The Wives of Los Alamos Read Online Free

the gravel. Our husbands led the way with a light. We walked toward our number written on a yellow piece of paper given to us in Santa Fe—our four, our number ten. It was a slanted piece of land and a piñon pine without a structure to sleep in.
     
    O UR HUSBANDS LED the way with a light, except they did not know exactly where our new home was situated, and so we moved forward and then retraced our steps. Someone called to us in the distance. The voice got closer and a man appeared, he was tall, and he said, Very sorry, we were expecting you later, it’s not ready yet, come to the lodge . We were cold, but we smiled even though it hurt our cheeks to smile, and we went into the lodge and made our way to our sleeping bags on the floor.
     
    T HOUGH WE DID not know it then, this was something men, women, and children across the West were also doing, in former horse stables swept out but still smelling, on gymnasium floors with a hundred others, with their one allowable suitcase, with a four-digit number pinned to the collar of their coats. We were white, or we passed for white, or we were not white, but we did not look Japanese, and we thought they went to a place where they could be protected from other Americans who might hate them because they were from enemy country. Because we did not know they would be net makers and would be protected by men who had lost their legs in the Pacific theater, what we felt was for ourselves, a bit of pity, and for our children, a bit of fear, and for our husbands, a bit of anger, and we undressed, and we tried to sleep.
     
    W E TOLD OUR children, This is an adventure! though we preferred the adventure of something new and exciting with the potential for a high return—a love affair, say—rather than a risky undertaking with a probably unfavorable outcome, like the Klondike gold rush. Our husbands saw our faces and said, You’ll love the country once you get used to it .
     
    W E TRIED TO sleep but we could not. We thought about our mothers who, when we got married, said, Marriage is not easy . We thought about our mothers who said, He is a good man , and our mothers who said, Be kind to him . Our mothers who said the secret to a good marriage was a clean house and a warm meal, our mothers who said the secret was keeping quiet, or our mothers who said the secret to a good marriage was picking your battles. Or, for one of our mothers, the secret to a good marriage, she said, was sex.
     
    W E THOUGHT OF our mothers who were right now on the back porch enjoying a cigarette, our mothers who were standing in the kitchen wrapping up a plate in tinfoil and putting it in the oven to keep warm, we thought of our mothers writing letters to our brothers who were crossing oceans we would never see. We thought of our mothers who were drinking gin gimlets with our fathers, who were dancing with our fathers at a party, who were drawing a bath, who were asleep. Our mothers who told us they were so proud of us. We thought of our mothers and we knew this was not our home, this New Mexico. Nevertheless, we would make the best of it.

Land
    I N THE MORNING we saw the view we had of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, the range jagged like shark’s teeth. And close behind us, we saw the green tops of the Jemez Mountains. The land was built up from eruptions and worn down by erosions. The Jemez volcano made a vast, flat meadow surrounded by rocky cliffs and in most seasons, when the wind brushed over the meadow, it became a rolling wave of grasses.
     
    W E CALLED WHAT we lived on—on the other side of the Jemez rim—a mesa, because we recognized the image from our college textbooks, or we called it a mesa because someone told us that was what it was. But it was not a mesa, exactly; it was a potrero , a dry tongue of land. The shaggy forest gave way to sudden cliffs and we could see we were isolated on three sides, like a high fortress with a deep moat. To mostly everything out there, we did not