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

handsome boy! behind the first yowls of our newborns.
     
    O R THE ROOM was silent and someone said, I’m sorry .
     
    W E NAMED THEM James, Patricia, Mary, Robert. We named them Linda, William, Richard, Shirley. Betty, Diane, Harold, Douglas. Brenda, Frances, Carolyn, Henry. When we began there were twenty of us, then fifty, then the number of us grew too large to count, and in the first year alone we gave birth to eighty healthy children.
     
    T HE GENERAL COMPLAINED to the Director, Too many babies! They are taking advantage of us! You’ve got to do something about this . The Director replied, casually, I’m not going to interfere in the lives of adults.

Help
    W E LONGED FOR our mothers, who would console us, who would watch our children so we could take a shower, so we could go out with our husbands on a date, so we could take a walk without a hundred necessities that had to be met. We wanted help. Someone to wash the windows, the dishes, the bathroom. Someone else to use the mangle, someone else to iron our husbands’ shirts.
     
    E VENTUALLY HELP CAME . They had glossy hair cropped at their chins. They had long dark hair pulled back or let loose. Some of us called them girls, the girls, except for Katherine, who called the girls helps and announced she should have as many helps as she was willing to pay. According to Ronnie, who was keen to the cost of everything, they earned three dollars per day.
     
    T HEY WERE TEWA women from the nearby San Ildefonso and Santa Clara pueblos who arrived by bus in the morning and disappeared by bus at night. Or they were Spanish women whose family homestead was nearby, or they were sixteen-year-old girls from St. Catherine’s Indian School coming up from Santa Fe.
     
    W E NOW HAD help, but there were saints’ days and feast days and the days leading up to them when the girls stayed at home to prepare. Since we did not celebrate these days, we found it hard to keep track of when they occurred, and it was not easy to find out in advance how many days they would be gone. We sometimes marched into the Maid Services Office and demanded to know why no girls arrived, only to be told it was a holiday.
     
    T HEY WERE OUR nannies, our maids, and our extended family members. They did not look like us and we hated them. They seemed content and beautiful and we loved them. They were just people like anyone else and we felt thankful to have them around. They were our Florencitas and Rosalies—who gave us black pottery for Christmas, who brought us thin tortillas made from blue corn and pottery candlesticks in the shape of high pueblo boots, who left us notes apologizing that they could not wash the bedsheets because our husbands were in them.
     
    T HEY GAVE US loaves of round bread baked in their beehive ovens. They were heedless of our instructions to vacuum the Oriental rugs and instead dragged them out on the back porch and shook them above the heads of the children playing below. One of the girls asked Katherine, whom she thought of as not only her boss but her friend, to bake one of her famed stuffed chickens for a celebration. Katherine did so, but said to the rest of us: Just who is working for whom?
     
    W E THOUGHT THEM generous and good with our children. We learned how to swaddle our babies as they did. We tutored their sons in English after school and they taught us how to make more northern New Mexico dishes—tortillas, posole, and corn cooked the Indian way. They learned to make our peanut butter sandwiches, but we never learned the delicious secret of their kapo-wano fried bread.
     
    A S WE ATE breakfast we saw the group of women walking past the water tower and to our houses, dressed in colorful mantas tied with woven belts, high white deerskin boots or plain walking shoes, with shawls over their heads and shoulders, and so much turquoise , we told one another. Enough to stock a trading post . When we noticed that the bus delivered them an hour before the shift started,