OUR HUSBANDS CAME home from the Tech Area for the last time and invited us to be their guests at Chez Mess Hall. We said, What a fancy place! Are you sure we can afford it? Or, I’ll have to curl my hair first. We stepped into the warm crowd of the mess hall, stood behind GIs and other families, and picked up a thin metal tray dented around the edges from use. It was our last dinner. Down the line we walked, greeting San Ildefonso men and women or WACs who scooped hot meat, green beans, rehydrated potatoes, and ash-colored gravy into each of the four compartments on our metal tray. The narrow compartments made our more soupy items swim into other things: a slight tilt of the tray or our hand and we were soon eating ice cream topped with pork gravy. And to think some people—the GIs, the single men—put up with this meal three times a day for three years.
IN LINE BEHIND us was our obstetrician, Dr. Kashavarez, and his family, and in front of us was Margaret, who was five months pregnant and who had been chastised earlier that day by Dr. K for gaining twenty-five pounds. His wife was a rail, her eyes gaunt, set far back, with dark semicircles beneath them. Margaret declined the potatoes and we continued down the line, both gazing longingly at the sundaes. One of us said, We lost our baby weight last time so who cares? It was our last day here and after tomorrow we’d never see Dr. K again. We let the hot fudge drop long and slow atop our vanilla scoops but avoided eye contact with him through dinner.
THE DAYS BECAME caravans of departing Studebakers and Cadillacs. Some of us were going back to England. Or we were staying in New Mexico and buying abandoned cattle ranches, or haciendas, or fishing cabins. A few of us were staying, unfortunately, in our plain green houses. We were designing Western homes made of stone, or adobe, or logs. We were planning brick homes in the Midwest with concrete frames and finished basements.
AND WE FELT the deflation that comes when one gets what one has wanted: it was not quite what it seemed it would be. We thought of the time when we first arrived, when only a stack of pine boards were all that existed of the houses, when garbage cans overflowed. How dust rose in great clouds beyond the set of older buildings. How we arrived and thought it was not beautiful, though we complimented the mountains to one another.
WE LEFT WITH more children than we came with and less wedding china. We left with black bowls, bright rugs, needles, thread, and muddy boots on our feet. We looked back on the time of our arrival to Los Alamos, how we felt very young. Some of us thought it was much better then, earlier, before we understood anything, though in our futures there was much more to learn.
AND IF WE wanted a sentimental good-bye, instead of going directly down the Hill to Santa Fe we drove past Valle Grande—the crater of a volcano, the high mountain roads, the rare dark clouds gathering and the wildflowers blooming in the caldera.