The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  THOUGH WE BECAME friends quickly, for the most part we still kept things from one another. We told Mary that we felt we were incapable mothers and we told Wendy about the ongoing flirtation with Donald which is of course nothing! because these two friends were both shy and never talked to the others. Or late one night we confessed to Susan, which we immediately regretted, and when we saw her at the Director’s party the next day we blushed because she knew something real about us that we were actually ashamed of, and could we trust her? We told no one that we hated the family we had left in Des Moines, that we never wrote them and hoped they thought us dead, or that we felt bad about the way we had treated them now that we were untraceable, in a town that was not on the map, with our real names stricken from the record, for all this time. Or we decided to write to our family. To apologize. Because the censors, our friends, would read our letters, instead of saying we were sorry, we told our family how much we missed them, how we looked forward to talking with them when we could come home, how we’d say more later.

  Excursions

  WHEN WE WANTED to leave we were fingerprinted, and even then we could only go as far as Santa Fe. We were told, for the millionth time, secrecy was imperative. We were given pamphlets that said we were not to mention the topographical details that are essential to the Project. But because we did not know what the project was we did not know what was essential. Were the pine trees essential? The sunsets? The mud? When we traveled to Santa Fe we said as little as possible and felt painfully self-conscious.

  THE JOURNEY WAS rickety and we hated it, or it was thankfully long and we loved flirting with the GI who drove the bus. We wanted to go to the Indian market in Santa Fe, but some of us were afraid of contracting polio, though it never came to Los Alamos. Or at least we mostly recollect that, though Alice reminds us that the high school science teaching schedule had to be revisited when Cecilia, the wife of a young chemist and science teacher, developed some kind of polio and died. It was a shocking event for everyone, and now, oh yes, we remember, that’s right, that was quite awful.

  WE WERE TOLD to talk to no one, to instead just nod and smile. We came down from the hill with our scraggly children, and we were instructed to be only one thing: unfriendly. When asked where we were from we all gave the same address: Box 1663, Santa Fe. We told our children to lie. About what town they lived in, about what their name was. You are Donna, you are William, we would tell them. You are just passing through; you are visiting from Texas. When asked what was being built up there on the Hill we instructed our children to say, Windshield wipers for submarines. And when they did say this, the shopkeepers said, She’s a smart one! and smiled. The shop owners would see our children the next month, and the next, and each time our children would look down at the ground for their lies uncovered, or our children would tell other lies to cover the first ones.

  AND OCCASIONALLY, ON the sidewalks in Santa Fe, we ran into friends from our college days and we panicked. When they asked us to have a Coke with them we said yes and when they asked, How are you doing? and, What are you doing here? we stiffened and looked around and fumbled. We saw young men in snap-brim hats study us from store windows, and we felt their eyes on us, but when we looked back to see them again, they were gone.

  Waverley

  IN THE AUTUMN, when the aspens turned the mountains into multitudes of gold, we took walks alone. Although when we first arrived we thought hiking was boring, later we wanted to see all of the mountaintops. On the highest slopes, the small leaves of the aspens quaked. And we listened to them—they were such exposed things holding on and making vulnerable, fluttering music—and this quaking gave us a peaceful feeling. We stood there thinking of nothing except leaves, leaves, leaves.

  OR STANDING IN this grove brought out the melancholy in us, and we felt a rush of sadness, in our throats, in our stomachs, in our necks, but it, too, was not attached to any one thing in particular. It was just this, the aspen leaves, not falling, but making the sound of holding on.

  WE WALKED BACK home. We had a secret. We set the table and laid out the steak we had saved our rations for and sat down. But before the first bite, we announced, I’m pregnant! Leon smiled and got up and kissed us and looked at us, really looked at us in the eye for what felt like the first time in months or Sam got up and left the table. And we said, What should we name him? We hoped it was a him and we had science backgrounds so we thought it would be funny to suggest first names that were elements from the periodic table and we said, Uranium Fisher, and before we could say more our husbands put their hands over our mouths. We asked, through voices muffled by their hands, What’s wrong?

  SOMEONE WILL HEAR you. Keep quiet. They sat back down and stared at us. Somewhere the dry leaves were falling.

  Children

  WE SAID WE had four children including our husbands.

  THERE WAS A small body of water, a man-made pond, in the center of town, which our children used to ice skate on during the winter and swim in during the summer. They dug holes under the fences, stole wood from construction sites, and built forts on the other side. They climbed in and out of the barbed wire fence through a hole covered by a woodpile. We thought woodpiles were snake dens and we told them not to do it, but we knew they would, and we had our snake kits ready.

  MUD, MUD EVERYWHERE in the rainy summers, in the melting snow of spring, and our children played like piglets. Soon they carried pocketknives they got by trading candy with their friends, and we were afraid but we knew we had to let them be children. Once we found out from our neighbor that on their way to school, as they cut through backyards, our young boys slashed the underwear hanging on the clotheslines, and we took their pocketknives away.

  OUR BOBBIES PRETENDED to change flat tires, our Cheryls were the best skiers, our Michaels threw rocks at the garbagemen. They played Ring Around the Roses and held hands with other women’s children for the first time. They bobbed for apples; they made Valentines.

  OUR CHILDREN WOULD be in class and hear a big boom and ask, What was that? Over time they grew accustomed to it and like most children were preoccupied instead with their friends, with the girl who won the spelling bee, with what they might eat for lunch, with what fort they might build after school.

  THE FIRE CHIEF’S daughter was the most popular, our daughters told us. Our daughters just wanted to be left alone, wanted to read books, or wanted to be well liked, but they were foreign, they were not the fire chief’s daughter, they were outsiders because we did not go to church on Sundays.

  WHEN OUR DAUGHTERS, the talkative ones, weren’t doing well at school we met their history teacher, our friend Louise, after class. What is she doing wrong?

  She never puts her hand up in class.

  THIS WAS SOMETHING we could manage. We had been that girl, or we could not understand being that girl. Either way, when we got home we marched into our daughters’ rooms. I don’t care if you know the answer or not, you put up your hand. And wouldn’t you know, their grades in history improved.

  OUR CHILDREN ASKED us to fix their bikes and to replace their tires so they could ride to the stables and feed and exercise the horses. And once we did fix their tires they said they would rather walk. We told one another then, All boys should be buried at twelve and not dug up until they are eighteen. But we thought of the boys actually buried at eighteen, and we didn’t say it again.

  OUR CHILDREN FOUND shotgun shells they thought were empty and one child banged them against the ground; they exploded, they tore through Cadillacs, they knocked our boys back, two boys could not hear for a week.

  Pond

  WE WERE AT our children’s piano lesson when Sarah came running in to say Patrick was in the pond but not moving. The pond our children ice-skated on, the pond our children swam in.

  OVER THE MUD hill, in our galoshes, in our untied oxfords, we ran. Starla leading, Margaret losing her left shoe. Folded in a green wool blanket next to the pond, Ingrid was bundling him, shooing away anyone who came too
close. She swayed and rocked his long body as if he were still an infant. Kissed his forehead, his cheeks. It was, as we knew it would be, too late.

  WE WENT TO her. If there were a thing to say we would say it, but there was nothing. I’m sorry.

  BUT WE COULD stand at the side of the pond with one leg ankle deep in mud and hold her until her sobbing momentarily stopped, until an MP or hospital orderly took Patrick away. Blissful-heart, breaking hours, frail body, fainting body, we could never change what time, too, can’t: your own child, gone. We stood and we tried to tell her with our standing: she would survive.

  AT HOME, WE brought out the vacuum, though we had just cleaned the carpet that morning. Under the loud hum of the machine, where our neighbors could not hear us, we sobbed.

  Longing

  BECAUSE OUR HUSBANDS were hard to reach, and dinner was the only time we saw them, we planned lively tales to get their attention, which were usually dramatic retellings of the mundane activities of our days. Oscar got into the trash again, Maria had to be told twice to get the floor clean, Bobby threw a tantrum at the commissary. Occasionally our husbands had not heard the news, and we reported on war updates we got from the radio, or from the GIs.

  OR PERHAPS WE let silence shade the evening, and we felt that we were a portrait on the wall, more invisible the longer it had been in its location, and we felt we were no longer new, no longer different, no longer eye catching. We raised our pitch; we made our tone pretty and light. It was no use. We wanted a night out with our husbands, we wanted to be anonymous for a few hours, we wanted to flirt. We missed brushing off the men in line at the deli counter. Crocuses pushed up through the hard clay, and we longed to be longed for.

  SOME OF US did not want to acknowledge our longings, for what that might mean, for how we were weak to them. Others of us were more confident, were better fantasizers, could desire a piece of chocolate but could go without it—and so we announced, at dinner parties, in front of our husbands, Frank, my dear, I could eat you up.

  AT HOME, WHEN we wanted a diversion, when we wanted sensory stimulation, when we wanted exercise, when we wanted social interaction—perhaps we went shopping. Because we were frequent browsers we were confident in what we liked and we were rarely talked into buying expensive and ugly things and therefore we did not feel any remorse. But for some of us, if we did buy anything, or if we checked our watches and noticed, to our surprise, three hours had gone by and we still needed to think about dinner, we did not feel elation, but a heaviness, a guilt for what we did with our time. Sometimes we returned home with items we did not previously plan to purchase—houndstooth slacks—and these sorry items stayed in our closet, first in the front and then to the back—with the tags on, until finally, accepting our bad purchase, we donated the neglected item to charity.

  ON THE MESA, when we felt restless, sleepy, antsy, distressed, and bored we went to the commissary, which did not console us at all.

  Spreading Rumors

  PEOPLE WERE TALKING; it was our job to spread a fantastical rumor to confuse any spies and nosy neighbors. In Santa Fe they could see our columns of smoke during the day and our lights at night. And on occasion the sleepy town was overtaken with women who had confident strides, who bought up the town’s supplies of purses, children’s shoes, and spare parts for washing machines.

  SO THE DIRECTOR told us to go to Santa Fe and pretend we were tipsy. We were ordered to hide our wedding rings in our pocketbooks and lean into the ears of local men, to dance slowly with them until they wanted to hear what we had to share. We were instructed to say we wanted to tell them a secret. We asked in a voice we tried to make deeper, Do you ever wonder what we are doing up there? We were told to say we were building an electronic rocket ship. But these local men in cowboy boots were tipsy, too (we did more than pretend), and they wanted to tell us their secrets instead. They wanted to tell us their dreams for their future or what they had lost so far: I want to own a ranch. My ex-wife is good with the children. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m gonna get her back. And my kids. You’ll see.

  WE WERE BORED with these men, or we were intrigued, or we wanted to hear anything except their sad longings, which did not include us. We liked having our wedding rings in our pocketbooks for a couple of hours and we liked pretending, at least briefly, we were single. The men came in close—we could smell their aftershave, could feel their warm breath. We said to ourselves, It’s for the war effort, and twirled our way across the dance floor.

  Crossroads

  FALL PASSED QUIETLY but winter did not: 1944 was ending and the Allied troops were preparing to advance into Germany. Our maids came in the morning and told us their boys in France and the Pacific wrote letters that said they felt walled in by the jungle, that their ship would soon sail, that their destroyer had seen action and they were doing just fine.

  AND ONE DAY we heard that the Germans attacked in Belgium near Malmédy and Allied communication was cut. We wrote home inquiring about our friends, our brothers, and our cousins, as we often did when the news became too much. More updates came: that Germans dressed in Allied uniforms drove U.S. tanks, using white tape to falsely indicate minefields, which cut off roadways. An American troop, weak from the cold, took off their weapons and raised their hands to the sky. German troops told them to stand in a field near the crossroads, and shot the unarmed prisoners. We heard of prison camps, of people being underfed, killed, and used for scientific research. We thought, dirty Axis.

  THERE WAS THIS, and another fight on the other side of the world, in the Pacific, where Japan was occupying large sections of southern China. U.S. air forces were bombing Iwo Jima. We’d hear these things, feel rushes of emotion, or feel it was fairly normal at this point, and life resumed. A notice in bold to conserve water, a flyer for the latest movie, and the drama of the garbage collectors versus the neighborhood dogs.

  ON OUR WALK back from the commissary on Christmas Eve we saw our husband’s friend Robert packing two green suitcases and a canvas bag into an Army car. Robert, we called. Where you headed? It was possible he could be going anywhere—someplace he could not tell us—but this was not a weekend bag, this was, perhaps, all he owned. Home, he said. We gave him a look. He said he was worried about his wife whom he had left behind in Poland. But as he said this he did not look at us. Something seemed odd—was it possible he was lying? He had not told us of his departure earlier and this seemed to be quite sudden, but we wished him a safe trip. We relayed the news to our husbands that evening, who seemed surprisingly unsurprised.

  Parenting

  WE TOILET-TRAINED our children and felt good because we were doing something we could somewhat control. Our children got sick and we wondered how much their illnesses were caused by our own anxiety, as the psychiatrist had suggested. We fretted over their eating habits, and we took them to the hospital, and we were laughed at by Army doctors who said everything was normal. But we still felt something was wrong, though in most cases their appetites came back.

  WE THOUGHT SOME mothers were better than we were: some mothers could get their children to eat more of their dinner, some mothers could suggest that their children pick up their toys and make it seem as if the children had thought of the idea on their own and their children ran to put their toys away, and their homes were clean.

  OUR CHILDREN DREW us in purple skirts, in blue overalls, with orange glasses. They drew us in the backyard hanging laundry, in the kitchen with a highball glass, in front of the house holding their hands, with red flowers as tall as we were, red flowers that never existed in the front yard. They drew their fathers less frequently and we sometimes had to remind them to include their fathers in the drawing. But they never left out the neighborhood mutt that got into the trash and spread our dirty tissues across the lawn.

  OUR HUSBANDS BROUGHT home plastic objects in primary colors and we did not know that they were casings from parts of the Gadget. We saw them in a box and gave them to the children to play with, or we made Christmas or
naments out of them and proudly showed our husbands the colorful tree, and our own inventiveness. Our husbands stood stiffly and grimaced and asked us to take them down immediately.

  WITH OUR CHILDREN, our husbands used their belts often, or sometimes, or they would never think of such a thing after what their fathers had put them through. But they did, on occasion. Or their fathers had been gentle, had taken deep breaths when they felt most frustrated, and so they did that, too; our husbands, who did not spend as much time with the children as we did, were far more patient than we were.

  OUR HUSBANDS MADE meatloaf and we praised them profusely. Or they did the dishes, or they neither cooked nor cleaned. Some of our husbands were exhaustively tender: they listened as our daughters named every tree they passed, Maria, Theodore, and told their stories. That one has a twin brother and he hates all the noise. We should be very quiet now when we walk by him. We loved the first wrinkles that formed around our husbands’ eyes and we admired them as they carried our children to bed.

  OUR CHILDREN BUTTED heads and brought home lice. Our children got the flu and chicken pox but, thankfully, never polio, which was one of our biggest fears. An iron lung would not make the trip up these hills even if we could afford its price tag: the cost of a new home. Our children gave the Director chicken pox and until he was rid of it he went unshaven and grew a scrawny beard.