Read Online The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tarashea Nesbit
Tags: Historical
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A ND LATER, AS we got to know one another better, as we became bored, as we continued to dislike ourselves, or as we became frustrated with being stuck in this town for so long, or we could no longer hold in the secrets that we did know, we said the obviously not nice.
W E TALKED ABOUT Jack’s wandering eye and William’s wrinkled, high-waisted slacks. One of us said, The General would do anything for a chocolate turtle—I heard he keeps a stockpile of them locked in his safe. One of us said, I smelled liquor on Mrs. Oppenheimer’s breath at breakfast on Tuesday .
W E TOLD THESE stories at each other’s kitchen tables, the same Army-issued square tables and the same stiff chairs we had ourselves. We felt savvy and funny—leaning in to Esther, to Patti—entertaining them with what we had heard, or suspected. It was like the beginning of a love story, these intimacies, and we had missed them since we’d moved. We shifted from talking about people in power—the Director, the General—to talking about husbands, and finally, to talking about one another. We speculated on who was depressed, who was disappointed, who was deranged, who was playing the game of Musical Beds. Mary has not washed her hair in a week. Tom has another family in San Antonio. Lisa disappeared with Jack at the Director’s party last night.
W E TALKED ABOUT who got their hair color from a bottle—insisting we would never—and who let the delivery boy put his hand on her knee. They kept us awake at night, these rumors, and they brought some of us closer together, and they built trust, or destroyed it, and they passed the time. Because of the lack of insulation in the duplexes and apartments, at least one of us could hear which man cussed at his wife or which man slapped his children after dinner. We knew which woman burst into tears when a military patrolman mentioned his concern about the increase in syphilis cases. We knew which woman disappeared when she was accused of telling secrets. We got our information from the GIs, from our maids, from our cooks, and later, from our own children, but we rarely got anything from the female scientists, or from our husbands, who were the ones who actually knew all the real secrets. Everything else we knew in about an hour.
W E WERE A group of people connecting both honestly and dishonestly, appearing composed at dusk and bedraggled at daybreak, committed, whether we wanted it or not, to shared conditions of need, agitation, and sometimes joy, which is to say: we were a community.
Intimacies
I T WAS THE time of year when the burrowed passions grow arms and legs—they have woken up, they have started to stir. Violence, thirst, and restraint had wintered away. It was the time when windows are left ajar and a person desires to exit rooms through those windows, and does. Around us, at night, above us, in the apartments, wafting through our windows: the beds creaking.
I T WAS SUNDAY ; spring light slanted onto cheeks, with time there had grown a certain looseness to our talk. Starla wanted to discuss the nature of love and said as much by asking, as she looked up from her gimlet, to Dorothy, and then Stan, the newcomers, How did you two meet? It was a seemingly innocuous question. Stan ran his hand across Dorothy’s arm. They smiled as couples do. Perhaps this was what Starla wanted: to hear a story that would break her heart.
T HE HEAVY SNOW of winter gave way to abundant wildflowers. Purple pasques blanketed the melting slopes. Though we grew from five to at least fifteen hundred people in one year’s time, and we soon felt we knew everybody, of course it was not so. The town felt like ours and we called it Shangri-La, or Sha-La for short, a name we meant, at different moments, both in earnest and in jest.
W E LIVED IN Los Alamos but we simultaneously lived elsewhere. The past in Chicago, the future in Cologne. Our differences were heightened by proximity. The
A ND LATER, AS we got to know one another better, as we became bored, as we continued to dislike ourselves, or as we became frustrated with being stuck in this town for so long, or we could no longer hold in the secrets that we did know, we said the obviously not nice.
W E TALKED ABOUT Jack’s wandering eye and William’s wrinkled, high-waisted slacks. One of us said, The General would do anything for a chocolate turtle—I heard he keeps a stockpile of them locked in his safe. One of us said, I smelled liquor on Mrs. Oppenheimer’s breath at breakfast on Tuesday .
W E TOLD THESE stories at each other’s kitchen tables, the same Army-issued square tables and the same stiff chairs we had ourselves. We felt savvy and funny—leaning in to Esther, to Patti—entertaining them with what we had heard, or suspected. It was like the beginning of a love story, these intimacies, and we had missed them since we’d moved. We shifted from talking about people in power—the Director, the General—to talking about husbands, and finally, to talking about one another. We speculated on who was depressed, who was disappointed, who was deranged, who was playing the game of Musical Beds. Mary has not washed her hair in a week. Tom has another family in San Antonio. Lisa disappeared with Jack at the Director’s party last night.
W E TALKED ABOUT who got their hair color from a bottle—insisting we would never—and who let the delivery boy put his hand on her knee. They kept us awake at night, these rumors, and they brought some of us closer together, and they built trust, or destroyed it, and they passed the time. Because of the lack of insulation in the duplexes and apartments, at least one of us could hear which man cussed at his wife or which man slapped his children after dinner. We knew which woman burst into tears when a military patrolman mentioned his concern about the increase in syphilis cases. We knew which woman disappeared when she was accused of telling secrets. We got our information from the GIs, from our maids, from our cooks, and later, from our own children, but we rarely got anything from the female scientists, or from our husbands, who were the ones who actually knew all the real secrets. Everything else we knew in about an hour.
W E WERE A group of people connecting both honestly and dishonestly, appearing composed at dusk and bedraggled at daybreak, committed, whether we wanted it or not, to shared conditions of need, agitation, and sometimes joy, which is to say: we were a community.
Intimacies
I T WAS THE time of year when the burrowed passions grow arms and legs—they have woken up, they have started to stir. Violence, thirst, and restraint had wintered away. It was the time when windows are left ajar and a person desires to exit rooms through those windows, and does. Around us, at night, above us, in the apartments, wafting through our windows: the beds creaking.
I T WAS SUNDAY ; spring light slanted onto cheeks, with time there had grown a certain looseness to our talk. Starla wanted to discuss the nature of love and said as much by asking, as she looked up from her gimlet, to Dorothy, and then Stan, the newcomers, How did you two meet? It was a seemingly innocuous question. Stan ran his hand across Dorothy’s arm. They smiled as couples do. Perhaps this was what Starla wanted: to hear a story that would break her heart.
T HE HEAVY SNOW of winter gave way to abundant wildflowers. Purple pasques blanketed the melting slopes. Though we grew from five to at least fifteen hundred people in one year’s time, and we soon felt we knew everybody, of course it was not so. The town felt like ours and we called it Shangri-La, or Sha-La for short, a name we meant, at different moments, both in earnest and in jest.
W E LIVED IN Los Alamos but we simultaneously lived elsewhere. The past in Chicago, the future in Cologne. Our differences were heightened by proximity. The
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