Thankfully, the ceremony was brief. To celebrate, the eight of us went to lunch at the Colony House, where we ate oysters and drank so much champagne that I eventually puked in a trash can out back. But before that, Paul’s dad gave a nice speech, which was a surprise because I had gotten the impression that his parents weren’t thrilled with this whole arrangement. It wasn’t anything they said, just the way they wore these thin-lipped smiles everywhere they went.
They stayed in town through Monday, but as soon as we waved them off, Paul had me down at the county clerk’s office, where we submitted ourmarriage license and paid three dollars to expedite the issuance of our marriage certificate.
“Just married,” said the woman behind the counter, who must have been able to tell, looking at the license, that we’d been married at city hall. “How nice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Paul, who was practically beaming.
“You been together long?” the woman asked, and I choked out a laugh.
“Long enough to know she’s the one,” said Paul, which was a sweet thing to say, but also a pretty big clue that the real answer wasNot long enough.
The woman looked me up and down, letting her eyes linger on my waist, which was cinched with one of those hideous chain belts that were all the rage that spring.
“Oh my God,” I whispered as we returned to our seats to wait, “she thinks I’m pregnant.”
Paul got a kick out of that. He leaned in real close, so I could feel his breath on my ear. “Too many more performances like last night’s, and you will be.” Then he goosed me, and I let out a cackle so loud it caused that old busybody to push her glasses down to the end of her nose and give us a hard stare.
7.
ALL OF THIS WAS LEAD-UPto the main event, which was taking me down to the personnel office on base and making Paul and me official in the eyes of the U.S. Navy. We were there all morning—Paul filling out a stack of paperwork a mile high, and me signing whatever he told me to sign with those crappy ballpoint pens that saidPROPERTY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENTon them. Then it was on to the travel office, where we needed to get me a plane ticket to Sardinia, not to mention a passport. “Have you ever applied for a passport before?” asked the woman who was helping us, and I admitted that the farthest I’d ever traveled was Savannah, which was barely across the state line.
In mid-February, Paul left for Puget Sound, which—for the record—I had figured out was in Washington State. The RADCON course or school or whatever he called it was six weeks long, and while he was learning about radiation exposure monitoring and medical surveillance and how to decontaminate a submarine tender, I was meant to be closing up shop in Charleston and preparing for our big move, although I wasn’t sure what a move like this entailed.
I knew Paul had made the arrangements to have our household goods shipped, and that I was supposed to divide our belongings into two piles—temporary household goods and, for lack of a better term, regular household goods. The temporary stuff was the bare essentials: sheets, towels, some cookware, anything we’d need while we waited for our regular shipment to show up in Italy. “Doesn’t everything come on the same boat?” I’d asked Paul on one of our long-distance calls, but he’d explained that, with any luck, this stuff would show up several weeks ahead of everything else.
I used my parents’ den as a staging area. In one corner was all the stuff Paul had brought over from the Bachelor Officer Quarters before he left. He had a record player and a pretty decent record collection, if you liked Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band. There were some basics likea desk lamp and an alarm clock and some personal effects like his Naval Academy yearbooks and a meritorious unit commendation he’d received for something or other. All of his belongings could have fit in three milk crates.
In another corner, I parked the stuff I’d removed from my own bedroom. Clothes and makeup, more records, a stack of books I wanted to read or reread, my typewriter, a camera, some old journals, and a beat-up dresser my dad had hauled to and from my first and only apartment. My mother didn’t want to part with my bed frame, but she told me I could take the mattress, which we both knew needed to be replaced, and the accompanying box spring. In the final days before the movers arrived, she kept adding items to my growing pile of odds and ends. An old quilt, a coffeepot, some Christmas china she’d received from her own mother and had never so much as taken out of the box.
Finally, there were our wedding gifts—a fondue pot and a rattan plant stand and some place mats that my aunt made a point of telling me were from France. A neighbor gave us a magazine rack that doubled as an end table and had a built-in ashtray, and my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Hallinan, who lived just down the road from us, dropped off a giant barometer that I was meant to hang in my kitchen.
The worst gift, by far, was a book Paul’s mother gave me. She had wrapped it in expensive-looking paper and ambushed me with it the night before the wedding. I don’t know what I thought was going to be in that package, but if I’m being honest, I probably figured she was giving me some family heirloom—maybe a string of pearls she’d worn on her own wedding day or a brooch that had belonged to Paul’s grandmother. Imagine my disappointment when I got the paper off and realized I was holding a copy ofThe Navy Wife: What She Ought to Know About the Customs of the Service and the Management of a Navy Household. There were sections on telephone etiquette and on which of your husband’s superiors to pay house calls to, and even a few paragraphs devoted to what to wear if invited to tea on a submarine.If slacks are becoming on you by all means wear them.“Do I have to pack this?” I asked my mother the night before the movers arrived, and she took a long drag of her Pall Mall, gave me a slightly sympathetic look, and said, “I think you’d better.”
8.
I HAD GIVEN MY NOTICEat Condon’s and sold my car for cash, so I spent my last days in Charleston running errands in Paul’s Chevelle, which was bright blue with a white racing stripe painted down the middle. It wasn’t the sort of car I’d have picked out for myself, but that didn’t stop it from being a whole lot of fun to drive.
As our departure date loomed, I bought a couple of suitcases and an Italian phrase book, had a cavity filled, and got fitted for a diaphragm. At the drugstore, I tried to calculate how much spermicide I’d need if Paul and I had sex every day for two years (slightly optimistic, I now realize), then remembered that we might try to get pregnant at some point. So I bought a dozen tubes and hoped they’d last.
Paul returned on the seventh of April, and we celebrated our reunion with a quickie in my parents’ garage before sitting down to a beautiful dinner my mother had spent the better part of the day preparing. “To the adventures you’ll have together,” my father said as he raised a glass to us both. When he thought we weren’t looking, I saw him wipe a tear from his eye.
The next morning, Dad followed Paul down to the port, where Paul dropped off his car at some office that promised to put it on a container ship bound for Naples. The day after that, my parents drove us to Charleston “International” Airport, which, at that time, was a teeny-tiny airport with four gates, a baggage carousel, and not much else.
My parents walked us to our gate and sat with us until it was time to board. “You’ve got your traveler’s checks?” my mother must have asked five times. Ordinarily, that kind of thing bugged me, but I humored her because I knew it’d be at least a year, if not two, before I saw her again, and it was impossible to forget that the last time my parents had seen a kid off, he’d come home in a box.
I felt a lot of guilt, leaving them like I was doing. Paul kept telling me I had to live my life and that they didn’t expect me to stay on James Islandforever. But going to Italy wasn’t like moving to Mount Pleasant or even Columbia. I wasn’t going to be coming over for dinner or driving home for the occasional weekend or holiday. I was going to be gone, gone. And I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for them, Lenny dead and now me on the other side of the world.
When our boarding call was issued, I started to panic. “You’ll come visit?” I said, even though I knew pigs would fly long before my parents did. My mother lit a cigarette and told me that for sure they were going to try.
Passengers were gathering their things and saying their final goodbyes, and I watched Paul hug my mother and shake my father’s hand. Then he stood off to the side, waiting for me to do more or less the same thing, but I couldn’t move. My parents seemed so old all of a sudden. Surely I wasn’t going to leave them here, in this sad little airport, waving after me?
Dad must have realized what was going on inside my head because he covered the distance between us, folding me up in his arms the same way he had when I was a little girl. I started to weep, and he patted my back for a minute or two, then kissed the top of my head. “You’re going to be all right,” he said into my hair, but the words came out a little funny, to where I wasn’t sure whether what he was saying was a statement or a question.
I’d never know, because I let him pass me off to my mother, who kissed my forehead and held my face in her hands. “Be good,” she said, and I promised I would.
9.
WE FLEW FROM CHARLESTONto Dulles, Dulles to Frankfurt, and Frankfurt to Rome. I’d never been on an airplane and was a little nervous about the takeoff, but Paul gave me a stick of Wrigley’s and told me I’d be fine. It was a weird sensation, entering the air for the first time, but I liked it and spent the first leg of the trip pointing out the window at farms and interstates and eventually big, fluffy clouds. On our transatlantic flight, I barely had time to adjust the pressure in my ears before a stewardess placed a Manhattan in my hand and a shrimp cocktail on my seat tray, which I feel the need to remind you—since you were born long after the golden age of air travel—was set with a ceramic plate, cloth napkin, and metal cutlery. We dined on teriyaki steak and pineapple upside-down cake and had several glasses of wine apiece, and after the stewardess had cleared our plates, she came around with a selection of cigarettes, which I smoked, against Paul’s recommendation, because why not?
