Free The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit Page B

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.
     
    I F 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.
     
    W E 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.

Women’s Army Corps
    O N MONDAY MORNINGS the trashcans outside the WACs’ dorms were full of Coors beer cans. There were three hundred WACs and they had showers and two bathtubs to share among themselves, which they told us about on several occasions. Their hair could not touch their collar; they wore beige skirts and oxfords.
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    A T NIGHT WE COULD hear them gathered around campfires singing songs we did not know the names of but once they were in our heads we could not get them out:
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    They get us up at five a.m.
    To scrub the barracks clean.
    Then what do we do when we get through?
    We scrub the damn latrine!
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    A ND WHEN WE were certain we could not take any more singing about military life we heard them marching and chanting:
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    Duty is calling you and me.
    We have a date with Destiny.
    Ready, the WACs are ready.
    Their pulses steady, the world set free.
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    T HEIR VOICES CARRIED as they marched from the campfire to their dorm door and into their rooms.
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    T HERE WAS NOT a bed check on Saturdays and on their days off they went to Santa Fe, perhaps watching the sunset on the roof of the La Fonda hotel, as we wished we could. One WAC, Pat, was rumored to, on her breaks, sleep in the stable next to the horses.
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    S OME WERE TEXANS who said little bitty and right nice and had names like Bobbie-Joe and Jimmie. Or they were former schoolteachers named Esther or Marian, from Indiana or Illinois, who said joining the Women’s Army Corps was the right thing to do. They organized the motor pool, shot dice, played the pump organ at church services, and called our husbands over the townwide intercom by their last names— Mitchell, Farmer, Perlman —but more frequently, about ten times a day, they called out Gutierraz and Marsh —the two maintenance men. They operated the telephones, censored our mail, and ran the PX, the diner where our husbands got their afternoon coffee and listened to the jukebox. They said they were proposed to once a month because there were ten military men on the Hill to every one of them.

Thaw
    I N APRIL THE cottonwoods in the valley began showing their green buds and the commissary carried huge hams for Easter. We reserved Fuller Lodge for Passover seder and prepared hundreds of matzo balls that the chef boiled in water instead of chicken stock. People said they tasted Excellent! but they did not. The chaplain, who was not asked to speak, gave a long talk about marauding tigers in India. We said it was a SNAFU, his speech and the matzo balls, an acronym we learned from the military: Situation normal, all fouled up .
     
    I F WE WERE the proper type, we finally broke down and bought a pair of blue jeans, a jean