The Wives of Los Alamos (10 page)

I
F IT WAS
evening when the military police stopped us, we had trouble holding our skirts down in the wind. We fumbled in our purses. They leaned in close to hear us say the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language: their own name.

W
E HAD A
fondness for the engineering division, who were the military, too, but only because they were forced to be. They were men with undergraduate degrees in engineering, and surely they annoyed MPs and sergeants with their disheveled look—their sloped shoulders from stooping over a table all day, their thick glasses, their gangly bodies with paunchy stomachs. And when they marched on weekends with the rest of the military, they were placed in the back as the caboose, and each of their steps was miraculously out of sync with the others.

For some of us, the proximity to a large number of single men revived our girlishness, and we curled our hair, or ironed it, applied lipstick, and smiled at ourselves in the mirror: to have a husband and a fantasy, to be admired at the age of twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-three, this felt like a good thing.

Women's Army Corps

O
N MONDAY MORNINGS
the trashcans outside the WACs' dorms were full of Coors beer cans. There were three hundred WACs and they had showers and two bathtubs to share among themselves, which they told us about on several occasions. Their hair could not touch their collar; they wore beige skirts and oxfords.

 

A
T NIGHT WE COULD
hear them gathered around campfires singing songs we did not know the names of but once they were in our heads we could not get them out:

 

They get us up at five a.m.

To scrub the barracks clean.

Then what do we do when we get through?

We scrub the damn latrine!

 

A
ND WHEN WE
were certain we could not take any more singing about military life we heard them marching and chanting:

 

Duty is calling you and me.

We have a date with Destiny.

Ready, the WACs are ready.

Their pulses steady, the world set free.

 

T
HEIR VOICES CARRIED
as they marched from the campfire to their dorm door and into their rooms.

 

T
HERE WAS NOT
a bed check on Saturdays and on their days off they went to Santa Fe, perhaps watching the sunset on the roof of the La Fonda hotel, as we wished we could. One WAC, Pat, was rumored to, on her breaks, sleep in the stable next to the horses.

 

S
OME WERE TEXANS
who said
little bitty
and
right nice
and had names like Bobbie-Joe and Jimmie. Or they were former schoolteachers named Esther or Marian, from Indiana or Illinois, who said joining the Women's Army Corps was the right thing to do. They organized the motor pool, shot dice, played the pump organ at church services, and called our husbands over the townwide intercom by their last names—
Mitchell, Farmer, Perlman
—but more frequently, about ten times a day, they called out
Gutierraz
and
Marsh
—the two maintenance men. They operated the telephones, censored our mail, and ran the PX, the diner where our husbands got their afternoon coffee and listened to the jukebox. They said they were proposed to once a month because there were ten military men on the Hill to every one of them.

Thaw

I
N APRIL THE
cottonwoods in the valley began showing their green buds and the commissary carried huge hams for Easter. We reserved Fuller Lodge for Passover seder and prepared hundreds of matzo balls that the chef boiled in water instead of chicken stock. People said they tasted
Excellent!
but they did not. The chaplain, who was not asked to speak, gave a long talk about marauding tigers in India. We said it was a SNAFU, his speech and the matzo balls, an acronym we learned from the military:
Situation normal, all fouled up
.

I
F 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.

W
E 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.

W
E 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

T
HE 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.

H
E 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.

A
ND 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.

H
E 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

W
HEN 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.

O
UR 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.

O
UR 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.

A
ND 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

T
HE 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.

T
HE 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.

O
NE 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.

B
UT WHAT COULD
we do?

W
AS 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?

W
E 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.