TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

AT DAWN, INGRID pointed and whispered Look! Far off, we could see the trees on the hillside, though the sun had not risen. It looked like a flickering bulb behind the hills. Would it stop? The cloud our husbands had made reached the natural clouds in the dawning sky. How far could it go? The explosion came to our eyes but not to our ears. Those asleep near us had no idea what was happening. The land was dark before, and now it was light and we knew: our town had made something as strong and bright as the sun.

WE STOOD HOLDING one another. We took deep breaths. We held our breath. We yelled. We thought it was awful, or triumphant, or beautiful, or all of the above. On this place formed millions of years ago by a huge eruption, our husbands had just made their own. We could not see what you can, our husbands jittery in welding glasses, pacing, saying, Now we’re all sons of bitches .

WE CELEBRATED BY toasting our men who were not there, toasting ourselves, toasting a hopeful end to the war. And we went back home and fell asleep in our beds, without our husbands.

ON SUNDAY THEY came home blind in one eye, or red-faced, as if they had stood in the sun all day. We thought they would finally tell us something but before we could ask any questions our sons or daughters interrupted by coming into the kitchen and saying, Can I have my peanut butter sandwich now, please?

AND WHEN WE gave them their sandwich and they walked outside with it we said to our husbands, What is it? And our husbands said, Let me get some rest. Then we can talk . Or our husbands came back smiling and gave us a V for victory sign. What have you heard? they asked us. We told them what we suspected. They mocked our ideas but told us to keep them to ourselves, so we knew we were on to something. Or our husbands ate chicken soup and went to bed. Or our husbands came home filthy and went straight to the shower. And while they were in the shower we gathered at Harriet’s. Can’t stay long, he’ll want to go right to bed when he gets out, but let’s have a drink in the meantime.

WE HEARD THAT the General told security officers to keep the explosion quiet from the wives. How little he knew. Harriet handed out glasses and we said what we would do when we returned home. We began to let ourselves, finally, feel the deep sorrow we had been fighting back, once we knew there was a good chance it would all be over soon. We still did not share our greatest secret, experienced by many but said to no one: how sometimes we felt deeply alone.

CAL ARRIVED AT Harriet’s door and we poured him a drink and pounded him with questions. He was a son of a missionary and grew up in Japan, and he told us what the multicolored explosion looked like up close, and he told us of the heat: A fiery eyeball . . . it grew arms, like a giant jellyfish rising from the desert. It was purple and went up and up. Made a rumbling whirl and all the mountains rumbled with it. My face was hot.

WE ASKED HIM, How will they use it? He said he could not say, which suggested both that he knew and that he did not know. He told us little that was useful, really, but we all still speculated about the end of the war. We went back home and nudged our husbands from sleep, and they said, Just be patient. You’ll know soon .

OR WHEN WE asked our husband what he had seen one husband said he could not tell us objectively, because though he saw the light, he heard nothing. He had been completely absorbed in something else. This was not surprising to hear. All of his attention had been focused on tearing up little pieces of paper and watching them fall, in order to calculate something. What something? we asked, but he replied, ever mysteriously, Nothing . Though he added, a bit bragging, really, that his calculations were nearly as accurate as precision instruments. And though this method could have seemed far too simple, we were used to our husbands finding plain ways to calculate difficult things, so of course their complete focus on little scraps of paper blowing back in the wind produced correct measurements. They shared what they were proud of, although it was usually too obscurely described to guess at.

ON MONDAY WE read the Santa Fe New Mexican . Amid news of cattle sales, a small mining disaster, and a horse thief on the loose we saw this: On early Sunday morning an accidental explosion at a munitions storage facility in the Alamogordo Bombing Range caused residents nearby to experience shockwaves . Because we were at least partially inside a secret, because our husbands were involved, we had the privilege of knowing this story was a lie. The girls came to clean Monday morning and told us their relatives’ homes farther south had broken windows. Some asked us if we knew what really happened. We were angry that the information we had was not the information the general public had. Or we thought it was best to maintain these kinds of secrets .

A WEEK WENT by before Beatrice came back. Beatrice! we called, in unison, from our front lawns. She told the General her father had had a miraculous recovery! She told us that before she left her husband had given her a code phrase. And when he wrote a letter to her that included the line, The cat cried all night when you left , she knew it was safe for her to return to Los Alamos. And here she was.

WE RECEIVED LETTERS from our brothers saying they were leaving next week for the Pacific. We hoped our husbands—and whatever they were testing—would hurry up. We told one another it would all be over soon, but of course, none of us were certain.

AND ONE AUGUST morning while we were checking on our flowers, Eleanor peeked her head out the front door. Her hair was still up in curlers and covered with a silk scarf colored with purple lilies. She called from across the street, Turn the news on, Barbara—it’s amazing. Maybe it’s all over, maybe we will all go home , and shut the door.

OR GENEVIEVE TAPPED on our window at ten thirty a.m. She shouted, though we were right in front of her: Our stuff was dropped on Japan. Truman just announced it. Just came over the paging system in the Tech Area . That’s what they must have exploded last month . That’s what she said, Our stuff . Any other word, like bomb , was more than we were ready to admit to; or any other word, like bomb , still felt illicit. We could say it, but we could not say it, either.

WE TURNED ON the radio and heard the newscaster, Kaltenborn—a commentator we appreciated for his consistently more detached and objective perspective—say: The first atomic bomb . . . equal to twenty thousand tons of TNT. A population of three hundred fifty thousand people killed by one bomb. A radius of one mile vaporized. We could hear Kaltenborn’s voice quiver—it never did this—and part of us was sure we were dreaming. This can’t be real , we said, more to ourselves than anyone else.

OUR HUSBANDS WHO could not repair a clogged shower drain. Our husbands who miscalculated the heat loss of old windows versus the cost of new storm windows and left us cold all winter. Our husbands who could not swim or drive a car, who refused to kill the moths that swarmed into our bedrooms.

FOR SOME OF us, our first thought was, It’s over! Our husbands rushed home to listen to the radio while we made lunch. Our children came out from their bedrooms and asked, What is an atomic bomb? We did not know for certain so we looked at our husbands and said almost as a question, That’s what your father made ? and our husbands looked at us from across the lunch table and said, It is .