AND WHY SHOULD it have? Were we blind to the struggles of others? First the Spaniards, then the Anglos, then the Mexicans—so many people trying to change them, kill them, and claim the land.
SOME OF US never talked to our housekeepers, or when we did we talked really slowly and really loudly. We climbed sacred mountains, stood on ceremonial structures, took arrowheads from ancient dwellings for souvenirs, and admired the views. Others of us grew protective of the petroglyphs. When Starla learned that her Henry’s favorite mushroom hunting grounds—where he gathered paper bags full of button fungi—was just below a plumed serpent carved in the rock, which could be seen well when the shadows fell, she gave him quite a scolding. Henry had never noticed it, never looked to see the numerous other carvings. Frank added that the living Indians intrigued him far more than the dead ones.
HOW MUCH DID we want them to stay exactly as we had imagined they had always been? Some of us said, over the ladies’ lunch, that others of us were going native. They were living in a past our ancestors had given up. We were women wanting the girls, who now wore attire similar to our own, to paint the most authentic images, to make the most traditional bowls. What could they do but accommodate us, their patrons.
THOUGH WE BENEFITED from their inexpensive domestic help, we still complained that the help was not enough. And it was not fair that some of the girls picked favorites, how they disliked being moved around on the chart each day, and some of us said they just went wherever they pleased anyway. We wanted more help or different help and we were told if we wanted more assistance we would need to have another baby. We complained to our husbands, but they instead tried to find solutions, or joke, rather than listen. They said, In the future there will be trained chimpanzees mopping our floors, and what the Maid Services Office really should do instead is set up an Agency of Primate Distribution.
OUR HUSBANDS PARODIED our maids in after-dinner skits; our husbands wore scarves on their heads and peasant skirts, turquoise bracelets clinking as they dusted the same table over and over again, as they pretended to be Sofia and took nips of our liquor. We laughed, we cackled, we thought it all in good fun.
A Good Wife
BEFORE WE ARRIVED at Los Alamos as wives and mothers we had been teachers in Seattle, housewives in New Jersey, watercolorists in Nebraska, writers in Des Moines, chemists at Harvard, and one of us had been a dancer in the Chicago ballet. Ingrid, Marie, Pauline, and Marjorie all had B.S.s in mathematics with minors in home economics. We were halfway through school when our husbands asked us to marry them, and it didn’t seem there was a point in continuing: few married women had careers, and our family did not need the extra income. Or we had once wanted to pursue doctoral degrees but were told by our male mentors during our senior year of college, There is no place in higher mathematics for women, no matter how brilliant. Some of us were told, The universities won’t want you, and you’ll be overqualified to teach high school. Many of us did not pursue a doctoral degree but married a man who got one instead. But a couple of us were encouraged to keep going, or kept going despite what our mentors told us, and we, too, became doctors.
AND NOW HERE there were jobs for us. The Director came to our house and asked us to Please think about working while you’re here, it would be a good career opportunity. And if that failed to get a yes, if we lowered our heads and said, Sorry, no, thanks, he replied, Consider the war.
OUR HUSBANDS WERE great physicists and we were considered great secretaries. Or we were hired because the military questioned our moral backbone and wanted to keep us out of mischief. And as secretaries we prepared and filed personnel cards, or stamped secret in red on medical records. We knew first who was moving to another division in the lab and who had an inexplicable rash. Our husbands appeared to know nothing so we were always telling them the news, despite the fact that they were the ones doing important things in the Tech Area.
WE WERE QUITE happy to peek inside the secret lab, to make a little bit of money, and to share in the war effort. And when we got inside the infamous Tech Area to begin our job as secretary, or calculator, it was, like most things one builds up in one’s imagination, disappointing. The mystery and glamor we’d fabricated was instead a dirty, cluttered, overcrowded mess. But the interior was quickly overlooked by the exciting tempo, casual attire, and jovial atmosphere. Someone was always pulling a practical joke. One bored scientist asked the operator to page Werner Heisenberg, which she did for three days straight—Heisenberg never materialized—until someone told her she’d have to page Berlin instead, as Herr Heisenberg was a famous German physicist working for the other side.
Our first bosses felt that they needed to explain a few things to us and said, Some of the men are exposed to radiation due to tube alloy, and we asked, What’s tube alloy? They blushed and told us to ask our husbands. We knew our husbands: if we were to ask them, they would just give us a mischievous grin. So we did not learn what tube alloy was until much later.
WE WERE SECRETARIES for three hours, six days a week, or we were teachers for eight hours, five days a week. Without any special degree or education, many of us were given the lowest form of security clearance and learned very little of interest. As lab technicians we were paid seventy percent of what a man would make in our position, and the cost of maid services would not be added on to our own salary. When we did the math, we discovered that our family would make only ten percent more a year if we worked than if we did not work. Several of us decided it was too much of a hassle, and we said, No, thank you, to the job offers. Lucille and Patricia said, No. Katherine, speaking for a large group of us, said, We have babies to take care of. Some of us tried it for a week and quit, ultimately choosing to stay home. And we got others to follow us.
IF WE WERE British we were not given clearance to work in the Tech Area, and we were told we could not teach school because our upbringing was very different than the American way, and we did not want to organize a library for residents who were tired of having to go to the one in Santa Fe to get their books. We were busy enough with our jobs as mothers, housekeepers, wives, and social organizers.
ONE BRIT, GENEVIEVE, could not be busy enough. She left her house every morning to visit the other wives on the mesa, to share advice or receive it; or she left town on the bus with an empty bag and returned in the evening with a full one, bringing back a low-point pot roast bought in Santa Fe and announcing a dinner party. She loved a bachelor with a cold, because it meant she could feed and mother him.
IF WEEKS DECLINED working we were accused of disloyalty to our country. Our husbands said we were being obstinate. Or our husbands said we did not have to do anything we didn’t want to. We worried that if we said yes our home would suffer, our husbands would feel neglected, and our children would become delinquents.
OR WE HAD taught college-level history classes when we were graduate students at Yale, and now we were teaching the children of Nobel laureates, but some of our best students were the children of mechanics. It was not fun to wrangle teenagers who were much more interested in passing notes than history.