The Wives of Los Alamos Read Online Free PDF Page A

Area. Really coming to a boil at South Mesa , she’d say to us, and sure enough later that afternoon we would hear explosions coming from South Mesa. We never figured out how she knew these things, but we concluded her husband told her. He must be very important. Her psychic abilities became even more mysterious when we learned, after the war, that her husband actually had the lowest level of security clearance. Who was she a private companion to?
     
    A ND THERE WAS something magnetic about Starla—it was easy to see why Ventura High voted her most likely to be president. She had a way of being friends with everyone while still retaining her own strong opinions. She never told people directly they were wrong, but they were often persuaded by her. In the mornings, just after sunrise, we could see her through our own gauzy, off-white curtains, and through her own, dancing—her daily exercise. She did not move gracefully at all. She was not petite, she sometimes had hamburger stuck between her teeth for whole dinner parties, her arms and legs leaped without any distinguishable rhythm, but she seemed herself somehow, and that was beautiful.
     
    W HAT ELSE WERE we? Energetic, disheveled, determined, and disagreeable. After teasing our friends’ husbands about their politics—either they were too sympathetic of communism, or they were too trusting of capitalism—a flash of anger would cross their faces and they would tell us we were quite the character .
     
    W HEN HE LEARNED that the Fuller lodge was built by Michigan investors as a resort area but no one wanted to vacation here, we were not surprised. Instead the vacation homes with bathtubs became sleeping quarters for the Los Alamos Boys’ School, a place designed to help harden the young boys of elite East Coast and Midwestern families. All those boys sent to the Southwest to be toughened up: boys who would go on to be presidents of Sears, American Motors, Quaker Oats, who would become the owners of the Chicago White Sox, who would become famous writers of the sixties counterculture. This location of hardening was now ours.
     
    B ATHTUB ROW, LOUISE deemed those older homes. Those houses were made not with tin and drywall but with stone and hardwood, and also had a claw foot tub, when all we had was a stall shower lined with zinc. Those women—the Director’s wife, three women who were also scientists, others who were somehow considered favorites—took baths that most of us could not, those women got a good soak, those women, we told one another, had maid service more frequently than we did. Those women, those women . And if our husbands told the Housing Office they needed a bathtub to get new ideas, it was still no use. Our status symbol was who had a bathtub, even though there was rarely enough water to fill it. Because of the water situation, the most impolite thing we could do was flush another woman’s toilet. Some of us, the spiteful ones, would use another woman’s restroom and exclaim, Oh my, I can’t believe I forgot! but no one believed them. When we ran out of water, we wore kerchiefs on our heads, or refused to leave the house. And many of us chortled at the wives who would not socialize on account of their dirty hair.
     
    W HEN THE WATER came out of the faucet it often came out brown, sometimes as thick as mud. We were told to take good citizen showers , to soap up and then turn on the shower. Many times we got prepared for a good citizen shower and the water never appeared. And our bodies were left cold, soapy, and sticky and we never took a good citizen shower again.
     
    B Y LATE SEPTEMBER we got news that though Italy had surrendered to the Allies, German paratroopers had rescued Mussolini and now the Germans occupied Rome, with Mussolini, some said, serving only as the figurehead. Our hopefulness of getting out soon was gone. The dry air cracked our lips and Katherine swore she gained a new wrinkle each month because of it. We applied thick