TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

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. Katherine 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.

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.

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.

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?