The Wives of Los Alamos (5 page)

M
ANY OF US
hated the women scientists. And the women scientists hated us, or they had better things to worry about. We tried to be their friends. We invited one of them to lunch but she was busy. We despised what she knew and how she laughed at our questions. How she went on hikes with our husbands without us. How she carried herself with the knowledge of things we did not know.

T
HEREFORE, A FEW
of us flirted with
her
husband, another scientist, at cocktail parties, after he had two drinks, while she was in the restroom; we flirted until we thought we could have him if we chose, and we winked at her when she returned to the conversation.

O
R WE TRIED
to keep our enemies closer than our friends. We brought over corn bread. We asked about her daughter, who was homesick, or her son, who was getting in trouble at school. We offered to make soup. We listened.

O
R WE HAD
little patience for petty competitions for power among women. We were preoccupied instead with the fate of Europe, and with our husbands and other scientists and their wives we talked about the war, Germany, and the suffering the Nazis were bringing into the world.

W
E DID NOT
all agree about the women scientists. Margaret thought Joan Hinton was nice enough, even though most of us said to one another,
Joan Hinton needs to pull down her skirt and stop flirting with Frank
. Frank was Louise’s husband.
Oh, Frank
. There was something refined about him, even in the summer with his shirt off, under a car, or playing the guitar. We could tell by how our husbands held their heads when speaking to him that he was respected, even if we did not know exactly what he did. And Frank, unlike our husbands, never seemed fettered, never seemed as if the pressure of this town, or this war, got to him. We, too, lingered on Frank.

From Fields, from Concrete

W
E WERE WARNED
by our mothers, our grandmothers, our uncles, our fathers, our priests, and our rabbis not to marry them before the war was over; they worried we were making a hasty decision; they thought time would change our minds. Our fiancés were men they did not like, or they loved the men we chose but they thought we were too young, or they wanted us to finish college first. And when we did marry them we were told,
Well, Virginia, you’ll need a broom and a dustpan.
Perhaps we did not marry our first loves—men who in our memory were reduced to caricature—the athlete, the class clown. We married the scientists instead, men with thick heads and scrawny bodies. Or we had always loved the scholarly ones most of all.

O
UR HUSBANDS CAME
from small towns, from large cities, from fields, from concrete. We met them on boardwalks in Atlantic City, on football fields in Iowa, at cafés in Berlin, at scientific meetings in Moscow. They were disqualified for the draft due to rheumatic fever as a child, diabetes, being overweight, being underweight, asthma, deafness, or poor eyesight. They spoke several languages, they were aggressive at sports, they loped across the street, they shined with knowledge. They thought we were beautiful, they thought we were smart, they thought we had soft breasts, they thought we would make good mothers.

W
E MARRIED THEM
weeks or months after Pearl Harbor—in spring, summer, fall, and winter—when our West Coast hometowns were declared to be in a state of emergency and all citizens had a curfew of ten o’clock. We wore smart white suits, or dresses our mothers made, or dresses we bought in Milan or Paris. We were married in parks, in churches, in synagogues, and in courthouses with our sisters, our mothers, our fathers, and our friends. We were married in the presence of neighbors, distant family members, our mother’s bridge partners—people we were obligated to invite though we did not really like them.

I
N THE AIR
was the threat of every man leaving, of every man being a hero, of every eligible bachelor dying—these threats made our fiancés more desirable to us, our love more urgent. We were ready to decide something very large about our futures.

W
E WERE FEATURED
in the celebrations section of our hometown newspaper with a paragraph about our wedding, what we wore, what we were doing now, and what our parents did. We were Audreys and Susans and we carried bouquets of white orchids surrounded by stephanotis. Our bridesmaids wore French blue chiffon, or gray tulle, and held yellow cascade bouquets of gladiolas and daisies. Or we wore cotton and did not tell the celebrations section that under our dresses were our worn-out saddle shoes. Afterward, we held small receptions at hotels, in church basements, and in our parents’ backyards.

O
UR BROTHERS SAID
we looked like movie stars, like angels, like ourselves, like ourselves but prettier, like our mothers. Or our brothers were late to our weddings because they were taking the officer candidate exam. Or our brothers were not there to see us wed—they were in a bunker in Europe, they were at Army gunnery school. They were Navy bombers, and on our wedding day the newspaper reported:
A Navy patrol plane with ten men aboard has been unreported since it took off on a routine training flight Friday and it is presumed lost in the Gulf
, and we did not hear from our brothers on our wedding day, or the next week, or the next.

O
UR PARENTS CRIED
; our parents’ friends told us how much they loved weddings because they got to feel as if they were renewing their own vows, too; we looked around rooms and lawns and churches and we could only see the smiling people, and we felt an abundance of love, though photographs later might show frowns or boredom.

N
OW WE THOUGHT
we had lost our glow but only from lack of sleep or because of the desert air, and we thought our husbands looked more distinguished these days, or less wild in the eyes, or more so. We felt in control of ourselves, we felt hopeful that we had made the right choice, we felt weary, we felt all these things at the same time, but more so: we felt we could not turn back.

Winter

 

W
INTER ARRIVED AND
our husbands were issued baggy overalls that came up to their chest and strapped over their shoulders, a heavy down coat, and a snood with a chinstrap. They looked like zoot suits for polar expeditions. Our husbands modeled this outfit, along with their shatterproof glasses and black shoes with thick soles that they said could not conduct electricity. We wondered. Where were the tender bodies of our brilliant husbands?

 

W
E TRIED TO
forget there was a war going on, and we had our own battles here on the mesa, anyway, but our daily lives were punctuated with news from the outside. British bombers raided Berlin in daylight for the first time and Germany was losing in Stalingrad—these things were hard to picture, so we thought of what we knew of those places before the war, how one summer we walked from one end of Berlin to the other admiring the architecture and history of such an old place; how in the early morning the smell of baked bread wafted through the streets. Berlin, our summer love.

 

W
HILE WE SLEPT
the snow piled high outside our windows. We woke to see a coyote stretched out on the white lawn and wanted to enjoy this sight with a steaming cup of coffee. But, when we went to pour water into the percolator, only a mud-colored spurt of liquid came out of the faucet, followed by a chugging sound, and then nothing.

 

W
E CONCLUDED THE
pipes must have frozen, and we were right: by midmorning we saw the military hauling buckets of water from the Rio Grande, forty miles down the Hill. No coffee for us for a while, nor could we brush our teeth. And though we had escaped the spring and summer sandstorms, the coal that fueled our furnaces was making a thick layer of soot on our cars and our windows. It was as if black muslin lay over the snow.

 

A
ND WHEN THE
Jemez was covered with snow we skied on Sawyer Hill with our children while some of our risk-taking husbands, bored by the same pattern of up and down that comes with alpine skiing, gathered groups to go on cross-country explorations further into the hills. They broke trails, climbed steeper mountains, and were happy when they could come home and announce they had tired out all of the men younger than themselves.

Our Husbands

O
UR HUSBANDS DREW
us graphs instead of writing us love notes, graphs that marked their love for us on the y-axis, and our time together on the x-axis, with a line rising exponentially toward an increase in love. Our husbands had salty necks, had holes in their pants. Our husbands were handsome, but their handsomeness was of a different nature now: they had a secret they would not confess. We gave our husbands glances that said we trusted they were making something of themselves.

T
HEY WERE NO
longer Doctor or Professor, but Mister. Instead of physicists and chemists, our husbands were called fizzlers or stinkers. We knew they worked in a lab, because they called it that at first, but soon the name was changed to the Tech Area. We heard it was dirty inside, that the dress was casual, that the people were talented and strange. They had arithmetic competitions to see who could compute the fastest. They picked the locks of one another’s file cabinets to prove they could crack any code. Or instead of appearing competitive about science, our husbands battled fiercely over Ping-Pong. They walked the halls and beat bongos to help them think.

O
UR HUSBANDS SAID
At any rate
, while we said
Nevertheless
. They doubled back on their thinking—they asserted, then considered, then found something contradictory and refuted what they initially claimed. Their arms gesticulated wildly when they were excited, or had an idea, and we had to be careful that they weren’t holding a screwdriver, a drink, or our young children.

M
ANY OF THEM
cared a lot about utility and nothing for appearances. If it were their choice our bookshelves, dining room chairs, and coffee tables would all be made of industrial materials like steel. Thankfully for us, these materials were difficult to come by during the war.

A
T SIX IN
the evening they would, usually, drift back from the Tech Area looking wild, talking their own language,
sciencese
, or talking about how to win at poker, or how to hunt wild turkeys. The words we could say became less and less technical and the words we could not say grew larger. We could not say
fission
, a word we overheard often when our husbands were graduate students. Our husbands said
Gadget
, and talked about
issues with the Gadget
, but what
was
the
Gadget
? We did not know. When no one was home we whispered their real names, and our own:
Dr. Fermi, Mrs. Fisher, Enrico, Jane, Jane Marie
.

T
HEY SQUINTED. THEY
ate slowly. Their gait was uneven. They stooped. They asked forgiveness rather than permission. Henry with his leather elbow patches. Enrico with his rolled-up khakis. Louis’s willowy frame in blue jeans. The Director’s black porkpie hat becoming faded and crumpled. Clarence’s piano playing, Frank’s deep laugh, Paul’s shy smile. Our husbands, the only cellist in town. Our husbands, as playful and naïve as our little boys, our husbands deep in thought, our husbands walking into telephone poles, our husbands’ ongoing drama of the misplaced reading glasses. From the Alps, from the lowlands. Our husbands returning from canyon hikes with arrowheads and blisters. All of them in silly hats singing at parties with delight, though their voices were bad. Our husbands who rode bikes through the mud and snow and insisted, despite what the General said, that they were not a motley crew.

T
HE GENERAL DESCRIBED
them as longhairs, for how they did not keep their hair cropped short but instead let it sometimes fall across their foreheads and into their eyes. They said to us,
We aren’t oddballs
.
We aren’t a bunch of crazies
. We laughed, or raised our eyebrows, or nodded. Many of us were not the kind to regularly agree with our husbands. Instead when they argued something we found counterexamples and asked questions that would get them caught in their own logical fallacies. They kept us sharp, too, though we complained about their corrections: like how alpenglow was not an
optical illusion
but rather an
optical phenomenon
.

H
OW WELL OUR
husbands knew science determined their status, which was indicated by how much access they had to secrets. We learned after the war that their security access was marked by the color of their badge. They wore white badges or they wore blue badges; they knew what was going on, or they only knew what they needed to in order to do their job. We knew close to nothing, though we speculated about who knew the most. Many of our husbands were physicists, and some of us guessed by who spent more time thinking than talking who had the high-status position of theoretical physicist. Some men we knew from before Los Alamos and we were happy to see them again. We could remember bits of their previous interests: one had investigated cosmic rays and now spent his days in a shack at the bottom of a canyon, another had conducted experiments related to radioactivity and, like our husbands, went to the Tech Area each morning.