The Wives of Los Alamos Read Online Free Page B

slept on these mattresses before us, who had carved their names into the frame. What had these beds and these men seen? Where had they traveled?
     
    T HE SMALL WOODEN buildings were all painted the same olive color, which matched the dusty pines and in some seasons blended in with the background of the mountains. Green walls, green chimneys, green tin. One of us set a pot of red geraniums in front of the door so our children, our husbands, and ourselves could recognize our home. One of us put a black bowl of pinecones on the porch. Because the streets were not named and the houses were identical, when we met someone at the commissary and invited them over for tea, or for coffee, the only way we could describe our home was in relation to the water tower, the highest thing in town: West of the water tower, third house on the right. East of the water tower, the last house on the left before the road ends . It was a landmark that mocked us—a water tower that only sometimes held enough water for us to bathe or flush our toilets.
     
    O UR HUSBANDS WERE unshaven and within a few days became bristly; for the first time we could not see their strong jawlines, and their faces moving in close, for a kiss, caused our own to sting.
     
    I N THAT FIRST week we were invited to learn how to run our clothes through the hand-cranked mangle at the community laundry. Before this, we had other people do our laundry, or we had electric wringers, and for many of us our memories of those hand-powered water extractors were of the heavy crank and our mother’s warnings not to get our hair caught in it. We were still wearing high heels and they stuck in the mud and we pretended that we learned what we were taught about the mangle but instead gathered our husband’s shirts in a wet bundle and carried them home, smiling sourly. We hung the clothes on the line and ironed the cotton shirts on our kitchen table. Because our clothesline was erected in one of the only spots on the mesa that was not in direct sunlight, in the morning we brought our children’s cloth diapers and our husband’s boxer shorts in as square little ice boards.
     
    I T WAS OUR first day, our second day, our hundredth day, and bells sounded. Bells sounded in the morning to tell our husbands it was time to go to the Tech Area, bells sounded in the evenings to tell our husbands it was time to get back to the Tech Area after dinner, bells sounded if there was a fire, bells sounded if we were out of water, bells sounded, bells sounded.

In the Day, in the Night
    L OUISE PLAYED POWER forward for the University of Nevada’s basketball team and helped win the state championship. She is a great shooter , her husband bragged. We weren’t surprised—she was a tall, strong woman who seemed to find a solution to everything, as if the belief that she could made it so. And though the weekly dust storms got the best of several of us, when it covered her house Louise just hauled her sofa out into the front yard, pounded the couch cushions clean again, and lugged it back inside without complaint. Others of us said, What’s the use? and only cleaned the sofa when it was our turn to host a party.
     
    M ARGARET WAS VERY pretty, very pregnant, and very helpless. She cried easily—about the dust, the snow, her husband—it did not seem to matter: each day there was something one could be upset about, and she was always upset. She appeared in the evenings puffy-eyed with a scraggly ponytail, dragging herself from the door to the porch post and leaning against it. Her whole body pouted. We guessed a smile had crossed her face on only a few occasions. Since she was our new neighbor we invited her to tea and introduced her to the other girls we were getting to know, but she complained about the same things, again and again, and there was only so much we could do.
     
    D OWN THE STREET was Katherine, a tall redhead with a thin beak of a nose, who seemed to divine the secret activities in the Tech