The Atomic Weight of Love (14 page)

“Sometimes you purposefully misunderstand me, Meri.” He shook his head, the put-upon husband. “You’re overly sensitive.” I felt my jaw lock as Alden continued his defense: “Quite simply put, it was a book I saw in Santa Fe. A new book, a book that is supposed to be good. That’s all,” he sighed. “I thought you’d find it intriguing, especially while you’re laid up.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to feel this way; I didn’t have the energy to feel this way. When I looked once more at his face, read his expression, what I saw there was honest confusion. He really had intended to bring me a birthday gift that would be something I’d enjoy. I loved books; Alden loved books. On one level, it made perfect sense.

“Alden,” I said and waited for him to stop staring out the window and look at me. “I’m a little touchy on this subject, that’s all,” I said, trying to bring him back to me, choosing to focus on his intentions, not his obtuseness. “Sit here a moment.” I patted the edge of the bed, scooted myself over, feeling the stitches in my abdomen grab, pull.

Gingerly, he sat next to me. “I meant well, Meri.”

“I know you did, sweetheart.” I put my hand on the small of his back.

“Sometimes, I guess I miss the boat.”

I laughed and again felt my sore belly. How perfect some clichés are, I thought. Alden would literally miss a boat, a plane, a train. He would walk in front of traffic, lost in some conundrum of theoretical physics.

“That’s what you have me for,” I said, smiling. “To keep you on board.”

Alden picked up the book and set it on the nightstand. “I’ll get you some fresh water,” he said, taking the water pitcher and heading for the hallway. “That, I think I can manage successfully,” he winked.

“Prove it,” I said, grinning.

DURING THE WEEKS I
was hospitalized, Belle was a frequent visitor. She brought me Russell Stover chocolates,
LOOK
magazines, and exuberant conversation. She swore with great aplomb, and she seemed to say exactly what she thought with little to no filtering. I swam in her freedom, her liveliness. I don’t know if it was because of that shared pelvic exam or if she would have done so anyway, but she spoke freely about sex—not in a vulgar way, just naturally, as if talking about sex were no different from sharing recipes for chicken cacciatore. I half fell in love with Belle Jordan.

“You’ll like this,” she said one day, hanging her legs over the side of the single visitor’s chair. The walls of the room were painted with an ineffectual coating of thin, white paint, and my pillow was so stingy that I had to use my arms to cushion my head. A stark black cross hung above the bed, and I imagined it falling one day, impaling me. “My original Texas girl’s name? Watling!” Belle waited for me to catch on. “Belle Watling!”

“As in the good-hearted whore in
Gone with the Wind
?”

“Yes, ma’am. Margaret Mitchell stole my name!”

“It is a pretty name. I like ‘Belle.’ ”

“Sure, me too—but even though the book came out after I was born, people think my parents named me after a madam.”

“A madam who never really has sex, though. She just drives around in her carriage delivering gold coins discreetly wrapped in handkerchiefs, donating funds to help the war wounded. She’s a beneficent whore.” I looked at my fingernails, thought I saw dirt beneath them. I was dying for a hot shower.

“Oh, that’s me all right! A beneficent whore!”

“You’re good to me, Belle.”

“I like you, Meridian. I have a sense about you. Still waters run deep and all that.”

“Oh, I might just bore you to tears.”

“Honey, you ever let loose, you’re not coming back. That’s my prediction. You will break out of this pretentious little hellhole, that’s where I’m putting my money.”

“You may have me confused with someone else.”

“I don’t think so.” She stood, looking at her watch. “Women gotta fight hard to be free, my friend. Daily. Pitched battle.” She smoothed the sheets and kissed me on the cheek. “Wait until you get better. I have plans for you.”

“Secret plans?”

“Anarchy. Rebellion. And probably a lot of booze.”

“My my my.”

“So get better. Start eating more of the food they bring you.”

“It’s awful. Can you identify even half of the entrees?”

She stood in the doorway next to a sign that listed visitors’ hours. “Tuna salad?”

“Love it. My husband won’t eat it, though, so I no longer make it.”

“Well, we’re not talking about his culinary demands, are we? The question was whether
you
like it.”

“I do.”

“Then tomorrow I will bring you a tuna salad sandwich. Maybe a slice of coconut cream pie, if I get my ass in gear this evening. I warn you, though,” she paused for effect, “if the cocktail hour extends beyond seven, I may not get around to the pie.” She blew me a kiss.

BELLE WAITED SEVERAL WEEKS
after my discharge before introducing me to horseback riding. Dr. Schumann owned horses he no longer had the time to keep properly exercised, so he was grateful for Belle’s enthusiastic plan to get me out and about. The first time I tried stretching the still-healing skin of my incision up, over, and across the saddle I cried out with the sudden pain.

“Nothing’s going to come apart at this point,” Belle said from where she’d stood to help me into the saddle. She mounted her horse gracefully. “The time is past for you to be sitting in a chair. The way you’ll get better now is to exercise.”

She showed me how to hold the palomino’s reins, to use my knees and thighs to grip the horse, and afterwards how to groom Heathen. I loved the smell of the barn—alfalfa hay and manure. There was something real, essential about it. I learned to feed Heathen carrots and quartered apples without risking my fingers, and I felt my strength returning as we rode along the frosty January ground amidst dried stalks of mountain wildflowers.

I think Alden was glad I’d found a friend, although he never asked much about Belle, didn’t seem to want to know her himself. I didn’t mind his apparent disinterest; Belle belonged to me. She was my reprieve, my secret hillside of laughter. And, increasingly, she was my only real companion. At night, when Alden and I used to talk, he used to work at engaging me. Now he disappeared into his book, his smoke, and the deep, soft cushions of his chair. It was as if, with relief, he could leave the job of entertaining me to someone else.

In the spring, the male towhee spends between seventy and ninety percent of his mornings singing. Nearly as soon as he mates, however, the percentage of time spent in song drops to five percent.

WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT
it, not even once—the fact that my exploding ectopic pregnancy and convalescence meant yet another year’s delay of my graduate studies, a bonus year added to Alden’s Los Alamos research plan. I wrote a letter begging accommodation of my situation, pleading my unforeseen health problems, and Cornell agreed to give me just one more deferral until the spring of 1948. After that, the admissions office made it clear, the offer for a scholarship and a spot in the graduate school would expire. The fates had intervened, tamped me down like the tobacco in the bowl of Alden’s pipe. I wasn’t going anywhere.

I TOLD BELLE
ABOUT
my crow journals, about my chance at graduate school slipping away.

“I’d like to know what’s stopping you,” she said one day while we sat at the edge of the stream in Frijoles Canyon, letting the water flow over our bare feet. We wore the Los Alamos outdoorswoman uniforms of crisp white blouses, heavy cotton dungarees, and leather belts with silver and turquoise buckles. I’d been letting my hair grow, and at last I was able to wad it all into a ponytail or spin it into a French twist when I wanted to feign elegance. I wore my favorite pair of sunglasses—Wayfarers with dark green lenses and near-pink plastic frames. We were finishing a lunch of apple pie, accompanied by a Thermos of coffee white with cream.

I picked up a decaying alder leaf, held it up so that I could see its skeletal remains, the fine lace of venation. “I’m like this leaf,” I said, showing it to her. “This is what’s left of me. The flesh is gone, the meat of me is gone.”

“Only if you let it be.”

“What am I supposed to do? Tell me. What do I do?”

“Get back to the writing. Get back to the birds.”

“There’s no point, anymore.”

“I think there is.” She took the leaf from me, leaned over the stream and let it go. We watched it, an inconsequential weight on the stream’s current. “You cannot give up, Meri. You just can’t. There’s too much of you, too much that you are and can be.” I saw debris stuck between her toes, wondered if we’d remembered to bring a towel to dry our feet.

“Was. The operative word is
was
.”

“I don’t believe that. Don’t squander your gifts. Don’t let yourself waste away in this fucking place.”

We were quiet for several minutes.

“Tell him that you need more than this.” She gestured to the trees around us, but I knew she meant Los Alamos. “Tell him he made you a promise. You can give him an ultimatum.”

“Oh,” I sighed. I could not imagine any positive reaction Alden would have to an ultimatum. And would I leave him if he didn’t accede to my wishes, whatever they were? Would I have the courage to draw a line and stick to it?

“Give it some thought, kiddo,” Belle said, and stood. “As someone who cares for you, I can’t watch this much longer.” She brushed leaves from the seat of her pants and walked toward the car.

I looked once more at the surface of the stream, saw many more alder and cottonwood leaves traveling downstream, lodged against stones or submerged, signaling for help from the depths like drowning swimmers.

“I’VE BROUGHT YOU SOMETHING.”

A couple of weeks later, I stood at the kitchen counter slicing the fresh zucchini I’d bought from a valley farmer.

“Come outside,” Alden continued. “It looks best in the sunlight.”

I dried my hands on a dish towel and followed him to the driveway. He unwrapped something heavy from a chamois cloth. There was a rounded brass base, about three and a half inches in diameter, with two lines incised for decoration, and on top of it nestled a disk of thick plastic, the bottom of which was painted a deep, indigo blue. He held it in his palms like a priest offering a sacrifice to the gods. “Step closer and look.”

Floating in the plastic disk was a piece of the moon—tinged green, sparkling, glowing, pitted. I could distinguish some grains of sand embedded in the rock. I took the plastic disk from its base, held it up so that I could see the thin crust of rock from the side.

“It’s Trinitite. Desert sand fused to form glass, heated by the first blast at Trinity site. A fellow I know, plastic chemist, he made some of these. One was sent to Truman, sits on his desk.”

“If I were a girl, I’d swear you’d been to the moon and chipped off a piece.” I moved it in the sun, let it catch the light. “It has the dark side of the moon trapped in it, too.”

“Well, it’s for you. For you to know what our sacrifices mean.”

I looked at him. “Sacrifices?”

“During the war. How long we had to be apart.” He put his arm about my shoulders, squeezed. “But now that’s all over.”

“The sacrifices aren’t over.”

He released me, stepped back. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“I mean my sacrifices. They are not over, they are not encased in a hunk of plastic and on display.” I handed him the Trinitite. “And you know that.” I realized I’d planted my feet further apart, steadied my stance. Was I really going to do this, now? Confront him, with so little planning?

“I meant this as a gift. It was just a gift.”

“I know that, and I appreciate it. But you cannot pretend that I am not still, always, giving up my dreams so that you can have yours.”

“But we’ve talked about this. I’m not going back to Chicago. This is where I want to be, and I am doing what I need to be doing.”

“And me?”

“You’ve got your crow observations, you can do something with that—maybe publish, if and when you reach some conclusions, prove your thesis.”

I blew out a breath. “Which is what? What’s my thesis, Alden?”

He was folding the chamois cloth, carefully.

“You don’t know it. You don’t know what my hypothesis is.”

“All right, Meri, it’s true. I don’t know.” He shoved the chamois into his back pocket. “But I strongly suspect that you don’t know what it is, either. I’ve seen you do very little in the last several months that has the remotest connection to your crow research.”

“Would you notice? Would you even notice?”

“I think I would. I’m not obtuse. I try to talk to you—you’re the one who has stopped talking to me.”

“I’m talking now.”

“No, you’re fuming. What is your point, other than complaint? You cannot seriously propose that I give up my job, that we leave Los Alamos and live in some student’s turret in upstate New York while you write a master’s thesis.”

“I was thinking about compromise.”

“Which would look like what? What do you envision as compromise in these circumstances?” I could see he was trying to keep the tone of his voice even, measured. “What do you
want
, Meri?”

But there wasn’t a viable compromise. Nothing I could see or imagine. And he knew it. I tightened the sash of my apron. I left him standing in the evening sun, walked back to the kitchen, and finished slicing the squash.

I’D NEVER BEEN A
drinker. Belle, on the other hand, kept an inviolate cocktail hour, and she found inventive ways to include alcohol in most of her off-duty pursuits. She wasn’t alone—a good number of the women (and men) in Los Alamos drank. They drank to adjust to life in a small, isolated mountain community after having lived in European cities and America’s university campuses, where they’d had access to theater, live music, restaurants with innovative chefs—fulfillment of all desires.

Belle was the first woman I’d known who let loose so easily, and in placid Los Alamos she was my good-time friend. I started drinking primarily because she practically demanded it of me, but also so that I could feel as free as she seemed to be. Trying to keep up with Belle, the effects of alcohol more intense in my small frame, at times I drank until I stumbled, bruised my arms and legs, slurred my words. For a time—the time with Belle—drinking was the anesthesia that made my life endurable. Alcohol lulled to sleep the resentment that lived inside of me, stilled its petulant voice.