“And they want us out, too?”
“I think we can assume so,” said Paul.
“Well, that’s not very nice,” I said, in an attempt to be funny.
The protesters were almost all young people. They wore collared shirts and bell-bottoms, and while they were obviously Italian, with their dark hair and Roman noses, they reminded me of American college students protesting the Vietnam War.
I would not have called the group intimidating. For one thing, they were attractive, and it’s hard to think of attractive people as sinister, or even objectionable. For another, they were casual with each other. Sure, they were shouting strange slogans that I couldn’t understand, but they were also laughing and flirting and sharing cigarettes, and I spied one girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, eating a piece of focaccia with her cardboard sign tucked under her arm. That image has always stayed with me.
Because there was no great way to get back to our hotel without wading through the crowd, we stood for a while with a group of onlookers who had gathered in front of a restaurant. The owner of the restaurant came out onto the street and watched the proceedings for a few minutes. Then he batted his hands at the lot of them, turned to us, and said, in very nice English, “The Americans spend more at this place than they do.”
This piqued my interest, and I wanted to ask him more, but he’d already gone back inside, so I addressed Paul instead. “Tom said all these people were from off the island, but how does he know that?”
“We’ve probably got a whole dossier on each of them,” he said, and I assumed he was kidding, although in hindsight, I know better.
We waited until the group began to make their way down the Via Vittorio Emanuele, toward the Piazza Rossa. When they had gotten as far as the church, we skirted the harbor and headed back to the Excelsior.
“We’re in for the night,” Paul announced as we rode the elevator up to our hotel room. The pronouncement felt a little paternalistic, but I didn’t even know the meaning of the wordpaternalisticat the time. All I knew was that the whole day—both what had happened at the beach and what we’d witnessed at the harbor—had left me feeling queasy. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner, and Paul ate three, but when I went to eat mine, I found I wasn’t hungry.
31.
THE NEXT MORNING,Paul woke, bathed, and dressed, then came around to my side of the bed to kiss me goodbye. “You going to miss me?” he asked as he stood to go, and I mumbled something into my pillow, insinuating that—yes—I would be lost without him.
I listened for the sound of the elevator door opening and closing, but I must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing I knew, the phone was ringing and it was a quarter to ten.
“Hello?” I said, my tongue like sandpaper in my throat.
It was Michele at the front desk. “Buongiorno, signora Archer. You have a visitor.”
“I do?” I could count the number of people I knew in La Maddalena on one hand.
There was a pause while Michele asked whomever it was to repeat their name. “Mary Lou Jenkins,” he finally said.
Jenkins.I had heard the name before, but my brain wasn’t working right. Then it hit me. Mary Lou Jenkins was the CO’s wife. “Tell her I’ll be right down,” I said as I leaped out of bed.
I ransacked the wardrobe and threw on the first sundress I found. There was no time for hair or makeup, so I brushed my teeth, pulled my hair into a quick ponytail, slipped on a pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and hurried downstairs.
It was easy to pick out Mary Lou Jenkins when I arrived in the lobby. She was standing by a ficus tree, clutching a tortoiseshell Lucite handbag, and looked every bit the part of a CO’s wife. I remember she wore this royal blue A-line skimmer that fit her so perfectly she must have had it professionally tailored. Her face was carefully made up, and her blond hair was in a chignon, which looked pretty on her, even if it wasn’t exactly in style.
I’ve found there’s this thing that happens to women sometime in their early to mid-forties. They’ve finally figured out what looks good on them,so they refuse to give it up, even when the dress or shoes or hairstyle or whatever it is begins to look dated. I say this because, sometime around 1968, Mary Lou Jenkins looked in the mirror and said to herself,Yes, this.
“Mrs. Jenkins?” I said as I arrived in front of her.
“Eileen?”
“That’s me.” For a brief moment, I wondered whether I was meant to curtsy or kiss her hand or adhere to some other obscure protocol that had no doubt been carefully outlined in the pages ofThe Navy Wife. Thankfully, she extended her hand, and I shook it.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, smiling. “Please call me Mary Lou.” She had stopped by, she said, to officially welcome me to La Madd and to see if I needed anything.
We made polite small talk for a few minutes before she looked at her watch. I was expecting her to beg off, so when she asked if I had time for a quick coffee, I almost fell over. “Sure,” I said.
I followed Mary Lou out of the lobby and into the center of town, where she stopped in front of a café called Bar Fiume. She selected an outdoor table that sat in the shade of a big awning, and I regretted not bringing a sweater.
“How are you finding things?” she asked after I’d ordered a cappuccino and she an americano.
If anyone else had asked me how I was finding life on the island, I might have admitted to feeling overwhelmed. But I was mindful of the fact that Mary Lou was the wife of Paul’s boss’s boss, or maybe it was his boss’s boss’s boss, so I just said, “Great.”
She raised an eyebrow in my direction, like she didn’t quite believe me. “It can be a difficult adjustment. Especially if this is your first time overseas.” She said this like she’d already sized me up and decided there was no way I’d ever been anywhere. It was true, of course, but I didn’t like the assumption. “Have you registered for the Intercultural Relations Seminar?”
