SOME OF US felt more distant from the group; there were those of us who felt far away from the cheering and there were those of us who were happy to be a part of it. Because we disagreed with one another, over coffee, over tea, when in line at the commissary we would whisper to ourselves, There’s Esther, and recall her saying, Our husbands lied to us, or, There’s Laura, and think of her saying, We didn’t start the war, we finished it.
WE LEARNED tube alloy was the code name for plutonium. On the way to Santa Fe we shouted Plutonium! Uranium fission! and all the other words we had not been able to say until now. Our children sang Atomic Bomb, Atomic Bomb to the tune of O Christmas Tree though it was only September. September and the Japanese had signed the final Instrument of Surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri. We felt a part of something, and the guard shining the flashlight in the backseat of the car, which was once an annoyance, or a fear, had now become a comforting indication that we were home.
IN THE NEWSPAPER, next to the story that Mrs. Giyon was robbed of the money hidden under her pillow as she slept last Friday night and an announcement that tomato juice was taken off the ration list, were tales about our own town: Their babies are born in a P.O. Box! They throw wild parties with lab alcohol! We saw our own lives from an outsider’s perspective, with embellishments meant to fascinate and horrify: wild parties, lots of babies, you know what that means! Likely due to the rush to get the stories out, there were several misspellings, even in the headlines, such as: Now the Stoories of the Hill Can Be Told.
WE ARGUED OVER what should happen next to the Hill. Some of us said, Peace research is the only way to atone. Some of us said, Nuclear research is the only way to ensure peace. And some of us said, Nothing, absolutely nothing, should happen here. We should leave those jeeps to rust.
WE THOUGHT OF each window we had once hated, breaking. We thought of the weeds growing up and consuming the barbed wire fences. We should leave as quickly as possible, the Director told us, and some of us agreed. Let each home sink deep into the mud, Katherine said. Then, when nature has consumed the buildings, let tour guides take over.
SOME OF US no longer thought our little town was an escape from a harsh modern world. Some of us no longer thought of this place as Shangri-La.
A FEW OF our husbands returned from Japan with pictures of what had happened. We sat on the gymnasium floor or on the hay bales and watched the slides projected on the screen. The images were of barely discernible bodies. Our husbands described the people they photographed as if they were not people, but specimens: Those that did not die instantly, if they were close enough to ground zero, did so within a few days. Here is a child’s arm in the rubble. Notice the effect of radiation. We saw permanent flat shadows where a man once sat on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank, waiting for his shift to begin. We saw skin bubbled up where a face once was. Survivors in the streets, thirsting for water, opened their mouths. The now radioactive rain streamed black down their necks. A man standing by a river cupped his left eyeball in his hand. Warblers had ignited in midflight miles away. A rose pattern burned out of a schoolgirl’s blouse and made a floral tattoo on her shoulder. Had the world gone mad? We went home and held our children.