The Wives of Los Alamos (17 page)

O
R IT COULD
just be the war.

W
E GATHERED AT
one another’s houses in the morning. We said,
Sit down, do tell.
Louise passed the sugar and said, without looking up,
Frank’s been inoculated for island diseases
. We all knew the U.S. troops were in Okinawa, still fighting, somewhat unsuccessfully. We did not want our husbands to go there.

W
E LEANED IN
, touched her arm, and her eyes filled with tears. We had taken to calling one another
Chiquita
following bad news, which we learned from our maids.
He’s leaving tomorrow?
we said, frowning.
I don’t envy you, Chiquita
. We knew something was coming. We conspired to find out what it was.

T
O DISCOVER WHO
else was leaving we got close to everyone’s husbands, made our voice a whisper, as if to tell these men a good story, and instead of telling them anything, we squeezed their biceps. The ones that were not going to the Pacific thought we were flirting with them and said,
Hey there!
and pinched us back. Maybe we were flirting. We told them they were strong. The husbands that were going to the Pacific winced where they were still healing from the shots. We reported this news back to the others.

U
NKNOWN THINGS WERE
happening. Explosions increased on the Pajarita Plateau, men were going south for three days a week, to who knows where, and some were leaving for overseas.

T
HE MILITARY POLICE
began stopping us at night, shining flashlights into our eyes again as if it was the first day we arrived here, and not two and a half years later, as if they did not know us.
Halt! Who goes there?
they demanded.
It’s just us, Willard
, we replied. They did not like us calling them by their first names just as much as we did not like them nosing around in our business, insisting on knowing our whereabouts. And as the military became stricter with us, and we complained, Ruth commented,
They are just bored babies. None of them will ever become a hero here.

O
NE NIGHT WHEN
when we returned home from a PTA meeting our husbands told us Japan was withdrawing from China, and this must mean Japan was weakening, and we thought,
He might not go to the Pacific after all
. The wind made melancholy sounds through the tall pines and some of our husbands left anyway.

B
Y JUNE WE
heard the Japanese Army had given the Okinawans hand grenades and directed them to blow themselves up.
Could you imagine
? we asked one another. We heard of parents holding their children’s hands and jumping off cliffs. As U.S. troops got closer, the suicides by Japanese soldiers and Okinawans increased. Within a few weeks the U.S. completely occupied the island.

A Night Passing

O
N THE FIRST
weekend in July our husbands announced they were leaving us for a couple of days. They said,
I need a thermos of coffee and a bag lunch. Be home on Sunday
. When we presented them with a thermos and a turkey sandwich, instead of saying thanks and rushing out the door they stopped and looked at us. They looked us in the eyes. They raised their hand to our cheek and we felt it was damp, or it was chilled. They said,
I love you.
We scanned their faces, we asked,
What’s going on?
Our question was met not with an answer, but a kiss. Their faces became blurred before us. Why were we crying? We knew somehow that they were afraid. They were walking out the door with a thermos and a bag lunch, and we did not know where they were going.

B
UT NOT ALL
of our husbands left us that weekend. A few of us, the pregnant ones, the ones, perhaps, with more sensitive or more nervous husbands, were told to pack for a camping trip. We said good-bye to Margaret and Ingrid, a bit confused about why some people were going away for the weekend and some were not. People who had left months prior for academic work returned with their families, saying they were just in town for the weekend.

A
COUPLE OF
our husbands took us to a spot along the river in the Sangre de Cristos to camp. We would have slept well but our husbands slept little, and in the middle of the night they sat up, as if startled, which startled us, though there was nothing startling happening outside our tent.
What is it?
we asked. And they said something, more to themselves than to us, and we could not make out the words. We said,
What are you saying, Jack?

I
N THE MORNING
our husbands pulled the sleeping bag over their heads and did not want to get out of the tent until midday, until the sun trapped the heat inside the tent, and they emerged with deep sleep lines on their cheeks and sweat dripping down their chins.

W
E DROVE BACK
to Los Alamos, eager to find out what we had missed.

T
HOUGH MOST OF
our husbands left for the weekend without giving us any clues, one husband, Bernard, told his wife, as he held the front door open for a final good-bye, holding his brown bag with two ham sandwiches:
You might see something if you stay up all night.

A
ND AGNES WAS
not afraid and she called a meeting. We gathered our clues. We compared notes about when our husbands came and went, pulled out the map, and tried to guess how far they had traveled and where they had gone. It seemed that all the important people had left for the weekend except us. We developed a plan: we would watch whatever it was from the porches of our houses. Whatever it was, we would experience it together.

W
E LOOKED TOWARD
the Jemez Mountains in the late afternoon and again in the evening. The sky was made of watercolors: pretty, but nothing unordinary. We cooked dinner, the sun descended, we put our children to bed. We sneaked over to Agnes’s, hoping our children would not wake.

O
R INSTEAD WE
fell asleep on our children’s beds with
The Brothers Grimm
in our hands. Or we were not invited over by Agnes because she did not like us, which we had considered, though we did not know what we had done wrong. Others of us did not even realize there was something to watch.

M
ANY OF US
convened at midnight on Agnes’s porch. The air was cold, although it was July, and this was a fact about the desert we had finally gotten used to. We huddled into one another and thought about our husbands standing hundreds of miles away, probably, with the other scientists, maybe feeling expectant, or maybe feeling scared.

I
T WAS A
new moon, and as our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, the surroundings became less and less invisible. There was a chance, given the grave way they’d said good-bye to us that morning, that our husbands would never come home. We did not say this aloud. Instead, we smoked cigarettes and passed a flask, or declined one. We told jokes, we complained, we talked as if it were any day. We asked Katherine,
How do you always look so put together?
And she told us a needle, thread, cleaning fluid, a clothing brush and a good iron were her secrets. Virginia talked about her love for Ireland. Mildred made sure the whiskey went around. Evelyn wore that purple felt swagger brim hat, which was gorgeous, if a little overdressed for the occasion, and we gave her a crosswise look we hoped she could not see but later we noticed she withdrew from conversation.

M
IDNIGHT, ONE A.M
.
, two
a.m.
, three
a.m.
, four. Nothing unusual was happening in the dark sky. The wind ceased. The desert was still. Some of us found this noiselessness unsettling and filled the space with nervous laughter or commentary that stated the obvious—
It’s cold out here
or
It’s so quiet
. And some of us found it calming and wished Katherine would stop being so chatty; others did not pay any mind to the quiet, or the talking, and felt at ease.

A
T DAWN, INGRID
pointed and whispered
Look!
Far off, we could see the trees on the hillside, though the sun had not risen. It looked like a flickering bulb behind the hills.
Would it stop?
The cloud our husbands had made reached the natural clouds in the dawning sky.
How far could it go?
The explosion came to our eyes but not to our ears. Those asleep near us had no idea what was happening. The land was dark before, and now it was light and we knew: our town had made something as strong and bright as the sun.

W
E STOOD HOLDING
one another. We took deep breaths. We held our breath. We yelled. We thought it was awful, or triumphant, or beautiful, or all of the above. On this place formed millions of years ago by a huge eruption, our husbands had just made their own. We could not see what you can, our husbands jittery in welding glasses, pacing, saying,
Now we’re all sons of bitches
.

W
E CELEBRATED BY
toasting our men who were not there, toasting ourselves, toasting a hopeful end to the war. And we went back home and fell asleep in our beds, without our husbands.

O
N SUNDAY THEY
came home blind in one eye, or red-faced, as if they had stood in the sun all day. We thought they would finally tell us something but before we could ask any questions our sons or daughters interrupted by coming into the kitchen and saying,
Can I have my peanut butter sandwich now, please?

A
ND WHEN WE
gave them their sandwich and they walked outside with it we said to our husbands,
What is it?
And our husbands said,
Let me get some rest. Then we can talk
. Or our husbands came back smiling and gave us a V for victory sign.
What have you heard?
they asked us. We told them what we suspected. They mocked our ideas but told us to keep them to ourselves, so we knew we were on to something. Or our husbands ate chicken soup and went to bed. Or our husbands came home filthy and went straight to the shower. And while they were in the shower we gathered at Harriet’s.
Can’t stay long, he’ll want to go right to bed when he gets out, but let’s have a drink in the meantime.

W
E HEARD THAT
the General told security officers to keep the explosion quiet from the wives. How little he knew. Harriet handed out glasses and we said what we would do when we returned home. We began to let ourselves, finally, feel the deep sorrow we had been fighting back, once we knew there was a good chance it would all be over soon. We still did not share our greatest secret, experienced by many but said to no one: how sometimes we felt deeply alone.

C
AL ARRIVED AT
Harriet’s door and we poured him a drink and pounded him with questions. He was a son of a missionary and grew up in Japan, and he told us what the multicolored explosion looked like up close, and he told us of the heat:
A fiery eyeball . . . it grew arms, like a giant jellyfish rising from the desert. It was purple and went up and up. Made a rumbling whirl and all the mountains rumbled with it. My face was hot.

W
E ASKED HIM
,
How will they use it?
He said he could not say, which suggested both that he knew and that he did not know. He told us little that was useful, really, but we all still speculated about the end of the war. We went back home and nudged our husbands from sleep, and they said,
Just be patient. You’ll know soon
.

O
R WHEN WE
asked our husband what he had seen one husband said he could not tell us objectively, because though he saw the light, he heard nothing. He had been completely absorbed in something else. This was not surprising to hear. All of his attention had been focused on tearing up little pieces of paper and watching them fall, in order to calculate something.
What something?
we asked, but he replied, ever mysteriously,
Nothing
. Though he added, a bit bragging, really, that his calculations were nearly as accurate as precision instruments. And though this method could have seemed far too simple, we were used to our husbands finding plain ways to calculate difficult things, so of course their complete focus on little scraps of paper blowing back in the wind produced correct measurements. They shared what they were proud of, although it was usually too obscurely described to guess at.