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

requested our husbands find us milkshakes, iced tea, fried chicken, lemonade, and lentil soup. And some things on this list were impossible to locate, which made our want for them that much stronger, and other things we found rather intolerable — jalapeño peppers, grapefruit—though we loved them before. We swore we would never get pregnant again, and we hated being pregnant in the summer and how our backs ached, and we loved our pregnant bodies, how they made room for another life, how everyone told us we were luminous. We worried about our child having all his fingers and toes, and we sipped more iced tea and hoped he would come out soon. Or we wished it would in fact be a she and that she would get out of us already.
     
    M ANY OF US had due dates just a few days apart and it was comforting to know that Starla, Ruth, Alice, and Louise would all be in the maternity ward, too. What a calming thought to walk out of the house with nothing to do except this: give birth. The idea of two weeks in the hospital—a break from cooking, cleaning, and hosting—meant having someone wait on us: nurses bringing us dinner, bathing our babies, changing our sheets, and monitoring our health. It would be a vacation! Louise said, It’s enough of an incentive to keep me pregnant for a lifetime .
     
    W E HELD AND received baby showers almost weekly, in rooms of tissue paper flowers and pink, yellow, or blue streamers. Some of us thought it was bad luck to buy anything before the baby was born, but others of us thought it was morbid not to and we extended our morning coffee by leafing through catalogs of strollers and bassinets. Though our homes were temporary, we wanted to paint, choose a crib, and consider wallpaper. Polka dots, stripes, flowers. We were told red was the first color a baby could see, and we thought we could use that as an accent color, but when we saw the red samples at a hardware store in Santa Fe we thought, blood, our brothers, the war , and changed our minds.
     
    O UR CHILDREN CAME fast and two weeks early, came in the backseat before our husbands could get out of the driveway, on the bathroom linoleum we had installed ourselves. We went into labor in the kitchen, and our neighbor came to help us, and someone else ran to get our husbands from the Tech Area. And when our husbands came home they heard the first earthly wails of their new daughters, their new sons, their twins, and we saw terror and awe in their eyes.
     
    O R WE GAVE birth in Army sedans on our way up the Hill, or at the hospital, right on time. A few of us pretended that we felt no pain as the contractions grew more painful, and we smiled serenely when our friends checked in on us. Or when our husbands came to see us on their lunch break we howled and they kissed our foreheads and apologized and said they were sorry but they had to get back to the Tech Area. And if this was our first birth, the pain we knew before contractions was actually not pain at all and most pain after childbirth was nothing. We learned labor was not generally a place for modesty, and if we were in the ward together we helped one another with compresses and conversation as best we could.
     
    S OMETIMES OUR HUSBANDS were not allowed in our rooms even if we begged for them, and if they were allowed they came in running, looking more terrified than we felt, and it was us who had to comfort them, saying, between contractions, I’m fine. Really .
     
    O R OUR DUE date came and went. We walked to the hospital, lay down, were gassed and cut open. We wanted to squat but were instructed to lie flat on our backs so the doctor could reach the baby more easily. We longed for our midwives trained in Tuskegee, who relaxed us by massaging our legs, who told us what to expect. We did not want drugs, but we were put under, and we have no memory of labor, except when we heard a cry, and being startled awake by the smell of coffee, and someone saying: It’s a beautiful girl! or, It’s a