The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  THE STRANGER, THE 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.

  MORNINGS 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.

  WE 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.

  WHEN 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

  WE DREW CLOSER and lowered our voices.

  WE BEGAN BY saying what seemed like nice things. Shirley looked pretty in her white gloves today at the commissary. But that compliment suggested other things, that Shirley was stuck-up, that Shirley thought she was too good to be seen with dirty fingernails like the rest of us.

  TO MAKE ONESELF the hero through a pregnant pause. We leaned in close to hear more, our eyes alight. And then what happened, and then what happened.

  WE MOVED FROM saying nice things to suggesting the not so nice: Did you see the priest whispering in Dorothy’s ear last night? Don’t you think he was standing awfully close?

  AND LATER, AS we got to know one another better, as we became bored, as we continued to dislike ourselves, or as we became frustrated with being stuck in this town for so long, or we could no longer hold in the secrets that we did know, we said the obviously not nice.

  WE TALKED ABOUT Jack’s wandering eye and William’s wrinkled, high-waisted slacks. One of us said, The General would do anything for a chocolate turtle—I heard he keeps a stockpile of them locked in his safe. One of us said, I smelled liquor on Mrs. Oppenheimer’s breath at breakfast on Tuesday.

  WE TOLD THESE stories at each other’s kitchen tables, the same Army-issued square tables and the same stiff chairs we had ourselves. We felt savvy and funny—leaning in to Esther, to Patti—entertaining them with what we had heard, or suspected. It was like the beginning of a love story, these intimacies, and we had missed them since we’d moved. We shifted from talking about people in power—the Director, the General—to talking about husbands, and finally, to talking about one another. We speculated on who was depressed, who was disappointed, who was deranged, who was playing the game of Musical Beds. Mary has not washed her hair in a week. Tom has another family in San Antonio. Lisa disappeared with Jack at the Director’s party last night.

  WE TALKED ABOUT who got their hair color from a bottle—insisting we would never—and who let the delivery boy put his hand on her knee. They kept us awake at night, these rumors, and they brought some of us closer together, and they built trust, or destroyed it, and they passed the time. Because of the lack of insulation in the duplexes and apartments, at least one of us could hear which man cussed at his wife or which man slapped his children after dinner. We knew which woman burst into tears when a military patrolman mentioned his concern about the increase in syphilis cases. We knew which woman disappeared when she was accused of telling secrets. We got our information from the GIs, from our maids, from our cooks, and later, from our own children, but we rarely got anything from the female scientists, or from our husbands, who were the ones who actually knew all the real secrets. Everything else we knew in about an hour.

  WE WERE A group of people connecting both honestly and dishonestly, appearing composed at dusk and bedraggled at daybreak, committed, whether we wanted it or not, to shared conditions of need, agitation, and sometimes joy, which is to say: we were a community.

  1944

  Intimacies

  IT WAS THE time of year when the burrowed passions grow arms and legs—they have woken up, they have started to stir. Violence, thirst, and restraint had wintered away. It was the time when windows are left ajar and a person desires to exit rooms through those windows, and does. Around us, at night, above us, in the apartments, wafting through our windows: the beds creaking.

  IT WAS SUNDAY; spring light slanted onto cheeks, with time there had grown a certain looseness to our talk. Starla wanted to discuss the nature of love and said as much by asking, as she looked up from her gimlet, to Dorothy, and then Stan, the newcomers, How did you two meet? It was a seemingly innocuous question. Stan ran his hand across Dorothy’s arm. They smiled as couples do. Perhaps this was what Starla wanted: to hear a story that would break her heart.

  THE HEAVY SNOW of winter gave way to abundant wildflowers. Purple pasques blanketed the melting slopes. Though we grew from five to at least fifteen hundred people in one year’s time, and we soon felt we knew everybody, of course it was not so. The town felt like ours and we called it Shangri-La, or Sha-La for short, a name we meant, at different moments, both in earnest and in jest.

  WE LIVED IN Los Alamos but we simultaneously lived elsewhere. The past in Chicago, the future in Cologne. Our differences were heightened by proximity. The McDougalls have a new Cadillac! one of us exclaimed, first to our husband, who did not even look up from his newspaper. Our rents were ten percent of our family salary no matter what we lived in, so some of our rents were more expensive even though we all had the same tiny houses, and some of us paid more money for smaller homes just because we did not have two children.

  THE TOWN GREW quickly—we’d go out for a walk, pick lilies for a flower arrangement, and come back to find that our street was expanded another block, four new trailers were installed, and families were already inside, at the dinner table, eating jellied chicken.

  SOME OF US tried visiting with everyone but did not realize we were being talked to as a boss, as a white person, as a wealthy person, as a woman, as a mother, as a European, as an American, which is to say we were not getting the whole story. People protected their intimacies from us, as we did, too.

  WE FELT CLOSE enough to our maids to make confessions, to tell them things we would not tell one another. We believed our maids felt equally as close to us—we did not think we had disrupted their lives or uprooted them from their homes. We thought the Indians, especially, loved their daily trips to this other world. The extra money was more than they had ever had, and with it they could afford new additions to houses, new furniture, even a few inside bathrooms. Some of our husbands wired the pueblo for electricity, and soon refrigerators and appliances appeared. When we were invited to the pueblo, many of us were still rather shocked to find Grand Rapids furniture, brass bedsteads, soda pop, and ordinary dishes in the Indian houses. Our houses had more Indian rugs, pottery, and paintings than their own homes had. Some of us set our tables with Maria’s famous black plates and candlesticks, but we noticed that Maria herself set her
own table with store-bought tablecloths and dishes.

  SOME OF THEM had traveled even farther than us, going to London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Coney Island while their husbands danced the Eagle Dance on stages for white people. The girls told us that Europeans generally clapped louder than Americans. They told us their husbands did not dance the Eagle Dance the way they did in the pueblo—their faces were not painted, for instance, and they used any kind of feathers they found along the way.

  THE VALLEY BELOW Los Alamos was an area inhabited by Spanish Americans for hundreds of years and by Indians for tens of thousands of years. Some of our maids’ husbands were ranchers or herders until their grasses withered. They came from the valley with trailers that had chimneys, called sheep camps. Some of their husbands were men with hair parted down the middle and two long fishtail braids tied with yarn, or hair kept short in the style given to them in Indian boarding schools, or hair they cut themselves, more stylish than our husbands’. Their husbands ladled soup in our cafeterias. Their husbands changed our lightbulbs, twisted metal wires in the Tech Area, were bitten by our dogs when they came for the trash. Later, when we saw these same men at their ceremonial dances, in fancy costumes and beating drums, they were completely different people to us.

  AND WHEN THE Army issued orders in the Daily Bulletin that anyone who did not live on the site could not purchase items at the commissary, we saw that the only people this really excluded were the girls. Even if the Army did have trouble keeping up with our growing population, we protested, these women still needed a way to purchase food for their own families. There were no stores in the pueblos, and since the women worked all day for us, they could not go to Española or Santa Fe to buy things. The Army reversed the ban and we were glad, although the maids often cut short their afternoons to go shopping before the buses left, which did not please many.

  WE WERE WHITE and said, I love how here no one is aware of any color differences, everyone is treated the same. Some women were not white, or not white in the same way, and they disagreed completely, but in public nodded in agreement. And when our maids moved to the Hill and went to our school to register their children, some of us put their light-skinned children with our light-skinned children and put their dark-skinned children in different classes some of us called the Mexican classes.

  THEIR TEENAGERS WERE our guards. Their young boys were our hospital orderlies and our messengers. When their sons or husbands were drafted we thought of our own young boys, or our own husbands, or we thought of theirs—our messengers, our hospital orderlies—and how they could be drafted though they could not vote in state or national elections. We helped to find workarounds—drafting them to Los Alamos instead—and if we couldn’t help, we cried together over the kitchen sink. But there were still some of us that did not think there was anything wrong with such laws.

  Military

  WE UNDERSTOOD WHY the military hated us. While their friends were off seeing action in the Pacific or Europe, their job here was to protect our husbands, who did not want to be protected, and to safeguard a secret they did not know quite how to watch over, since they did not know what it was.

  THE MILITARY OFFICIALLY ran the town in one way, and our husbands in practice ran the town in some ways, and we ran the town clandestinely in others. The flare of trumpets awoke us at sunrise on weekends, and we were annoyed, because the weekends were our only chance at sleeping in. The troops eternally paraded and marched; we heard the steady beat of their boots, their Hut! their Attention! as they turned. They were men just a bit younger than our own husbands, sometimes just ten years older than our sons, with soft baby faces and young eyes that looked out under stiff hats.

  UNLIKE OUR HUSBANDS, the military men could not bring their wives to Los Alamos. They said to us, What makes you so special? We said the Army ruled the Hill as if it were a fascist country—controlling when we could leave, where we could live, how much help we got, and what we ate. They were our number one complaint—how they made us fill out dozens of forms, in duplicate, just to get a new lightbulb.

  WE COULD NOT often be mad at them directly because we needed them for furniture, appliances, and food. We blamed them for what went wrong because we needed someone to blame, because we could not blame our husbands. But when the washing machines broke down and the General accused us of abusing them we had something to say: Have you ever done your family’s laundry, General? No? Thought not. We are not the ones to be accused of abuse.

  WE ARGUED, UNREASONABLY, that the Army men had more money for new cars, because they always seemed to have them. Or maybe because they could not bring their wives they did not have them around to insist on home decorations—new linoleum, new curtains—and so did in fact have more to spare. They did not have to answer to a wife regarding their spending habits and so they did just what they wanted and bought a new car.

  AND THOUGH OUR medical services were free, our doctors were Army doctors, and we had no choice about which doctor we preferred to see, but they weren’t so bad, and we joked privately over how these Army doctors had signed up to heal soldiers in battle and instead got us—a bunch of high-strung, healthy women complaining of headaches and morning sickness.

  THE GENERAL NEVER missed an opportunity to say he, too, was a scientist, because he had obtained an undergraduate degree in engineering at West Point and had been the project manager for the construction of the Pentagon. He made it clear he did not want us here. He thought we would cause trouble, he thought we would be a distraction. And he wanted our husbands in uniform, beneath him, not wearing jeans, but they had refused to come on those grounds, and the General had to relent and instead our husbands stayed civilians, and we came along.

  IF IT WAS evening when the military police stopped us, we had trouble holding our skirts down in the wind. We fumbled in our purses. They leaned in close to hear us say the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language: their own name.

  WE HAD A fondness for the engineering division, who were the military, too, but only because they were forced to be. They were men with undergraduate degrees in engineering, and surely they annoyed MPs and sergeants with their disheveled look—their sloped shoulders from stooping over a table all day, their thick glasses, their gangly bodies with paunchy stomachs. And when they marched on weekends with the rest of the military, they were placed in the back as the caboose, and each of their steps was miraculously out of sync with the others.

  For some of us, the proximity to a large number of single men revived our girlishness, and we curled our hair, or ironed it, applied lipstick, and smiled at ourselves in the mirror: to have a husband and a fantasy, to be admired at the age of twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-three, this felt like a good thing.

  Women’s Army Corps

  ON MONDAY MORNINGS the trashcans outside the WACs’ dorms were full of Coors beer cans. There were three hundred WACs and they had showers and two bathtubs to share among themselves, which they told us about on several occasions. Their hair could not touch their collar; they wore beige skirts and oxfords.

  AT NIGHT WE COULD hear them gathered around campfires singing songs we did not know the names of but once they were in our heads we could not get them out:

  They get us up at five a.m.

  To scrub the barracks clean.

  Then what do we do when we get through?

  We scrub the damn latrine!

  AND WHEN WE were certain we could not take any more singing about military life we heard them marching and chanting:

  Duty is calling you and me.

  We have a date with Destiny.

  Ready, the WACs are ready.

  Their pulses steady, the world set free.

  THEIR VOICES CARRIED as they marched from the campfire to their dorm door and into their rooms.

  THERE WAS NOT a bed check on Saturdays and on their days off they went to Santa Fe, perhaps watching the sunset on the roof of the La Fonda hotel, as we wished we could. One WAC, Pat, was rumored to, on her break
s, sleep in the stable next to the horses.

  SOME WERE TEXANS who said little bitty and right nice and had names like Bobbie-Joe and Jimmie. Or they were former schoolteachers named Esther or Marian, from Indiana or Illinois, who said joining the Women’s Army Corps was the right thing to do. They organized the motor pool, shot dice, played the pump organ at church services, and called our husbands over the townwide intercom by their last names—Mitchell, Farmer, Perlman—but more frequently, about ten times a day, they called out Gutierraz and Marsh—the two maintenance men. They operated the telephones, censored our mail, and ran the PX, the diner where our husbands got their afternoon coffee and listened to the jukebox. They said they were proposed to once a month because there were ten military men on the Hill to every one of them.

  Thaw

  IN APRIL THE cottonwoods in the valley began showing their green buds and the commissary carried huge hams for Easter. We reserved Fuller Lodge for Passover seder and prepared hundreds of matzo balls that the chef boiled in water instead of chicken stock. People said they tasted Excellent! but they did not. The chaplain, who was not asked to speak, gave a long talk about marauding tigers in India. We said it was a SNAFU, his speech and the matzo balls, an acronym we learned from the military: Situation normal, all fouled up.