The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  THEY WERE OUR nannies, our maids, and our extended family members. They did not look like us and we hated them. They seemed content and beautiful and we loved them. They were just people like anyone else and we felt thankful to have them around. They were our Florencitas and Rosalies—who gave us black pottery for Christmas, who brought us thin tortillas made from blue corn and pottery candlesticks in the shape of high pueblo boots, who left us notes apologizing that they could not wash the bedsheets because our husbands were in them.

  THEY GAVE US loaves of round bread baked in their beehive ovens. They were heedless of our instructions to vacuum the Oriental rugs and instead dragged them out on the back porch and shook them above the heads of the children playing below. One of the girls asked Katherine, whom she thought of as not only her boss but her friend, to bake one of her famed stuffed chickens for a celebration. Katherine did so, but said to the rest of us: Just who is working for whom?

  WE THOUGHT THEM generous and good with our children. We learned how to swaddle our babies as they did. We tutored their sons in English after school and they taught us how to make more northern New Mexico dishes—tortillas, posole, and corn cooked the Indian way. They learned to make our peanut butter sandwiches, but we never learned the delicious secret of their kapo-wano fried bread.

  AS WE ATE breakfast we saw the group of women walking past the water tower and to our houses, dressed in colorful mantas tied with woven belts, high white deerskin boots or plain walking shoes, with shawls over their heads and shoulders, and so much turquoise, we told one another. Enough to stock a trading post. When we noticed that the bus delivered them an hour before the shift started, some of us invited them in for coffee on cold days. And as we made oatmeal we heard them speaking quickly and giggling in the living room, but we never found out what was so funny. Though most knew three languages—English, Spanish, and their native Tewa—many talked little to us.

  OTHERS OF US made closer friendships. On her way to the dorms where she worked, Ana stopped to talk about mesa affairs. Later on, when she started taking her lunches at our house, we sat and gossiped. A few of us learned about some young Indians’ thinking: how they wanted to remain in the pueblo but desired a better life for their children than they had. How the old people wanted to keep things as they were. Ana was saving money for a new house with an inside bathroom, good heating, and an icebox like the Army provided for us. Julieta, on the other hand, resisted such improvements, considering them unnecessary.

  ONE GIRL TOLD us that each time the General came to the pueblo to recruit them for work he wore khaki shorts. The tribal members gave him a Tewa nickname—a word we can’t recall—and he seemed very proud to have his own special name. What did the name mean? we asked our housekeeper. She smiled and said, The man who wears baby pants.

  WHEN WE WERE invited to feast days it seemed strange to us to watch the corn dancers bring the Catholic saint from the church and place it in a shrine set up for the day, then perform the ancient dances that seemed to have no relation to Christianity. When the dancers stopped to rest, they had a choice of going into the kiva or kneeling in the shrine to pray before the saint. At sunset the dancers, still in corn dance costume, carried the saint back to the church. We asked, How can you be good Catholics and also believe in your traditional gods? Ana saw nothing strange or contradictory—this, she said, was the way it had always been. But by asking Anita, an Indian who sometimes spoke in Fuller Lodge about Indian customs, we learned of the pueblo’s two rebellions against Spanish rule and their centuries of cohabitation.

  WE ASKED APOLONIA what her husband did for work. He does the hunting. Now they were buying food from the commissary, so we asked again, What does your husband do now? She replied, I give him money. He goes to the store and buys the food. It could have been more complicated than these chosen words, there may have been things she could not or would not articulate about her relationship with her husband, but we did not press her.

  SHE ASKED US what we were doing here in the desert. We said, The war. She nodded and we interpreted this as disapproval, so we said, Do you know why we are fighting? She said No, or she said Yes, but either way we could tell it did not matter. We told her a story—of surprise attacks, victims, greed. Well, what do you think of the war now? we asked, feeling we’d done a particularly good job of conveying the atrocities. She gave us a look. Her opinion had not changed.

  AND WHY SHOULD it have? Were we blind to the struggles of others? First the Spaniards, then the Anglos, then the Mexicans—so many people trying to change them, kill them, and claim the land.

  SOME OF US never talked to our housekeepers, or when we did we talked really slowly and really loudly. We climbed sacred mountains, stood on ceremonial structures, took arrowheads from ancient dwellings for souvenirs, and admired the views. Others of us grew protective of the petroglyphs. When Starla learned that her Henry’s favorite mushroom hunting grounds—where he gathered paper bags full of button fungi—was just below a plumed serpent carved in the rock, which could be seen well when the shadows fell, she gave him quite a scolding. Henry had never noticed it, never looked to see the numerous other carvings. Frank added that the living Indians intrigued him far more than the dead ones.

  HOW MUCH DID we want them to stay exactly as we had imagined they had always been? Some of us said, over the ladies’ lunch, that others of us were going native. They were living in a past our ancestors had given up. We were women wanting the girls, who now wore attire similar to our own, to paint the most authentic images, to make the most traditional bowls. What could they do but accommodate us, their patrons.

  THOUGH WE BENEFITED from their inexpensive domestic help, we still complained that the help was not enough. And it was not fair that some of the girls picked favorites, how they disliked being moved around on the chart each day, and some of us said they just went wherever they pleased anyway. We wanted more help or different help and we were told if we wanted more assistance we would need to have another baby. We complained to our husbands, but they instead tried to find solutions, or joke, rather than listen. They said, In the future there will be trained chimpanzees mopping our floors, and what the Maid Services Office really should do instead is set up an Agency of Primate Distribution.

  OUR HUSBANDS PARODIED our maids in after-dinner skits; our husbands wore scarves on their heads and peasant skirts, turquoise bracelets clinking as they dusted the same table over and over again, as they pretended to be Sofia and took nips of our liquor. We laughed, we cackled, we thought it all in good fun.

  A Good Wife

  BEFORE WE ARRIVED at Los Alamos as wives and mothers we had been teachers in Seattle, housewives in New Jersey, watercolorists in Nebraska, writers in Des Moines, chemists at Harvard, and one of us had been a dancer in the Chicago ballet. Ingrid, Marie, Pauline, and Marjorie all had B.S.s in mathematics with minors in home economics. We were halfway through school when our husbands asked us to marry them, and it didn’t seem there was a point in continuing: few married women had careers, and our family did not need the extra income. Or we had once wanted to pursue doctoral degrees but were told by our male mentors during our senior year of college, There is no place in higher mathematics for women, no matter how brilliant. Some of us were told, The universities won’t want you, and you’ll be overqualified to teach high school. Many of us did not pursue a doctoral degree but married a man who got one instead. But a couple of us were encouraged to keep going, or kept going despite what our mentors told us, and we, too, became doctors.

  AND NOW HERE there were jobs for us. The Director came to our house and asked us to Please think about working while you’re here, it would be a good career opportunity. And if that failed to get a yes, if we lowered our heads and said, Sorry, no, thanks, he replied, Consider the war.

  OUR HUSBANDS WERE great physicists and we were considered great secretaries. Or we were hired because the military questioned our moral backbone and wanted to keep us out of mischief. And as secretaries we
prepared and filed personnel cards, or stamped secret in red on medical records. We knew first who was moving to another division in the lab and who had an inexplicable rash. Our husbands appeared to know nothing so we were always telling them the news, despite the fact that they were the ones doing important things in the Tech Area.

  WE 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.

  WE 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.

  IF 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.

  ONE 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.

  IF 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.

  OR 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.

  OR 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.

  WE 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.

  THOSE 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.

  WE 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.

  WE 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.

  AS 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.

  SOME 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.

  WE 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.

  AND 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

  THOUGH 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.

  WE 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.

  WE 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.

  WE 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.

  MANY 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.

  AT 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 misadventure? 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.