THEY SQUINTED. THEY ate slowly. Their gait was uneven. They stooped. They asked forgiveness rather than permission. Henry with his leather elbow patches. Enrico with his rolled-up khakis. Louis’s willowy frame in blue jeans. The Director’s black porkpie hat becoming faded and crumpled. Clarence’s piano playing, Frank’s deep laugh, Paul’s shy smile. Our husbands, the only cellist in town. Our husbands, as playful and naïve as our little boys, our husbands deep in thought, our husbands walking into telephone poles, our husbands’ ongoing drama of the misplaced reading glasses. From the Alps, from the lowlands. Our husbands returning from canyon hikes with arrowheads and blisters. All of them in silly hats singing at parties with delight, though their voices were bad. Our husbands who rode bikes through the mud and snow and insisted, despite what the General said, that they were not a motley crew.
THE GENERAL DESCRIBED them as longhairs, for how they did not keep their hair cropped short but instead let it sometimes fall across their foreheads and into their eyes. They said to us, We aren’t oddballs. We aren’t a bunch of crazies. We laughed, or raised our eyebrows, or nodded. Many of us were not the kind to regularly agree with our husbands. Instead when they argued something we found counterexamples and asked questions that would get them caught in their own logical fallacies. They kept us sharp, too, though we complained about their corrections: like how alpenglow was not an optical illusion but rather an optical phenomenon.
HOW WELL OUR husbands knew science determined their status, which was indicated by how much access they had to secrets. We learned after the war that their security access was marked by the color of their badge. They wore white badges or they wore blue badges; they knew what was going on, or they only knew what they needed to in order to do their job. We knew close to nothing, though we speculated about who knew the most. Many of our husbands were physicists, and some of us guessed by who spent more time thinking than talking who had the high-status position of theoretical physicist. Some men we knew from before Los Alamos and we were happy to see them again. We could remember bits of their previous interests: one had investigated cosmic rays and now spent his days in a shack at the bottom of a canyon, another had conducted experiments related to radioactivity and, like our husbands, went to the Tech Area each morning.
IF WE INVITED more people to dinner than we had table space for, our husbands went out an hour before the guests arrived and found a piece of wood, sawed it down, and built an extension leaf. When the scientists, our husbands, arrived to Ingrid’s house stomping their boots on the porch and calling to her husband, Congratulations! while holding up bottles of liquor, which should have been dificult to find in this time of rationing, we had no idea what they were talking about. Ingrid asked Henry why he was being congratulated, and we asked our husbands why they were congratulating him, but our husbands just shrugged, and then smiled; we scoffed and walked away. We went, next, to one of the female scientists, Irene, a sturdy young girl with short hair and blunt bangs, who was said to have a spectacular IQ; surely another woman would tell us. We asked her, What’s all this about? And she raised her head, looked down at us—she was quite tall—and said, smiling, Why, he shot down a Jap battleship! And earlier that day the Army radio station had reported that the U.S. military destroyed four Japanese carriers and a cruiser, but our husbands had been here all along, and so what that female scientist said was surely impossible. She was pulling our leg, though it felt like more than that.
WE THOUGHT, YOU are making fun of me, and we concentrated our faces in the other direction so she would not see our wobbly chins, because we were inexplicably starting to tear up, we were becoming too emotional, and she was poking fun at what we did not know and we were losing our wits. Who cares about her, we thought. When she turned toward a man with whom she could converse about science, toward our husbands, and our husbands touched her shoulder as they spoke, we told ourselves we hated her.
BEFORE WE GOT married we asked our grandfathers, whose own marriages had lasted forty years or more, What is the secret to a happy marriage? And they paused, looked down at their chicken salad, and said, You have to really like each other. After the attraction, you have to really like the person. We crunched our lettuce. Our teeth clinked against the fork. Did we like our fiancés? What does liking someone mean? Before we got married our mothers told us we had to communicate. Ask him how his day was. Take an interest in his profession. But we could not do this anymore. Our husbands were gone for twelve hours a day and sometimes did not come home at all. Instead they dragged an Army cot—identical to our own beds—into the Tech Area. And we were not allowed to ask questions.
What did we think our husbands were doing in the lab? We suspected, because the military was involved, that they were building a communication device, a rocket, or a new weapon. We ruled out submarines because we were in the desert—but we closely considered various types of code breaking.
Cooking
THE ALTITUDE MADE our breads flat. We requested hot plates, and they arrived, and we carried them with us to parties. Posters of corn that said corn is the food of the nation! lined the Lodge walls and we made so much corn bread, corn cakes, corn casserole, and corn with pepper that we were soon sick of corn.
WE NAMED OUR stoves after an autobiographical memoir told by a horse—one that began with his carefree days as a youth, moved to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, and ended with his happy retirement in the country. All along he recounted tales of cruelty and kindness. We named our stoves Black Beauty and snorted with laughter. Or we called it that because everyone else did, though we did not get the reference, or we refused to call it that. Mostly, we thought our stove was huge and ugly and we only loved it when the electricity went out, because since it was heated with wood and coal, we could still continue cooking dinner even if we had no power. At first, before we became savvy with our stove, we would go without supper. Sometimes there were no lights in the streets, and no flashlights to carry around, and it was dark all through town, but never quiet, and families were reading aloud, and there was candlelight, and we heard the laughter of children being tickled.
SOME OF US hated the stove situation so much we complained, and we asked for a new stove, an electric one, and if our husbands had high security clearance, something might be done about it. We called the Housing Office and heard the Army man’s voice gurgle and we guessed he had been celebrating some small military victory. This seemed to happen every day, but we thought it was really just an excuse to celebrate the enjoyment of liquor. Maybe this time it was something about the Allies landing in Anzio, or some other sign that might indicate we were beating the Germans. Although winning could be worthy of celebration we still needed a new stove.