OUR CHILDHOODS WERE similar. Our childhoods were similar in the way that our parents were distant, or our childhoods were similar because our parents always thought we could do better, or our childhoods were similar because we wrote our mothers twice a week and we all wished we were back in Omaha. We were from a European country and we all did not understand why Americans announced, at dinner parties, that they were going to the bathroom.
THOUGH WE BECAME friends quickly, for the most part we still kept things from one another. We told Mary that we felt we were incapable mothers and we told Wendy about the ongoing flirtation with Donald which is of course nothing! because these two friends were both shy and never talked to the others. Or late one night we confessed to Susan, which we immediately regretted, and when we saw her at the Director’s party the next day we blushed because she knew something real about us that we were actually ashamed of, and could we trust her? We told no one that we hated the family we had left in Des Moines, that we never wrote them and hoped they thought us dead, or that we felt bad about the way we had treated them now that we were untraceable, in a town that was not on the map, with our real names stricken from the record, for all this time. Or we decided to write to our family. To apologize. Because the censors, our friends, would read our letters, instead of saying we were sorry, we told our family how much we missed them, how we looked forward to talking with them when we could come home, how we’d say more later.
Excursions
WHEN WE WANTED to leave we were fingerprinted, and even then we could only go as far as Santa Fe. We were told, for the millionth time, secrecy was imperative. We were given pamphlets that said we were not to mention the topographical details that are essential to the Project. But because we did not know what the project was we did not know what was essential. Were the pine trees essential? The sunsets? The mud? When we traveled to Santa Fe we said as little as possible and felt painfully self-conscious.
THE JOURNEY WAS rickety and we hated it, or it was thankfully long and we loved flirting with the GI who drove the bus. We wanted to go to the Indian market in Santa Fe, but some of us were afraid of contracting polio, though it never came to Los Alamos. Or at least we mostly recollect that, though Alice reminds us that the high school science teaching schedule had to be revisited when Cecilia, the wife of a young chemist and science teacher, developed some kind of polio and died. It was a shocking event for everyone, and now, oh yes, we remember, that’s right, that was quite awful.
WE WERE TOLD to talk to no one, to instead just nod and smile. We came down from the hill with our scraggly children, and we were instructed to be only one thing: unfriendly. When asked where we were from we all gave the same address: Box 1663, Santa Fe. We told our children to lie. About what town they lived in, about what their name was. You are Donna, you are William, we would tell them. You are just passing through; you are visiting from Texas. When asked what was being built up there on the Hill we instructed our children to say, Windshield wipers for submarines. And when they did say this, the shopkeepers said, She’s a smart one! and smiled. The shop owners would see our children the next month, and the next, and each time our children would look down at the ground for their lies uncovered, or our children would tell other lies to cover the first ones.
AND OCCASIONALLY, ON the sidewalks in Santa Fe, we ran into friends from our college days and we panicked. When they asked us to have a Coke with them we said yes and when they asked, How are you doing? and, What are you doing here? we stiffened and looked around and fumbled. We saw young men in snap-brim hats study us from store windows, and we felt their eyes on us, but when we looked back to see them again, they were gone.
Waverley
IN THE AUTUMN, when the aspens turned the mountains into multitudes of gold, we took walks alone. Although when we first arrived we thought hiking was boring, later we wanted to see all of the mountaintops. On the highest slopes, the small leaves of the aspens quaked. And we listened to them—they were such exposed things holding on and making vulnerable, fluttering music—and this quaking gave us a peaceful feeling. We stood there thinking of nothing except leaves, leaves, leaves.
OR STANDING IN this grove brought out the melancholy in us, and we felt a rush of sadness, in our throats, in our stomachs, in our necks, but it, too, was not attached to any one thing in particular. It was just this, the aspen leaves, not falling, but making the sound of holding on.
WE WALKED BACK home. We had a secret. We set the table and laid out the steak we had saved our rations for and sat down. But before the first bite, we announced, I’m pregnant! Leon smiled and got up and kissed us and looked at us, really looked at us in the eye for what felt like the first time in months or Sam got up and left the table. And we said, What should we name him? We hoped it was a him and we had science backgrounds so we thought it would be funny to suggest first names that were elements from the periodic table and we said, Uranium Fisher, and before we could say more our husbands put their hands over our mouths. We asked, through voices muffled by their hands, What’s wrong?
SOMEONE WILL HEAR you. Keep quiet. They sat back down and stared at us. Somewhere the dry leaves were falling.
Children
WE SAID WE had four children including our husbands.
THERE WAS A small body of water, a man-made pond, in the center of town, which our children used to ice skate on during the winter and swim in during the summer. They dug holes under the fences, stole wood from construction sites, and built forts on the other side. They climbed in and out of the barbed wire fence through a hole covered by a woodpile. We thought woodpiles were snake dens and we told them not to do it, but we knew they would, and we had our snake kits ready.
MUD, MUD EVERYWHERE in the rainy summers, in the melting snow of spring, and our children played like piglets. Soon they carried pocketknives they got by trading candy with their friends, and we were afraid but we knew we had to let them be children. Once we found out from our neighbor that on their way to school, as they cut through backyards, our young boys slashed the underwear hanging on the clotheslines, and we took their pocketknives away.
OUR BOBBIES PRETENDED to change flat tires, our Cheryls were the best skiers, our Michaels threw rocks at the garbagemen. They played Ring Around the Roses and held hands with other women’s children for the first time. They bobbed for apples; they made Valentines.
OUR CHILDREN WOULD be in class and hear a big boom and ask, What was that? Over time they grew accustomed to it and like most children were preoccupied instead with their friends, with the girl who won the spelling bee, with what they might eat for lunch, with what fort they might build after school.
THE FIRE CHIEF’S daughter was the most popular, our daughters told us. Our daughters just wanted to be left alone, wanted to read books, or wanted to be well liked, but they were foreign, they were not the fire chief’s daughter, they were outsiders because we did not go to church on Sundays.
WHEN OUR DAUGHTERS, the talkative ones, weren’t doing well at school we met their history teacher, our friend Louise, after class. What is she doing wrong?
She never puts her hand up in class.