The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  IF OUR HUSBANDS were drafted, or our brothers, we hated the term theater to describe parts of a war. If we did not have anyone in battle, or if we had generations of men in our families who had been in battle, we loved the term theater, and we thought it conjured both the drama and the artifice.

  WE HEARD NEWS that the U.S. invaded the Pacific islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, but thankfully, all of our husbands who were drafted returned, because they were working on a war project already, and they did not leave for the Pacific. But they were here, on the Hill, in the Tech Area, fighting anyway.

  Our Children

  HOW MUCH WAS parenting like warfare? Digging trenches, changing diapers, gunfire, or a child’s head hitting the corner of a coffee table—hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror. We felt we had been lied to about how lonely raising young children could be, about how for the first year we were not us, but them.

  IN OUR SECOND pregnancy we birthed nine-pound children that others envied. We had lost our first and did not believe we were actually having a baby until it was on our chest, scooting down to find our breasts. We ate huge piles of mashed potatoes and meatloaf as soon as we delivered. We lost our baby weight while we rested for ten days at the hospital, or our stomach muscles never recovered and our party dresses no longer fit, but we could not afford or find the time to make another.

  WHEN WE BROUGHT home the second child, our first child wanted to hold it, or our first child said, Put that back inside your belly.

  OUR CHILDREN HAD squeaky voices, were dawdlers, kicked the chairs in front of them, would not make eye contact with strangers, or else they spoke rapidly, frequently, giggled, passed notes, started rumors. They were restless. They loved that there was not enough water to wash their faces or brush their teeth. They refused to put on their galoshes. They took off all their clothes in the street and blamed their stuffed animals for their mischief. In other words, they were just like us. Or they were like our husbands, or they were just like the black sheep of our families, our uncles, and we asked, How did this creature ever come out of me?

  WE READ A book about the effects of war on children that said children, during wartime or not, bite and kick one another and steal toys without regard for the other children’s unhappiness. It said there was an ongoing war happening in the nursery. The outer world matches the real aggressiveness that rages inside every child. War is natural and therefore the effects of war on children were minimal. The authors said children arrive at shelters after their homes are destroyed and play merrily, and eat heartily, and this was proof that a 350-pound bomb does much less damage to a child than a divorce. And some of us agreed and felt better about the war and felt bad for Susan, whose husband was lost in the Pacific, and some of us felt angry at Myrtle for telling her husband she wanted to separate—Think of the children! we exclaimed to her, rattling the pages of the book in her face, but she would not listen.

  OUR CHILDREN WERE newborns, were toddlers, were in elementary school or in junior high, were teenagers or were in college and therefore forbidden from visiting us on the Hill or from even knowing where we had disappeared to. Sara and Moll’s daughter would be leaving Los Alamos for college at the end of the summer and would not be allowed to come back to visit, nor could we visit her. Until the war was over. Until our work here was done. How long would that be?

  A MILITARY PSYCHIATRIST came to town and asked if we wanted to have our children evaluated. We said yes because we wanted to hear from a professional how stunning our children were becoming. The psychiatrist gave them white paper and crayons and asked them to draw whatever they liked. Our children drew trains and Humpty Dumpty and the psychiatrist told us this meant that although our children seemed happy, they actually believed life was very hazardous. We frowned. We asked what we could do. But some of us thought, really, that perhaps our children were just perceptive. We could not disagree with our three-year-olds’ assessment. Life was hazardous. We thanked the doctor and we started questioning our children’s artwork anyway, because we were supposed to, and we asked ourselves, Are they happy? Really happy?

  THE PSYCHIATRIST SAID we should have taken longer to wean them. Or we needed to tell them more often how smart they were. Or we needed to be less anxious, and the psychiatrist suggested we make an appointment for ourselves to come back alone next Tuesday.

  Days

  THERE WAS ALWAYS something to get excited about, something to do, but many of us were getting bored. A secretary called, Fire! over the town PA system and we came running with a tub of dirty dishwater. A man had tossed his cigarette into a puddle of oil.

  WE HATED THE barbed wire fence, although some of us hardly noticed it with time. But for a few of us the barbed wire fence was a reminder of concentration camps and we felt ill whenever it, which stretched along the border of our town, came into view.

  MICHAEL, OUR HUSBAND’S friend whom we referred to in letters as our dour friend who misses New York, founded the Mushroom Society—a group that listened to Mahler recordings in the Tech Area late in the evening. And since many of us were not allowed in the Tech Area we stood outside the fence, near the north-facing windows, in the snow, to listen to the deeply serious and the utterly commonplace. The tentative measure of something slow to wake. The dark forest rumblings. Mahler’s sad, beautiful, and expansive music.

  SANDY’S FAMILY WAS moving into Bathtub Row and for housewarming presents we bought her towels with our own initials embroidered on them and said, In case you want to invite us over!

  WAS LOS ALAMOS a summer camp for adults? Some of us felt helpless at the arrival of unexpected guests, constant knocks on the door to borrow flour or to invite us to a bridge game, while others felt invigorated by it. But sometimes when our husbands tried to cajole us to go out and socialize with their friends we said, I’m in for the night—not feeling well, smiled, and settled back into the couch with a novel.

  IN MANY WAYS, life on the Hill was the same day again and again. In a closed-off community, small misunderstandings could quickly become melodrama. A couple of surely innocent details said to one person became a subplot worthy of Tolstoy, a subplot written and rewritten by other members of the town. If a few facts had to be overlooked for the purposes of good storytelling, they would be.

  AT A PARTY at the Director’s house Katherine pretended she was part of a conversation about potato casseroles but instead we watched her out of the corner of our eyes. She arranged herself to be standing alone with Henry, and we heard her ask, How’s Starla? with concern in her voice that we were sure she did not feel. Just fine, Katherine, just fine. If he got her hint, he rejected it.

  IN AUGUST WE heard news that Paris was liberated. Paris, we said, recalling the place fondly—the spring we studied abroad and shared a studio flat with a balcony only two could stand on, a loveseat of a balcony that looked into the attic apartments of the building across the way, where we could see, even if we did not want to, a particularly pale man who seemed to enjoy not wearing clothing. Even if we never lived there, even if we never visited, even if we knew Paris only in books, we thought we knew the café life of the 14th arrondissement, the academic life of the 5th. Paris, liberated, their motto standing true—tossed by the waves but never sunk. Though we loved Paris, when a parade was called that evening, only twelve people participated—suggesting how far inward we had turned, or suggesting we were tired of the Hill’s alternating routine of trumpeting and nail-biting.

  Exceptions

  OUR MOTHERS WERE ill or our fathers had birthdays and we could not visit. But we learned—in a way that we never wanted to—that there was an exception. We packed our suitcases and took trains to Duluth, to Los Angeles, past the soda shop where our first loves kissed us, past the service flags and blue stars hanging in windows—we could see who had gone off to war while we were gone—and past windows where blue stars were replaced with gold. Back into our parents’ houses, back into our mothers’ arms, to the funeral parlors of our hometowns, where we stared into
the faces of our own dead brothers.

  A FEW OF us got an exception of a different nature. Our sisters announced their sweethearts were coming home and they were getting married. Though our husband’s request for both of us to travel to San Francisco for the wedding was denied, a wife was permitted to go, and we busied our summer with correspondence to our sister about color schemes, florists, and menus. It was the first time in a long time we’d thought about the outside world. Searching through boxes in the back of our closet for nice gloves and a presentable dress for the wedding brought back memories of home. We could smell the sea again. How were the neighbors we’d left behind? Was the pharmacist still frowning as he counted pills? How was the butcher? Had the weeds grown tall around our house and was someone else living there?

  OUR PARENTS MET us at the train station while our sisters, weak from wedding preparations, were in bed with pneumonia. Their future husbands, who had arrived from the Pacific two days earlier, were lying in their own childhood beds across town. Our first thought about our parents was, They look tired, or, They look so much older, and they probably had the same thoughts about us, too.

  ON THE DRIVE home we chatted but only half listened and recall little—something about the neighbors’ dog, something about the tree in the front yard—but on our minds instead was the cool sea air and the familiar, cleanly designed bridges that brought out a feeling of grandeur in us as we crossed them, as if the feat of their construction was somehow ours as well.

  BACK IN OUR hometowns, past the doorman, the mailman, up the stairs, inhaling the bay, the bakery, the trash in the alley, the soft light, the sound of a foghorn. And up two flights or into the elevator we went. We closed the brass gate and looked above to see the white clouds of New York through the skylight, and we arrived at our door and rang the bell just because we could. We picked up the telephone to hear the operator ask us what number we would like to reach, and we dropped our suitcases in the entryway to our bedroom and remembered what this home offered that we had not been in for years: a shining porcelain bathtub. Our mothers kept our sons and daughters occupied while we soaked until our fingers and toes wrinkled.

  WE FOUND OUR sisters tired from their illnesses but ecstatic. They asked us for advice. We warned them of dehydration caused by nerves—drink water constantly—and we told them to take nothing as a sign, unless it was a good sign. On the eve of our own wedding our husbands woke with their legs as tight as statues, their veins visible like a colt’s; they woke and stood and collapsed on the bed and if we thought, Is this a sign? we did not say it, and our husbands did not say it. Anyway, really, it was not a sign, we told our sisters, it was our anxiety, it was dehydration. Drink more water than you think possible.

  Close Quarters

  WE WERE TIRED of borrowing Jane’s green dress, even though we told one another, It’s not the size of the wardrobe that counts, it’s the shape. We felt better about ourselves when we glanced at Ruby’s sagging hemline, when we considered Annie’s matron bulge.

  WE CONSPIRED TO stop wearing decorative hats and delicate stockings because this was the new power; to have been here longer was to have more authority. And one way we had authority was by knowing the fashion of this place. We wore blue jeans and cackled over the new girls who wore heels. Did you see her get stuck in the mud outside the post office? Poor girl. She’ll never get those clean! Or we tried to avoid this kind of talk.

  WE TOLD THE new arrivals—Pauline with the pink half-moon manicure that called attention to her stubby hands, Doris with the upswept victory roll, Betty with the calm voice—what was what in this town. Those are the bathtub houses, those are the four-family houses, those are the Quonset huts, and those are the trailers. We told the new girls, You are going to need a year’s supply of lotion for just one month here. We watched them notice the dryness and lick their lips. We thought of our own dry lips and hands when we first arrived and we thought, Silly thing, you are only making it worse.

  WE RECOLECTED HOW we, too, were horrified when we first arrived to see women wearing blue jeans or ski suits. How we cussed at the runs in our stockings created by brushing against a table, a piñon branch, or who knows what. How we were down to one pair of silk stockings with no way to get more. The fashion magazine Glamour came to Shirley in the mail and she read aloud to us: There’s no substitute for a daily bath as the groundwork of glamour! And we all longed for a bath we could not take, and Esther said aloud what we all thought: Oh, be quiet. And she shut the magazine.

  OUR ATTIRE TOOK on the drab camouflage of the surroundings; the beige and muted tones of the desert became our wardrobe—and we could see how this attire appeared to an outsider, to the newly arrived. There was the sunlight’s skill at color and though we were subtle, though we often blended into the background, we left our red lips on one another’s coffee cups and highball glasses.

  DORIS LED THE charge of wearing broomstick skirts and Indian jewelry, perhaps thinking it would endear us to the Spanish Americans and Indians. We agreed that if you were in the soup it was best to swim.

  SEPTEMBER CAME, AND inside our duplexes and apartments we heard the sounds of other families: thuds, bedsprings, a pattern of toy trucks being thumped on the floor, the rhythm of brooms, of vacuums, of steps, of typewriter keys. We heard timers, shower curtains, radios, faucets, the scrubbing of floors, our neighbors singing along. We heard the especially painful wails of children who were not our own.

  ON OUR NEIGHBORS’ radios, which wafted into our living rooms, inescapable, we heard the weather interrupted to report, instead, that U.S. forces had landed in the Philippines. These were routine interruptions, almost as regular as Bob Hope ending every show with Bye-bye, and buy bonds.

  IF WE JOINED the square dance group we made squaw costumes and wore heavy Indian jewelry. The colors of our husband’s badges were forgotten then, and we said it was the most inclusive place on the Hill, our square dance group, and we did not think about how those of us in this group were all Catholic. And no trailer mothers wanted or found time to lead the Cub Scouts, and so their boys were discouraged by some of us from joining the Cub Scouts. Nevertheless, Carol arranged for a sandbox and swing set to get their children out of the streets and a Quonset hut with a Ping-Pong table and a Victrola for the teenagers. We led the City Council and won the battle to keep our spare-room apartments as well as the fight not to expand the firing range.

  PERHAPS THE WACs thought we were prima donnas. Cecilia said they resented being told they were going to an island but had to come here instead. When we asked for carpet in the bedroom they narrowed their eyes as if to say our lodging was already too luxurious. If you want it you’ll have to buy it and install it yourself.

  WE DID NOT like taking orders from girls in khaki. We especially did not like WACs slamming their cash registers shut and shouting, You’ll have to get in another line. We were sure they did not want to be running the cash register at the commissary, but they had signed up for it, not us.

  AND WE THOUGHT the WACs who assigned our homes and our maids picked favorites, and we said we were snubbed by the WACs when, upon giving birth to a second child, we were placed in a home next door to a single scientist who practiced his trumpet each night.

  SOME OF US had the rare ability to project nonchalance, and some of us had the talent of spontaneity, and many of us knew how to give meaningful compliments. Some of us were said to be judgmental, and some us were called cynical by our husbands when we speculated about how the war would end. A few of us had the curse of truthfulness, which gave us little power.

  NO MATTER HOW alone we felt there were things we could never do as individuals. A woman cannot conspire with herself. Alone, we were not a pack, a choir, or a brigade. But together, we were a mob of women armed with baby bottles and canned goods, demanding a larger commissary, and we got it. We were more than I, we were Us. We were Us despite our desire for singularity. We were the Us that organized the town council and nominated Starla to speak for the group. Katheri
ne had wanted the role, we knew, and as much as we appreciated her entertaining stories, we realized, upon considering her for the role, we did not completely trust her.

  AS THE ONE most capable of spreading rumors, Katherine was possibly the most indiscreet. And what if her ecstatic utterances did not just sing out to the ears of the town but were also muffled into thick sheets spread over pine needles, lost between the tangle of brush and branches? There was no one else as adroit as Katherine, no one else better at prying without it seeming so and at providing evidence of those suspected of playing Musical Beds. Her loud voice should have given rise to other suspicions, but when we were in her company, we thought more of what she told us and less of what to think about her own marriage. Which is to say, some of us now suspected we had been misled.

  OUR CHILDHOODS WERE similar. Our childhoods were similar in the way that our parents were distant, or our childhoods were similar because our parents always thought we could do better, or our childhoods were similar because we wrote our mothers twice a week and we all wished we were back in Omaha. We were from a European country and we all did not understand why Americans announced, at dinner parties, that they were going to the bathroom.