Chapter 27
HOW TO DESCRIBE MY FIRST Glimpse of the tender?
Well, for one thing, she was a good bit smaller than I thought she’d be.
I guess I’d been picturing an aircraft carrier or maybe an amphibious assault ship—whatever I’d seen going in and out of Charleston Harbor most frequently.
At five hundred and twenty-nine feet long, the Gilmore was downright diminutive by comparison.
She was also old, her best days very obviously behind her.
The submarine tender was cracked and corroded, with a lot of obsolete equipment and a list of deferred maintenance a mile long. But I felt a vague tenderness for this creaky old boat. Without her, I wouldn’t be in Italy, and Paul and I wouldn’t have gotten married. At least not yet.
I looked over at Paul, wondering if he felt the same way.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and kissed his cheek.
The Gilmore was docked at a long concrete pier that ran parallel to the shore, which technically makes it a wharf.
In any case, the tender wasn’t pulled up alongside it.
Picture a parking space you’ve got to back into.
Her stern was flush with the pier and her bow jutted out into the open sea, so that submarines could dock along either side of her.
I could already see one sub on her port side, and as we drew closer, I realized that what I was actually looking at was two subs—one right next to the other.
The liberty boat had begun to slow, which made it a little easier to talk to Paul. “What are those?” I asked, pointing to a ring of red buoys that surrounded both tender and subs.
“Nets and booms.”
I didn’t have time to ask what they were for because we were fast approaching the pier. “Stand clear,” shouted a crew member, and the next thing I knew, we’d disembarked and were tripping past the Gilmore’s gangway.
Most of the women headed straight for a big metal building that I would soon learn housed the commissary and NEX, but Paul wanted to give me the full tour, so we took a less direct approach, meandering past two sets of enlisted barracks, one for Americans and another for Italians.
He pointed out a gym and a bowling alley and a boathouse, and I was struck by the fact that there wasn’t one architecturally significant building on the entire site.
By that, I mean there wasn’t one building with a real foundation and walls that weren’t made of either homasote or corrugated tin.
When we finally arrived in front of the commissary, Paul handed me some dollars, which already seemed unfamiliar, and told me to pick up whatever I thought we needed. I had assumed we’d shop together, but now I wondered if I’d been reading him wrong from the beginning. “You don’t want to come in?”
“I’m going to see if my division chief is over at the BEQ. He wasn’t there yesterday, and I wanted to introduce myself.”
I didn’t argue, but as I wandered the tiny aisles of that very sad excuse for a grocery store, I could feel myself growing more and more resentful.
I hadn’t even wanted to go grocery shopping, so what was I doing in this windowless room, which smelled of rotten produce and expired milk, on a perfectly good Saturday?
The beach would have been a distraction, proof that I was on vacation.
But the commissary was real life, and a stark reminder that I now lived on a remote island and would not be returning home anytime soon.
In the condiments aisle, I saw a familiar jar of Jif on a shelf and reached for it.
I didn’t even particularly like peanut butter, but I tossed it in my cart anyway.