It was a form she wanted me to fill out, and I did the best I could with it, then waited a good ten or fifteen minutes while she made several more drinks and had a prolonged conversation with a customer. Finally, she took the slip from me and walked to the end of the counter, where she picked up a handset and hit some buttons on what I hoped was a switchboard.She spoke with an operator, and when she was satisfied with whatever had transpired on the other end of the line, she got my attention and pointed at the bank of phones. “Vai nella prima cabina,” she said. I stared at her blankly, so she held up one finger and said in that same too-loud voice, “Number one.”
It wasn’t until I had folded myself into the booth that I realized how badly I wanted one of my parents to be at home and available to accept the call. I’d been gone less than a week, but it felt like a lifetime, and I think I needed someone to remind me that I was still the same old Eileen, just plunked down somewhere new.
I picked up the receiver and listened to a faraway ringtone. When I heard my mother’s tinny “Hello?” I practically yipped with joy.
“It’s me! Eileen!” I said, twisting around to give the woman at the bar a thumbs-up, but she’d already moved on.
“You got there okay?” asked my mother, and I turned back to the wall in an effort to hear her a little better.
“Yeah, we’re here,” I said, and described the whole setup at Bar Sanna. “Calling’s expensive, so I can’t stay on long. I just wanted to tell you we made it.”
There was a slight delay, which reminded me that my voice was—somehow—traveling through tiny wires that ran from this remote island to the mainland of Sardinia, and then where? Rome? New York? I pictured each word of ours zipping along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and then it just seemed remarkable that we could speak to each other at all.
“How is everything?” my mother asked, and I didn’t know where to begin.
“It’s beautiful. Like a paradise,” I said.
“How’s Paul? Has he started work?”
I told her a little bit about the tender and Santo Stefano, but I realized we’d already been on the phone longer than I’d intended, and I had no idea what the call was going to cost.
“I’ll write everything down for you. In a letter,” I promised. “Is Dad home?”
“He’s out mowing the yard. Let me go get him.”
I calculated the time it’d take for my mother, who was no doubt standing in the kitchen with the phone cord wrapped around her waist, to getoutside and wave him down. She’d shout something at him, and he’d cut the engine, ask her to repeat whatever it was she’d just said.Eileen’s on the phone!she’d say for the third or fourth time. And he’d ask,Now?Then it’d be at least another minute or two before he made it to the kitchen. I was fairly certain I couldn’t afford all that.
“Stop, Mom. Don’t. You there?” I said, praying she hadn’t already put down the phone and headed for the backyard.
“I’m here.”
“I’ve got to go. But I’ll try to call you again soon.”
“Okay,” she said. “We love you, baby.”
I could feel my eyes brimming with hot tears, and I almost begged her not to go, to give me a few more minutes, to tell me that I hadn’t done the wrong thing, marrying a guy I barely knew and moving halfway around the world with him. But all I said was “I love you, too.”
I was still teary-eyed when I returned to the bar to pay, but when the woman told me I owed her twenty-four thousand five hundred lire, the equivalent of about thirty-six dollars, what I wanted to do was sob. My instinct was to argue—I couldn’t have been on the phone longer than ten minutes—but the only phrase on the first page of my phrase book that even came close to capturing what I needed to say wasNon capisco, orI don’t understand. I said it as passionately as I knew how, but she was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, withdrawing a worn piece of paper from somewhere underneath the bar and pointing to a chart in the center of it. On Saturdays, during peak hours, station-to-station calls were five thousand two hundred fifty lire for the first three minutes, and one thousand seven hundred fifty lire for each additional minute. I had been on the phone for quattordici minuti, she explained, and—like it or not—the call was going to cost me as much as a car payment.
“Capisci?” she said, and I nodded slowly, then reached for my wallet.
What Icapisci-ed was that I would not be calling my parents again for a very long time.
29.
THERE WERE MORE THAN ADozen breathtaking beaches on the island of La Maddalena, but only one that looked like it was within walking distance of the hotel. The city beach, Spiaggia di Punta Tegge, was less than a mile from the center of town, so on Sunday, after another round of cappuccinos and cornetti, Paul and I stuffed two hotel towels and a book apiece into our smallest duffel bag and set off walking.
The walk was not a pleasant one. Once we got past the harbor, the sidewalk petered out, and on the way out of town, the cars picked up speed. Paul recommended we walk single file, so as not to make ourselves an easy target, but even so, there were several points at which I jumped off the road and into a patch of scratchy grass to avoid being struck. On more than one occasion, I suggested we turn back and maybe look for a taxi, but Paul kept insisting that we were “almost there” until eventually we were.
Spiaggia di Punta Tegge was located on a peninsula of solid rock that jutted out into the sea like a prehistoric skin tag. A dirt path, wide enough for a car, led from the road to a small parking lot, which was crowded but nowhere near as bad as it could get—I would learn later—on a hot day in July. On the other side of the parking lot was a small whitewashed building that we confirmed was a café, and past that was a dive center, still closed for the season. At the farthest end of the peninsula was some sort of walled structure.
Once we’d gotten the lay of the land, we surveyed the beach. It feels criminal to say this, but Spiaggia di Punta Tegge—the part with the actual sand—was only okay. By American standards, you could have put it head-to-head with Folly Beach or Sullivan’s Island, and it still would have come out on top. But compared to other beaches I’d discover on La Maddalena, it was nothing special. A narrow shelf of sand, a couple of big granite boulders, and a view of Palau on the other side of the channel. Of course, at that time, I was convinced we’d arrived in a heaven on earth.
Paul and I spread our skimpy hotel towels out on the sand and kicked off our sandals. The temperature was only in the high sixties, too cold to sunbathe, but we’d worn bathing suits anyway. Mine was a turquoise one-piece I’d owned since high school, and when I pulled my T-shirt over my head, Paul let out a low whistle. I pretended to be embarrassed, although I was secretly quite pleased.
“I haven’t seen you in a bathing suit before,” he said appreciatively.
“Likewise,” I said as I eyed him in his too-short trunks.
