The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit Page A

we’d left behind? Was the pharmacist still frowning as he counted pills? How was the butcher? Had the weeds grown tall around our house and was someone else living there?
     
    O UR PARENTS MET us at the train station while our sisters, weak from wedding preparations, were in bed with pneumonia. Their future husbands, who had arrived from the Pacific two days earlier, were lying in their own childhood beds across town. Our first thought about our parents was, They look tired , or, They look so much older , and they probably had the same thoughts about us, too.
     
    O N THE DRIVE home we chatted but only half listened and recall little—something about the neighbors’ dog, something about the tree in the front yard—but on our minds instead was the cool sea air and the familiar, cleanly designed bridges that brought out a feeling of grandeur in us as we crossed them, as if the feat of their construction was somehow ours as well.
     
    B ACK IN OUR hometowns, past the doorman, the mailman, up the stairs, inhaling the bay, the bakery, the trash in the alley, the soft light, the sound of a foghorn. And up two flights or into the elevator we went. We closed the brass gate and looked above to see the white clouds of New York through the skylight, and we arrived at our door and rang the bell just because we could. We picked up the telephone to hear the operator ask us what number we would like to reach, and we dropped our suitcases in the entryway to our bedroom and remembered what this home offered that we had not been in for years: a shining porcelain bathtub. Our mothers kept our sons and daughters occupied while we soaked until our fingers and toes wrinkled.
     
    W E FOUND OUR sisters tired from their illnesses but ecstatic. They asked us for advice. We warned them of dehydration caused by nerves— drink water constantly —and we told them to take nothing as a sign, unless it was a good sign. On the eve of our own wedding our husbands woke with their legs as tight as statues, their veins visible like a colt’s; they woke and stood and collapsed on the bed and if we thought, Is this a sign? we did not say it, and our husbands did not say it. Anyway, really, it was not a sign, we told our sisters, it was our anxiety, it was dehydration. Drink more water than you think possible.

Close Quarters
    W E WERE TIRED of borrowing Jane’s green dress, even though we told one another, It’s not the size of the wardrobe that counts, it’s the shape . We felt better about ourselves when we glanced at Ruby’s sagging hemline, when we considered Annie’s matron bulge.
     
    W E CONSPIRED TO stop wearing decorative hats and delicate stockings because this was the new power; to have been here longer was to have more authority. And one way we had authority was by knowing the fashion of this place. We wore blue jeans and cackled over the new girls who wore heels. Did you see her get stuck in the mud outside the post office? Poor girl. She’ll never get those clean! Or we tried to avoid this kind of talk.
     
    W E TOLD THE new arrivals—Pauline with the pink half-moon manicure that called attention to her stubby hands, Doris with the upswept victory roll, Betty with the calm voice—what was what in this town. Those are the bathtub houses, those are the four-family houses, those are the Quonset huts, and those are the trailers. We told the new girls, You are going to need a year’s supply of lotion for just one month here. We watched them notice the dryness and lick their lips. We thought of our own dry lips and hands when we first arrived and we thought, Silly thing, you are only making it worse .
     
    W E RECOLECTED HOW we, too, were horrified when we first arrived to see women wearing blue jeans or ski suits. How we cussed at the runs in our stockings created by brushing against a table, a piñon branch, or who knows what. How we were down to one pair of silk stockings with no way to get more. The fashion magazine Glamour came to