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converse about science, toward our husbands, and our husbands touched her shoulder as they spoke, we told ourselves we hated her.
     
    B EFORE 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
    T HE 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.
     
    W E 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.
     
    S OME 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.
     
    T HE ARMY MAN said a stove would come that day, and it did not come; he said a stove would come the next and it never came. And therefore it is possible we took matters into our own hands. Late one Sunday night, when the town was still groggy from the weekend, we gathered with Louise, Starla, Ingrid, and Katherine. We made a furniture dolly with two-by-fours, a scrap of carpet, and four wheels borrowed from Louise’s sofa. Perhaps we went into the common area and took what we needed, and felt the thrill of doing things we were not supposed to do, and it is possible we experienced this thrill more than once.

Foreigners
    S OME OF US had not always been Americans. Our husbands went from being Hans to Jack, and we went from being Mrs. Mueller to Mrs. Miller. We changed out of slacks and