The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  AT SIX IN the evening they would, usually, drift back from the Tech Area looking wild, talking their own language, sciencese, or talking about how to win at poker, or how to hunt wild turkeys. The words we could say became less and less technical and the words we could not say grew larger. We could not say fission, a word we overheard often when our husbands were graduate students. Our husbands said Gadget, and talked about issues with the Gadget, but what was the Gadget? We did not know. When no one was home we whispered their real names, and our own: Dr. Fermi, Mrs. Fisher, Enrico, Jane, Jane Marie.

  THEY SQUINTED. THEY ate slowly. Their gait was uneven. They stooped. They asked forgiveness rather than permission. Henry with his leather elbow patches. Enrico with his rolled-up khakis. Louis’s willowy frame in blue jeans. The Director’s black porkpie hat becoming faded and crumpled. Clarence’s piano playing, Frank’s deep laugh, Paul’s shy smile. Our husbands, the only cellist in town. Our husbands, as playful and naïve as our little boys, our husbands deep in thought, our husbands walking into telephone poles, our husbands’ ongoing drama of the misplaced reading glasses. From the Alps, from the lowlands. Our husbands returning from canyon hikes with arrowheads and blisters. All of them in silly hats singing at parties with delight, though their voices were bad. Our husbands who rode bikes through the mud and snow and insisted, despite what the General said, that they were not a motley crew.

  THE GENERAL DESCRIBED them as longhairs, for how they did not keep their hair cropped short but instead let it sometimes fall across their foreheads and into their eyes. They said to us, We aren’t oddballs. We aren’t a bunch of crazies. We laughed, or raised our eyebrows, or nodded. Many of us were not the kind to regularly agree with our husbands. Instead when they argued something we found counterexamples and asked questions that would get them caught in their own logical fallacies. They kept us sharp, too, though we complained about their corrections: like how alpenglow was not an optical illusion but rather an optical phenomenon.

  HOW WELL OUR husbands knew science determined their status, which was indicated by how much access they had to secrets. We learned after the war that their security access was marked by the color of their badge. They wore white badges or they wore blue badges; they knew what was going on, or they only knew what they needed to in order to do their job. We knew close to nothing, though we speculated about who knew the most. Many of our husbands were physicists, and some of us guessed by who spent more time thinking than talking who had the high-status position of theoretical physicist. Some men we knew from before Los Alamos and we were happy to see them again. We could remember bits of their previous interests: one had investigated cosmic rays and now spent his days in a shack at the bottom of a canyon, another had conducted experiments related to radioactivity and, like our husbands, went to the Tech Area each morning.

  IF WE INVITED more people to dinner than we had table space for, our husbands went out an hour before the guests arrived and found a piece of wood, sawed it down, and built an extension leaf. When the scientists, our husbands, arrived to Ingrid’s house stomping their boots on the porch and calling to her husband, Congratulations! while holding up bottles of liquor, which should have been dificult to find in this time of rationing, we had no idea what they were talking about. Ingrid asked Henry why he was being congratulated, and we asked our husbands why they were congratulating him, but our husbands just shrugged, and then smiled; we scoffed and walked away. We went, next, to one of the female scientists, Irene, a sturdy young girl with short hair and blunt bangs, who was said to have a spectacular IQ; surely another woman would tell us. We asked her, What’s all this about? And she raised her head, looked down at us—she was quite tall—and said, smiling, Why, he shot down a Jap battleship! And earlier that day the Army radio station had reported that the U.S. military destroyed four Japanese carriers and a cruiser, but our husbands had been here all along, and so what that female scientist said was surely impossible. She was pulling our leg, though it felt like more than that.

  WE THOUGHT, YOU are making fun of me, and we concentrated our faces in the other direction so she would not see our wobbly chins, because we were inexplicably starting to tear up, we were becoming too emotional, and she was poking fun at what we did not know and we were losing our wits. Who cares about her, we thought. When she turned toward a man with whom she could converse about science, toward our husbands, and our husbands touched her shoulder as they spoke, we told ourselves we hated her.

  BEFORE WE GOT married we asked our grandfathers, whose own marriages had lasted forty years or more, What is the secret to a happy marriage? And they paused, looked down at their chicken salad, and said, You have to really like each other. After the attraction, you have to really like the person. We crunched our lettuce. Our teeth clinked against the fork. Did we like our fiancés? What does liking someone mean? Before we got married our mothers told us we had to communicate. Ask him how his day was. Take an interest in his profession. But we could not do this anymore. Our husbands were gone for twelve hours a day and sometimes did not come home at all. Instead they dragged an Army cot—identical to our own beds—into the Tech Area. And we were not allowed to ask questions.

  What did we think our husbands were doing in the lab? We suspected, because the military was involved, that they were building a communication device, a rocket, or a new weapon. We ruled out submarines because we were in the desert—but we closely considered various types of code breaking.

  Cooking

  THE ALTITUDE MADE our breads flat. We requested hot plates, and they arrived, and we carried them with us to parties. Posters of corn that said corn is the food of the nation! lined the Lodge walls and we made so much corn bread, corn cakes, corn casserole, and corn with pepper that we were soon sick of corn.

  WE NAMED OUR stoves after an autobiographical memoir told by a horse—one that began with his carefree days as a youth, moved to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, and ended with his happy retirement in the country. All along he recounted tales of cruelty and kindness. We named our stoves Black Beauty and snorted with laughter. Or we called it that because everyone else did, though we did not get the reference, or we refused to call it that. Mostly, we thought our stove was huge and ugly and we only loved it when the electricity went out, because since it was heated with wood and coal, we could still continue cooking dinner even if we had no power. At first, before we became savvy with our stove, we would go without supper. Sometimes there were no lights in the streets, and no flashlights to carry around, and it was dark all through town, but never quiet, and families were reading aloud, and there was candlelight, and we heard the laughter of children being tickled.

  SOME OF US hated the stove situation so much we complained, and we asked for a new stove, an electric one, and if our husbands had high security clearance, something might be done about it. We called the Housing Office and heard the Army man’s voice gurgle and we guessed he had been celebrating some small military victory. This seemed to happen every day, but we thought it was really just an excuse to celebrate the enjoyment of liquor. Maybe this time it was something about the Allies landing in Anzio, or some other sign that might indicate we were beating the Germans. Although winning could be worthy of celebration we still needed a new stove.

  THE ARMY MAN said a stove would come that day, and it did not come; he said a stove would come the next and it never came. And therefore it is possible we took matters into our own hands. Late one Sunday night, when the town was still groggy from the weekend, we gathered with Louise, Starla, Ingrid, and Katherine. We made a furniture dolly with two-by-fours, a scrap of carpet, and four wheels borrowed from Louise’s sofa. Perhaps we went into the common area and took what we needed, and felt the thrill of doing things we were not supposed to do, and it is possible we experienced this thrill more than once.

  Foreigners

  SOME OF US had not always been Americans. Our husbands went from being Hans to Jack, and we went from being Mrs. Mueller to Mrs. Mi
ller. We changed out of slacks and into blue jeans, and already we felt more like Americans. But we were still Europeans, too.

  WE SAT ON hay bales in Fuller Lodge and watched short films put out by the War Department that were aired before the featured movies. We wanted to watch Meet Me in St. Louis but we had to suffer through films that asked, Why are we Americans on the march? Pearl Harbor, is that why we are fighting? Or is it because of Britain? France? China? The list continued for at least ten more countries.

  THE ANSWER TO the question was: For freedom. They say trouble always comes in threes—look at these faces. And we saw Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler at podiums, in front of hundreds of people, speaking. They gave up their power, the film said, and they meant non-Americans, citizens of other countries. Some of us had extended families that were still in Germany, France, Norway, Poland, Holland, Greece, Belgium, and elsewhere. Or we were born in the U.S. and the film did not seem strange to us.

  WE WERE ITALIANS and we clenched our teeth; or we were Germans and we laughed out loud when we heard, Germans have a natural love of regimentation and harsh discipline; or we were not surprised. But when the film said, German defeat was never acknowledged in the last war and they were ready to back anyone who would obtain victory for them, we wished these silly theatrics would hurry up so we could escape into the stories of Holiday Inn, Slightly Dangerous, or My Sister Eileen. And if we had been brave, if we had wanted to make a scene, to say This is wrong, we would get up from our hay bale and walk out. But where would we go and whose mind would it have changed? We would be back in our drafty living room with only our own suffering—missing the film and worrying that our new friends might think us suspect.

  Growing

  ONE SPRING NIGHT we got permission to use a military phone to the call the outside world and we stood with our husbands and dialed our parents’ number from the military police booth, and we looked up to see what looked like millions of stars, a pointillism we never saw back home and the connection was so scratchy, we weren’t even sure it was our mothers on the line or if they could hear us. We yelled, with our husbands, in unison, We’re pregnant! though of course our husbands were not pregnant, but at that time, before morning sickness, before labor, when our stomachs felt just a little hotter to the touch and only our sense of smell was enhanced, it was as if they, too, were pregnant with us.

  OR THERE WAS a time before morning sickness and it did not just occur in the morning.

  SOMETIMES,RATHER THAN calling, we wrote to our mothers and they sent back directives: Wash your feet twice a day. Drink a glass of wine each night. Go to bed hungry. Lots of milk. Lots of activity. Sex, but not in the last trimester. Name him Theodore, after my father. Name her Opal, after your dead aunt. Name him anything but Henry.

  ALTHOUGH WE TOLD our mothers immediately, many of us did not tell one another until the fifth month. Maybe we hoped no one would notice until then because we were staying so slender. Or we did not tell because we had lost one before and we did not want to get our hopes up, or anyone else’s. We did not want to be offered condolences. We did not want to explain why our bellies were small again, but where was our baby?

  SOME OF US squealed as soon as we missed a period and ran to tell the rest of us. And the second place we might run to was the Housing Office, where we would announce, I’m pregnant! or I’m having another one! because this might mean we would qualify for a bigger green house. The man at the Housing Office said, Ma’am, you’ll have to wait until we can hear the baby crying before you can fill out one of these forms.

  OUR BELLIES GREW. Our husband’s spicy scent wafted to us from across a room and Roscoe’s litter box stank even when there was nothing in it. We requested our husbands find us milkshakes, iced tea, fried chicken, lemonade, and lentil soup. And some things on this list were impossible to locate, which made our want for them that much stronger, and other things we found rather intolerable—jalapeño peppers, grapefruit—though we loved them before. We swore we would never get pregnant again, and we hated being pregnant in the summer and how our backs ached, and we loved our pregnant bodies, how they made room for another life, how everyone told us we were luminous. We worried about our child having all his fingers and toes, and we sipped more iced tea and hoped he would come out soon. Or we wished it would in fact be a she and that she would get out of us already.

  MANY OF US had due dates just a few days apart and it was comforting to know that Starla, Ruth, Alice, and Louise would all be in the maternity ward, too. What a calming thought to walk out of the house with nothing to do except this: give birth. The idea of two weeks in the hospital—a break from cooking, cleaning, and hosting—meant having someone wait on us: nurses bringing us dinner, bathing our babies, changing our sheets, and monitoring our health. It would be a vacation! Louise said, It’s enough of an incentive to keep me pregnant for a lifetime.

  WE HELD AND received baby showers almost weekly, in rooms of tissue paper flowers and pink, yellow, or blue streamers. Some of us thought it was bad luck to buy anything before the baby was born, but others of us thought it was morbid not to and we extended our morning coffee by leafing through catalogs of strollers and bassinets. Though our homes were temporary, we wanted to paint, choose a crib, and consider wallpaper. Polka dots, stripes, flowers. We were told red was the first color a baby could see, and we thought we could use that as an accent color, but when we saw the red samples at a hardware store in Santa Fe we thought, blood, our brothers, the war, and changed our minds.

  OUR CHILDREN CAME fast and two weeks early, came in the backseat before our husbands could get out of the driveway, on the bathroom linoleum we had installed ourselves. We went into labor in the kitchen, and our neighbor came to help us, and someone else ran to get our husbands from the Tech Area. And when our husbands came home they heard the first earthly wails of their new daughters, their new sons, their twins, and we saw terror and awe in their eyes.

  OR WE GAVE birth in Army sedans on our way up the Hill, or at the hospital, right on time. A few of us pretended that we felt no pain as the contractions grew more painful, and we smiled serenely when our friends checked in on us. Or when our husbands came to see us on their lunch break we howled and they kissed our foreheads and apologized and said they were sorry but they had to get back to the Tech Area. And if this was our first birth, the pain we knew before contractions was actually not pain at all and most pain after childbirth was nothing. We learned labor was not generally a place for modesty, and if we were in the ward together we helped one another with compresses and conversation as best we could.

  SOMETIMES OUR HUSBANDS were not allowed in our rooms even if we begged for them, and if they were allowed they came in running, looking more terrified than we felt, and it was us who had to comfort them, saying, between contractions, I’m fine. Really.

  OR OUR DUE date came and went. We walked to the hospital, lay down, were gassed and cut open. We wanted to squat but were instructed to lie flat on our backs so the doctor could reach the baby more easily. We longed for our midwives trained in Tuskegee, who relaxed us by massaging our legs, who told us what to expect. We did not want drugs, but we were put under, and we have no memory of labor, except when we heard a cry, and being startled awake by the smell of coffee, and someone saying: It’s a beautiful girl! or, It’s a handsome boy! behind the first yowls of our newborns.

  OR THE ROOM was silent and someone said, I’m sorry.

  WE NAMED THEM James, Patricia, Mary, Robert. We named them Linda, William, Richard, Shirley. Betty, Diane, Harold, Douglas. Brenda, Frances, Carolyn, Henry. When we began there were twenty of us, then fifty, then the number of us grew too large to count, and in the first year alone we gave birth to eighty healthy children.

  THE GENERAL COMPLAINED to the Director, Too many babies! They are taking advantage of us! You’ve got to do something about this. The Director replied, casually, I’m not going to interfere in the lives of adults.

  Help

  WE LONGED FOR our mot
hers, who would console us, who would watch our children so we could take a shower, so we could go out with our husbands on a date, so we could take a walk without a hundred necessities that had to be met. We wanted help. Someone to wash the windows, the dishes, the bathroom. Someone else to use the mangle, someone else to iron our husbands’ shirts.

  EVENTUALLY HELP CAME. They had glossy hair cropped at their chins. They had long dark hair pulled back or let loose. Some of us called them girls, the girls, except for Katherine, who called the girls helps and announced she should have as many helps as she was willing to pay. According to Ronnie, who was keen to the cost of everything, they earned three dollars per day.

  THEY WERE TEWA women from the nearby San Ildefonso and Santa Clara pueblos who arrived by bus in the morning and disappeared by bus at night. Or they were Spanish women whose family homestead was nearby, or they were sixteen-year-old girls from St. Catherine’s Indian School coming up from Santa Fe.

  WE NOW HAD help, but there were saints’ days and feast days and the days leading up to them when the girls stayed at home to prepare. Since we did not celebrate these days, we found it hard to keep track of when they occurred, and it was not easy to find out in advance how many days they would be gone. We sometimes marched into the Maid Services Office and demanded to know why no girls arrived, only to be told it was a holiday.