IF WE WERE the proper type, we finally broke down and bought a pair of blue jeans, a jean shirt, and boots so we could ride the horses. The mountains still smelled to us like lavender and lemon verbena, and we hiked the Valle Grande, a mountain meadow the size of Manhattan that in spring became a purple field of wild irises. When we stopped walking we could hear the snakes rattling in the sagebrush.
WE TOOK THE horses down Frijoles Creek for fourteen miles before arriving at the meandering Rio Grande. We watched the migration of sandhill cranes, admired the fading blue color of the piñon jay, avoided the swimming garter snakes, and were grateful to see a group of mule deer fawns before they lost their spots. Tarantulas with orange tufts on their back ends walked along our hiking trails on warm spring days, but we were not scared. And though we feared mountain lions, black bears, and bobcats, their sightings were mythical.
WE CARRIED COATS for the horses and sausage and whiskey for us. We got drunk quickly from being so high up in the mountains and sometimes, we are sure, we acted strange or delightful. We called one another’s names and reached out our hands for the flask. We rode at night, even when it was raining, even when we were on a mountain ridge in the middle of a thunderstorm, in lightning. One night, after a long afternoon trip turned into an evening outing, with a full moon illuminating our trail, Alice said, Which way should we go? and we looked at her but did not reply. She continued, This way it’s only seven miles home, and pointed to the left. And this way is longer but much more beautiful, she said, and pointed to the right. We took the path to the right. And when we came home late, it was our husbands this time who walked out onto the porch as they heard our boot steps, folded their arms over their chests, and scowled. We laughed and said, Oh, Richard!
The Director
THE DIRECTOR GETTING down on one knee to talk to us, because we were sitting. The Director hosting dinner parties—making arugula and mint salad with an impossible-to-find pecorino cheese, creating prosciutto-and-gruyère-stuffed ravioli, presenting us with English plum pudding—dishes he claimed to have learned to make from the best chef in Italy, the grandest dame in Britain, or the finest lady from Arkansas, as he winked at us.
HE WAS OUR center of attention, quietly. He did not shout but something about him demanded we listen. Six feet tall and stooped, lanky and shifty in any seat. Oppy, Oppie, Opje—we were awed by his erudition, we were charmed by his elegance, we were chilled by the sarcasm he directed at those he thought of as shoddy or slow thinkers. Our husbands said, The man is unbelievable! He gives you the answer before you can even formulate the question.
AND BECAUSE HE spoke eight languages he could recite poems to us in our mother tongue. He told us that À la Recherche du Temps Perdu—In Search of Lost Time—changed the course of his life. He spoke passionately about why he got involved in the war: I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.
HE HAD THE bluest eyes. And it was as if he could tell what any one person was thinking and speak aloud a confirmation that they were not alone in the feeling. Even the female scientists let out a giggle in his presence. Even the General said he was A genius, a real genius! We watched him ride through the desert on horseback, we watched him seemingly unaffected by strong martinis and chain-smoking. He seemed unfailingly in control of himself, but not as if it took effort. We suspected he had secrets deeper than the Hill’s shared secrets. Which made him—to some of us—quite tempting.
Letters
WHEN THE CHILDREN were at school we sat at our desk typing letters to our mothers. Bobby does the darndest things! Frank keeps busy at work. We girls have a knitting circle now. We edited out our fear, anger, and loneliness for our mothers, who had sons overseas, who were anxious enough.
OUR MOTHERS WROTE to us and said they were enclosing chocolate-covered raisins and when their letters arrived without the raisins we assumed the censors, which were other wives just like us, or maybe the WACs, had eaten them.
OUR PARENTS WROTE to us and asked, What is it like there? When can we visit? When are you coming home? And we replied, Soon, I hope, or, I don’t know, or, We are in the West. The weather is fine! Or we did not reply because we did not know what to say, really.
AND OUR BROTHERS wrote us letters that arrived with postmarks from two months prior. Our brothers described the first time they shot and killed a man and the pistol they kept as a souvenir. Our brothers said: It is odd how hard one becomes after a little bit of this stuff, but it gets to be more like killing mad dogs than people. We replied with sympathetic sentences—I cannot imagine what you are going through over there—we replied with suggestions they could not possibly agree to—Take care of yourself. Be safe. We signed our names as we always did—With Love, Sis, or with more formality—Fondly, Dottie McDougal. Mostly, we could not understand what our brothers were experiencing because we had never experienced it ourselves, just as, perhaps, they could not understand us.
Heat
THE HOT IRRITATIONS of summer arrived and our husbands said we talked too much. They accused us of asking questions that were too obvious, or too personal. Secrecy, like cocktails, like smoking, like wearing overalls, was the new habit we acquired.
THE SUMMER’S WEATHER of blue skies and fast, roaring downpours paralleled our annoyance about petty things. The town was growing and there were not enough supplies for all of us. The unrefrigerated truck that carried our milk for hundreds of miles delivered it warm and nearly spoiled each week. Someone stole metal from the Tech Area and now all of our cars were subject to searches. MPs made us and our children stand on the side of the dirt road in direct sunlight as they lifted up and inspected each floor mat, as well as the trunk. What would I want with scrap metal? we asked them. They raised the mat behind the driver’s seat and did find one thing: a soggy animal cracker smashed into the floorboard.
ONE FRIDAY NIGHT at the Lodge Katherine said, while pouring us each a vodka punch, Have you noticed Starla’s outfit, ladies? Why, that’s her best dress, isn’t it. Her last remark was not a question. We let the suggestion settle, except Helen, who wanted to show she’d noticed it first, added, Those silk hose. Was Starla wearing her best-looking outfit, a green dress and her one pair of silk hose, to get the attention of someone? Her husband, Henry, who was kind, but in truth, one of the least exceptional of our men, was out in the canyon testing something for the weekend. Her daughter, Charlotte, was sleeping over at Louise’s. Girls, Katherine said, think of what this might mean. Margaret, always one to identify with sadness, replied: Poor Henry. Poor Louise! the group of us called out.
BUT WHAT COULD we do?
WAS THEIR MARRIAGE not weathering well? Lisa disagreed, which was to be expected. She was, after all, Starla’s close friend from Chicago. How could she not?
WE SOMETIMES RESENTED how our husbands asked us to step out of the room in our own house so they could talk to their friends late into the night. And some of us spied and heard things, and some of us would never eavesdrop though we really, really wanted to, and some of us did not even think to listen to what our husbands and their friends were talking about because we were too busy thinking about our own worries: what Shirley meant when she said that thing yesterday, how to stretch the ration coupons to make a nice dinner tomorrow.
WE WATCHED STARLA throughout the night—one eye on our husbands speaking sciencese, and one on her. Though many men gave her a glance, if she had a preference she did not show it. Each man was greeted kindly, each stance was taken judiciously. Until it was the end of the night, until it was Frank who touched her arm and her eyes betrayed her best look of neutrality.
SOMETIMES OUR HUSBANDS returned from the Tech Area and said they could not stand it anymore. We did not know if it was us or here or their work, but we were concerned it was us. We could not talk to our best friends about this suspicion, because they were back in Idaho, or in New York. A couple of us said, I can�
��t take this, either, and actually left. We returned to our mothers. We became Nevadans and moved to Reno for a quick divorce. And our husbands moved into the singles dorms and we were unofficially, or officially, separated.
THE HAMBURGER! INGRID called, raising her arms, the hamburger! And we recalled that image of her: Starla’s hamburger keeping us smiling the length of her conversation with the Director, or Starla’s hamburger making us anxious because we could find no subtle way to tell her about it.
WHEN THE SONG ended she came over to us flushed, out of breath, she grabbed our arms and urged us on the dance floor with her. She insisted on taking the lead. Two women—we thought, This is silly! But we let ourselves be pulled into the middle of the room.
AN ARM BRUSHING our arm, the stirring of winter desires—perhaps we spoke of Starla to soothe ourselves. After three songs we collected our husbands, who had fallen asleep in a corner chair.
Husbands
WE LEARNED TO accept their distracted air, their unwillingness to tell us more about their research, their ignorance of what we did all day or what we gave up to be here.
SOME OF OUR husbands sounded important and acted important and we treated them as if they were important to the project, but we would find out later that they were not very important at all. Or they were important but they never suggested they were. Some of us thought it wouldn’t end for years, that we would live here until we died; others believed we would go home any day now. A few of our husbands would confirm or deny our hunches. We did not know how much our husbands knew or were keeping from us. They were physicists, this we did know, and therefore we had our own suspicions. Arthur, a single male scientist, got a beagle and named him Gadget and said he was our mascot and there was something illicit in the way he said the dog’s name at first, as if he knew he was being mischievous.
ONE OLDER SCIENTIST spoke only in a whisper, and then only when spoken to directly, and never made eye contact. We called him Mr. Baker, and if we knew him from before Los Alamos, back at Chicago, say, or in New York, we called him Uncle Nick, because though it was strictly forbidden to say aloud that he was the infamous, talented physicist Neils Bohr, we just could not bring ourselves to call him Mr. Baker. We admired how he played a comb covered in tissue paper. Our husbands regarded him with deference and held their tongues the moment his lips parted.
WE TOOK TO reading war history books we checked out from the tiny library Helen ran. We asked ourselves, again and again, what were the options with the Army involved? We thought chemical weapons, maybe an expansion of mustard gas. We thought—we hoped—our husbands were working on code breaking, but our husbands were physicists and we had to consider what they might be able to build using their skills. We considered a weapon. We learned more than we wanted to about mustard gas—large blisters filled with yellow fluid, burning skin, blinding until death. Though we wanted the war to end, and we wanted to go home, and we generally were not skeptical, and we thought maybe it was a good war, we did not respond well to the individual stories of other people suffering from these weapons. We sometimes hoped our husbands would fail.
The Beach
IN EARLY JUNE, the news came to us first through the military radio station, and when we heard it, we could not believe it. In over eight centuries, no one had ever successfully crossed the English Channel in battle. But now the military had. It seemed so unlikely, or it seemed just about time, and this was one of the few instances when we clinked our glasses with the military men and WACs, united in our shared victory.
WHILE WE BOILED oats for breakfast, twenty-five thousand men—our brothers, nephews, childhood crushes—were ascending the foggy beaches of Normandy. The German Field Marshal had taken the weekend off, concluding that the high seas would make it impossible for the Allies to land and the low clouds would prevent aircraft from finding their targets. Also, and we loved this fact, it was his wife’s birthday.
EVERY MONTH WE admired the full moon, how it lit our way back to our homes after dinner parties. Across the world others were appreciating the full moon for how it lit their ships’ paths in the early dawn. We came home in a good mood—the moon did this—thinking of how small we were, how large the world was.
NOW SWORD, JUNO, Gold, Omaha, and Utah beaches were stormed; bridges were bombed; Allies were moving forward on one front, but they seemed to be losing ground in the Pacific. Each night as we slept, other lives were ending.
Wanted
AT THE MAIL counter, where we stood asking if our mail had arrived, depositing new letters addressed to our mothers, there was a poster. What caught our eye was the word wanted! We looked closer. We saw a dark-haired, pale-faced woman, her hair in a victory roll, like ours. She appeared menacing with the dark background and the direct eye contact, except her face seemed gentle, too. Was there a killer in our midst? She looked like one of us, but no one we exactly recognized. We studied the poster more closely and saw the writing above her head: wanted! for murder. And below her neck: her careless talk costs lives.
SOME OF US shivered, some of us got paranoid about what we told Judy the day before, some of us laughed on the inside but not the outside, for we had made the mistake of laughing at this kind of thing in front of WACs before. It did not ingratiate ourselves to them, and we needed them to obtain passes to Santa Fe and to find out how our children were doing in gym class. So we looked back, kept quiet, took our mail, said, Thank you, and walked home.
The Commissary
BECAUSE WHAT WE were doing was important, our commissary stocked chocolate bars. Mr. Gonzalez tended the vegetables with his watering can, but there was nothing he could do to perk up the wilted lettuce, peppers, and cucumbers shriveled in wood crates. Wrinkled zucchini, molding tomatoes, old garlic sprouting green tails. There were gallons of mustard and mayonnaise without a crisp vegetable in view. Milk in a small chest next to the vegetable bins, growing sour, and never enough for all of us. These Army-issued perishables traveled from El Paso and were not made fresher by the 360-mile journey.
WE ARGUED THAT there were perfectly fresh vegetables growing in the valley, so why could we not eat those instead? It was senseless, and we never got a straight answer, which was how things functioned in Sha-La. We bought cans of unmarked food and were surprised by their contents—beans, stewed tomatoes—and that occasionally—or frequently, depending on the storyteller—the cans had worms in them.
IT WAS ALSO at the commissary that we found new sources of information. We could tell, by their dress and stockings, who had just arrived to town. We offered to show them around the Hill and we offered to watch their children and we hoped they would lend us that pink dress we admired and share with us the tea they brought with them from London, and we hoped they would invite us over to their place to listen to new records. We traded our extra linoleum and our second pair of blue jeans for sugar, nylons, and secrets.
WE BUDGETED RATION coupons and saved up for steak on our anniversary, on our husbands’ birthdays, and on the night we announced we were pregnant. Not all of us were good about rationing, and not all of us thought the rules should apply to us. We became tricksters out of perceived need, or because we wanted a bit more excitement. When our ration books were empty we wore red lipstick to the commissary; we leaned in to the butcher counter and said to the GI behind it, You wouldn’t let me starve, would you, John? And John could rarely say no to us, women asking sweetly for meat, and we reached our arms out to receive steaks wrapped in brown paper, and we slipped him something expensive, but easier to come by: a paper bag of whiskey.
Ants
IN JUNE, ON picnics, on hikes, our children saw columns of ants in the sky. Ants fly? they asked. We thought of when we were younger, when we were more romantic, when we learned about the behavior of ants. We knew a lot about the mating rituals of ants because we had written a thesis on them, because our mothers had, because we remembered things Mister Smith told us in Bio 101.
WE TOLD OUR children this was their nuptial flight. We t
old them it was how ants make children. We did not say starlings hover nearby, watching, waiting until the ants are too tired to fight, or too dizzy from the day, and all the starlings have to do is open their mouths to receive this humming column of food in the sky.
FROM AFAR IT looked like falling rain and we did not tell our children how the male ants beat their wings excitedly, mount, and drop in hundreds from the sky. How the queen flies away, tears off her own wings, digs a hole, forms a nest, and waits for her children to hatch.
WE LET THEM make an anthill from a Mason jar and keep it in their room. They fed the ants breadcrumbs and within a few days the ants died. While our children were away at school we dug up new ants and replaced the old ones, so for at least a little while our children would not know there are things they cannot save.
The Theater
SINCE THE DRAFT age had been extended in 1941 and our husbands were no longer working at the university, we worried they might have to leave us to fight in the war. But we were told there was no way our husbands would ever have to go to war since they were working on a war project. Sometimes the draft letter did come, and our husbands left for San Francisco, and we were certain they would be called to the Pacific theater, or we had a feeling it would all be okay.
The Wives of Los Alamos Page 7