The Atomic City Girls

“You’re the most beautiful woman I know.” “I know that ain’t true. But I like to hear you say it.”

“You’re telling me that you knew about the atom bomb before any of the rest of us?” She nodded. “But you couldn’t possibly have understood how it worked.”

“She saw it all in cinematic glory, herself with perfect Ingrid Bergman hair and outfit, the house the sort she’d only ever seen in the movies, with open, sprawling rooms and a yard that was just for show, not for tending vegetables or animals. What was harder to imagine was how they would get there.”

“She’d always known her mother hated her grandfather, though the reasons had never been fully explained. Her mother hardly ever spoke about her life before meeting June’s father. The one thing June was certain of was that her grandfather Jericho was a drunk.”

“You would never see this money, these resources being spent in peacetime. No government would go to this trouble to research cures for diseases or simply advance human knowledge. No, we exert ourselves to this extent only in times of war, to invent killing machines. And this, my dear, will be a killing machine worse than any that man has ever dreamed up before.”

“It was good not to be working, yet the day stretched out in front of him empty and lonely.”

“She belonged in large rooms with high ceilings, sipping from porcelain teacups, ordering servants around.”

“After a while, Tennessee becomes inevitable. One stops fighting it, so to speak.”

“No one wanted to think a pretty girl was poor.”

“She used to love the way he looked at her, and wanted to be the girl he saw. But now she knew that she was that girl and always had been. She was thankful to him for seeing more in her than she had recognized in herself and helping her to also see it. But he wasn’t responsible for it; she alone was responsible for who she was.”

“You may think I’m beautiful, but this takes work.”