The Wives of Los Alamos (8 page)

W
E WERE QUITE
happy to peek inside the secret lab, to make a little bit of money, and to share in the war effort. And when we got inside the infamous Tech Area to begin our job as secretary, or calculator, it was, like most things one builds up in one’s imagination, disappointing. The mystery and glamor we’d fabricated was instead a dirty, cluttered, overcrowded mess. But the interior was quickly overlooked by the exciting tempo, casual attire, and jovial atmosphere. Someone was always pulling a practical joke. One bored scientist asked the operator to page Werner Heisenberg, which she did for three days straight—Heisenberg never materialized—until someone told her she’d have to page Berlin instead, as Herr Heisenberg was a famous German physicist working for the other side.

Our first bosses felt that they needed to explain a few things to us and said,
Some of the men are exposed to radiation due to tube alloy
, and we asked,
What’s tube alloy?
They blushed and told us to ask our husbands. We knew our husbands: if we were to ask them, they would just give us a mischievous grin. So we did not learn what tube alloy was until much later.

W
E WERE SECRETARIES
for three hours, six days a week, or we were teachers for eight hours, five days a week. Without any special degree or education, many of us were given the lowest form of security clearance and learned very little of interest. As lab technicians we were paid seventy percent of what a man would make in our position, and the cost of maid services would not be added on to our own salary. When we did the math, we discovered that our family would make only ten percent more a year if we worked than if we did not work. Several of us decided it was too much of a hassle, and we said,
No, thank you
, to the job offers. Lucille and Patricia said,
No
. Katherine, speaking for a large group of us, said,
We have babies to take care of
. Some of us tried it for a week and quit, ultimately choosing to stay home. And we got others to follow us.

I
F WE WERE
British we were not given clearance to work in the Tech Area, and we were told we could not teach school because our upbringing was
very different than the American way
, and we did not want to organize a library for residents who were tired of having to go to the one in Santa Fe to get their books. We were busy enough with our jobs as mothers, housekeepers, wives, and social organizers.

O
NE BRIT, GENEVIEVE
, could not be busy enough. She left her house every morning to visit the other wives on the mesa, to share advice or receive it; or she left town on the bus with an empty bag and returned in the evening with a full one, bringing back a low-point pot roast bought in Santa Fe and announcing a dinner party. She loved a bachelor with a cold, because it meant she could feed and mother him.

I
F WEEKS DECLINED
working we were accused of disloyalty to our country. Our husbands said we were being obstinate. Or our husbands said we did not have to do anything we didn’t want to. We worried that if we said yes our home would suffer, our husbands would feel neglected, and our children would become delinquents.

O
R WE HAD
taught college-level history classes when we were graduate students at Yale, and now we were teaching the children of Nobel laureates, but some of our best students were the children of mechanics. It was not fun to wrangle teenagers who were much more interested in passing notes than history.

O
R WE WOULD
have worked—we’d been a telephone operator once—but our husbands did not think it was a good idea, they thought wives should stay home, and we could see their point to some degree, and though we wanted to get out of the house, though our children were away at school most of the day, though we were stirring, stirring, all day, alone, though it would have been better for us, we did not work.

W
E HAS DEGREES
in chemistry and when we said,
Okay
, thinking we would get a chance to do real research in the Lab, we were asked to take a typing test. And that’s when we said,
No
. We said,
No
, and we were punished with less help. We were tired of being told by men what to do and we said,
No
. Or we had two toddlers and were not interested in a career in science anymore.

T
HOSE OF US
who worked did so because we were curious or bored, or we did not know how to decline the offer and not feel guilty. And if we did work we were told on our first day not to ask any questions and we didn’t—much.

W
E WERE MAIL
carriers and we took long trips down winding cliffs to gather the mail in Santa Fe, escorted by an armed guard. We had mailbags locked to our wrists, and only one person—another woman—had the key. We were scolded by the other women if we did not deliver all the mail immediately. We monitored each piece of outgoing mail and sometimes corrected the grammar, or let the writer know that though she said a check was enclosed, she had forgotten to include it.

W
E WORKED IN
rooms full of only women and we were called calculators. We sat six to a table at calculating machines and processed ten- to fourteen-digit numbers. We clanked and banged continuously. We solved differential equations without access to the physics behind them. We made plots of French curves. Eventually, IBM equipment replaced us. We thought our biggest accomplishment was not our calculations, but the survival of our families in this wild military camp.

A
S PART OF
a volunteer community protection team, we issued passes to new residents and listened for spies, though we had no idea what we were listening for. We were given a list of watchwords, words we had been hearing around town already.
Uranium. Fission. The Gadget.
We were told to look for nervousness, to listen for inflection, and we thought we would be brilliant at this kind of work: we had a lifetime of experience in paying attention. But we never caught a spy.

S
OME OF US
did things no one will ever know about because we did not discuss our jobs with anyone. There was a fracture: the tired wives who worked in the Lab and had security clearance and the tired wives who did not work in the Lab. We all worked, of course, cleaning, cooking, bathing, loving, but some of us fabricated lenses using molds that reminded us of cookie cutters. Louise went into labor while at work but monitored her contractions with a stopwatch and still finished her experiment before leaving the Tech Area.

W
E WERE SCIENTIFIC
librarians, personal secretaries, switchboard operators. The Director gave us fatherly advice about the pressures of wartime marriages. We sang
Happy Birthday
to senior scientists over the PA system
.

A
ND AFTER OUR
shift Clara came by and asked us what we did all day and we shrugged, noting how we hated that shrug from our husbands, how we were doing the thing that annoyed us the most, but Susie was polite and knew we could not say and therefore did not ask us. At night we were exhausted and told our husbands,
What I need is a good wife.

When the Ground Trembled

 

T
HOUGH WE NO
longer kept our fingernails clean, many of us still measured our waist each morning. We wanted to accentuate broad, wide shoulders, which we rarely had. We wore trousers and wedges and boots because we were often on the side of the road with blown-out tires. We still had our fur coats, which lost tufts if we were not careful, but most of us were careful because we knew replacements were impossible. Because buttons were popping off our children's clothes and getting lost in the mud, we switched to zippers.

 

W
E FORGAVE ONE
another in public, quickly, even if we did not truly feel the forgiveness in our hearts. And even if we did not fully forgive, we still brought over soup and muffins when their children were sick, because we saw how Geraldine was cut off from afternoon cocktails at Katherine's for, as Katherine said,
flirting with her Charlie
; we saw how Grace was snubbed for not sending a written thank-you note after a dinner party Edna hosted. We knew these isolations would keep us out of knowing things. We did not want to be like Florence, pretending we had to weed in the yard all afternoon because no one invited us over.

 

W
E NEEDED MORE
information, or we were concerned our children would not have any other children their age to play with, or we were bored but not lonely, or we were desperately lonely.

 

W
E WENT TO
Lisa, one of our old friends from Chicago who happened to be sent here, too, and told her our grudges, one at a time. Katherine couldn't see why kindergarten would not take her child even though he was not potty-trained. Rose complained that Starla was taking a lead role in the social activities while
she
was surely the better qualified.

 

M
ANY OF US
preferred the wives who seemed to have natural curiosity, who asked,
How do you think that is constructed?
and instead of calling for their husbands to fix the stove, pulled it out from the wall and first attempted to discover how it operated on their own.

 

A
T NIGHT, AS
our husbands snored, we read books on loan to us from friends, sent to us by our parents, checked out from the library, mailed to us as part of our Book-of-the-Month Club subscription. We read stories of women who followed their husbands on unknown adventures, like Osa Johnson's
I Married Adventure
, about a Kansas teenager who married a photographer. Together they traveled to Borneo, Kenya, and the Congo, then, in their fifties, near retiring, pondering whether they should have had children, their commercial flight to California crashed. Her husband died, but Osa lived another twenty years. Had we married
mis
adventure? Because we were no longer state citizens, we could not legally vote, get divorced, or obtain a fishing license in the state of New Mexico.

 

T
HE
S
TRANGER
,
T
HE
Little Prince
,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
,
Madame Bovary
,
Native Son
,
The Grapes of Wrath
. Deep within ourselves, we were waiting for something to happen. Our greatest, grandest, most prolonged story: waiting. At times, we became tired from the reading, we wished the next day was already over. But eventually the muscles in our necks relaxed and we slept.

 

M
ORNINGS WE WOKE
and hoped something would arrive for us, but rarely did anything arrive. Because we felt powerless, we went to war over milk shortages, water shortages, maid services, and unfair housing assignments. We said,
Someone with one child should not have more help than someone with two.
We said,
A family that needs only two bedrooms should not get a home with three
. The commissary should carry bottled artichoke hearts, the movie schedule should be changed, the neighbor's dog snapped at our child and should be put down, we need a shoe repair service, we need faster mail service, the public laundry is overcrowded, the rifle range is too close.

 

W
E THREATENED TO
strike unless more maids became available. We tried to master cooking on a temperamental stove but we had no eggs and we howled until the veterinarian brought us some. We commissioned our boys to build us a golf course and when we needed to make a fence around it we stole wire from the Army supply office. We created an orchestra, a square dance club, a jazz band, and a tennis court. We got things by calling a meeting. We got things by being devious.

 

W
HEN THE GROUND
trembled and the air smelled like fireworks we knew our husbands, or the military, were trying out explosives. The scent got on our clothes and we could smell sulfur on our hair for days. We tried to control our responses to the sounds in the distance, how they brought the war in close to us and made us worry and we said we would no longer let them do that, even when they rattled our walls, we must not get too upset. We tried to control our impulse to shudder and then one day we noticed we no longer asked
What was that?
and neither did our children.

Talk

W
E DREW CLOSER
and lowered our voices.