OR WE WOULD have worked—we’d been a telephone operator once—but our husbands did not think it was a good idea, they thought wives should stay home, and we could see their point to some degree, and though we wanted to get out of the house, though our children were away at school most of the day, though we were stirring, stirring, all day, alone, though it would have been better for us, we did not work.
WE HAS DEGREES in chemistry and when we said, Okay, thinking we would get a chance to do real research in the Lab, we were asked to take a typing test. And that’s when we said, No. We said, No, and we were punished with less help. We were tired of being told by men what to do and we said, No. Or we had two toddlers and were not interested in a career in science anymore.
THOSE OF US who worked did so because we were curious or bored, or we did not know how to decline the offer and not feel guilty. And if we did work we were told on our first day not to ask any questions and we didn’t—much.
WE WERE MAIL carriers and we took long trips down winding cliffs to gather the mail in Santa Fe, escorted by an armed guard. We had mailbags locked to our wrists, and only one person—another woman—had the key. We were scolded by the other women if we did not deliver all the mail immediately. We monitored each piece of outgoing mail and sometimes corrected the grammar, or let the writer know that though she said a check was enclosed, she had forgotten to include it.
WE WORKED IN rooms full of only women and we were called calculators. We sat six to a table at calculating machines and processed ten- to fourteen-digit numbers. We clanked and banged continuously. We solved differential equations without access to the physics behind them. We made plots of French curves. Eventually, IBM equipment replaced us. We thought our biggest accomplishment was not our calculations, but the survival of our families in this wild military camp.
AS PART OF a volunteer community protection team, we issued passes to new residents and listened for spies, though we had no idea what we were listening for. We were given a list of watchwords, words we had been hearing around town already. Uranium. Fission. The Gadget. We were told to look for nervousness, to listen for inflection, and we thought we would be brilliant at this kind of work: we had a lifetime of experience in paying attention. But we never caught a spy.
SOME OF US did things no one will ever know about because we did not discuss our jobs with anyone. There was a fracture: the tired wives who worked in the Lab and had security clearance and the tired wives who did not work in the Lab. We all worked, of course, cleaning, cooking, bathing, loving, but some of us fabricated lenses using molds that reminded us of cookie cutters. Louise went into labor while at work but monitored her contractions with a stopwatch and still finished her experiment before leaving the Tech Area.
WE WERE SCIENTIFIC librarians, personal secretaries, switchboard operators. The Director gave us fatherly advice about the pressures of wartime marriages. We sang Happy Birthday to senior scientists over the PA system.
AND AFTER OUR shift Clara came by and asked us what we did all day and we shrugged, noting how we hated that shrug from our husbands, how we were doing the thing that annoyed us the most, but Susie was polite and knew we could not say and therefore did not ask us. At night we were exhausted and told our husbands, What I need is a good wife.
When the Ground Trembled
THOUGH WE NO longer kept our fingernails clean, many of us still measured our waist each morning. We wanted to accentuate broad, wide shoulders, which we rarely had. We wore trousers and wedges and boots because we were often on the side of the road with blown-out tires. We still had our fur coats, which lost tufts if we were not careful, but most of us were careful because we knew replacements were impossible. Because buttons were popping off our children’s clothes and getting lost in the mud, we switched to zippers.
WE FORGAVE ONE another in public, quickly, even if we did not truly feel the forgiveness in our hearts. And even if we did not fully forgive, we still brought over soup and muffins when their children were sick, because we saw how Geraldine was cut off from afternoon cocktails at Katherine’s for, as Katherine said, flirting with her Charlie; we saw how Grace was snubbed for not sending a written thank-you note after a dinner party Edna hosted. We knew these isolations would keep us out of knowing things. We did not want to be like Florence, pretending we had to weed in the yard all afternoon because no one invited us over.
WE NEEDED MORE information, or we were concerned our children would not have any other children their age to play with, or we were bored but not lonely, or we were desperately lonely.
WE WENT TO Lisa, one of our old friends from Chicago who happened to be sent here, too, and told her our grudges, one at a time. Katherine couldn’t see why kindergarten would not take her child even though he was not potty-trained. Rose complained that Starla was taking a lead role in the social activities while she was surely the better qualified.
MANY OF US preferred the wives who seemed to have natural curiosity, who asked, How do you think that is constructed? and instead of calling for their husbands to fix the stove, pulled it out from the wall and first attempted to discover how it operated on their own.
AT NIGHT, AS our husbands snored, we read books on loan to us from friends, sent to us by our parents, checked out from the library, mailed to us as part of our Book-of-the-Month Club subscription. We read stories of women who followed their husbands on unknown adventures, like Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure, about a Kansas teenager who married a photographer. Together they traveled to Borneo, Kenya, and the Congo, then, in their fifties, near retiring, pondering whether they should have had children, their commercial flight to California crashed. Her husband died, but Osa lived another twenty years. Had we married misadventure? Because we were no longer state citizens, we could not legally vote, get divorced, or obtain a fishing license in the state of New Mexico.
THE STRANGER,THE Little Prince, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Madame Bovary, Native Son, The Grapes of Wrath. Deep within ourselves, we were waiting for something to happen. Our greatest, grandest, most prolonged story: waiting. At times, we became tired from the reading, we wished the next day was already over. But eventually the muscles in our necks relaxed and we slept.
MORNINGS WE WOKE and hoped something would arrive for us, but rarely did anything arrive. Because we felt powerless, we went to war over milk shortages, water shortages, maid services, and unfair housing assignments. We said, Someone with one child should not have more help than someone with two. We said, A family that needs only two bedrooms should not get a home with three. The commissary should carry bottled artichoke hearts, the movie schedule should be changed, the neighbor’s dog snapped at our child and should be put down, we need a shoe repair service, we need faster mail service, the public laundry is overcrowded, the rifle range is too close.
WE THREATENED TO strike unless more maids became available. We tried to master cooking on a temperamental stove but we had no eggs and we howled until the veterinarian brought us some. We commissioned our boys to build us a golf course and when we needed to make a fence around it we stole wire from the Army supply office. We created an orchestra, a square dance club, a jazz band, and a tennis court. We got things by calling a meeting. We got things by being devious.