Chapter One
1943
I know they only invited me to that dinner out of pity. I knew they all knew.
It wasn't like what it is now, not a bit. Now, it's... well if you've grown up in modern times, it's hard to explain exactly what it was like then; how repressed we all were, especially when it came to sex. It's much better now.
Bobby was the year above me in high school, and I did like him, I really did. He was tall and incredibly clever and nice to his mother. My mom and his mom were best friends, I think that's why they kind of pushed us into it. His mom must have known. Moms always do.
So he took me to my junior prom, and we made awkward conversation, and I suppose that I, naive as I was back then, thought it was rather noble of him not to try and feel me up in the back of his father's Packard, like the other boys did, or so I'd heard; that it was sweet of him to match my corsage so perfectly. He was a good dancer.
And he was so, SO smart; supersmart: he wasn't going to be stuck in Madison,R.I. for a second longer than necessary, you could see that about him for sure.
At 16 he was already taking math class at the junior college, and they ran out of things to teach him too, and then he got offers from everywhere you could believe and he accepted MIT, and when he raced through that in two years and got offered a research job straight away. So it made sense that he might move into married people's quarters- I'd been up to see him then, and he'd visited me many times, and everyone from our families was so happy about it, so, you know, we just did. There was a war on.
We got married in my back yard, with a pretty bower and my pa, who didn't say a lot at the best of times, just said 'good luck, kitten', and our mothers held hands, which at the time I thought was sweet, and now I know it was Bobby's mother probably just thinking, 'oh please, oh please let this turn out alright, let my son not be an outcast for the rest of his life" and my mother- I suspect- wishing, 'please let my shy quiet little daughter get out and see something of the world; please don't let her get trapped married to the guy who works at the garage; let her do well and have a nice home and all those things she doesn't even realise yet are important."
I was nineteen years old.
*
Like many nicely brought up girls in the forties, I knew no more about sex than my dutch ancestors would have done two hundred years ago. Probably remarkably less in fact, as I had a bedroom to myself, with a ruched gingham counterpane and a three panelled mirrored dressing table of which I was extremely proud, and no elder brothers or sisters to teach me a thing. Neither did we live on a farm, which might at least have given me some insight into the mechanics.
All I knew was it was meant to be rather tricky and, judging from the pained way women elder than me looked when the subject came up, entirely embarrassing, risky, slightly dirty, and unpleasant.
I could consider myself lucky, I supposed, that Bobby was only very rarely interested in it, and then it took place very very quietly, with eyes averted on both sides. It was a little painful to begin with, but not unendurable, although it often took a long time, and generally he would prefer it if I lay on my stomach, which whilst not terribly comfortable saved me the problem of trying not to look at him not looking at me, and I could think myself somewhere else.
Regardless, by our third year of marriage this had mostly petered out altogether, and neither of us ever mentioned it.
Otherwise, we were reasonably cheerful, and Bobby was incredibly busy. The call had come at short notice, after Pearl Harbour, when I was 22 and Bobby 24. He got called up to somewhere I couldn't really talk about. I mean, at all, not even to mom and momma B, as we called his mom, both of whom were furious with us about this.
We just had to leave our little faculty house right behind us- the government had plans for us, they told us, which sounded ominous, but you know, there was the most terrible war happening in Europe, everybody said so, and we were in it now and this must have something to do with it, although I didn't know why we had to get on a train and cross right across the US. But we did.
*
The heat got to me. We had damp, dripping humid summers back in R.I. but it was fall that was the big deal where we lived, that's what people waited for, followed by long snowy months of digging your way out to the car in the morning or waiting for the bus with heavy mittens and nothing visible except your eyes.
The dry, repetitive, endless summer heat of New Mexico was new to me: that huge sky; the dust, shimmering all the way to the horizon. It made me languid: weary and slightly edgy at the same time, the slight sense of danger in every breath one took: the warnings never to drive in the desert alone; always to carry water with you at all times: plus of course we were in a compound, guarded; restrained.
The men looked stiff and uncomfortable in their shirts and ties and jackets; many from the cold universities of the east: Stanford; MIT, Harvard, Yale. Their tweed and patched corduroy looked out of place. Everyone was hot.
Our compound didn't even have a swimming pool and, with only our tiny prefab house to clean and Bobby working incredibly long hours- sometimes he even slept in the Tech Area, they called it- oh, boy, there was so little for a girl to do.
*
There were eight of us at that dinner party, early in August.
Margie, who considered herself something of a queen bee, which she was, to be fair: she arranged piano lessons for children, helped out when people were sick and didn't have their own family close at hand; and arranged the social circle and the church rota, neither of which interested me particularly; her partner- in- crime Susan, who had an identical hair do, and looked a bit like Margie only slightly fatter, and laughed at her jokes constantly as if that were her job, and her husband, Professor Franks, a Scandinavian man, very tall, who spat quite a lot when excited, which was often. Margie's husband Pete was the manager of the facility, so she really did know everybody.
Then there was Carly Rushton, who was gorgeous, and a gossip and permanently furious about everything and talked constantly about the life she'd left behind in California, which was apparently a great deal like New Mexico, only much much better. She had three boys whom she hollered at all day and she drank a great deal. Her husband was a short, quiet man whom would you not have picked out if you were matching Happy Family cards for them.
Plus some widower, and me, because Bobby was working, and even on nights when Bobby wasn't working he despised socialising with the compound wives; found it tedious and superficial and liked, as I knew, to go and do his own thing in town from time to time.
As to exactly what his own thing was, I did not know and never liked to enquire. Which sounds peculiar between a husband and a wife, but listening to Margie and Susan chit chat had taught me a thing or two- mostly, that a husband should constantly be asking for sex and pestering you, which did not chime with my experience in the slightest, but also that some women- Carly Rushton's name did come up- were considered 'goers',or had been in their day, with an appetite for it.
What did that even mean, I would think, languishing through the hot, hazy, endless days with only the huge purple sunsets of the evening to separate one from the other, which I saw in alone too. What did it mean, to want it, to be hungry for it? Sometimes when the heat lay heavy and I would doze off, only very faintly, in the afternoon, perhaps after reading a novel, I would get an intimation of what that might mean; something would twitch, a little, half in and out of consciousness, in that place I had been taught- somehow, how?- never to go anywhere near, but I would wake up with a start, confused, breathless, my skirts pulled up around my knees, my thoughts in disarray.
Bobby was a good man, but oh, the poor thing, he wasn't built for marriage. He had no interest, really, in what I did with my days- which wasn't surprising, considering how little I did do with them. He didn't care for my meals- I had been given the Housewife's Manual as a wedding gift, and I was dutifully working my way through it as well as possible on local rations, substituting tinned fruit for fresh, and Kool Whip for cream, with varying results.
He loved his work though, adored it. And beyond it was something on a horizon, something that was not me, that he must have strained to see. Perhaps a child or two might have been a distraction or something that brought us together a little more but clueless as I was, I knew there had to be a little more going on between us than what we had for there ever to be the slightest chance of that.
*
I knew who Dick Feynman was before that evening, kind of; everybody did. Everyone at Los Alamos was clever: he was a genius. Bobby had spent a couple afternoons working with him and come home, shaking his head in disbelief.
"Usually' said Bobby, who'd been about the smartest guy in every room he'd been in since he was eleven years old. "Usually when I see someone work- in my own goddam field- I can tell you what they're doing. I can tell you exactly what's up. But with this guy, sheesh. I can't figure out his method. Well, this is his method: someone writes a question up on the board, then Dick writes the answer up on the board. Unbelievable.
The other reason everyone knew of him was that his wife had died the previous year, only 25 years old, back east in New York State. New Mexico was a good climate for TB, I knew that, but she hadn't made it that far. I know the fact that people used to die of TB all the time might seem strange to you, but they did, and until the good drugs, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.
So I'd heard of Dick Feynman, but not met him, and was preparing myself for another evening of The Men completely ignoring The Women to discuss The Gadget in vague and incomprehensible abstractions. I'd never been at one of those things that didn't end with the men all huddled in a corner, drawing diagrams on the serviettes.
And us women would be expected to chat about whatever women were meant to like to chat about; children, I supposed, and weddings, and cooking, schooling, and when they were going to built that hospital and oh isn't it awful for Siss, poor you, almost the youngest here and your husband so que... busy, which I did not enjoy, the mouths behind the hands, the genteel tittering, as if it were a massively better achievement to be married to a spitting scandinavian who scattered crumbs behind himself wherever he went, or a tiny fat professor who was terrified of his own wife and sons.
But the alternative was watching the sun go down, yet again, in purple splendour, alone, from the back of my porch. Right at that instant, though, I'd have taken it, I was thinking, as Margie starting handing round ritz crackers with a smear of primula cheese on top and scattered with something that might have been paprika. I sipped at my martini, which was eye- wateringly strong,and put it down and pretended to be doing something else, and thought how much I would like to go home.
Then I looked up, and Dick Feynman walked in, and, well, that was very much the end of that.
*
