The Wives of Los Alamos (11 page)

W
E WATCHED STARLA
throughout the night—one eye on our husbands speaking sciencese, and one on her. Though many men gave her a glance, if she had a preference she did not show it. Each man was greeted kindly, each stance was taken judiciously. Until it was the end of the night, until it was Frank who touched her arm and her eyes betrayed her best look of neutrality.

S
OMETIMES OUR HUSBANDS
returned from the Tech Area and said they could not stand it anymore. We did not know if
it
was us or here or their work, but we were concerned it was us. We could not talk to our best friends about this suspicion, because they were back in Idaho, or in New York. A couple of us said,
I can’t take this
,
either
, and actually left. We returned to our mothers. We became Nevadans and moved to Reno for a quick divorce. And our husbands moved into the singles dorms and we were unofficially, or officially, separated.

T
HE HAMBURGER
!
I
NGRID
called, raising her arms,
the hamburger!
And we recalled that image of her: Starla’s hamburger keeping us smiling the length of her conversation with the Director, or Starla’s hamburger making us anxious because we could find no subtle way to tell her about it.

W
HEN THE SONG
ended she came over to us flushed, out of breath, she grabbed our arms and urged us on the dance floor with her. She insisted on taking the lead. Two women—we thought,
This is silly!
But we let ourselves be pulled into the middle of the room.

A
N ARM BRUSHING
our arm, the stirring of winter desires—perhaps we spoke of Starla to soothe ourselves. After three songs we collected our husbands, who had fallen asleep in a corner chair.

Husbands

W
E LEARNED TO
accept their distracted air, their unwillingness to tell us more about their research, their ignorance of what we did all day or what we gave up to be here.

S
OME OF OUR
husbands sounded important and acted important and we treated them as if they were important to the project, but we would find out later that they were not very important at all. Or they were important but they never suggested they were. Some of us thought it wouldn’t end for years, that we would live here until we died; others believed we would go home any day now. A few of our husbands would confirm or deny our hunches. We did not know how much our husbands knew or were keeping from us. They were physicists, this we did know, and therefore we had our own suspicions. Arthur, a single male scientist, got a beagle and named him Gadget and said he was our mascot and there was something illicit in the way he said the dog’s name at first, as if he knew he was being mischievous.

O
NE OLDER SCIENTIST
spoke only in a whisper, and then only when spoken to directly, and never made eye contact. We called him Mr. Baker, and if we knew him from before Los Alamos, back at Chicago, say, or in New York, we called him Uncle Nick, because though it was strictly forbidden to say aloud that he was the infamous, talented physicist Neils Bohr, we just could not bring ourselves to call him Mr. Baker. We admired how he played a comb covered in tissue paper. Our husbands regarded him with deference and held their tongues the moment his lips parted.

W
E TOOK TO
reading war history books we checked out from the tiny library Helen ran. We asked ourselves, again and again, what were the options with the Army involved? We thought chemical weapons, maybe an expansion of mustard gas. We thought—we hoped—our husbands were working on code breaking, but our husbands were physicists and we had to consider what they might be able to build using their skills. We considered a weapon. We learned more than we wanted to about mustard gas—large blisters filled with yellow fluid, burning skin, blinding until death. Though we wanted the war to end, and we wanted to go home, and we generally were not skeptical, and we thought maybe it was a good war, we did not respond well to the individual stories of other people suffering from these weapons. We sometimes hoped our husbands would fail.

The Beach

I
N EARLY JUNE
, the news came to us first through the military radio station, and when we heard it, we could not believe it. In over eight centuries, no one had ever successfully crossed the English Channel in battle. But now the military had. It seemed so unlikely, or it seemed just about time, and this was one of the few instances when we clinked our glasses with the military men and WACs, united in our shared victory.

W
HILE WE BOILED
oats for breakfast, twenty-five thousand men—our brothers, nephews, childhood crushes—were ascending the foggy beaches of Normandy. The German Field Marshal had taken the weekend off, concluding that the high seas would make it impossible for the Allies to land and the low clouds would prevent aircraft from finding their targets. Also, and we loved this fact, it was his wife’s birthday.

E
VERY MONTH WE
admired the full moon, how it lit our way back to our homes after dinner parties. Across the world others were appreciating the full moon for how it lit their ships’ paths in the early dawn. We came home in a good mood—the moon did this—thinking of how small we were, how large the world was.

N
OW SWORD, JUNO
, Gold, Omaha, and Utah beaches were stormed; bridges were bombed; Allies were moving forward on one front, but they seemed to be losing ground in the Pacific. Each night as we slept, other lives were ending.

Wanted

A
T THE MAIL
counter, where we stood asking if our mail had arrived, depositing new letters addressed to our mothers, there was a poster. What caught our eye was the word
wanted!
We looked closer. We saw a dark-haired, pale-faced woman, her hair in a victory roll, like ours. She appeared menacing with the dark background and the direct eye contact, except her face seemed gentle, too.
Was there a killer in our midst?
She looked like one of us, but no one we exactly recognized. We studied the poster more closely and saw the writing above her head:
wanted! for murder.
And below her neck:
her careless talk costs lives.

S
OME OF US
shivered, some of us got paranoid about what we told Judy the day before, some of us laughed on the inside but not the outside, for we had made the mistake of laughing at this kind of thing in front of WACs before. It did not ingratiate ourselves to them, and we needed them to obtain passes to Santa Fe and to find out how our children were doing in gym class. So we looked back, kept quiet, took our mail, said,
Thank you
, and walked home.

The Commissary

B
ECAUSE WHAT WE
were doing was important, our commissary stocked chocolate bars. Mr. Gonzalez tended the vegetables with his watering can, but there was nothing he could do to perk up the wilted lettuce, peppers, and cucumbers shriveled in wood crates. Wrinkled zucchini, molding tomatoes, old garlic sprouting green tails. There were gallons of mustard and mayonnaise without a crisp vegetable in view. Milk in a small chest next to the vegetable bins, growing sour, and never enough for all of us. These Army-issued perishables traveled from El Paso and were not made fresher by the 360-mile journey.

W
E ARGUED THAT
there were perfectly fresh vegetables growing in the valley, so why could we not eat those instead? It was senseless, and we never got a straight answer, which was how things functioned in Sha-La. We bought cans of unmarked food and were surprised by their contents—beans, stewed tomatoes—and that occasionally—or frequently, depending on the storyteller—the cans had worms in them.

I
T WAS ALSO
at the commissary that we found new sources of information. We could tell, by their dress and stockings, who had just arrived to town. We offered to show them around the Hill and we offered to watch their children and we hoped they would lend us that pink dress we admired and share with us the tea they brought with them from London, and we hoped they would invite us over to their place to listen to new records. We traded our extra linoleum and our second pair of blue jeans for sugar, nylons, and secrets.

W
E BUDGETED RATION
coupons and saved up for steak on our anniversary, on our husbands’ birthdays, and on the night we announced we were pregnant. Not all of us were good about rationing, and not all of us thought the rules should apply to us. We became tricksters out of perceived need, or because we wanted a bit more excitement. When our ration books were empty we wore red lipstick to the commissary; we leaned in to the butcher counter and said to the GI behind it,
You wouldn’t let me starve, would you, John?
And John could rarely say no to us, women asking sweetly for meat, and we reached our arms out to receive steaks wrapped in brown paper, and we slipped him something expensive, but easier to come by: a paper bag of whiskey.

Ants

I
N JUNE, ON
picnics, on hikes, our children saw columns of ants in the sky.
Ants fly?
they asked. We thought of when we were younger, when we were more romantic, when we learned about the behavior of ants. We knew a lot about the mating rituals of ants because we had written a thesis on them, because our mothers had, because we remembered things Mister Smith told us in Bio 101.

W
E TOLD OUR
children this was their nuptial flight. We told them it was how ants make children. We did not say starlings hover nearby, watching, waiting until the ants are too tired to fight, or too dizzy from the day, and all the starlings have to do is open their mouths to receive this humming column of food in the sky.

F
ROM AFAR IT
looked like falling rain and we did not tell our children how the male ants beat their wings excitedly, mount, and drop in hundreds from the sky. How the queen flies away, tears off her own wings, digs a hole, forms a nest, and waits for her children to hatch.

W
E LET THEM
make an anthill from a Mason jar and keep it in their room. They fed the ants breadcrumbs and within a few days the ants died. While our children were away at school we dug up new ants and replaced the old ones, so for at least a little while our children would not know there are things they cannot save.

The Theater

S
INCE THE DRAFT
age had been extended in 1941 and our husbands were no longer working at the university, we worried they might have to leave us to fight in the war. But we were told there was no way our husbands would ever have to go to war since they were working on a war project. Sometimes the draft letter did come, and our husbands left for San Francisco, and we were certain they would be called to the Pacific theater, or we had a feeling it would all be okay.

I
F OUR HUSBANDS
were drafted, or our brothers, we hated the term
theater
to describe parts of a war. If we did not have anyone in battle, or if we had generations of men in our families who had been in battle, we loved the term
theater
, and we thought it conjured both the drama and the artifice.

W
E HEARD NEWS
that the U.S. invaded the Pacific islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, but thankfully, all of our husbands who were drafted returned, because they were working on a war project already, and they did not leave for the Pacific. But they were here, on the Hill, in the Tech Area, fighting anyway.

Our Children

H
OW MUCH
WAS
parenting like warfare? Digging trenches, changing diapers, gunfire, or a child’s head hitting the corner of a coffee table—hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror. We felt we had been lied to about how lonely raising young children could be, about how for the first year we were not us, but them.

I
N OUR SECOND
pregnancy we birthed nine-pound children that others envied. We had lost our first and did not believe we were actually having a baby until it was on our chest, scooting down to find our breasts. We ate huge piles of mashed potatoes and meatloaf as soon as we delivered. We lost our baby weight while we rested for ten days at the hospital, or our stomach muscles never recovered and our party dresses no longer fit, but we could not afford or find the time to make another.

W
HEN WE BROUGHT
home the second child, our first child wanted to hold it, or our first child said,
Put that back inside your belly
.