Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “It was hydrogen,” he finally said.

  She glanced over at him. He was pouting, staring straight ahead with his double chins tucked down so his face melted into his neck and then his shirt collar, to dreadful effect. Jabba the Hutt. It astounded her that this man had spawned her husband. She could find no point of intersection, physical or otherwise.

  “What was hydrogen?” she asked.

  “That zeppelin that blew to hell and killed all the fancy-pants passengers. The Hindenburg.”

  His tone made clear the passengers had deserved their horrific destiny for some reason. The fanciness of their pants. That’s how it worked in Nick World. What scared Willa was how well she could predict the bizarre parameters of that place.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “It was hydrogen. Oxygen might be slightly less explosive. Sometime if you’d like to test your hypothesis please be my guest. As long as it’s somebody else’s car, and no member of my family is in it.”

  She heard the castigation in my family and felt some remorse, but this man didn’t belong to her. Her own parents had given her every kind of succor their lives allowed. The person she should now be driving to a doctor’s appointment was her mother. Willa had pleaded with Darcie to move in with them during her final years but her sweet mother resisted to the end, unwilling to be a burden. Instead, Willa got Nick.

  They passed an exit to a town called Glassboro. “Jersey is supposed to be the Garden State,” she said. “I always figured that was somebody’s idea of a joke.”

  “Glassboro,” Nick commented. “Used to make a shitload of glass in Jersey. Back before the war that was a big thing, the Jersey glass factories.”

  Willa found that “shitload of glass” lit up an unfortunate mental image. She tried to erase it by pondering which war he meant, and whether this could be true. Reviewing what she knew of the origins of glass, she came up with roughly nothing. An island outside Venice where she and Iano once watched artists blowing fiery bubbles, making preposterously expensive vases. They’d had wine at lunch and were struck giddy with a fear of busting up the artisan glass gallery. Their honeymoon had started with Greek relatives in airless houses and ended with sex on lots of beaches.

  “Seriously?” she asked. “Glass? Why here?”

  “Silica. All that white sand there is silica. That’s your main ingredient for making glass. And the trees. Wood, for firing the furnaces. That’s all you need.”

  For most of his working life Nick had been a welder, with a functional knowledge of heat and chemistry. He barely had a sixth-grade education, given the turbulent backstory of rural island life, war, and narrow escape. But the man knew his materials.

  North of Glassboro the land remained empty but exits grew more frequent: TWP meant “township.” Township of Washington, Township of Deptford. Still, it was hard to imagine a city the size of Philadelphia popping up out of those trees anytime soon.

  “Put on the radio,” he commanded.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s a problem. We would have to agree on a station.”

  “Talk show,” he said, and mumbled some call letters she didn’t try to recognize. He leaned forward to study the buttons and displays on the dash. They’d had this car nearly ten years but Nick hated digital controls. He was a self-proclaimed analog man.

  “Your talk radio is not going to be my cup of tea,” she said. She knew what he wanted: jocular, obscenely confident commentators who disparaged any kind of progressive thinking, egged on by callers who were angry about even the most basic modern social arrangements. Gay marriage aside, some of these people seemed incensed that their kids had to attend racially integrated schools. They were offended to distraction by the idea of a nonwhite man at the helm of their great nation. Probably they weren’t completely sold on female suffrage. These callers were clinging to a century-old vision of America, and Willa preferred to forget such people existed.

  Nick located the FM button and skimmed through some static, then turned the volume to a level probably audible to other drivers on the highway. The self-possessed talking head came booming in with the topic of the day, a crazy presidential candidate who would surely burn out by the end of the month. The Bullhorn. He was offensive to everyone else Willa knew or could imagine, so it stood to reason Nick would admire him.

  “No way,” Willa said loudly. “Music or nothing. That’s our deal.”

  Suddenly they were plunged into the outskirts of Philly. Out of the sand flats they rose into a confluence of highways and abruptly over water, the Walt Whitman Bridge.

  Willa punched the radio off and Nick went slack. She knew he was scheming. He would sit there obsessed, focusing all his energy on waiting until the time was right to creep forward and get his station back on. Tig had been just like that as a toddler, possessed of a superhuman, intransigent patience. Maybe that was the genetic intersection. Nick’s stubbornness had passed down to a son too cheerful to accept it, then found purchase in a granddaughter. Everything else about Iano had to come from Roula. Willa hadn’t known her mother-in-law very well, so her admiration of the woman could safely flourish.

  The city skyline lay ahead to the right, the stadium on their left, and signage informed Willa she would have to pay a five-dollar toll to exit the bridge.

  “Damn it,” she said. “Can you reach my purse?” It was in the backseat. She might as well ask him to run a 10K for charity. She eased into the far right lane, where the traffic was blessedly backed up, giving her time to unbuckle her seat belt, turn around, and grab her purse. She extracted a five-dollar bill from her wallet. Sure enough, Nick nabbed that opportunity to lean up and turn on the radio again. The jokey talk-show guys were still discussing the candidate, whether lampooning or lauding him Willa couldn’t even tell. He sounded like a parody of poor statesmanship anytime he opened his mouth. She punched off the radio.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” she said. “I’m not going to listen to those guys. I’m not asking, I’m telling, and let me remind you I have some power here. When we get off this bridge I could pull the car over and turn off the ignition.”

  Was she threatening his oxygen supply? Willa would not suffocate a fellow human, regardless of creed. She couldn’t stand the person she sounded like right now. “I’m sorry, Nick. I’m not going to shut you off. We’ve been family a long time. Let’s just get ourselves through one more day.”

  Nick grunted a beleaguered assent. Traffic had ground to a standstill as three lanes of inbound traffic merged into one. Amid a gaggle of orange cones and the filthy carcasses of heavy equipment, the bridge was undergoing some major repair.

  “What you said the other night at dinner? That was right.”

  Willa turned to stare. “Wow. Mark the date.”

  “What?”

  “I said, thank you, Nick. Please tell me what I was right about.”

  “We all just want better for our own. Tough times for you and Iano right now, with the kids and all. Everything so fucked up. I hate that for you.”

  “Thanks.” She stared out the window at a ponytailed guy with Mr. Universe arms wielding a jackhammer, shattering pavement like broken glass. The noise was surreal. She could feel it vibrating her teeth in her jawbones. She envied Nick’s deafness.

  “The thing is,” Nick said, “you know what the cause of it is? Why we got nothing to pass on after working hard all our lives?”

  “I hate to ask. What’s the cause of it?”

  “The wetbacks.”

  Willa nodded. Of course. Please let this traffic move forward.

  “The plant where I worked all those years? You should see it now. Nothing but wetbacks. Back in my time we had a union looking after us. Then the Mexicans come in and take everything out from under our asses.”

  “I see. Illegal Mexican immigrants invaded your plant, wrestled the white guys to the ground, escorted them out, and then told the company, ‘Sure boss, we don’t need any union wages.’ That’s how it went down?”

  �
��Not exactly.”

  “The laws changed so plant owners could break strikes and bust up the unions, back in the eighties. I know that for a fact, I was covering labor news at the time. The pay scale collapsed. You know this, Nick. Weren’t you forced to take early retirement?”

  Nick didn’t answer. She knew the layoff had injured his pride. Willa felt a pang, not of sympathy with her fellow redundant but excitement at the memory of that beat and its thrilling polemics. Older reporters had laughed at her for coming to work in sneakers, keen to get assigned to some showdown on a picket line, but they didn’t laugh at the stories she got. She’d been so green then, still struggling to master a professional journalist’s cool, and the ban on viewing her subjects emotionally. Even if they were getting teargassed.

  “If it’s all Mexican workers in that plant now,” she felt compelled to explain to deaf ears, “it’s because nobody else will do such dangerous work for lousy pay.”

  “Yeah, they changed the law. Now it says they gotta hire everybody but the whites. Girls too, they got girls in there now. It’s not natural.”

  Brake lights on the car ahead flickered, hinting at forward motion, but nothing came of it. Willa considered turning off the ignition to save gas, but then remembered the matter of oxygen pump and asphyxiation. She took a deep breath.

  “You’re thinking of fair-hiring laws. They require companies to hire applicants if they’re qualified, that’s all. Regardless of race or gender. Not because of it.” The jackhammer now seemed to be operating directly on her skull. So this is how it turns out, she thought. Hell is the Walt Whitman Bridge. I hear America singing! Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs!

  “Thing is, if there’s girls and Mexicans in a factory, there’s not going to be enough jobs for the men. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “So we gals should stay home and let our husbands bring home the bacon. That’s your proposal for economic recovery?” She tapped the gas lightly, edging almost to the bumper of the car ahead. “Well, hot dog. You’re looking at a housewife with no job. Give me a medal, I’m doing my part for God and country.”

  “You don’t have to go all pissy on me.” He leaned forward and turned the radio back on. Miraculously, at the same moment, the traffic began to move.

  “One paycheck doesn’t feed a family anymore, Nick. Seems like you’d notice a thing like that.” All three of his daughters were employed. One was divorced from a deadbeat, with four kids she had to raise on her own. Willa marveled at his capacity to live a life undisturbed by actual evidence. Nick concentrated on scanning across radio static, resting briefly on a rap song, moving on, finding more. Philadelphia stations seemed tuned to the hip-hop demographic.

  He turned it off and heaved himself back against the seat. “Goddamn monkey music. Goddamn—”

  “Just don’t,” Willa interrupted in a singsong command. “Don’t say that word. You have to know how offensive that is.”

  “Offensive to you.”

  “Yes!” she hissed, easing up to the tollbooth finally, opening the window, and holding out a five-dollar bill to a beautiful young man with long cornrows and heartbreaking, curly eyelashes. He nodded at her in a rhythmic way that led her to see the twin jewels of his red earbuds. She smiled back, rolled up the window, and drove on. “Offensive to that young man and to me and most other people alive in the twenty-first century. Regardless of our own color. Sometimes, Nick. Jesus.” She bit her lip.

  “Well, I’m a sick old man. I’m not gonna be around that much longer.”

  Willa neither confirmed nor denied this prediction. She concentrated on finding her way toward the university medical complex. Her phone’s navigator voice was in the middle of a disapproving recalculation. During her chat with Nick she had somehow missed an important cue, exiting the northbound from Vineland too soon and taking the wrong bridge. Who even knew there were two bridges into Philadelphia? The whole Walt Whitman experience had been a gratuitous wrong turn. Now they seemed to be following the edge of the waterfront. She could see no water at all, only the strange vision of gigantic ships moving along beside them, looming above buildings and trees. An industrial smokestack belched fire. The air in the car suddenly smelled of Delaware Bay and swampland.

  “If Roula was here she would treat me decent,” Nick said. “Roulaki, there was a woman knew how to take care of a man.”

  “I’m sorry she isn’t here. I wish she were.”

  “Ha. I bet. So you wouldn’t have to.”

  Willa would have to pace herself to get through this day. Nick was probably exhausting even to himself. It couldn’t be easy to keep track of individual grudges against so many disparate objects, people, and doctrines. Surely it would be simpler to have some unifying theory of hatred that covered everything at once. Instead, they’d just have to keep feeding all Nick’s fires with the extra oxygen.

  *

  In the doctor’s office Willa longed to lie down on one of the nice upholstered sofas under the large abstract paintings and take a nap. She couldn’t get past the first page of the medical history forms. Nick refused to fill them out himself, claiming the writing was too blurry for him to read. It might have been true, vision could have been one more casualty of his uncontrollable blood sugar. She would add that to the list of boxes she’d already checked: arthritis, arrhythmia, bursitis, cardiovascular disease, deafness, emphysema, fluid retention—this drear alphabet was long. Among other diabetic swindles, Nick’s extremities had initiated a horrific process of melting off his body. He’d hidden the open wounds on his legs, nobody knew for how long. Willa hadn’t asked about the masses of bloody Kleenex that repulsed her when she emptied his trash, but eventually Tig noticed the bleeding through his socks. The condition must be excruciating. Objectively Willa knew that Nick Tavoularis was no place to be, a supersized house of pain besieged by aggressive fear or pride that made him resist medical attention. He believed all doctors were in cahoots, and that the intertwined snakes on their caduceus represented the twin ambitions of getting rich and killing their patients.

  From their names she guessed both physicians in this practice were from India. She saw no way of preparing anyone for the bigoted outburst likely to greet the doctor’s hello and extended hand. She considered writing Tourette’s on the intake form, but she knew it was wrong to associate Nick’s odium with any real disease. At least these doctors were male. To Willa’s relief, every female physician on her list had been too booked up to take him. Female practitioners in Nick’s view were freakish women driven by perversion to touch male strangers’ bodies. He would share his opinion freely.

  She wondered if he’d noticed this whole facility was being run by nonwhite workers. In the lobby downstairs, a battery of clerks checking patients into the complex were lined up in individual glass cubicles displaying a palette of sepia hues. Both receptionists in this office were African American, one with a voluminous weave and brightly colored nails, the other a striking beauty in a short-cropped Afro who resembled a young Eartha Kitt. Two nurses—one older, one young, both Asian—came intermittently to the portal to summon the next patient from the waiting room. The patients were elderly and white, without exception. From what Willa had seen of the City of Brotherly Love, this stratification of service workers and the served seemed to hold throughout.

  She returned to the list of maladies, wishing she could just check those few that did not apply. It took a moment for her to understand the receptionist was trying to get her attention. “Miz Tavoularis,” she was repeating, pronouncing it “Tavyalerius,” though Willa had certainly heard worse. And it wasn’t her name, of course, she was Knox. Even back in her lovestruck youth when she’d married Iano, it had seemed rash to trade away four letters for four unpronounceable syllables. Willa walked to the desk with her clipboard of overdue homework, summoned by the receptionist with the painted nails. At close range the manicure was arresting, each long nail its own vivid little painting: flowers, peace symbols, lines, and swirls.


  “I’m sorry, I’m not finished with these forms. He’s complicated.” Willa tried a contrite smile, but the receptionist wasn’t having it. She tapped her computer screen with a talon that wore a smiley face.

  “There’s a problem here with your insurance.”

  Willa reflexively reached into her purse before realizing this gatekeeper was already in possession of her insurance cards. “I gave you my information.”

  “Yeah, I know you gave it to me, ma’am. What I’m saying is, we got a problem. We can’t accept that insurance here.”

  I don’t even want to be here, Willa wished to declare. Please don’t make me fight for the privilege. “I understand you don’t process Medicare here and you need supplemental insurance. Your office explained all that over the phone. That’s why I gave you the other card. It’s our family plan.”

  “We can’t accept the other plan either. If he had the Medigap plan plus part A, B, and D or maybe the Medicare Advantage plan, I’m still not sure about your family HMO as his supplemental. But we might be able to work with you then.”

  “Yeah. I think those are all things he would have had to sign up for when he turned sixty-five, and that didn’t happen. I’m truly sorry it didn’t. But now he’s kind of the Titanic of preexisting conditions, and this university employee plan is what we can get.” Willa tried to show sufficient remorse for having a Medicare-delinquent father-in-law. The truth was so very far beyond “didn’t happen.” Nick’s essential identity rested on his contempt for Pussy Welfare Crybabies, which extended to matters like the Medigap.

  The receptionist seemed tired of repeating herself. “Well, your plan number doesn’t come up on my screen so that means we don’t take it.”

  “It’s a new policy,” Willa offered. “My husband just started working here this fall and signed us up on the faculty policy. The family plan. Mr. Tavoularis is my husband’s father. They told us coverage would start after thirty days.” Willa watched her many arguments having no effect. “Maybe it’s not registered yet, or something? Can you try checking it again?”