TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

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.

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.

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 ornaments 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.

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.