The Wives of Los Alamos (14 page)

O
UR CHILDREN ASKED
us to fix their bikes and to replace their tires so they could ride to the stables and feed and exercise the horses. And once we did fix their tires they said they would rather walk. We told one another then,
All boys should be buried at twelve and not dug up until they are eighteen
. But we thought of the boys actually buried at eighteen, and we didn’t say it again.

O
UR CHILDREN FOUND
shotgun shells they thought were empty and one child banged them against the ground; they exploded, they tore through Cadillacs, they knocked our boys back, two boys could not hear for a week.

Pond

W
E WERE AT
our children’s piano lesson when Sarah came running in to say Patrick was in the pond but not moving. The pond our children ice-skated on, the pond our children swam in.

O
VER THE MUD
hill, in our galoshes, in our untied oxfords, we ran. Starla leading, Margaret losing her left shoe. Folded in a green wool blanket next to the pond, Ingrid was bundling him, shooing away anyone who came too close. She swayed and rocked his long body as if he were still an infant. Kissed his forehead, his cheeks. It was, as we knew it would be, too late.

W
E WENT TO
her. If there were a thing to say we would say it, but there was nothing.
I’m sorry
.

B
UT WE COULD
stand at the side of the pond with one leg ankle deep in mud and hold her until her sobbing momentarily stopped, until an MP or hospital orderly took Patrick away. Blissful-heart, breaking hours, frail body, fainting body, we could never change what time, too, can’t: your own child, gone. We stood and we tried to tell her with our standing: she would survive.

A
T HOME, WE
brought out the vacuum, though we had just cleaned the carpet that morning. Under the loud hum of the machine, where our neighbors could not hear us, we sobbed.

Longing

B
ECAUSE OUR HUSBANDS
were hard to reach, and dinner was the only time we saw them, we planned lively tales to get their attention, which were usually dramatic retellings of the mundane activities of our days. Oscar got into the trash again, Maria had to be told twice to get the floor clean, Bobby threw a tantrum at the commissary. Occasionally our husbands had not heard the news, and we reported on war updates we got from the radio, or from the GIs.

O
R PERHAPS WE
let silence shade the evening, and we felt that we were a portrait on the wall, more invisible the longer it had been in its location, and we felt we were no longer new, no longer different, no longer eye catching. We raised our pitch; we made our tone pretty and light. It was no use. We wanted a night out with our husbands, we wanted to be anonymous for a few hours, we wanted to flirt. We missed brushing off the men in line at the deli counter. Crocuses pushed up through the hard clay, and we longed to be longed for.

S
OME OF US
did not want to acknowledge our longings, for what that might mean, for how we were weak to them. Others of us were more confident, were better fantasizers, could desire a piece of chocolate but could go without it—and so we announced, at dinner parties, in front of our husbands,
Frank, my dear, I could eat you up
.

A
T HOME, WHEN
we wanted a diversion, when we wanted sensory stimulation, when we wanted exercise, when we wanted social interaction—perhaps we went shopping. Because we were frequent browsers we were confident in what we liked and we were rarely talked into buying expensive and ugly things and therefore we did not feel any remorse. But for some of us, if we did buy anything, or if we checked our watches and noticed, to our surprise, three hours had gone by and we still needed to think about dinner, we did not feel elation, but a heaviness, a guilt for what we did with our time. Sometimes we returned home with items we did not previously plan to purchase—houndstooth slacks—and these sorry items stayed in our closet, first in the front and then to the back—with the tags on, until finally, accepting our bad purchase, we donated the neglected item to charity.

O
N THE MESA
, when we felt restless, sleepy, antsy, distressed, and bored we went to the commissary, which did not console us at all.

Spreading Rumors

P
EOPLE WERE TALKING
; it was our job to spread a fantastical rumor to confuse any spies and nosy neighbors. In Santa Fe they could see our columns of smoke during the day and our lights at night. And on occasion the sleepy town was overtaken with women who had confident strides, who bought up the town’s supplies of purses, children’s shoes, and spare parts for washing machines.

S
O THE DIRECTOR
told us to go to Santa Fe and pretend we were tipsy. We were ordered to hide our wedding rings in our pocketbooks and lean into the ears of local men, to dance slowly with them until they wanted to hear what we had to share. We were instructed to say we wanted to tell them a secret. We asked in a voice we tried to make deeper,
Do you ever wonder what we are doing up there?
We were told to say we were building an electronic rocket ship. But these local men in cowboy boots were tipsy, too (we did more than pretend), and they wanted to tell us their secrets instead. They wanted to tell us their dreams for their future or what they had lost so far:
I want to own a ranch. My ex-wife is good with the children. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m gonna get her back. And my kids. You’ll see.

W
E WERE BORED
with these men, or we were intrigued, or we wanted to hear anything except their sad longings, which did not include us. We liked having our wedding rings in our pocketbooks for a couple of hours and we liked pretending, at least briefly, we were single. The men came in close—we could smell their aftershave, could feel their warm breath. We said to ourselves,
It’s for the war effort
, and twirled our way across the dance floor.

Crossroads

F
ALL PASSED QUIETLY
but winter did not: 1944 was ending and the Allied troops were preparing to advance into Germany. Our maids came in the morning and told us their boys in France and the Pacific wrote letters that said they felt walled in by the jungle, that their ship would soon sail, that their destroyer had seen action and they were doing just fine.

A
ND ONE DAY
we heard that the Germans attacked in Belgium near Malmédy and Allied communication was cut. We wrote home inquiring about our friends, our brothers, and our cousins, as we often did when the news became too much. More updates came: that Germans dressed in Allied uniforms drove U.S. tanks, using white tape to falsely indicate minefields, which cut off roadways. An American troop, weak from the cold, took off their weapons and raised their hands to the sky. German troops told them to stand in a field near the crossroads, and shot the unarmed prisoners. We heard of prison camps, of people being underfed, killed, and used for scientific research. We thought,
dirty Axis
.

T
HERE WAS THIS
, and another fight on the other side of the world, in the Pacific, where Japan was occupying large sections of southern China. U.S. air forces were bombing Iwo Jima. We’d hear these things, feel rushes of emotion, or feel it was fairly normal at this point, and life resumed. A notice in bold to conserve water, a flyer for the latest movie, and the drama of the garbage collectors versus the neighborhood dogs.

O
N OUR WALK
back from the commissary on Christmas Eve we saw our husband’s friend Robert packing two green suitcases and a canvas bag into an Army car.
Robert
, we called.
Where you headed?
It was possible he could be going anywhere—someplace he could not tell us—but this was not a weekend bag, this was, perhaps, all he owned.
Home
, he said. We gave him a look. He said he was worried about his wife whom he had left behind in Poland. But as he said this he did not look at us. Something seemed odd—was it possible he was lying? He had not told us of his departure earlier and this seemed to be quite sudden, but we wished him a safe trip. We relayed the news to our husbands that evening, who seemed surprisingly unsurprised.

Parenting

W
E TOILET-TRAINED
our children and felt good because we were doing something we could somewhat control. Our children got sick and we wondered how much their illnesses were caused by our own anxiety, as the psychiatrist had suggested. We fretted over their eating habits, and we took them to the hospital, and we were laughed at by Army doctors who said everything was normal. But we still felt something was wrong, though in most cases their appetites came back.

W
E THOUGHT SOME
mothers were better than we were: some mothers could get their children to eat more of their dinner, some mothers could suggest that their children pick up their toys and make it seem as if the children had thought of the idea on their own and their children ran to put their toys away, and their homes were clean.

O
UR CHILDREN DREW
us in purple skirts, in blue overalls, with orange glasses. They drew us in the backyard hanging laundry, in the kitchen with a highball glass, in front of the house holding their hands, with red flowers as tall as we were, red flowers that never existed in the front yard. They drew their fathers less frequently and we sometimes had to remind them to include their fathers in the drawing. But they never left out the neighborhood mutt that got into the trash and spread our dirty tissues across the lawn.

O
UR HUSBANDS BROUGHT
home plastic objects in primary colors and we did not know that they were casings from parts of the Gadget. We saw them in a box and gave them to the children to play with, or we made Christmas ornaments out of them and proudly showed our husbands the colorful tree, and our own inventiveness. Our husbands stood stiffly and grimaced and asked us to take them down immediately.

W
ITH OUR CHILDREN
, our husbands used their belts often, or sometimes, or they would never think of such a thing after what their fathers had put them through. But they did, on occasion. Or their fathers had been gentle, had taken deep breaths when they felt most frustrated, and so they did that, too; our husbands, who did not spend as much time with the children as we did, were far more patient than we were.

O
UR HUSBANDS MADE
meatloaf and we praised them profusely. Or they did the dishes, or they neither cooked nor cleaned. Some of our husbands were exhaustively tender: they listened as our daughters named every tree they passed,
Maria, Theodore
, and told their stories.
That one has a twin brother and he hates all the noise
.
We should be very quiet now when we walk by him.
We loved the first wrinkles that formed around our husbands’ eyes and we admired them as they carried our children to bed.

O
UR CHILDREN BUTTED
heads and brought home lice. Our children got the flu and chicken pox but, thankfully, never polio, which was one of our biggest fears. An iron lung would not make the trip up these hills even if we could afford its price tag: the cost of a new home. Our children gave the Director chicken pox and until he was rid of it he went unshaven and grew a scrawny beard.

W
E HAD CHUBBY
children we tried to put on diets, feeding them broccoli and American cheese and corn and canned peaches and
No more seconds!
and
Go outside and play!
but they remained plump and we thought it was in order to defy us. Many times, we were right and many times, we were wrong.

T
IME MOVED SLOWLY
—but the notches on our children’s closet doors indicated that time was in fact passing, as did the war updates: Hitler had ordered a retreat on the Western front, having run out of fuel to keep the tanks going, and no one nearby was willing to give him any. To many of us this seemed particularly humorous.

O
NE AFTERNOON, A
man in a snap-brimmed hat knocked on our door and asked if he could come in. Once inside, he told us that the neighbor girls were playing in the front yard of the apartment across the street when a man tried to coax one to come with him behind a toolshed. One girl ran for her mother, but by the time the mother got there, the man was gone. Had we seen anything? We reached for our sewing basket. Earlier that day, when we retrieved our clothes hanging on the line we noticed that our own underwear were slashed. We handed them to the man in the snap-brimmed hat. He held them up, inspecting.
I’d just thought it was the neighbor boys that cut through the yard
.
After contemplating our panties for what felt like far too long, he replied,
No pocketknife did this. Please don’t repair them. We may need them as evidence
, and handed them back to us. The man said the matter was not to be discussed so as to avoid causing panic in the town. We thought of some girls who might not run home to tell their mothers. Some girls obeyed all kinds of commands, not just ours. And when he left we gazed out our window, watching the sunlight reflect off the snowy hillside. We got up and took our revolvers down from the shoebox in the closet. Or we got up and put our son’s baseball bat by the sofa. We locked the door for the first time.