Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Iano raised his eyebrows. “Cheerios?”

  She laughed. “Baby cereal. You remember this stage. Rice cereal or grits, the porridgey things that aren’t quite food yet.”

  He seemed to think about that. Did he remember the porridge stage? “Grits are corn, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Do we say ‘grits are’ or ‘grits is’?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve been out of West Virginia too long, and it’s all your fault.”

  Iano lowered his glasses, turned to her, and made an extremely exaggerated sad face that made Willa laugh. Like those big-eye kids.

  “Screw Paris, preppie. Paris and music and all that stuff you think you stole from me.” She tried to flare her nostrils like a dying Ali McGraw in Love Story, but never had that knack. “And thank you for caring, by the way. About the grammar of grits.”

  He blew out an exasperated sigh. “These kids are poisoning my brain. If you read one of these papers your head would explode.”

  “So flunk them all.”

  “I can’t. I’m supposed to have a sense of mission. Did you know Chancel started in a church basement, as a study group for the disadvantaged?”

  “This is not PC, but are all these kids really destined for college? Is it reasonable for society to pressure them into poli-sci 114 instead of a hostess job at Red Lobster? So shoot me. But where has all our education gotten us?”

  Without looking up from his reading, Iano lodged a finger just above her ear and pulled the trigger. “On average, college graduates still make more money.”

  “And have those big, sharp student loans. The better to eat your juicy paycheck. Somebody at a bank is getting rich from their college careers, that much I’m on to.”

  “Mine is not to question why, moro. Mine is just to poli-sci.”

  “I always hated the sound of that. Polly Sigh. It sounds like mass hysteria in a sorority house.”

  “Or one of those inflatable sex dolls.” Still he read.

  “And you’ve got the sighing Pollies to prove it.” She rolled over on her belly and put her face close to his. He looked up, the essay still folded back in one hand, reading glasses on his nose, as if he expected his wife to go away at any moment. Bless his heart.

  “So what’s the story on Gwendolyn?”

  “Gwendolyn?”

  “She came to the house this morning.”

  He stared at Willa, frowning, then at the ceiling, frowning. Then something hit him visibly. “Guenevere? With the purple hair? She came here?”

  Willa felt rising hysteria, of the silly kind. “Guenevere? You can’t be serious. Are women trying to give their children ridiculous names?”

  Iano seemed at a loss. He of the family of Athenas, et cetera, wrong question.

  “So which are you?” she asked. “The Lancelot or the King Arthur?”

  “What?”

  “Lancelot was the seducer, King Arthur was the sad older man. Guenevere, as usual, the victim of circumstance.”

  He wasn’t even a little amused. “She came here, today? Jesus. What did she say?”

  “Like, I guess I knew he was like married and all? But I didn’t know there was like a baby …”

  “Willa. Why did she come here?”

  She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. She would never tell him how off the wall it had been with Tig there. Willa still felt hysterical, along comic rather than tragic lines, which was the wrong track. Iano was beside himself. She probably should be too.

  “So I guess it’s over. Is it over?”

  “Over? My God! Nothing ever started.”

  “No?”

  “No. She has a work-study in our department and apparently her duties include lurking around the copy machine so she can stare into my office. I keep closing my door. I hate to damage her record, but I’m thinking of getting her assigned someplace else.”

  So Willa wasn’t wrong, the girl was infatuated. At moments throughout the day her outrage had alternated with remorse, for maybe humiliating an innocent student in a fit of groundless paranoia.

  Willa raised herself up to look in his eyes. “Really. No sin with Guenevere?”

  “Moro. Are you asking, seriously? That eyebrow thing is off-putting, to be frank.”

  She stared at his deep brown irises and saw what was in there: No Guenevere. Not even impure thoughts. “But without the piercings, you’d consider it?”

  He closed his eyes, genuinely miserable. “Willa. This isn’t fair.”

  “Sorry. I believe you.”

  He opened his eyes and she saw his fear. A thing she hadn’t considered.

  “Oh God, Iano. I’m really sorry.” She plummeted from hysteria to anguish. “She didn’t say you were having an affair, don’t punish her for that. Technically she said you were having a carpool. I was just reading between the lines. Sorry. I guess I just thought I’d run it by you.”

  “Christ, Willa. You scared the hell out of me. I had this Fatal Attraction thing running in my head, a crazy girl telling lies about me, going to the dean.”

  “Sorry,” Willa said again, the word that could never be said enough in the space of one marriage. Ali McGraw in Love Story notwithstanding.

  “I’m sorry too, moro. This bullshit you have to put up with. It was crazy for her to come here bothering you. She lives in Vineland, this girl. I don’t know how she found out we’re here, but early in the semester she asked me if she could get a ride. I’d forgotten that. She was having car trouble and blah blah. I don’t think she’s getting much support from home. I gave her a couple of excused absences but I certainly made no offers.”

  “You were probably just polite. In her age bracket that’s practically a proposal.”

  “Right. Boundaries, everybody keeps saying this word and I never get it. Am I stupid? First men are pigs, and now we can’t even be nice without some kind of implied sexual fallout?”

  “Iano, you didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still children, even if they’re twenty. Nobody’s teaching them manners.” What she really thought was that these girls had tapped into a moxie mine that was unknown to females of Willa’s generation. When she was in college it took half a semester’s worth of courage just to show up at office hours. Especially if the professor was hot.

  “This kills me, Willa. That you wouldn’t trust me.”

  “I do.” She looked deeply into his eyes, trying to channel some other loving wife, less neurotic and better rested. “You wouldn’t lie to me. I know that. End of subject.”

  This appeared to be enough for Iano. She watched him take up the essay again, and marveled at the teaspoons of reassurance that could be enough for Iano. Was he faking that? All other humans she knew, herself chief among them, seemed to ache with unfulfilled wants. He read to the end of a page, turned it back, and read on. After an indefinite interval he noticed her silence and looked up.

  “Ti, moro?”

  “It’s not the girl. I’m just thinking of life in general. You’re not disappointed?”

  He considered this for roughly two seconds. “No. About what?”

  “I don’t know. You gave up so much trying to get tenure and security, we all did. And here you are back on the bottom rung, reading bad essays for crummy pay.”

  “I did get security. Unfortunately my college didn’t.”

  “I know. I’m not blaming you. The same thing happened to both of us, we lost what we’d worked for and I feel cheated. Some days I’m still so mad, I can’t stand being in my own skin. Isn’t it just human, to keep wanting?”

  His eyes crinkled at the corners, and here was the smile she could no more resist after thirty years than the Gueneveres could at freshman orientation. “Se thelo,” he said.

  “I know. I want you too.” She kissed him, feeling something that had been dormant awhile, a stirring of sap in the heartwood. But she pulled away before he did. Sat up and rearranged the oversize T-shirt that kept falling off her shoulder. “Okay. This has been bothering m
e and I need to talk about it. You’re stuck below your station and I don’t think we should just … you know. Give up.”

  “What are you saying, Willa? I’m a happy loser?”

  “No! Not a loser. But maybe I’m looking for a little more fire in the belly, on your own behalf? You deserve more.”

  “Deserving, getting, and wanting are three different things, moro. Typically unrelated.”

  She thought this over. “Yeah. The first two are pretty static, you deserve what you deserve, you get what you get. And that last one runs away with the family silver.”

  He laughed. “What is it you want, Willa Knox? What do you really, really want?”

  She looked at him lying back on the pillow, glasses on his nose, essay in one hand, the other arm cocked behind his head; portrait of a man relaxed. “To be as happy as you are. For all of us to be okay. For Zeke to be himself again, and Tig to be reasonable.”

  “I’m asking about you. Just for yourself. What is it you don’t have, that would make you happy?”

  “I don’t know. I want the sexual energy of a twenty-year-old and several kinds of genius. To write like Virginia Woolf and sing like Beyoncé. And look like Beyoncé.”

  “I was discussing the material realm, not the magical.”

  “Okay. A roof that doesn’t leak and a car that doesn’t conk out. Health insurance that doesn’t reject our claims.”

  “Those are unwants. You’re wishing problems away. I’m asking you to come up with things you actually want.”

  “Oh, I could give you a list. Believe me.” She ran both hands through her hair at the temples, concentrating. “I’m out of the habit. I’ve spent years trying not to want. Just, you know, as an endeavor, like quitting smoking. Let me think. I want to fill the grocery cart without keeping a running tally in my head. To be able to buy a nice bottle of wine sometimes and drink it, just because we feel like it.” She gazed at the peeling wallpaper over the chest of drawers and unfocused her eyes, loosening the reflexes of parsimony. “I used to want Limoges. Nice china. I know that sounds stupidly materialistic. It was in my twenties, I didn’t know we’d be moving every few years and breaking everything except the cast iron and the plastic sippy cups.” She exhaled. “I wish we had a life that didn’t have to leave behind a trail of broken pieces.”

  She paused for comment. Iano offered none. She knew she was failing the assignment: he was giving her permission to be stupidly materialistic. “Okay. Eight dining room chairs that match, with no wobbly legs. A classy leather jacket. Maybe a nice pair of boots. Which would be a waste because I never go anywhere. Okay, I want to go somewhere. Is that materialistic enough?”

  “That depends. Where do you want to go?”

  “A week at a beach house. Or I don’t know, England, the British Museum. Or your parents’ village on Crete. What’s the name of that beach with the pink sand?”

  “Elafonisi.”

  “Elafonisi. And those amazing cream-of-wheat pastries we ate in bed with our coffee every morning. What are those called?”

  “Bougatsa.”

  “God, yes. I want bougatsa.” She could probably get herself sexually aroused on the memory of those breakfasts. “Okay, wild card. I want a hot tub in our backyard where we could lie around naked and look up at the stars.”

  “You would have to cut down those mother trees.”

  “We couldn’t do that.” She shot him a glance, then closed her eyes again. “Don’t mess with me, I’m on a roll here.”

  “You’re wishing for a different life.”

  “Not completely. I want this life, with this husband, maybe a slightly revised house and kids. Except in this version we drink our coffee and kiss each other goodbye and go to work. Both of us. Instead of one of us going stir-crazy on lockdown with an old man and a baby, while her former wit ferments into bitter broth. I’m bored to tears, Iano. Am I allowed to say that? I want a job. With a good magazine that still has a print edition, and smart colleagues. Is that a magical want?”

  “A paycheck is material.”

  “I want a biweekly paycheck.”

  “When you had a biweekly paycheck, you kept wishing you could quit the magazine and write freelance full time.”

  “You’re right. I did.”

  “Really you wanted to write a book.”

  “I did.”

  “And if you did, you would want it to sell a hundred thousand copies.”

  She thought about this. “It’s true. I’m not a happy-on-the-midlist kind of gal.”

  He shook his head, smiling. Like the loving parent of an impossible child.

  “What? You think I’m unusual? That’s human nature. In terms of the available options, it’s inevitable to want all the goods. Isn’t it?”

  This question he considered at length. “Not inevitable,” he said finally. “If that were true, people would never marry. But we do. We choose to be monogamous. Maybe wanting less than everything translates to quality over quantity.”

  She looked at him, feeling suddenly as if she might come undone. From plenty of middle-aged men that choice would be an empty compliment, but from Iano it wasn’t. If today had taught her anything.

  “We’ve been good, haven’t we?” she said, lying down again, staring up at the cracks that mapped their ceiling. “Except for a couple of lapses, monogamous and happy. So much for my theory of bottomless human voracity.”

  “Not lapses.” He looked stung. “Only one lapse. A hundred years ago when I had shit for brains.”

  She rolled over to face him, and despite all her best efforts, thought of the tattooed magenta visitor. Wondering what girls like that wore to bed: probably something, given the penchant for costume. Not ancient pajama bottoms and an oversize Steely Dan Tshirt. “Two, counting the swimming coach. That redhead.”

  Iano assessed her smile the way Willa would study a bank statement. “We’ve been through this. I did not go to bed with her. And she wasn’t a redhead.”

  Willa moved her face very close to his. “Not in a bed? In a chair, then? Your office chair, that big squeaky one?” She ran a finger over his lips. “Or did you do it in her little Honda? Working around the stick shift, steaming up the windows?”

  He groaned. “Holy mother. No, my love, we did not. And furthermore it hurts my back thinking about the stick shift.”

  He set his readers aside, threw the essay on the floor, and slowly rolled on top of her, keeping his weight on his elbows, clasping both her wrists and pressing them into a hands-up pose of surrender on either side of her head. “Thank God we’re old. You see, moro, this is the beautiful thing. We don’t have to make love in cars ever again.” He kissed her for a very long time.

  She lifted her pelvis against his erection, opening up and moving to fit herself exquisitely against him. He took her lower lip between his teeth and gently began humping her through the veil of her pajamas and his silk boxers, a move charged with the illicit, explosive eroticism of youth. She was stunned by how quickly she aroused toward orgasm as images broke on her brain like fireworks, herself and not herself, dorm rooms, backseats, times when you couldn’t get naked, people with whom you didn’t dare. She couldn’t help how much this was exciting them both. Was it a crime to cop a turn-on from the adrenaline rush of stolen goods and ancient infidelities? Was she allowed at this point to say fuck it?

  He released her wrist in order to adjust things below, then slipped inside her so easily Willa gasped. She held her breath, tensed exactly the right muscles, and tilted herself to fine-tune the friction of his thrusts. Threaded her hand through the wilderness of his hair, pulled his face against hers to feel sandpaper jaw and his breath on her neck. Everything about his body could strike a current in hers that zinged through the present haze straight back to the days when sex was the best thing they had, constant and ferocious, two bodies hungry to learn each other by heart. The dangerous allure of novelty might have sparked this torment, but in the eye of the storm they held on hard to the world they knew.


  *

  Willa felt the lightness of having forgotten something as she walked down the hallway of HealthVine with no baby strapped on. He’d surprised her by taking an afternoon nap. Iano was at home all day grading papers, and had promised to keep an ear out for when he woke up. Willa couldn’t recall the last time she’d been this far from Dusty. Even the nurses noticed when she passed by the spaceship curve of their station.

  “Where’s our little man today?” the short one asked, looking up from the computer where she was logging in patient notes at the speed of light. Delyse, Jamaican, Willa’s favorite, though who among this overworked angel band did she not adore? A multicolored bouquet of child and grandchild photos bloomed amid the medication orders on the bulletin board behind them. It turned out babies were welcome in rehab wards, where contagious diseases weren’t the problem and everyone needed to lay eyes on a positive prognosis.

  “Today it’s my turn to look in on the big baby. How’s he behaving?”

  Both nurses rolled their eyes, almost identically: the look reserved for very special patients like Nick. Willa put her hands together in a little namaste of thanks. Christmas decorations had gone up since she’d been there last, she noticed: weary tinsel garlands and a tiny silver tree on the meds station. It was barely November. In a place like this, she supposed, the best thing to do with the calendar was get it behind you.

  Usually she could hear Nick’s TV from the nurses’ station, blasting down the hall, probably in violation of the rules. Nick had given up parts of both feet and the use of his right side, but in exchange he’d bullied his caretakers’ pity into the freedom to keep his conservative station on full time, full volume. Right now Willa didn’t hear it, though, even as she approached the open door of his room. Iano had mentioned the late-night arrival of a roommate. Some compromise must have been required.