Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver Page A

soulmate. Back before Lena, I liked to think of myself as a congenial hermit in blue jeans and Nikes, a latter-day Gregor Mendel among his peas.
    Lena is a specialist in toxicology and operates a poison hotline at the county hospital. People from all over the state call her in desperation when their children have consumed baby aspirin or a houseplant or what have you, and she helps them. It might sound morbid, but no one could be more full of the joy of life than Lena, even where her job is concerned. She is magnificent at parties. Her best story is about a Gila monster named Hilda, which served a brief term as the pet of the Norman Clinderback family. Hilda was an illegal gift from an uncle in Tucson, and crossed our nation in a fiberglass container of the type meant for transporting cats. The Gila monster, by all rights a stranger to this part of Indiana, is a highly poisonous lizard, but is thought by most experts to be too lazy to pose a threat to humans. The incident precipitating the call to my wife involved a July 4th picnic in which Hilda was teased beyond endurance with a piece of fried chicken. Hilda had a bite of Norm Junior’s thumb instead.
    Of course, the story ended happily. Lena wouldn’t make light of someone else’s grief, having suffered her own. Another thing that runs in her family, besides the white forelock, is a dire allergy to the stings of bees and wasps. In childhood she lost her sister. Suddenly and incomprehensibly this child passed over from life to death before Lena’s eyes while they sat in the yard making clover necklaces. Lena could die by the same sword. Theoretically, any outdoor excursion that includes my wife could come to tragedy.
    But it was this aspect of her life that led her into the study of toxic reactions, and it was through the poison hotline that we met. I called because I had gotten diatomaceous earth in my eye. I don’t know exactly how it happened, whether I rubbed my eye while I was working with it, or if it was carried by a gust of wind—the powder is light. What I remember most clearly is Lena’s voice over the phone, concerned and serious, as if there were nothing on earth more important to her than preventing my cornea from being scratched.
    If things had gone another way, if I hadn’t gathered the courage to call back the next week without the excuse of a poisoning, I might have become one of her stories. Instead, I became her husband. I called and explained to her what I’d been doing with diatomaceous earth, since I thought she might wonder. The name is poetic, but in fact this substance is a lethal insecticide. I was dusting it onto the leaves of my eggplants, which had suffered an attack of flea beetles and looked like they’d been pelleted with buckshot. I’m fond of eggplants, for aesthetic reasons as much as any other. “Really,” I said to Lena, my future wife, “could anyone ask for a more beautiful fruit?” Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.
    Our courtship was very much a vegetable affair. By way of thanks I invited her to see my garden, and to my amazement sheaccepted. She had never grown vegetables herself, she said, and it impressed her to see familiar foods like cabbages rooted to the earth. I showed her how brussels sprouts grow, attached along the fat main stem like so many suckling pigs. She seemed to need to take in the textures of things, brushing her hands across velvety petals, even rubbing my shirt sleeve absently between her thumb and forefinger as if to divine the essence of a botanist. I promised to cook her an eggplant rollatini by the time of the summer solstice. But before the shortest night of the year I had already lain beside Lena, trembling, and confessed I’d never held anything I so treasured.
    Lena says I was the first poison victim ever to call back, except in the case of repeat offenders. And to think I nearly didn’t. A person could spend most of