Chapter 7
ALL OF THIS WAS LEAD-UP to 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 said PROPERTY OF THE U.S.
GOVERNMENT on 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 like a 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 of The 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. ”