WE UNDERSTOOD WHY the military hated us. While their friends were off seeing action in the Pacific or Europe, their job here was to protect our husbands, who did not want to be protected, and to safeguard a secret they did not know quite how to watch over, since they did not know what it was.
THE MILITARY OFFICIALLY ran the town in one way, and our husbands in practice ran the town in some ways, and we ran the town clandestinely in others. The flare of trumpets awoke us at sunrise on weekends, and we were annoyed, because the weekends were our only chance at sleeping in. The troops eternally paraded and marched; we heard the steady beat of their boots, their Hut! their Attention! as they turned. They were men just a bit younger than our own husbands, sometimes just ten years older than our sons, with soft baby faces and young eyes that looked out under stiff hats.
UNLIKE OUR HUSBANDS, the military men could not bring their wives to Los Alamos. They said to us, What makes you so special? We said the Army ruled the Hill as if it were a fascist country—controlling when we could leave, where we could live, how much help we got, and what we ate. They were our number one complaint—how they made us fill out dozens of forms, in duplicate, just to get a new lightbulb.
WE COULD NOT often be mad at them directly because we needed them for furniture, appliances, and food. We blamed them for what went wrong because we needed someone to blame, because we could not blame our husbands. But when the washing machines broke down and the General accused us of abusing them we had something to say: Have you ever done your family’s laundry, General? No? Thought not. We are not the ones to be accused of abuse.
WE ARGUED, UNREASONABLY, that the Army men had more money for new cars, because they always seemed to have them. Or maybe because they could not bring their wives they did not have them around to insist on home decorations—new linoleum, new curtains—and so did in fact have more to spare. They did not have to answer to a wife regarding their spending habits and so they did just what they wanted and bought a new car.
AND THOUGH OUR medical services were free, our doctors were Army doctors, and we had no choice about which doctor we preferred to see, but they weren’t so bad, and we joked privately over how these Army doctors had signed up to heal soldiers in battle and instead got us—a bunch of high-strung, healthy women complaining of headaches and morning sickness.
THE GENERAL NEVER missed an opportunity to say he, too, was a scientist, because he had obtained an undergraduate degree in engineering at West Point and had been the project manager for the construction of the Pentagon. He made it clear he did not want us here. He thought we would cause trouble, he thought we would be a distraction. And he wanted our husbands in uniform, beneath him, not wearing jeans, but they had refused to come on those grounds, and the General had to relent and instead our husbands stayed civilians, and we came along.
IF IT WAS evening when the military police stopped us, we had trouble holding our skirts down in the wind. We fumbled in our purses. They leaned in close to hear us say the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language: their own name.
WE HAD A fondness for the engineering division, who were the military, too, but only because they were forced to be. They were men with undergraduate degrees in engineering, and surely they annoyed MPs and sergeants with their disheveled look—their sloped shoulders from stooping over a table all day, their thick glasses, their gangly bodies with paunchy stomachs. And when they marched on weekends with the rest of the military, they were placed in the back as the caboose, and each of their steps was miraculously out of sync with the others.
For some of us, the proximity to a large number of single men revived our girlishness, and we curled our hair, or ironed it, applied lipstick, and smiled at ourselves in the mirror: to have a husband and a fantasy, to be admired at the age of twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-three, this felt like a good thing.