The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit Read Free Book Online

into blue jeans, and already we felt more like Americans. But we were still Europeans, too.
     
    W E SAT ON hay bales in Fuller Lodge and watched short films put out by the War Department that were aired before the featured movies. We wanted to watch Meet Me in St. Louis but we had to suffer through films that asked, Why are we Americans on the march? Pearl Harbor, is that why we are fighting? Or is it because of Britain? France? China? The list continued for at least ten more countries.
     
    T HE ANSWER TO the question was: For freedom. They say trouble always comes in threes—look at these faces . And we saw Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler at podiums, in front of hundreds of people, speaking. They gave up their power , the film said, and they meant non-Americans, citizens of other countries. Some of us had extended families that were still in Germany, France, Norway, Poland, Holland, Greece, Belgium, and elsewhere. Or we were born in the U.S. and the film did not seem strange to us.
     
    W E WERE ITALIANS and we clenched our teeth; or we were Germans and we laughed out loud when we heard, Germans have a natural love of regimentation and harsh discipline ; or we were not surprised. But when the film said, German defeat was never acknowledged in the last war and they were ready to back anyone who would obtain victory for them , we wished these silly theatrics would hurry up so we could escape into the stories of Holiday Inn , Slightly Dangerous , or My Sister Eileen. And if we had been brave, if we had wanted to make a scene, to say This is wrong , we would get up from our hay bale and walk out. But where would we go and whose mind would it have changed? We would be back in our drafty living room with only our own suffering—missing the film and worrying that our new friends might think us suspect.

Growing
    O NE SPRING NIGHT we got permission to use a military phone to the call the outside world and we stood with our husbands and dialed our parents’ number from the military police booth, and we looked up to see what looked like millions of stars, a pointillism we never saw back home and the connection was so scratchy, we weren’t even sure it was our mothers on the line or if they could hear us. We yelled, with our husbands, in unison, We’re pregnant! though of course our husbands were not pregnant, but at that time, before morning sickness, before labor, when our stomachs felt just a little hotter to the touch and only our sense of smell was enhanced, it was as if they, too, were pregnant with us.
     
    O R THERE WAS a time before morning sickness and it did not just occur in the morning.
     
    S OMETIMES,RATHER THAN calling, we wrote to our mothers and they sent back directives: Wash your feet twice a day. Drink a glass of wine each night. Go to bed hungry. Lots of milk. Lots of activity. Sex, but not in the last trimester. Name him Theodore, after my father. Name her Opal, after your dead aunt. Name him anything but Henry.
     
    A LTHOUGH WE TOLD our mothers immediately, many of us did not tell one another until the fifth month. Maybe we hoped no one would notice until then because we were staying so slender. Or we did not tell because we had lost one before and we did not want to get our hopes up, or anyone else’s. We did not want to be offered condolences. We did not want to explain why our bellies were small again, but where was our baby?
     
    S OME OF US squealed as soon as we missed a period and ran to tell the rest of us. And the second place we might run to was the Housing Office, where we would announce, I’m pregnant! or I’m having another one! because this might mean we would qualify for a bigger green house. The man at the Housing Office said, Ma’am, you’ll have to wait until we can hear the baby crying before you can fill out one of these forms .
     
    O UR BELLIES GREW . Our husband’s spicy scent wafted to us from across a room and Roscoe’s litter box stank even when there was nothing in it. We