Free The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

McDougalls have a new Cadillac! one of us exclaimed, first to our husband, who did not even look up from his newspaper. Our rents were ten percent of our family salary no matter what we lived in, so some of our rents were more expensive even though we all had the same tiny houses, and some of us paid more money for smaller homes just because we did not have two children.
     
    T HE TOWN GREW quickly—we’d go out for a walk, pick lilies for a flower arrangement, and come back to find that our street was expanded another block, four new trailers were installed, and families were already inside, at the dinner table, eating jellied chicken.
     
    S OME OF US tried visiting with everyone but did not realize we were being talked to as a boss, as a white person, as a wealthy person, as a woman, as a mother, as a European, as an American, which is to say we were not getting the whole story. People protected their intimacies from us, as we did, too.
     
    W E FELT CLOSE enough to our maids to make confessions, to tell them things we would not tell one another. We believed our maids felt equally as close to us—we did not think we had disrupted their lives or uprooted them from their homes. We thought the Indians, especially, loved their daily trips to this other world. The extra money was more than they had ever had, and with it they could afford new additions to houses, new furniture, even a few inside bathrooms. Some of our husbands wired the pueblo for electricity, and soon refrigerators and appliances appeared. When we were invited to the pueblo, many of us were still rather shocked to find Grand Rapids furniture, brass bedsteads, soda pop, and ordinary dishes in the Indian houses. Our houses had more Indian rugs, pottery, and paintings than their own homes had. Some of us set our tables with Maria’s famous black plates and candlesticks, but we noticed that Maria herself set her own table with store-bought tablecloths and dishes.
     
    S OME OF THEM had traveled even farther than us, going to London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Coney Island while their husbands danced the Eagle Dance on stages for white people. The girls told us that Europeans generally clapped louder than Americans. They told us their husbands did not dance the Eagle Dance the way they did in the pueblo—their faces were not painted, for instance, and they used any kind of feathers they found along the way.
     
    T HE VALLEY BELOW Los Alamos was an area inhabited by Spanish Americans for hundreds of years and by Indians for tens of thousands of years. Some of our maids’ husbands were ranchers or herders until their grasses withered. They came from the valley with trailers that had chimneys, called sheep camps. Some of their husbands were men with hair parted down the middle and two long fishtail braids tied with yarn, or hair kept short in the style given to them in Indian boarding schools, or hair they cut themselves, more stylish than our husbands’. Their husbands ladled soup in our cafeterias. Their husbands changed our lightbulbs, twisted metal wires in the Tech Area, were bitten by our dogs when they came for the trash. Later, when we saw these same men at their ceremonial dances, in fancy costumes and beating drums, they were completely different people to us.
     
    A ND WHEN THE Army issued orders in the Daily Bulletin that anyone who did not live on the site could not purchase items at the commissary, we saw that the only people this really excluded were the girls. Even if the Army did have trouble keeping up with our growing population, we protested, these women still needed a way to purchase food for their own families. There were no stores in the pueblos, and since the women worked all day for us, they could not go to Española or Santa Fe to buy things. The Army reversed the ban and we were glad, although the maids often cut short their afternoons to go shopping before the buses left, which did not please many.
     
    W E WERE WHITE and said, I love