babies. With all said and done, she still felt happier than she ever remembered being, though of course her memory was shot.

  Those days had been wafting back to Willa lately as she found herself again daydreaming about REM sleep. Things like showers and focused lovemaking had taken a backseat while she relearned how to organize life around the all-consuming nothingness and everythingness of an infant. Maybe Iano was reliving those days too, neglect and all. Just a thought.

  *

  In order to study the character of Polyergus, I captured several and made them prisoners. I gave them every necessary accommodation, and placed an abundance of food before them. But they seemed to scorn the idea of labor, and would not even feed themselves. I kept them in this condition three days, until I was satisfied they would all die without their slaves, so I put a few in the prison with them. These faithful creatures manifested joy on meeting their half-famished masters. They stroked and licked them, removing all dust from their bodies, and prepared food and fed them; finally they excavated a room for them, and took them from my sight.

  They
were reading in bed. Or Iano was. Willa was waiting for the right time; this would have to be the place. Suddenly she realized his paper had drifted down to his chest and she might have missed her window. But he wasn’t asleep. He was staring at her.

  “What?”

  “You look so happy.”

  “Do I?”

  Was she? Admittedly she’d become engrossed, to the extent of forgetting she was reading, and actually hearing Mary’s earnest, levelheaded voice.

  “People don’t get that blissed out reading anything but the Bible. Or porn.”

  She laughed, tipping her tablet toward him so he could see for himself, no God or penises. “Mary Treat. My new Bible.”

  “Your new porn.”

  “Not that sexy. But interesting. She’s describing these creepy ants that can’t do anything for themselves, so they have to steal babies from other ants and raise them as slaves. It’s like a parable of the One Percent, as told by ants.”

  He smiled and went back to his paper-clipped pages of student essay. A demoralizing pile of these loomed on his nightstand.

  “Thanks for going back over there tonight, Iano. You’re a good son. Better than he deserves. You know that, right?”

  He didn’t look up from his reading. “I know that. And if he dies alone tonight, I’ll still feel like a piece of shit.”

  She rested her tablet on her chest and lay watching this beautiful, patient man in reading glasses surrender himself to an endless river of badly constructed sentences on what have you. American Federalism. Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn’t be stuck with intro classes forever.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay longer with Nick this afternoon,” she said.

  “It’s really okay.” Still reading.

  “I had the best-laid plans, but Dusty ran through all the fuel I brought with me in half the time expected. He’s turned into an eating machine.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “It is. But it would be nice to stretch out the feedings, especially at night.” She powered off her device, set it on the bedside table, bit a hangnail on her thumb, and then stopped, thinking of the goth girl. Few were the moments that day when she had not. “It seems early to start him on solids. But I might try mixing a little cereal into his formula.”