Read The Wives of Los Alamos for Free Online

how in the early morning the smell of baked bread wafted through the streets. Berlin, our summer love.
    Â 
    W HILE 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.
    Â 
    W E 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.
    Â 
    A ND 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
    O UR 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.
     
    T HEY 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.
     
    O UR 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.
     
    M ANY 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.
     
    A T 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 .
     
    T HEY 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