THE VALLEY BELOW Los Alamos was an area inhabited by Spanish Americans for hundreds of years and by Indians for tens of thousands of years. Some of our maids’ husbands were ranchers or herders until their grasses withered. They came from the valley with trailers that had chimneys, called sheep camps. Some of their husbands were men with hair parted down the middle and two long fishtail braids tied with yarn, or hair kept short in the style given to them in Indian boarding schools, or hair they cut themselves, more stylish than our husbands’. Their husbands ladled soup in our cafeterias. Their husbands changed our lightbulbs, twisted metal wires in the Tech Area, were bitten by our dogs when they came for the trash. Later, when we saw these same men at their ceremonial dances, in fancy costumes and beating drums, they were completely different people to us.
AND WHEN THE Army issued orders in the Daily Bulletin that anyone who did not live on the site could not purchase items at the commissary, we saw that the only people this really excluded were the girls. Even if the Army did have trouble keeping up with our growing population, we protested, these women still needed a way to purchase food for their own families. There were no stores in the pueblos, and since the women worked all day for us, they could not go to Española or Santa Fe to buy things. The Army reversed the ban and we were glad, although the maids often cut short their afternoons to go shopping before the buses left, which did not please many.
WE WERE WHITE and said, I love how here no one is aware of any color differences, everyone is treated the same. Some women were not white, or not white in the same way, and they disagreed completely, but in public nodded in agreement. And when our maids moved to the Hill and went to our school to register their children, some of us put their light-skinned children with our light-skinned children and put their dark-skinned children in different classes some of us called the Mexican classes.
THEIR TEENAGERS WERE our guards. Their young boys were our hospital orderlies and our messengers. When their sons or husbands were drafted we thought of our own young boys, or our own husbands, or we thought of theirs—our messengers, our hospital orderlies—and how they could be drafted though they could not vote in state or national elections. We helped to find workarounds—drafting them to Los Alamos instead—and if we couldn’t help, we cried together over the kitchen sink. But there were still some of us that did not think there was anything wrong with such laws.
Military
WE UNDERSTOOD WHY the military hated us. While their friends were off seeing action in the Pacific or Europe, their job here was to protect our husbands, who did not want to be protected, and to safeguard a secret they did not know quite how to watch over, since they did not know what it was.
THE MILITARY OFFICIALLY ran the town in one way, and our husbands in practice ran the town in some ways, and we ran the town clandestinely in others. The flare of trumpets awoke us at sunrise on weekends, and we were annoyed, because the weekends were our only chance at sleeping in. The troops eternally paraded and marched; we heard the steady beat of their boots, their Hut! their Attention! as they turned. They were men just a bit younger than our own husbands, sometimes just ten years older than our sons, with soft baby faces and young eyes that looked out under stiff hats.
UNLIKE OUR HUSBANDS, the military men could not bring their wives to Los Alamos. They said to us, What makes you so special? We said the Army ruled the Hill as if it were a fascist country—controlling when we could leave, where we could live, how much help we got, and what we ate. They were our number one complaint—how they made us fill out dozens of forms, in duplicate, just to get a new lightbulb.
WE COULD NOT often be mad at them directly because we needed them for furniture, appliances, and food. We blamed them for what went wrong because we needed someone to blame, because we could not blame our husbands. But when the washing machines broke down and the General accused us of abusing them we had something to say: Have you ever done your family’s laundry, General? No? Thought not. We are not the ones to be accused of abuse.
WE ARGUED, UNREASONABLY, that the Army men had more money for new cars, because they always seemed to have them. Or maybe because they could not bring their wives they did not have them around to insist on home decorations—new linoleum, new curtains—and so did in fact have more to spare. They did not have to answer to a wife regarding their spending habits and so they did just what they wanted and bought a new car.
AND THOUGH OUR medical services were free, our doctors were Army doctors, and we had no choice about which doctor we preferred to see, but they weren’t so bad, and we joked privately over how these Army doctors had signed up to heal soldiers in battle and instead got us—a bunch of high-strung, healthy women complaining of headaches and morning sickness.
THE GENERAL NEVER missed an opportunity to say he, too, was a scientist, because he had obtained an undergraduate degree in engineering at West Point and had been the project manager for the construction of the Pentagon. He made it clear he did not want us here. He thought we would cause trouble, he thought we would be a distraction. And he wanted our husbands in uniform, beneath him, not wearing jeans, but they had refused to come on those grounds, and the General had to relent and instead our husbands stayed civilians, and we came along.
IF IT WAS evening when the military police stopped us, we had trouble holding our skirts down in the wind. We fumbled in our purses. They leaned in close to hear us say the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language: their own name.
WE HAD A fondness for the engineering division, who were the military, too, but only because they were forced to be. They were men with undergraduate degrees in engineering, and surely they annoyed MPs and sergeants with their disheveled look—their sloped shoulders from stooping over a table all day, their thick glasses, their gangly bodies with paunchy stomachs. And when they marched on weekends with the rest of the military, they were placed in the back as the caboose, and each of their steps was miraculously out of sync with the others.
For some of us, the proximity to a large number of single men revived our girlishness, and we curled our hair, or ironed it, applied lipstick, and smiled at ourselves in the mirror: to have a husband and a fantasy, to be admired at the age of twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-three, this felt like a good thing.
Women’s Army Corps
ON MONDAY MORNINGS the trashcans outside the WACs’ dorms were full of Coors beer cans. There were three hundred WACs and they had showers and two bathtubs to share among themselves, which they told us about on several occasions. Their hair could not touch their collar; they wore beige skirts and oxfords.
AT NIGHT WE COULD hear them gathered around campfires singing songs we did not know the names of but once they were in our heads we could not get them out:
AND WHEN WE were certain we could not take any more singing about military life we heard them marching and chanting: