The Wives of Los Alamos Read Online Free Page A

exist. The light shimmered and stretched our own views. And in the eastern side of the sky we saw the alpenglow, a bright red band on the horizon, as if the sun were setting in both the west and the east, and we did not think about the optics; we just thought it was beautiful.
     
    T HE SPARSE LANDSCAPE felt isolating and disturbing. Or to see so much with so little in it was relaxing, and we admired the quiet. Some of us could understand why, before us, people from big cities visited here to regain their strength in the fresh dry air.
     
    W E SQUINTED AND wrapped a scarf over our foreheads. Some of us did not burn easily but many of us did. We came from sunny places and we thought the light was bright and cheerful or we came from overcast places and saw the light as harsh and comfortless.
     
    O UR HOUSES, CARS , and skin appeared covered by another skin, a skin not our own but the sandy, warm-toned skin of the desert. The spring rain created a carpet of yellow and purple wildflowers we could see in the distant desert meadow. And after the rain, the sagebrush filled the air with a smell like camphor—sweet, but medicinal. Rainstorms soaked our chimneys, put out our water heaters, and turned the clay of the volcanic soil into a slick adhesive our children’s shoes got stuck in. Our husbands made a boardwalk of pine trees so we could get from the car to the front door.
     
    S OON THE FLOWERS were withering in the hottest, driest days of summer, and we were hot inside our houses and we were hot outside and we were sweaty and the soil clung to our wet arms, to our lips. We tried to read books in the yard or we began a victory garden, planting tomatoes, spinach, green beans, watermelon, and basil to make our rations go further. Though it rained, rapidly, in the midafternoon, we were not accustomed to gardening in a desert climate and we watched as nothing sprouted; we watched as our victory garden did not grow.
     
    T HERE WERE BUILDING crews, bulldozers, cranes, the sounds of trucks, the clouds of dust, the roar of diesel, the chaos that comes with construction. The few dignified, original stone and ponderosa pine buildings—the lodge and a dozen homes—were, within weeks, surrounded by barracks, apartments, Quonset huts, trailers, and prefabricated houses.
     
    A T THE HOUSING Office in a piñon-shingled garage next to the water tower on wooden stilts, we argued with Vera, a Women’s Army Corps member, who did not want to grant us a bathtub. As politely as we could muster we thanked her for nothing and walked back to what she said was ours—a thin-walled little house. Our loveseats and wingback chairs and record players and books were still all piled in the middle of the living room—we had stalled unpacking in hopes we could persuade the Housing Office we needed one of those stone houses with a bathtub. We plugged in the radio for comfort and heard, for the first time, or the first time in a long time, cowboy music. The jealousy of lost love, the sorrow of being a poor man, men telling women, through jolly beats, to put down their pistols—all of this was interrupted by the news that Mussolini had been arrested. And as we looked around at the only things we had to set up—our dining table, our sickly cactus centerpiece, our dishtowel napkins—we hoped this meant we would not have to stay in New Mexico for very much longer. Five days later Italy did surrender, but several cactus centerpieces would die before we had hope that Germany and Japan might give up.
     
    T HE SANDY SOIL came through cracks in the windows and doorframes, and gathered on the furniture, the floor, and our Army-issued cots, which were stamped used . Gusts of sand made outlines of our bodies on the sheets. We stared at the used stamp at the foot of our beds. Eventually we learned that used did not mean it was recycled, but stood for the United States Engineering Division. But they were used: our beds still bore the names and ranks of boys who had