The Wives of Los Alamos Read Online Free PDF

cold cream that made our foreheads shiny and our faces smell like, according to our husbands, rotting flowers , and we had to choose between our husbands’ noses and our future faces.
     
    I N THE DAY we wore gingham, at night we wore our prewar silk stockings, our prewar silk dresses. If we were the same proportions and lived close to one another we swapped clothes to make our own wardrobes appear more extensive. We admired Starla’s purple felt swagger brim hat, Louise’s ruby feather skimmer, Helen’s red-checkered skirt, and Margaret’s canary yellow scarf. We had not accounted for the harsh high desert nights and for the first weeks we were cold in our cotton. In the chilly evenings we envied Ingrid’s wool cardigan in blush, which we were unable to buy ourselves due to the rationing. And, we could not believe it, but we even envied—on days we carried two armfuls of groceries home after the sun went down—the Army’s bulky drab-colored coats.
     
    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,