The Atomic City Girls: A Novel Read online

  Everyone was grinning at Mrs. Lawson, but the poor woman could hardly bring herself to smile back.

  “Make sure they take care of you,” she said finally.

  Ronnie was all confidence. “The Army takes care of its men.”

  After dinner, he wanted to take June on a walk down to Gregory’s Pond. That night his kisses were filled with passion, and his hands touched parts of her they’d never dared go near before. She let them. A feeling of duty had fallen over June ever since Ronnie had asked her to marry him. She didn’t seem to be choosing or participating in anything; she just responded however she thought he wanted her to.

  Again, his hot, urgent whisper was at her ear, “If you’re going to be my wife, it wouldn’t be a sin for us to . . .”

  He couldn’t say the words, but she knew what he meant. And even to this one last outrageous request, she couldn’t say no. The boy was going to war, she figured, she had to make him happy on his last night home. And besides, it was over quickly.

  Four months later, he was dead.

  It had been an afternoon in September when Evie came running over and found June on the porch of the house, shelling peas. As soon as she saw Evie sobbing on the drive, June knew what had happened. It was so fast. Just the day before, she’d gotten her first, and now only, letter from Ronnie after he’d shipped out.

  June went with Evie to the Lawsons’ house. Mrs. Lawson was crumpled on the kitchen floor in her worn blue apron, curled in a fetal position, moaning. She was a stocky woman, but appeared small and compact, as though tragedy had shrunk her. June didn’t know what to do, what to say, but Evie was watching, expecting June to somehow help her mother. June got down on her knees beside the woman and touched her shoulder. “It’s June, Mrs. Lawson. Evie told me.” As she said this, her voice cracked, and she felt hot tears spill over her eyes.

  Mrs. Lawson became quiet. She sat up and looked at June, taking her hand. “Oh, poor June. You loved him so much. You loved my boy.” She embraced June, who was sobbing now herself, partly at the loss of Ronnie, partly at the tremendous guilt of knowing she hadn’t ever loved him like she should.

  And so the past two months had been full of this gnawing sadness and unrelenting self-hatred. She went through her chores on the farm, more obsessed with Ronnie than she ever had been when they were courting, the perfect image of a miserable young war widow. She cried into her pillow at night, stayed quiet at the dinner table, and spent inordinate amounts of time to herself, walking the paths they used to go down together.

  Finally her father suggested that it might do her good to get away from the farm. Why didn’t she go work at Oak Ridge with her sister? The idea suited her well enough; she liked the thought of working, and hoped it would distract her from herself.

  Because beneath her grief, deeper down than even the guilt, was another feeling, one she wouldn’t dare name or even allow herself to think before trying to shake it loose.

  Relief.

  ***

  JUNE WAS ABLE to follow her roommate to the bus stop on her first day to be sure she was going to the right place. They had to wait in a long line to get aboard and were forced to stand when they finally got on the bus. Cici grabbed hold of a leather strap hanging from the ceiling, and June looked around for something similar to grab on to. But before she’d spotted anything, the bus began to move, and she felt herself lurch backward into a seat.

  It was just after seven A.M., and clouds of dirt kicked up by cars and buses glowed in the morning light. People were marching up and down the boardwalks or standing at bus stops. Even a group of children waited by the side of the road. The bus wound through town into a less developed area to the south, then around the base of a ridge and into another valley. June thought she recognized it as Pine Ridge, near where her grandfather’s house had been, but it was too hard to tell with all the construction. As they turned into the valley, another large watchtower appeared, like the one at the entrance, and beyond that, a huge complex of buildings. Vast warehouses connected by parking lots spread out into the distance. The hillside above the valley was treeless and scarred with a large muddy gash. Cranes and trucks appeared to be hard at work building even more facilities there. The scene was stark and industrial and covered in brown dust.

  Everyone had to line up to go through “clock alleys.” June had been to a training the day before, so she knew to clock in at the alley for her craft, which was operation, since she would be operating a machine. Cici got in the line for operation as well, and June was happy that she didn’t have to strike out on her own quite yet. Posted on the wall over their heads was a stern warning: “Employees shall clock in and out only in the alley designated. Employees punching cards in any other alley will be subject to Immediate DISMISSAL.” After clocking in, they had to present their badges at a security checkpoint. Here Cici left to report to her job. “Good luck! I’ll see you at home tonight, and we’ll celebrate your first day.”

  She gave June’s hand a quick squeeze and walked away, tall and perfectly proportioned. After going through two more security checkpoints, June was sent to a training room. Five other girls from her previous training session were already waiting. A woman stood in the front of the room with a brown clipboard in her hand and a serious expression. A poster behind her read: “Everyone pays a loafer’s wages. You with hard work, your sons and brothers with LIVES.”

  The woman began calling out names and ticking them off one by one on her clipboard. June was called out last. The woman put the board down. “I’m Miss Collins, your floor supervisor here at Y-12. I’m going to take you to your cubicles. You should have been trained on the basics of this in the bullpen. Your job is to operate a machine. You will be working in the same cubicle with the same machine every day. Your job is simple, but it is of vital importance. You must be diligent and alert. We cannot tolerate mistakes. You will watch the meters and adjust the dials to make sure they stay in the right range.”

  Miss Collins marched them deeper into the building. Long rows of lights shone down from enormous high ceilings, illuminating metal equipment. Industrial noises screeched and echoed in the distance. Miss Collins stopped in front of a row of tall machines, each with a female operator perched on a stool in front of it, spaced about ten feet from one another. “These are your cubicles,” she said, and began pointing out where each of them should sit. The “cubicles” were actually large metal boxes that reached all the way to the ceiling and were covered in meters, knobs, and levers. June had been given a diagram of the machines in her training, so she was familiar with the design. Still, the scale of the operation was a surprise.

  Those sitting at the cubicles got up to let the new workers sit down. June looked up at her cubicle as she sat and noticed that “General Electric” was etched into the metal. She stared at the array of levers and knobs.

  “You’ve been trained on how to turn the knobs?” asked the dimpled girl who had given June her stool.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you give it a try?”

  June looked at the meters and then gave the knob a slight turn to the right. The needles on the meters responded, pointing upward where they should be.

  “Good job,” said the girl. “It’s not too hard; you’ll get the hang of it fast. The tricky thing is not getting bored. You have to find things to occupy your mind, you know, or you can go crazy staring at these meters.”

  “Thanks,” said June, and the girl moved off down the hallway. She’d been on the night shift, which someday June would have to work as well because shifts rotated.

  June watched the meters carefully and adjusted the dials every time they started to veer in the wrong direction. Miss Collins wandered up and down observing the girls, and June felt herself sitting up straighter on the stool as Miss Collins walked by. It was simple enough; occasionally she had to adjust the levers as well, but after half an hour, she was already beginning to feel as though she had mastered the machine. There were switches she didn’t und
erstand, labeled “Tank Operation,” “Vacuum Operation,” “Heater Operation,” but they had been told to ignore them. The knobs and meters all indicated different numbers, and the girls were supposed to keep them at the right numbers, though they had no idea what they meant.

  Soon her mind began to wander. She was still staring at the meters, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to think about them. All sorts of other thoughts were creeping in, taking over. She could feel the itchy wool of her skirt through her cotton slip. She wondered how the other girls were doing, if their machines were just the same as hers or different. Occasionally she even looked over to see what they were doing, but always turned back to her machine as soon as she spotted Miss Collins. She wondered if Miss Collins had a beau or even any friends, for that matter; she seemed so stiff and serious. But that was probably just because of the importance of her job. Maybe outside of work, she was friendly.

  She wondered what Mama and Daddy were doing back at the farm right now. What would she be doing if she were there, too? A cold wave of homesickness washed over her, and she tried to stop thinking about it. Homesick was an appropriate word. When she thought about home, an actual physical sensation overwhelmed her, a longing she could feel in her stomach. She saw the sun rising behind the house, her bed laid out with one of Grandma’s quilts; she thought of Mama taking biscuits out of the oven, Daddy wolfing them down at the table. Even the thought of her crazy grandfather Jericho talking to his hound dogs made her heart swell up into her throat. She tried to focus on the meters.

  At least she had Cici to be friends with. They would go to dinner at the cafeteria together tonight and maybe to a movie afterward; June would suggest it. Cici seemed to know about all the dances going on; maybe tagging along with her roommate wouldn’t be so bad. She wondered why Cici didn’t like Lizbeth, their other roommate. June had only met her once, but she seemed nice enough.

  There was so much noise in this room, and June wondered what was responsible for it. What was this machine doing? What did the meters measure? What did her knob control?

  She heard loud, fast footsteps behind her and turned to see a thin man with dark hair and glasses, young but important-looking in a brown suit, walk through the hall. His eyes met hers, and she turned back to the machine, ashamed to have been caught neglecting her duties. For a moment she felt glad that he had looked at her, then immediately embarrassed and ashamed by her gladness. What would a man like that, probably some sort of top-level official who could walk through all the different areas of the plant, want with her? Besides, she had no right to want men to look at her anyway, and with that thought, her mind turned, as it always did, to Ronnie.

  Where was he now? She wanted to believe in heaven but couldn’t quite picture it. Could Ronnie see her now? Did he know what this machine was doing? Could he read her mind? The thought shook her, forced her to look away from the meters, down at her hands. She was lost in her guilt, imagining that if Ronnie could see her now, he’d know for sure that she didn’t love him. Ronnie had been killed in Saint-Malo, France. They had an atlas at home, and she had found it on the map of Europe, so far away that it hardly seemed real. She and Ronnie had been in French class together just a year ago, learning the language of this country where he had gone to die. She thought of Ronnie’s mother, huddled on the floor, sobbing. She would write Mrs. Lawson a letter.

  There must be so many Mrs. Lawsons all across America. Not just America, of course—all over the world. And to think of the places where bombs were being dropped, where Hitler had invaded. . . . June felt lucky to be here in America. Why should she be spared when so many were suffering, dying? What would she do if she were a man and had to go fight? She couldn’t imagine it; she would be so scared. How did they know what to do in battle? She knew, of course, that they were trained, but how could you ever know what to do when people were trying to kill you? Was it different for men? Did they have some innate understanding of how to fight, how to kill?

  When her shift was finally over, June turned the machine over to another girl. It felt wonderful to be off the stool, and she couldn’t wait to get home and talk to Cici. In the back of her mind, she wondered how in the world she would do this again all day tomorrow, and the day after that, but she pushed that thought away, as she’d been pushing her thoughts away all day long, and paid attention to how glorious it felt to not be staring at those meters.

  She followed the other girls through the clock alley and back out to the bus stop. A bus was waiting, already crowded with other workers whose shifts had just ended. This time June knew to find a strap and hold on. Just as the bus began to lurch forward, the man in the brown suit jumped aboard, barely keeping his balance as he climbed the steps and grabbed the strap next to June’s. She faced out the window, but he only had room to stand sideways, facing her. As the bus turned out of the parking lot, she struggled to keep from leaning into him, aware that her shoulder was grazing his chest. She stared down at his shoes, the leather deeply creased and covered in dried mud. The bus came to a sudden stop, and her body tensed as she tried to keep herself from falling into him. She felt her shoulder make contact with his body. “Excuse me,” she murmured.

  “Certainly.” His voice was deep and assured. She looked up and met his dark eyes. His stare felt intense, and she looked down again quickly. She could feel the warmth of his body next to hers and realized her heart was beating hard and fast.

  (Courtesy of the Department of Energy)

  (Courtesy of the Department of Energy)

  Chapter 2

  SAM CANTOR HAD ARRIVED IN OAK RIDGE ONE YEAR EARLIER. He’d been waiting for months for his assignment, watching as one by one his colleagues in the physics department at Berkeley all went off to work for the Army. When he finally got the order to report to Tennessee, it had been a relief. He was only twenty-nine and could feel the judgmental stares of strangers wondering why he wasn’t in uniform. At least now he would be a part of the war effort. During the long train ride to Knoxville, he watched as soldiers piled off and on at every stop, kissing girlfriends and mothers good-bye, slapping fathers and brothers on the back with fragile bravado. Sam wondered which of these leave-takings would turn out to be tragedies and judged himself for cowardice cleverly disguised as intellect.

  Sam piled into what the private cheerfully called a “stretch car” to make the journey from Knoxville to the Clinton Engineer Works. A Chevrolet had been cut in half and some boards and pieces of sheet metal nailed across its midsection to create an elongated vehicle that looked like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Sam sat on the boards between two other men also reporting for employment at the CEW. While the feeling of their hot bodies pushed up against his was deeply unpleasant, he consoled himself with the thought that they would be the first to be flung out on the side of the road if the car fell apart.

  The odor of unwashed bodies mingled with that of gasoline. Despite the proximity of his neighbors, though, Sam was cold, unused to the damp eastern climate after three years in California. He ached with tiredness, days of inadequate sleep taking their toll. First there had been the train ride, then the last two nights at the Andrew Johnson Hotel. The place was overflowing with out-of-towners looking for work in Oak Ridge, and Sam was forced to share a room with three other men, one a genuine hillbilly who didn’t seem to own shoes. Sam himself was in ragged shape, worse than usual—and usually his clothes needed mending and his face shaving. He was pale and thin, and his too-long brown hair curled at the ends. A pair of thick round glasses magnified the dark circles under his eyes. He needed a cigarette badly. A hot bath and a clean bed wouldn’t be bad either. Above all, he needed a stiff drink.

  “Is tha-it ee-it?” The man to his left seemed to be speaking, but Sam couldn’t decipher a word through the man’s piercing twang.

  “Is tha-it ee-it?”

  “What?” asked Sam helplessly.

  “Tha Clinton Engineer Works.”

  The man to Sam’s right leaned over him
. “Yes, sir, I do believe that’s it.”

  Sam looked up from his companion and saw they were approaching a tall fence covered in barbed wire and a concrete tower, from which a man with a large rifle looked down. The stretch car stopped behind about twenty other vehicles all waiting to enter. When the car finally made it through the security gate forty minutes later, they drove into a massive construction site. Workers climbed on huge piles of wood and metal, the road was clogged with trucks going in both directions, and the damp air was heavy with the stinging sweet smell of asphalt and lumber. In the midst of the cranes and half-built buildings stood a large billboard with a picture of three monkeys with their hands on their eyes, ears, and mouth, respectively. The sign commanded: “What you see here, what you hear here, what you do here, let it stay here.”

  Around a bend, they came upon a community of trailer homes, row after row of nondescript white boxes winding around a semicircle. There were no trees in this newly constructed area, just prodigious amounts of dirt. Newly paved roads wound up a hillside covered in small prefabricated homes. Farther on was something of a town with a market, pharmacy, and cinema constructed around a small cement plaza, and beyond this loomed the Hill, where a broad white building housed the CEW administrative offices.

  The stretch car stopped in front of a wooden boardwalk, but it was impossible for Sam to get out without placing his foot in a trough of mud. As he felt his one pair of shoes being sucked into the muck, he tried to focus on the positive—he was finally out of the car.

  Inside, a large reception area resounded with chatter and the sound of high heels clicking on tile. After waiting in a long line, Sam spoke to a receptionist with blond curls. She told him he would probably be kept here for two days as he underwent orientation and security procedures and filled out paperwork. “But I’ve been filling out paperwork for two days already in Knoxville!” he snapped.