The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  MEANWHILE, WE WERE featured in Mademoiselle. We went to work for the FBI. We wrote textbooks, led high school physics programs, became president of women’s universities, divorced. We made pineapple upside-down cake for the first time in years.

  WE LEFT AND moved to places where air raid sirens blared, where we dropped and covered, where we feared someone else would use what our husbands first developed on us and we practiced drills to move our families quickly into nuclear fallout shelters.

  WE LEFT AND said the Hill was an anthill and the bomb was its queen. But many of us told everyone, when we got back to civilian life, There was no crime at all in Los Alamos. We all kept our doors unlocked. It was the safest place to raise a family.

  WE LEFT HAPPY, we left relieved, we left thinking we had been a part of something unique, we left with doubts about our husbands, or about ourselves, or our country, or all of these, or none of it. We left wanting most what we had once had in the middle of the howling night, our friends: Louise, Starla, Margaret, Ingrid. We left pregnant, we left tired, we left, in some ways, just as we arrived: dusty and in need of a shampoo.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Julie Barer, who saw the project’s heart and was essential in opening it up. Thank you to Nancy Miller, for your trust in the book and for those few, but exacting, suggestions. You two together, along with the teams of Barer Literary and Bloomsbury, have created the dream experience for a first book.

  Thank you George Gibson, Alexandra Pringle, Helen Garnons-Williams, Summer Smith, Cristina Gilbert, Patti Ratchford, Lea Beresford, Nikki Baldauf, Elizabeth Van Itallie, and Emily DeHuff. Thank you William Boggess, Gemma Purdy, and Leah Heifferon. Thank you Heather McClenahan, Rebecca Collinsworth, and all of those involved with the Los Alamos Historical Society for honoring and archiving so many lives at Los Alamos. Thank you Jane Viste, who after a reading of mine probably most focused on the aesthetics of Cherenkov radiation, expressed interest in these scientists’ wives and thus moved my attention.

  Several books provide inspiration for this project, among them: Patrik Ouredník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. More than several books compile a brief bibliography of Los Alamos or the period: Phyllis K. Fisher’s Los Alamos Experience, Jane Wilson and Charlotte Serber’s Standing By and Making Do: Women of Wartime Los Alamos, Eleanor Jette’s Inside Box 1663, Bernice Brode’s Tales of Los Alamos: Life on the Mesa 1943–1945, Leona Marshall Libby’s The Uranium People, Laura Fermi’s Atoms in the Family, Emily Yellin’s Our Mothers’ War, Studs Turkel’s “The Good War”, Jennet Conant’s 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, Jon Hunner’s, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community, and Edith Warner’s In the Shadow of Los Alamos: Selected Writings.

  Thank you to my family, both here and gone. Thank you, Dr. Hall and the infinite empathy of the maternity ward night shift at Swedish.

  Thank you to the late Elspeth Pope for seeing me fit for residency at Hypatia-in-the-Woods when I had just started this project, and thanks to the University of Washington in Tacoma for a Cascadia home. Thank you to the University of Denver and Washington University in St. Louis, for the time to write and the community to write within.

  Thank you to my teachers, who are my friends, and my friends, who are my teachers: Shena McAuliffe, Jesse McCaughey, Jen Denrow, Sara Witt, Yanara Friedland, Poupeh Missaghi, Joe Lennon, Sarah Vap and her Salish Sea Workshop, Todd Fredson, Eliana Schonberg, Rachel Sullivan Adams, Molly Langmuir, Cynda Collins Arsenault, Brigid McAuliffe, Mary Jo Bang, Kathryn Davis, Laird Hunt, Eleni Sikelianos, Selah Saterstrom, Adam Rovner, and Brian Kitely.

  Thank you to my husband, Jerritt Collord.

  A Note on the Author

  TaraShea Nesbit was born in Dayton, Ohio, one of the lesser-known Manhattan Project locations. Her writing has been featured in the Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other literary journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Denver and is the nonfiction editor of Better: Culture & Lit. A graduate of the M.F.A. program at Washington University in St. Louis, TaraShea is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Denver.

  Copyright © 2014 by TaraShea Nesbit

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

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  Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York, 10018.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Nesbit, TaraShea.

  The Wives of Los Alamos : a novel / TaraShea Nesbit. — First U.S.

  Edition.

  pages cm

  eISBN 978-1-62040-505-5

  1. Married women—New Mexico—Los Alamos—Fiction. 2. World

  War, 1939–1945—New Mexico—Los Alamos—Fiction. 3. Los Alamos

  (N.M.)—Fiction. 4. Deception (Military science)—History—20th

  century—Fiction. 5. Atomic bomb—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3614.E467W58 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2013036239

  First U.S. Edition 2014

  This electronic edition published in February 2014

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