How to Be an Atomic Wife

1.
First, accept the unbalanced exchange of the Pacific coastline for desert shrub and begrudgingly go from there. Stare in mock amazement, a manicured hand shielding your eyes as you scan the endless expanse of ombre browns and taupes, before disembarking the train in a small town a few miles from his own beloved ranch house. You can recall the rambling wood structure where the wind battered against the windows at night and the hellacious yipping of baby coyotes could be heard no matter how many gunshots were fired from the darkened porch. But that was a place you once survived, fresh from your second divorce, slightly drunk on the whiskey he would tip into your mouth from a flask kept at his hip while you two rode the hills of the Sangre de Christo, his equally wild-haired brother loping alongside with a rucksack of cigarettes and jerky bobbing against his saddle. He was a distraction then, an academic ladies man with a nasal Yankee whisper playing cowboy in unwashed dungarees, and now you’ve gone and married him.
2.
Start to remember that this was where you, yes you, truly learned to love him, away from the garden parties overlooking the Golden Gate bridge, away from the trays of canapés and university shop talk, while cow-eyed coeds and wives of his colleagues gathered around him as he told story after story gesturing with a constantly refreshed martini, in a voice that would soon seem so small and frail over the broadcasted interviews begging the same questions of how could this happen and why did they turn on you? Back then you were only thinking of your orchids and the humidity levels in the greenhouse before you left for the evening and when he’d finally realize that you were, in the fact, the only interesting person there.
3.
Don’t complain when he says this is only one leg of the journey, that from California to New Mexico was the easy part, and now it’s time to report to town before the long drive home, a word he rolls uneasily around in his mouth. It’s all hairpin turns along unpaved gravel to a valley unaccustomed to irrigation and secret missions, and you clutch the handle of your suitcase the entire way, grabbing his arm when the wheels seem to swerve perilously close to the edge of cliffside. One day soon you’ll overhear a decorated general remark that he, your one true love, your bonafide genius with an unthinkable task, shouldn’t be trusted to run a hamburger stand, much less the experiment he’s been placed in charge of. Recalling that moment, when he is holding onto the brim of his faded fedora, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip as he laughs and howls at the turns that make your stomach flip, you’ll think that maybe, this general was right.
4.
After you surrender your identity to a series of numbers stamped on a photo that betrays your exhaustion, remember not to phone your family back home or send a forwarding address. Accept that this is one mysterious game in which you, the Wife, must do your own patriotic duty in keeping your Husband calm, cool, and collected as only a Wife can during these difficult and trying times. Remember to keep your sympathy in check for the young, who come cherry-picked from the Ivy leagues and bring their hastily married high school sweethearts agog at the lack of running water and need for a hot plate and instead reserve if for those men, like him, your darling Husband, who are men of science now exiled from their homelands. Reserve your patience for them when they need you to translate something, which they will then translate for their wives, wives the same age as you but bearing the mark of such exile in their long faces, crossing and uncrossing their legs under threadbare dresses with bruised, low-heeled shoes. Each of their accents, like the one you have worked hard to suppress, will seem so romantic, so familiar, their stories of leaving so heartbreaking, so unjust, that you will struggle to keep your sanity during the re-telling of it all, an anger so white in the middle of your ribs towards a menacing stranger you’ve never met that it threatens to split you in two. But instead you mix too-strong highballs for them to drink in the company of you and your husband in your small living room while these men talk about the beauty of science and how much more there is to discover.
5.
Learn to get just drunk enough in the morning that you have a headache by lunch time and cannot possibly eat a thing when the other wives invite you over for mediocre sandwiches and pilfered bottles of sweating cola. Instead, languish on your couch until he comes home, not wanting to talk, sometimes just wanting to fuck, and you are so well- rested it’s all you want to do. Let him pull whatever dress or skirt you happen to be wearing up around your waist until the zipper is digging into the small of your back, not even bothering to fully take off his own pants, and let him enter you right there in the living room, the curtains only half drawn, a cigarette still burning in the ash tray. Hold him too close to you and take in every muscle along his neck, every edge of his dark, stubbled jawline, and keep yourself from counting the ribs under his shirt which now seems three sizes too big. You’re shy over your weight against him at all other times of your life together but not now, never when he is over you, commanding you, pressing his mouth against yours in an almost juvenile desperation that indicates how afraid he is to die.
6.
Let your alcoholism become a trademark, like a hat you wear at jaunty angle so no one can fully see your true expression, and then take off in place of another, your intelligence and arrogance allowing you believe this alcoholism isn’t a weakness of character but merely a by-product of your environment when you are alone, which is 85% of the time, in a land you have come to hate, surrounded by people who you want to strangle. It is convenient that around this time, the time you wish most to flee, that you discover you are pregnant again, and this is a cause for celebration among the townspeople. Martinis are now replaced with cold glasses of milk, gingham house dresses sheath your ever- expanding form, and you only go outside to smoke under the tree in your front yard and to see how long you can stare directly into the sun. The first had been a boy, easy to carry and later free to run wild, but you know the second will be a girl, from the way your legs swell and your back aches and your body feels a deep surrendering of itself to this invader, this intruder you don’t possibly have the strength to welcome into a world you are so unsure of.
7.
Before you give birth, you dream of those who will not survive, of screaming children with eyeless faces and fathers cradling blankets of ash in their arms. We must do something, he tells you in the grey haze of night, wagging his folded hands when you both can’t sleep and the task seems never-ending. This can’t be the end, not after all this work, all this time with the team, and in those few justifying words do you realize that this is how the world really comes to an end to make way for another: with great hesitation by terrified men who cannot see the joy of the journey but must act, act as if they command the fates, eager to snip the string even when the blade is rusted and nothing is guaranteed. You want to embrace him but when he speaks like this you do not know him, his heart so dark and unreachable as the sea. You could sink alongside him, a fingertip or two away for all eternity, but instead you listen for his breathing to slow in time with yours, your two bodies side by side like ships waiting in the darkness for that flash of sunrise to right them home.

You can learn more about Sarah by clicking on her bio:   https://thievingmagpie.org/sarah-hassan-bio/