WE HAD CHUBBY children we tried to put on diets, feeding them broccoli and American cheese and corn and canned peaches and No more seconds! and Go outside and play! but they remained plump and we thought it was in order to defy us. Many times, we were right and many times, we were wrong.
TIME MOVED SLOWLY—but the notches on our children’s closet doors indicated that time was in fact passing, as did the war updates: Hitler had ordered a retreat on the Western front, having run out of fuel to keep the tanks going, and no one nearby was willing to give him any. To many of us this seemed particularly humorous.
ONE AFTERNOON, A man in a snap-brimmed hat knocked on our door and asked if he could come in. Once inside, he told us that the neighbor girls were playing in the front yard of the apartment across the street when a man tried to coax one to come with him behind a toolshed. One girl ran for her mother, but by the time the mother got there, the man was gone. Had we seen anything? We reached for our sewing basket. Earlier that day, when we retrieved our clothes hanging on the line we noticed that our own underwear were slashed. We handed them to the man in the snap-brimmed hat. He held them up, inspecting. I’d just thought it was the neighbor boys that cut through the yard. After contemplating our panties for what felt like far too long, he replied, No pocketknife did this. Please don’t repair them. We may need them as evidence, and handed them back to us. The man said the matter was not to be discussed so as to avoid causing panic in the town. We thought of some girls who might not run home to tell their mothers. Some girls obeyed all kinds of commands, not just ours. And when he left we gazed out our window, watching the sunlight reflect off the snowy hillside. We got up and took our revolvers down from the shoebox in the closet. Or we got up and put our son’s baseball bat by the sofa. We locked the door for the first time.
OTHER TIMES WE were angry at our children for distracting us from letter writing, from dinner, from our own thoughts. Sometimes we were angry at our children for paying no attention to us, for rolling their eyes, for locking themselves in their messy rooms. We had hoped it was our parents that were the problem with our own youthful detachments, not us, but our children were showing us the truth. They pulled away when we tried to kiss them and yet they still cried quite easily. Their smiles turned to smirks and they learned to talk out of the side of their mouths. We grew nervous in their presence and felt prepared for them to mock us at any time. We tried to reduce our children to something manageable in our minds, not what they were, exactly, but something different, simpler.
THERE WAS NEVER any quiet; our bathroom doors did not lock, our children came in asking, When am I going to be old enough to carry someone on my back? And When can I climb on the roof ? And When can we go see Grandma? And the older ones asked: Why can’t I stay at Madeline’s tonight? Why can’t I go to the dance? When can I shave my legs? What is Dad working on?
OUR BOYS STARTED growing tall and saying No and meaning it. They were bored, too, but differently.
OUR CHILDREN TALKED back to us in Spanish slang they learned from the carpenter’s children, or the Tewa they learned from our maids and we did not understand, though we were pretty sure we were being insulted.
WE HOSTED PARTIES for the teenagers of the town, mostly the children of other people—the carpenters, the cooks—and we taught the boys to dance as a way, we thought, to keep them out of trouble. And if our own sons and daughters weren’t teenagers they began the dance of hitting and punching one another, no longer knowing what to do with their affections—their bodies growing into shapes foreign to them. Their voices, when they addressed us, were frequently close to shouting.
SOME OF US were older and had boys who did not smile, and they wanted to be kissed, but not by us, and there were only ten girls in their class to choose from, they said, because the Mexican girls, black girls, and Indian girls did not count. Some of us disagreed. But many girls were not interested in our boys; instead, they folded their skirts over at the waist to make the hem shorter for when a soldier walked by, and they tried out new smiles they learned about in our women’s magazines. A few of our daughters didn’t seem to be thinking about these things at all and instead brought home posters that said wipe that Jap off the map and when we asked where they got it our daughters said, The post office gave it to me, and they taped it to the ceilings above their beds.
Blame
WE WERE WASHING dishes and we saw the overflowing trash can, or a child came in asking for milk, and we were reminded of something significant: we could never be separated from our children or our husbands, entirely. At times we heard the rise of our husbands’ voices lovingly in our heads, when they were away at the Tech Area for what felt like weeks, coming home only to eat dinner, and we felt as if we were widows. We would be alone hanging curtains and look back at our well-sewn, well-hung yellow drapes and hear them say, You’re an ace, Mary, and recall fondly, or sadly, their voices.
THERE WERE OTHER problems. Some of our husbands would not let us sleep until we made love, and we were tired but it was easier to turn toward them than to feign sleeping, so we turned toward them. Sometimes in those moments we left our bodies for a few minutes, making love as if we were in another room, and we watched ourselves, distantly, and then they snored, and then, finally, we got some sleep.
OR OUR HUSBANDS still came up behind us in the kitchen and delighted us with their bodies and we turned around. Our children were in bed, were outside playing, were staying the night at a friend’s house. We pushed into our husbands, we pulled them in, we moved their hands up our skirts.
OR WE BECAME more like roommates or friends than lovers. We cuddled, and that was all. Or we did all of the above, at different intervals, in different arrangements, for years.
ON WEEKENDS WE would take hikes with them. They talked and talked about the war and Germany but their voices were sometimes lost in the rush of the river. We enjoyed nature’s sounds taking over theirs, and we let them talk, and saved our own breath for the ascent back up the canyon. Sometimes between the canyon walls, we made echoes of our own raised voices. You always. I never. I can’t believe. You. You. You. Perhaps we were frustrated by the heat, were dehydrated, or were tired; we blamed our fight on the wind or the water, on a bad night’s sleep, on our frustration with the children. But it was this: We could not leave. Or it was this: We feared the enemy was getting closer.
Instructions
A FEW OF our husbands read How to Win Friends and Influence People and offered to pay us a dime for every time they broke one of the rules, such as Never tell someone they are wrong directly, and Start with questions to which the other person will answer yes. We said we did not want to help because we did not want this persuasion directed at us. Although maybe there were things to appreciate: Don’t criticize and Pay little attentions.
SOMETIMES SPREADING TIME with our husbands and one another brought out the worst in us. And occasionally the best. From time to time we said Why certainly and we felt Of course not. Sometimes we felt so familiar, too familiar, and our own words frightened us when they came from our mouths, as did the actions of our hands: it is those we are closest to that we can harm the most. And occasionally, during a fight, we were quiet, and we waited out the silence until our husbands could no longer stand it.
OCCASIONALLY THIS TECHNIQUE did not work; our husbands could go without speaking, in the humming uncomfortable for days. We lost, and we showed them how we needed them more than they needed us. Some of us had parents who lived for decades at this low simmer, some of us had parents who might, on a good day, a holiday, say, or for the birth of a grandchild, finally play a loving tune on top of that hum, but they never, ever, forgot the solemn chord.
Other Women’s Children
WE HEARD MOTHERS scream at their sons, we saw four-year-old boys walk out into the street and we saw fathers throw them against the house as punishment. We watched the windows shake. We saw children sobbing in front yards and hated what we saw, but we did nothing except talk about it. Our chil
dren watched this too and said, Poor Michael, and cried. Our children picked up new phrases from these violent observations, or from these children, such as What’s eating you? Those parents worked with their hands, and we felt safer knowing they were not one of us. Or we thought they were like us and we felt cowardly for not doing anything.
THEIR CHILDREN GOT in lots of fights. Their children were picked on, their children made wooden guns and wanted to be just like the soldiers. We did not know our children called their children Okie and hillbilly, or we did notice because, when we were angry that the garbage truck did not come all week, or that they let their children run wild, some of us said these names, too.
THE OLDER CHILDREN were children of machinists, construction workers, and secretaries. We sensed that they missed the activities found in other towns—team sports, cheerleading, band—and we feared them and their boredom. We were anxious about the boys’ fascination with all things Army; we let the girls babysit our children, hoping they would read the New Yorkers left lying around or explore our classical record collection. The carpenters’ daughters were just as smart as our daughters, and they got scholarships to college, and they went. Or they were afraid of leaving their family, what was familiar to them, and they married GIs instead.
AND WHEN OTHER men spanked our children for climbing on their swing sets we fumed and related the story to our husbands, who said we needed to relax. We were angry about the lack of social services, especially when our children reported dreams of that bad man who spanked them, because particularly then we felt helpless. The military police had been called on these men several times, but these fathers said, No, I didn’t do that, and the MPs just went away.
WE LOOKED CLOSER when we walked by the officers’ hall in midday and saw Army men and WACs, men and women enjoying the day dancing, and part of us wanted to join them in the fun, but we could not. We worried about what our husbands would say, and we had children to take care of, and come to think of it, who was watching these women’s children?
When We Woke
EVEN WITHOUT THE holidays, there was continually a cause for celebration—the Allies beat the Axis, or we beat the Army by getting artichoke hearts stocked at the commissary, by extending the length our golf course, or by decreasing the size of the firing range. We went to parties every weekend throughout the year, sometimes not knowing exactly what was being celebrated.
AT THE BRITISH parties we sipped mulled wine and listened to recitations of limericks. If we were given to self-pity, we resolved it through dancing, and through liquor. We undid our top buttons and smiled brightly at the few GIs who were invited or who were not invited but came anyway, at our husbands, at one another, and we danced.
THE FLUTTER OF the night felt a bit like college, when young men in starched white shirts or wrinkled cotton stood on front porches and asked us our names, or where we were from. And we replied with Iowa or Sally, common words, and felt the quiet embarrassment and excitement of what those questions might lead to.
WE DANCED AND sang along to Hit That Jive, Jack. We swayed to I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen. We did not like This Is the Army, Mr. Jones and slowed our movements, stepped aside, asked our partners if they would be so kind as to refresh our drink.
WE LEARNED HOW to drink cocktails before dinner. We learned how to notice the flirtations between people; we talked about who was now sleeping with whom and, if the bedrooms were currently occupied by revelers, about Musical Beds. We were beginning to prefer the company of other women and because we spent so much time with them, we noticed more acutely when we were interrupted, when the men turned toward one another and how some women let their voices trail off. At dinner parties when our men were on one side and we were on the other we gathered around fireplaces and talked about gas shortages, water shortages, and people. Kitty Oppenheimer always seems to have plenty of gas in her tank, Mildred said, and Katherine added, Enough to get her to Santa Fe and back twice a week. What is she doing down there? And Ingrid told us, I saw Frank pay a morning visit to Margaret’s house yesterday. Saw him while I was having my coffee. He sure stayed awhile.
WHEN AT A party late, when they insisted on dancing and stepped on our feet, when they slumped in a chair, we grasped our husbands by the hand. They asked, Where we were going now? and we said, It’s a surprise, and we took their hazy eyes to bed. Sometimes we wandered into someone else’s house thinking it was our own. And we saw someone reading a book on a sofa that looked like ours but wasn’t, and we apologized, saying, So sorry! and closed the door.
WE FELT THE freedom of living in isolation—no university president attended our parties, no department chair wife was around to observe the liberties we took with our dance moves or cocktails, and so on the weekends, fenced in as we were, we celebrated and square-danced, we let go. We often woke the next morning with no water and spent the day reeking of rum, and our lungs burned from smoking so many cigarettes. We wanted what we could many times not have: coffee, a shower.
LATER, ONCE THE secret was out, the rumors that we played Musical Beds got around and when we arrived back home our aunts asked us, gravely, Did you ever go to those parties? And we responded, Aunt Hilda! Don’t be silly.
1945
Cities
WHEN WE HEARD Dresden was destroyed by firebombing some of us thought of the time our fathers took us to the market there, the pink heads of pigs all in a row. Or we thought about the time we toured towns by train with our parents, riding through the dense conifers of the Black Forest, arriving at a small town, a name we can’t recall, watching an older man cross the street in lederhosen, just like a postcard, and how the tall mountain framed him. One shop had all the quaint cuckoo clocks in the glass storefront timed exactly, and at noon on a Monday afternoon we watched as the balcony doors of fifty tiny wooden houses opened in unison, and fifty windup birds popped out and made the same resonant cu-ckoo.
THE BUILDINGS OF Dresden we saw in the newspaper were now the skeleton constructions of stage props—only one side of a church, a bank, and city hall stood—it was a city of leaning towers with steel wires hanging down from the fifth or fifteenth story like willow branches. But also it was a city of statues appearing desperate and ominous above the rubble, including Hercules, Martin Luther, and several pairs of lions with long flowing manes.
A CITY, GONE, and the Allies did this. We asked some of the wives, Can you believe it? Dresden! And some women said, Thank goodness! They should just bomb Germany to bits; nothing else is going to stop the war. And some women said, Isn’t it just awful. It was times like this we found an excuse to borrow a horse and head south and down to Edith’s house under the Otowi Bridge, because unlike us she moved to New Mexico years ago to avoid the pressure for success she felt in the East. We were introduced to her through the Director, who had invited us for dinner at her place: she occasionally hosted an invitation-only restaurant. Edith, and her Indian friend Tilano, who on holidays gave our children bows, arrows, and turkey feather headdresses, and for us, fireplace brooms and bundles of piñon kindling tied with red ribbon.
IT WAS RUMORED she had a nervous breakdown and her parents agreed to let her go west instead of continuing to be a teacher. She read everything, was often writing in a journal, knew the names of every bird and plant we saw, kept a vibrant garden, was curious, listened as if she cared, and rarely said a bad word about anyone. She was an island of culture in the wilderness. Tea? she would ask us before we got off the horse, and soon we felt better.
BUT WAR NEWS was inescapable and frequent: by late February, U.S. troops had raised their flag at the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, where the rocky slopes were red with the blood of soldiers and civilians.
Lookouts
FINALLY, TO OUR joy, spring arrived. The daffodils emerged. We heard the U.S. invaded Okinawa and kamikaze pilots flew their aircrafts into Allied ships. We thought about those we’d once loved, or loved presently, who were out there somewhere floating in the ocean.
; AND THEN THE news of President Roosevelt’s death. It was frightening that he died before finishing his vow to end the war and we certainly were not comforted by the newscaster’s report that the new president, Truman, was very cognizant of his own shortcomings. But the balance sheet of the Allies and the Axis in Europe looked better for our side, and in late April, Mussolini was assassinated.
WOULD THE WAR in Europe be over? We grew hopeful, but not too hopeful; we did not want to be disappointed, and there was still the Pacific to think of.
TWO YEARS IN the New Mexico sun had worn our faces. And even though we got caught in late afternoon thunderstorms there was also the threat of a lightning strike and the gusty winds spreading wildfires through dry grasses. On a clear day we could see billows of smoke a hundred miles away, and in the mornings the wind carried the smell of burning wood so close to us, it was as if we had had a campfire the night before.
WE SAW HORSES and coyotes, and for the group of us that rode outside the fence together, greater adventures. We saw mountain lions and snakes and once, at the top of the ridge, we saw a man with binoculars studying the buildings of our town below. One of us called, Spy! and he looked at us and ran. We galloped toward him into the rough rock and it proved too much for the horses. When Betty drew a revolver we all exclaimed and while we were exclaiming the man went out of view, but Betty was nonchalant and said, I take this everywhere with me, and put her gun back under her shirt.
The Wives of Los Alamos Page 10