TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

ONE SPRING NIGHT we got permission to use a military phone to the call the outside world and we stood with our husbands and dialed our parents’ number from the military police booth, and we looked up to see what looked like millions of stars, a pointillism we never saw back home and the connection was so scratchy, we weren’t even sure it was our mothers on the line or if they could hear us. We yelled, with our husbands, in unison, We’re pregnant! though of course our husbands were not pregnant, but at that time, before morning sickness, before labor, when our stomachs felt just a little hotter to the touch and only our sense of smell was enhanced, it was as if they, too, were pregnant with us.

OR THERE WAS a time before morning sickness and it did not just occur in the morning.

SOMETIMES,RATHER THAN calling, we wrote to our mothers and they sent back directives: Wash your feet twice a day. Drink a glass of wine each night. Go to bed hungry. Lots of milk. Lots of activity. Sex, but not in the last trimester. Name him Theodore, after my father. Name her Opal, after your dead aunt. Name him anything but Henry.

ALTHOUGH WE TOLD our mothers immediately, many of us did not tell one another until the fifth month. Maybe we hoped no one would notice until then because we were staying so slender. Or we did not tell because we had lost one before and we did not want to get our hopes up, or anyone else’s. We did not want to be offered condolences. We did not want to explain why our bellies were small again, but where was our baby?

SOME OF US squealed as soon as we missed a period and ran to tell the rest of us. And the second place we might run to was the Housing Office, where we would announce, I’m pregnant! or I’m having another one! because this might mean we would qualify for a bigger green house. The man at the Housing Office said, Ma’am, you’ll have to wait until we can hear the baby crying before you can fill out one of these forms .

OUR BELLIES GREW. Our husband’s spicy scent wafted to us from across a room and Roscoe’s litter box stank even when there was nothing in it. We requested our husbands find us milkshakes, iced tea, fried chicken, lemonade, and lentil soup. And some things on this list were impossible to locate, which made our want for them that much stronger, and other things we found rather intolerable—jalapeño peppers, grapefruit—though we loved them before. We swore we would never get pregnant again, and we hated being pregnant in the summer and how our backs ached, and we loved our pregnant bodies, how they made room for another life, how everyone told us we were luminous. We worried about our child having all his fingers and toes, and we sipped more iced tea and hoped he would come out soon. Or we wished it would in fact be a she and that she would get out of us already.

MANY OF US had due dates just a few days apart and it was comforting to know that Starla, Ruth, Alice, and Louise would all be in the maternity ward, too. What a calming thought to walk out of the house with nothing to do except this: give birth. The idea of two weeks in the hospital—a break from cooking, cleaning, and hosting—meant having someone wait on us: nurses bringing us dinner, bathing our babies, changing our sheets, and monitoring our health. It would be a vacation! Louise said, It’s enough of an incentive to keep me pregnant for a lifetime .

WE HELD AND received baby showers almost weekly, in rooms of tissue paper flowers and pink, yellow, or blue streamers. Some of us thought it was bad luck to buy anything before the baby was born, but others of us thought it was morbid not to and we extended our morning coffee by leafing through catalogs of strollers and bassinets. Though our homes were temporary, we wanted to paint, choose a crib, and consider wallpaper. Polka dots, stripes, flowers. We were told red was the first color a baby could see, and we thought we could use that as an accent color, but when we saw the red samples at a hardware store in Santa Fe we thought, blood, our brothers, the war , and changed our minds.

OUR CHILDREN CAME fast and two weeks early, came in the backseat before our husbands could get out of the driveway, on the bathroom linoleum we had installed ourselves. We went into labor in the kitchen, and our neighbor came to help us, and someone else ran to get our husbands from the Tech Area. And when our husbands came home they heard the first earthly wails of their new daughters, their new sons, their twins, and we saw terror and awe in their eyes.

OR WE GAVE birth in Army sedans on our way up the Hill, or at the hospital, right on time. A few of us pretended that we felt no pain as the contractions grew more painful, and we smiled serenely when our friends checked in on us. Or when our husbands came to see us on their lunch break we howled and they kissed our foreheads and apologized and said they were sorry but they had to get back to the Tech Area. And if this was our first birth, the pain we knew before contractions was actually not pain at all and most pain after childbirth was nothing. We learned labor was not generally a place for modesty, and if we were in the ward together we helped one another with compresses and conversation as best we could.

SOMETIMES OUR HUSBANDS were not allowed in our rooms even if we begged for them, and if they were allowed they came in running, looking more terrified than we felt, and it was us who had to comfort them, saying, between contractions, I’m fine. Really .

OR OUR DUE date came and went. We walked to the hospital, lay down, were gassed and cut open. We wanted to squat but were instructed to lie flat on our backs so the doctor could reach the baby more easily. We longed for our midwives trained in Tuskegee, who relaxed us by massaging our legs, who told us what to expect. We did not want drugs, but we were put under, and we have no memory of labor, except when we heard a cry, and being startled awake by the smell of coffee, and someone saying: It’s a beautiful girl! or, It’s a handsome boy! behind the first yowls of our newborns.

OR THE ROOM was silent and someone said, I’m sorry .

WE NAMED THEM James, Patricia, Mary, Robert. We named them Linda, William, Richard, Shirley. Betty, Diane, Harold, Douglas. Brenda, Frances, Carolyn, Henry. When we began there were twenty of us, then fifty, then the number of us grew too large to count, and in the first year alone we gave birth to eighty healthy children.

THE GENERAL COMPLAINED to the Director, Too many babies! They are taking advantage of us! You’ve got to do something about this . The Director replied, casually, I’m not going to interfere in the lives of adults.

WE LONGED FOR our mothers, who would console us, who would watch our children so we could take a shower, so we could go out with our husbands on a date, so we could take a walk without a hundred necessities that had to be met. We wanted help. Someone to wash the windows, the dishes, the bathroom. Someone else to use the mangle, someone else to iron our husbands’ shirts.

EVENTUALLY HELP CAME. They had glossy hair cropped at their chins. They had long dark hair pulled back or let loose. Some of us called them girls, the girls, except for Katherine, who called the girls helps and announced she should have as many helps as she was willing to pay. According to Ronnie, who was keen to the cost of everything, they earned three dollars per day.

THEY WERE TEWA women from the nearby San Ildefonso and Santa Clara pueblos who arrived by bus in the morning and disappeared by bus at night. Or they were Spanish women whose family homestead was nearby, or they were sixteen-year-old girls from St. Catherine’s Indian School coming up from Santa Fe.