OUR HUSBANDS CAME from small towns, from large cities, from fields, from concrete. We met them on boardwalks in Atlantic City, on football fields in Iowa, at cafés in Berlin, at scientific meetings in Moscow. They were disqualified for the draft due to rheumatic fever as a child, diabetes, being overweight, being underweight, asthma, deafness, or poor eyesight. They spoke several languages, they were aggressive at sports, they loped across the street, they shined with knowledge. They thought we were beautiful, they thought we were smart, they thought we had soft breasts, they thought we would make good mothers.
WE MARRIED THEM weeks or months after Pearl Harbor—in spring, summer, fall, and winter—when our West Coast hometowns were declared to be in a state of emergency and all citizens had a curfew of ten o’clock. We wore smart white suits, or dresses our mothers made, or dresses we bought in Milan or Paris. We were married in parks, in churches, in synagogues, and in courthouses with our sisters, our mothers, our fathers, and our friends. We were married in the presence of neighbors, distant family members, our mother’s bridge partners—people we were obligated to invite though we did not really like them.
IN THE AIR was the threat of every man leaving, of every man being a hero, of every eligible bachelor dying—these threats made our fiancés more desirable to us, our love more urgent. We were ready to decide something very large about our futures.
WE WERE FEATURED in the celebrations section of our hometown newspaper with a paragraph about our wedding, what we wore, what we were doing now, and what our parents did. We were Audreys and Susans and we carried bouquets of white orchids surrounded by stephanotis. Our bridesmaids wore French blue chiffon, or gray tulle, and held yellow cascade bouquets of gladiolas and daisies. Or we wore cotton and did not tell the celebrations section that under our dresses were our worn-out saddle shoes. Afterward, we held small receptions at hotels, in church basements, and in our parents’ backyards.
OUR BROTHERS SAID we looked like movie stars, like angels, like ourselves, like ourselves but prettier, like our mothers. Or our brothers were late to our weddings because they were taking the officer candidate exam. Or our brothers were not there to see us wed—they were in a bunker in Europe, they were at Army gunnery school. They were Navy bombers, and on our wedding day the newspaper reported: A Navy patrol plane with ten men aboard has been unreported since it took off on a routine training flight Friday and it is presumed lost in the Gulf, and we did not hear from our brothers on our wedding day, or the next week, or the next.
OUR PARENTS CRIED; our parents’ friends told us how much they loved weddings because they got to feel as if they were renewing their own vows, too; we looked around rooms and lawns and churches and we could only see the smiling people, and we felt an abundance of love, though photographs later might show frowns or boredom.
NOW WE THOUGHT we had lost our glow but only from lack of sleep or because of the desert air, and we thought our husbands looked more distinguished these days, or less wild in the eyes, or more so. We felt in control of ourselves, we felt hopeful that we had made the right choice, we felt weary, we felt all these things at the same time, but more so: we felt we could not turn back.
Winter
WINTER ARRIVED AND our husbands were issued baggy overalls that came up to their chest and strapped over their shoulders, a heavy down coat, and a snood with a chinstrap. They looked like zoot suits for polar expeditions. Our husbands modeled this outfit, along with their shatterproof glasses and black shoes with thick soles that they said could not conduct electricity. We wondered. Where were the tender bodies of our brilliant husbands?
WE TRIED TO forget there was a war going on, and we had our own battles here on the mesa, anyway, but our daily lives were punctuated with news from the outside. British bombers raided Berlin in daylight for the first time and Germany was losing in Stalingrad—these things were hard to picture, so we thought of what we knew of those places before the war, how one summer we walked from one end of Berlin to the other admiring the architecture and history of such an old place; how in the early morning the smell of baked bread wafted through the streets. Berlin, our summer love.
WHILE WE SLEPT the snow piled high outside our windows. We woke to see a coyote stretched out on the white lawn and wanted to enjoy this sight with a steaming cup of coffee. But, when we went to pour water into the percolator, only a mud-colored spurt of liquid came out of the faucet, followed by a chugging sound, and then nothing.
WE CONCLUDED THE pipes must have frozen, and we were right: by midmorning we saw the military hauling buckets of water from the Rio Grande, forty miles down the Hill. No coffee for us for a while, nor could we brush our teeth. And though we had escaped the spring and summer sandstorms, the coal that fueled our furnaces was making a thick layer of soot on our cars and our windows. It was as if black muslin lay over the snow.
AND WHEN THE Jemez was covered with snow we skied on Sawyer Hill with our children while some of our risk-taking husbands, bored by the same pattern of up and down that comes with alpine skiing, gathered groups to go on cross-country explorations further into the hills. They broke trails, climbed steeper mountains, and were happy when they could come home and announce they had tired out all of the men younger than themselves.
Our Husbands
OUR HUSBANDS DREW us graphs instead of writing us love notes, graphs that marked their love for us on the y-axis, and our time together on the x-axis, with a line rising exponentially toward an increase in love. Our husbands had salty necks, had holes in their pants. Our husbands were handsome, but their handsomeness was of a different nature now: they had a secret they would not confess. We gave our husbands glances that said we trusted they were making something of themselves.
THEY WERE NO longer Doctor or Professor, but Mister. Instead of physicists and chemists, our husbands were called fizzlers or stinkers. We knew they worked in a lab, because they called it that at first, but soon the name was changed to the Tech Area. We heard it was dirty inside, that the dress was casual, that the people were talented and strange. They had arithmetic competitions to see who could compute the fastest. They picked the locks of one another’s file cabinets to prove they could crack any code. Or instead of appearing competitive about science, our husbands battled fiercely over Ping-Pong. They walked the halls and beat bongos to help them think.
OUR HUSBANDS SAID At any rate, while we said Nevertheless. They doubled back on their thinking—they asserted, then considered, then found something contradictory and refuted what they initially claimed. Their arms gesticulated wildly when they were excited, or had an idea, and we had to be careful that they weren’t holding a screwdriver, a drink, or our young children.
MANY OF THEM cared a lot about utility and nothing for appearances. If it were their choice our bookshelves, dining room chairs, and coffee tables would all be made of industrial materials like steel. Thankfully for us, these materials were difficult to come by during the war.
AT SIX IN the evening they would, usually, drift back from the Tech Area looking wild, talking their own language, sciencese, or talking about how to win at poker, or how to hunt wild turkeys. The words we could say became less and less technical and the words we could not say grew larger. We could not say fission, a word we overheard often when our husbands were graduate students. Our husbands said Gadget, and talked about issues with the Gadget, but what was the Gadget? We did not know. When no one was home we whispered their real names, and our own: Dr. Fermi, Mrs. Fisher, Enrico, Jane, Jane Marie.