The Wives of Los Alamos Read Online Free PDF Page B

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
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    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?
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    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;