Settling In, part 8

One morning while Ana and I were walking she invited me over for lunch. “I’ve asked some of the new Office of Defense Cooperation wives over,” she said. “I’m going to show them how to cook some of the basic Spanish dishes—tortilla española and lomo adobado.”

“I’d love to come!” I said.

The appointed hour was noon, and I walked across the street and pressed the buzzer. Ana buzzed me in her gate, and I went into the house. There I met Lea, a pretty blond Navy wife; Trish, whose husband was a Marine; and Roseanne, whose husband was in the Army. “I already started,” Ana said. “I’m making a tortilla.” She explained as she worked: “This is the ultimate poor people’s food. Four eggs, four potatoes, an onion, and you can feed four people.” She sliced the potatoes thinly and cooked them slowly in a pan with about an inch of olive oil in it. “You don’t brown the potatoes. You just cook them slowly.” She added some salt, some onion, and she occasionally turned the potatoes with a spatula.

The cooked potatoes were drained and added to the beaten eggs, and then we watched the delicate operation of frying one side of the tortilla, turning it onto a plate, and sliding it into the pan so the other side could cook. Ana did this with great skill, and we had the delicious product for an appetizer.

“Now the lomo,” she said. This was a simpler dish. She unwrapped slices of boneless pork loin from white butcher’s paper. The slices were already coated with a spice blend that made them a bright orange-red—the color of the paprika in the blend. A little olive oil in the pan, a little time on each side, and we had our main course. “Buen provecho,” Ana said—the Spanish equivalent of bon appétit.

As we ate I listened to the conversation about military life in a foreign station. I was definitely the odd duck here, a corporate wife. These were people who were in a different frame of reference. “We picked our car up at Rota,” Lea said. “It took forever to get the diplomatic plates, but finally we got it done. Then we loaded up with stuff from the PX and drove here.”

I already recognized the red cuerpo diplomático (diplomatic corps) license plates from the many American School parents who were diplomats or military folk. But what was Rota?

“Rota is the U.S. Navy base down in southern Spain,” Ana explained to me. “Military personnel can go down there for medical care or to use the military store. We can get all sorts of American foods and cigarettes at discount prices. As a matter of fact, Phil is planning to get you-all a nice frozen Butterball turkey for Thanksgiving from Rota!”

I knew I could get a small but tasty fresh turkey at Hipercor any day of the week, but I thanked her enthusiastically.

Trish was talking about her husband’s Spanish language education. “He’s got six more months of school, and then he enters ODC in March,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s awful how long they have to be in school,” said Lea. “But my husband’s Spanish is pretty good now. And I can’t speak a word! I have to wait for him to come home to do anything.”

“That’s crazy, Lea,” Ana said. “If you need to do something, just call me. I’ll help you.” But I could tell that Ana was miffed that Lea wouldn’t even try to learn some Spanish.

I had brought a cookbook with me to Ana’s. Mike and I hadn’t even remembered that we owned a Spanish cookbook, but we did. So when it was time to move to Spain we threw it in the shipment with all our favorite cookbooks.

“Can you tell if this thing is any good?” I asked Ana. “The author is an American woman married to a Spaniard. I figure it will be easy for me to use, because all the measurements are in ounces and inches instead of grams and centimeters.” The cookbook was The Foods and Wines of Spain by Penelope Casas. “To search out the finest Spanish recipes,” the blurb said, “Penelope Casas traveled over 25,000 miles, crisscrossing Spain. Region by region . . . she found local cooks, some still untouched by twentieth-century ways, and discovered their secrets, often putting to paper recipes that had never before been set down.”

Ana took a few minutes to leaf through the book. “This looks really good,” she said. “I’ve always wanted an American cookbook for Spanish food when I’ve lived in the States, but I never found a decent one. I think this one is great!” She stopped at the recipe for cocido, the regional stew of Madrid made with sausage, chicken, cabbage, potatoes and chickpeas. “Oh, but this is no good,” she said. “Let me fix this for you.”

She took a pencil and started crossing out steps in the recipe. “I don’t make these meatballs at all,” she said, “and I take out the sausage after an hour. I don’t like onions—do you?—and at this point I just cook the whole thing together for four to five hours.” When she was finished I had a neatly edited, authentically Ana version of the dish.

That night I showed Mike the customized recipe for cocido, and then he spent a few minutes leafing through the cookbook. Suddenly he stopped. “Susie,” he said, “look at this.” He was looking at a note written in the front of the book, in the wretched handwriting of his brother Brian.

12/85

Mike & Susie—

Happy anniversary & many more. Here’s a country
(probably the only one) that you might not have a
cookbook from.

Enjoy!

Love,

Brian

We stared at each other, mouths open. “I can’t believe it,” Mike said. “It’s like an omen!” I responded. “I think he knew something we didn’t know,” Mike said.

Settling In, part 7

The other thing that I added to my roster of activities was a Spanish art history class that Christine Lotto had told me about. I had called the number she’d given me and spoken to Everett Rice, an American who taught the subject to both American and Spanish students at the University of St. Louis’s Madrid branch, as well as to groups of expatriates. Everett said I should be at St. George’s Church, the English church, at 11a.m. on Tuesday, and he told me which subway stop was nearby. He also said to bring a check for 12,000 pesetas—about $100.

In a spirit of experimentation, I dressed nicely—not in the leggings and tunic I’d probably have worn at home, but in good-looking slacks, a blouse and a blazer, like what I thought a Spanish woman would have worn. I took a bus and then the subway to St. George’s, which was in a fairly fancy neighborhood of shops and apartments called Serrano. Everett said he’d leave the church’s gate partway open so his students could get in, but when I got there it was locked. I took a short walk up the street, past a shoe store and a shop with fancy lingerie, and when I came back the church’s gate was ajar.

I walked across the courtyard and up a few steps to a big meeting room. A tall, thin, gray-haired man was darting about, setting up chairs auditorium-style. “Are you Everett Rice?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “And you are . . .?”

“I’m Susie Haubenstock,” I said. “I spoke to you on the phone a few days ago—I got your name from Christine Lotto.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, continuing to set up. “I’m glad you’re joining us. We’ll be a nice group this year, I think. You’ll see we’ll start right from the beginning, with cave paintings. Then we go into architecture for quite a while, and then on to the Golden Age of Spanish painting.” By now he was beginning to set up a slide projector and a screen. I saw several carousels of slides up at the front of the room.

Other women were beginning to arrive. Most were my age or older, and most were dressed quite nicely, though some were in more casual clothes. I heard some English accents mixed in with the American chatter. I didn’t see anyone I knew, but I said hello to a couple of women sitting nearby, just to be sociable.

Finally Everett got the twenty or so women sitting and ready to start, and he was just about to turn off the lights when Amy Levine, the mother of Julie’s friend Anna, came in and took a seat in the front row. I was happy to see a familiar face.

As promised, Everett began his lecture and slide show with the cave paintings from Altamira in northern Spain. “Notice how the artist uses the contour of the stone to give dimension to his work,” he said—and I could see on the screen the bulge in the cave wall that had become the muscle of a boldly painted bull. The colors were astonishingly bright and well preserved, and I began to catch Everett’s enthusiasm for this ancient work.

My professor, I learned, was Kentucky-born and had been living in Spain for about thirty-five years, having first come as a college student. “I fell in love with the place, and I just stayed,” he said. His knowledge of Spanish art was encyclopedic, and he often used his vacations to travel to see Spanish paintings in museums in the U.S., London or Paris. His arsenal of carousels was a real treasure, because he had gathered slides of Spanish works through all these trips. But he often apologized for their quality: “If you could only see the true colors of this painting,” he’d lament. “This slide doesn’t do it justice.” Both current and former students were enlisted to acquire replacements for faded slides during their own travels.

The class ended at 12:45, and I caught up with Amy as the group broke up. She was asking Everett some questions, and I waited for them to finish their conversation. I was amazed at the level of detail at which Amy was quizzing him, though. It seemed that she already knew plenty about Spanish art.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked as she finished up with Everett.

“Oh, hello, I didn’t see you before!” she said. “I didn’t know you were taking this class.”

“Yeah, I was so excited to find out about it,” I said.

“I just ran and sat up in front because my vision is not too good,” she explained. “I never saw who else was in the room. Are you running home now? Do you have time to get some lunch?”

I was delighted to be asked. “No, I’m in no hurry,” I said. “But it’s a little early for lunch. Do you know something that’s open?”

“Well, there’s a California right on Calle Serrano,” she said. California was a chain of food shops with restaurants inside. “I think they start serving early.”

“That’s fine with me,” I said, and we walked a block to the place.

Inside we saw a sign that pointed to an autoservicio—cafeteria—in the basement. “Is that okay with you?” Amy asked. “I don’t care about having a fancy meal.”

“No, that’s perfect with me,” I said, and we went down to see what they had.

We took a walk down the serving line first, to see what was available. There was a central island with bowls of salad wrapped in plastic. There were rolls. There were a couple of soups. And there were steam tables with several choices of fish, meats, and vegetables. “Looks fine to me,” I said, and Amy agreed.

I took a salad and chose one of the grilled fish dishes. Amy took a different fish and asked for a tinto—a glass of red wine—which was the normal lunchtime beverage. We chose a table among the red laminate tops and sat down.

“How is it?” Amy asked me once I tasted my fish.

“It’s really perfect,” I said, amazed. “I don’t even order fish in restaurants at home anymore, because it’s always overdone. But here’s cafeteria fish, steam table fish, and it’s completely wonderful! How do they do that?”

“Mine is fabulous, too,” she said. “Why can’t they do this in New York?” With her Boston accent, it sounded like “cahn’t”.

“This country is pretty amazing,” I said. “The food isn’t fancy, but it’s always perfectly cooked.”

“Maybe it has to do with the freshness,” she said. “I’m no cook, I don’t know anything about it, but I know that the transportation system for fish here is much better than anything we have at home. The Spaniards are very exacting. They have to have all their pescados y mariscos”—fish and seafood—“very fresh.”

As we ate Amy told me that she was taking private Spanish lessons from a teacher who came to her apartment in the city. “My teacher has taught me a lot about the cultural differences here,” she explained. “She’s been a terrific help to me. Last week we found out that Anna needed glasses, so we arranged the optometrist appointment at the same time as my Spanish lesson, and we used the lesson time to have Maria interpret for us.”

“Mike’s doing private Berlitz lessons in his office,” I told her.

“Eric is, too,” she said. “But it was almost impossible to get the bank to pay for it. We had to make a big deal out of it for them to pay for my lessons, too. They haven’t been helpful at all—no help in finding an apartment, no invitations to dinner, nothing.”

I saw again how lucky we had been in the welcome we’d received from Price Waterhouse.

We continued to talk, and Amy told me about the summer months she’d spent in Madrid with her girls. “There weren’t many Americans around,” she said. “But there was a group from an American fertilizer company that’s doing some work with the Spanish government. Most of the women were very nice, but all they wanted to do was shop! I’m not much of a shopper, so I got bored right away.”

“I’m not a shopper either,” I said, and at that moment we bonded.

“Why don’t we all get together for dinner next Saturday night?” she suggested. I accepted gladly.

Settling In, part 6

The first time I went to Spanish class at the little language school in Aravaca, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was just a five-minute drive from my house, but the narrow, clogged streets of the town were unfamiliar to me. There seemed to be lots of little shops, but nowhere to park. Sometimes a street would be completely blocked when a butane delivery truck was there. People who wanted to cook or heat with gas had to have it delivered in small tanks, and the butane truck would come and drop off a couple tanks and pick up your empties. But in those tiny streets the truck took up the whole width of the roadway, so you had to wait while the exchange was made.

I found the school that first day after driving past it twice and circling back. Given the typical lack of parking spaces, I found I had to drive on beyond it and continue for a couple of blocks just to find a place to leave the car. I walked back toward the school, passing apartment buildings with laundry hung on lines in the back.

There was a blond lady behind the desk in the reception area, and a silent little man sitting in a chair nearby. “Buenos días,” I greeted the lady. She answered politely and helped me register for class, explaining in Spanish that she would get the textbooks for the students. It wasn’t until weeks later that I learned that she was an Irishwoman named Bernice who, of course, spoke perfect English, and that the silent little man was her Spanish husband.

The classroom was tiny, with about eight chairs that had writing desks attached. There was a blackboard and a desk for the teacher, who came in just after me. “Me llamo Dolo,” she said—my name is Dolo. She explained that Dolo was a nickname for Dolores and said that she came from Galicia, in northwest Spain. She was short, dark and pretty and always smartly dressed. I was now used to seeing young mothers in the grocery section of Hipercor wearing jodhpur-style pants and riding boots—very stylish at that moment—and usually a sharply ironed blouse with a tweed jacket or a fine wool sweater. They always wore a pretty silk scarf or a necklace, and their hair was invariably pulled back into a tidy barrette. This was Dolo’s style, too. With her dark hair and complexion she almost always wore shades of brown, and she looked wonderful in them.

There was one person who’d arrived in class before me—an attractive young German woman who turned out to be an au pair for a Spanish family. She introduced herself in Spanish as Britta. Though she spoke great English, we only spoke Spanish in class—Dolo didn’t know English at all.

As I had hoped, Huibrecht Kruger arrived a few minutes after me. I had noticed that she was always wonderfully dressed, too, usually with an extra-interesting piece of jewelry. She favored unusual beads, abstract metal pins, and dangling multicolored earrings. Her artist’s flair was apparent. And she brought with her another South African woman, Karin, who was her partner in the painted-ostrich-egg business. “Su marido trabaja con el mío en la embajada de Sudáfrica,” Huibrecht said—“Her husband works with mine in the South African Embassy.” Karin was a few years younger than Huibrecht but equally pretty, with the same musical South African accent when I heard her speak in English.


“No hablo español como Huibrecht,” Karin told Dolo apologetically—“I don’t speak Spanish like Huibrecht.” But Huibrecht explained that she and her husband had been posted to the South African embassy in Peru at one time, and she’d learned Spanish then, though she claimed not to remember it too well.

We spent the class time conversing a bit and getting to know one another as Dolo assessed our ability level in Spanish. That way, she said, she could tell which textbook would be best for us. Bernice popped in about midway through the two-hour class and offered everyone “café o té”—coffee or tea—which seemed most civilized to me, though I was too shy to ask for any. But at the end of the class I left feeling happy that I’d found a place to continue to work on my Spanish, and that I’d get to know Huibrecht better.

Settling In, part 5

Not all our weekend excursions were as pleasant. Mike had received an invitation from a Price Waterhouse colleague, Rafa, for us to join him and his wife Maricarmen and their teenage son for a day at their country club. This was a generous and hospitable invitation, I knew. Amy Levine, the mother of Julie’s friend Anna, had complained to us about her husband’s colleagues at the bank—never an invitation, no offers of help, nothing to welcome them to Spain. Our situation was different, and it was something to be grateful for.

But I began the day with trepidation. Everything would be unfamiliar, and I was shy, not at my best with new people in new places. And, of course, I was insecure about my Spanish.

Mike followed Rafa’s directions to the country club, which was not too far from our house. We drove into a large circular driveway before a low, shaded brick clubhouse. Again we had a lovely, sunny day, and the parking lot was nearly full. I could see people walking between the clubhouse, the tennis courts, and the nearby soccer field. I pumped up my flagging courage and entered the clubhouse with Mike and the girls.

We found Rafa and Maricarmen easily. “Encantado,” Rafa said, kissing me on both cheeks. This was the standard Spanish self-introduction. “Encantada,” I responded—“enchanted”. He was about six feet tall, fortyish, with dark hair, and he was a little thick around the middle. I repeated the greeting with Maricarmen, who was petite and blond and pretty and spoke no English.

Rafa’s English, however, was excellent. “Our son is playing soccer. We probably won’t see much of him. But you and I, Mike, we have a tennis reservation, and we should go over there now.” They hoisted their tennis bags and disappeared.

I froze. I was going to be in Maricarmen’s charge, it seemed.

“¿Te gusta nadar?” Maricarmen asked me—Do you like to swim?

I didn’t, much, but I couldn’t think of an alternative.

“Y a las chicas, ¿les gusta?” And the girls, do they like it?

“Sí,” I said, my stomach sinking. I was going to have to communicate and take care of the kids and myself and make this work for at least an hour, I figured. I felt like crying.

Maricarmen led us to the locker room, and I went through the always-embarrassing routine of changing in front of a stranger. Then we walked onto the deck of the large indoor pool. The place was empty, and Maricarmen went right into the water and started swimming laps. Julie and Lisa sat on the side for a while and then dropped into the pool and splashed around a little. I was immobilized, sitting on the edge of the pool, feeling silly and embarrassed and fat in my bathing suit. I was feeling stupid, too, because I couldn’t seem to generate, in Spanish, the kind of polite chitchat that you have to do with a new acquaintance.

So I just kept sitting there, and Maricarmen would stop every lap or so and try to exchange some pleasantries with me—how old were the kids, how did we like Spain, etc. I was stuck there in my locked brain, trying to respond as best I could. I watched the kids, I watched the clock, I looked out the window, and I wallowed in my misery.

Finally Maricarmen finished her laps, and we went back into the locker room and changed. “¿Quisiera ver todo el club?” she asked me—would I like to see the whole club?

“Sí,” I answered. So she took us for a stroll through the grounds, which were green and manicured, with well-kept sports facilities and lots of busy, happy-looking people. She continued to converse with me, and I answered haltingly, belying the A I had gotten in my summer Spanish class. It was not the same trying to actually use this language, and I felt like a failure.

At last we returned to the clubhouse and met Mike and Rafa for lunch. Maricarmen’s sister was there, too, and once they were together Maricarmen pretty much gave up the hopeless task of trying to talk to me. The two sisters chatted happily in Spanish through lunch. Mercifully, Rafa spoke to us in English.

“We don’t use this club as much as we probably should,” he said. “A lot of the weekends we go to our pueblo”—village—“where we can relax.”

“What do you mean?” Mike asked. “Don’t you live in Madrid?”

“Oh, yes,” Rafa said, “but many city people buy a little house in a small town where they can go for the weekend. You go there Friday night, you stay there till Sunday night or Monday morning. We have been going to our pueblo for many years. My son knows all the boys there, they play football all weekend. It is a good change from Madrid. We are lucky because Maricarmen works only part-time. She finishes at two o’clock on Friday, so she can leave very early for the pueblo and miss some of the traffic. I usually have to come much later.”

I was feeling a little better as we ate, but still my jaw was tense and I couldn’t wait for the day to be over. The leisurely lunch finally came to an end, the rumored son made a brief appearance and was introduced, and we were finally able to say our goodbyes and leave.

“I’m sorry I was such a slug,” I said ruefully to Mike. “I couldn’t talk at all. I felt like an idiot.”

“What?” he said. “I didn’t notice anything.”

Settling In, part 4

Another weekend adventure was a trip to Manzanares El Real, a town not far from Pozuelo that hadn’t made it into Fodor’s. But Mike had heard from a couple of people that there was a good castle there, so we looked it up in the Campsa guide and drove about thirty miles northwest, into the mountains.

We had another beautiful, clear day—we had had great luck with weather so far. The trip was easy, with even the small side roads well marked. On the Mercedes’ CD player was “The Iguanas,” the first release of a Tex-Mex-Cajun band Mike’s brother had given us about nine months before, but which we hadn’t listened to much. It was to become our theme music for family trips throughout Spain. About half the songs were sung in Spanish, and the band’s lineup included two saxophones, which gave it an unusual sound. We all laughed at the songs as we got to know them well. There was the opening one, about a guy with a bad hangover: “Late at night I do just as I please; early in the morning I’m down on my knees,” the lead singer sang. And the one that Julie used to scare Lisa, “¿Para donde vas?” (Where are you going?), which had a big pause in the middle, followed by Julie shouting in Lisa’s ear, “¿Para donde vas?” The giggles went on for fifteen minutes after that one.

So we tooled along through the barren Castilian countryside, with only the occasional scrubby tree emerging from the dry golden grass of the high plain. The sky was huge and blue and punctuated with a never-ending show of huge white clouds. The shadows’ edges were sharp-edged in the brilliant sun, as happens only in air that lacks moisture and dust. This was not the earthy, juicy atmosphere of Andalucía, in the south, which most people think of when they think of Spain. This was the sere, austere north central land of Don Quixote. What had struck me as brown and boring was starting to look good to me and to get inside me.

We got to the little town of Manzanares El Real, near the Sierra de La Pedriza, a part of the mountain range north of Madrid. We made our way over to the castle, which was at one edge of the town. All was quiet and shady there, and when we parked the car we walked over to the castle gates. The sign, in Spanish, said that the castle could be viewed only on a tour, and when we studied the schedule we learned that it would be about an hour till the next tour.

We walked through quiet residential streets till we came to a commercial block. “Would you guys like some ice cream?” Mike asked. “Yeah!” said both kids. We entered a little café. The blue and white “Camy” sign outside was already well known to Julie and Lisa. It meant that the café had a freezer with a dozen standard kinds of ice cream novelties in it: popsicles, ice cream bars, ice cream sandwiches. A special new favorite of theirs was the sorbets, which came in natural containers—that is, the lemon sorbet came in a hollowed-out lemon, and the orange in a hollowed-out orange, all frozen together as one package. “I want to try the coconut,” Julie said, eyes wide. There was a half of a coconut shell filled, presumably, with coconut sorbet.
“Can I have that, too?” Lisa asked. Mike paid for the treats, and we sat at an outside table while the kids ate.

After relaxing for a while we went back to the castle. The gates had been opened, and we entered the thick castle wall and walked up a stone path to the entrance. Mike bought our tickets and found out that we had a few minutes still to wait for the tour. “Let’s take a look around,” he said.

There were great rugged walls of tan stone, a good four feet thick at the base. There were narrow staircases leading up to the ramparts, and as we went up we saw slit windows that would allow archers to shoot at their attackers. “Can we go up on top of the wall?” Lisa asked. “I don’t know,” said Mike. “Let’s see.” There were more stairs leading up, so we climbed to the top and came out to a beautiful view of the valley below the castle. “This is how they build castles,” Mike told the kids. “You put them up high so it’s hard for your enemies to reach you, and you have a good view of anybody that might try to attack you.” The girls ran back and forth on top of the wall, looking in every direction.

Finally we came down and lined up for our tour. It was in Spanish, but the guide was not too fussy about keeping track of the group, so we were able to wander on our own. Much of the interior had been furnished with period antiques, and we saw suits of armor and massive chairs and tables. Dark, heavy tapestries lined some of the walls, adding a little warmth and color to the cold, pale stone.

After the tour we felt ready for more, so Mike checked the Campsa book again and decided we should see La Pedriza National Park, six miles away. There we found huge blocks of granite that looked as if they’d tumbled down a mountain to rest in a big pile. People were rock climbing in the pile, and we went up a little way, but it was too steep for us, so we went down to the base, where there was a little spring. Children were wading in the cool water while their parents watched, but Julie and Lisa were shy about joining in. We walked to the snack kiosk nearby and got them each a soft drink. By this time in our life in Spain Lisa had declared a permanent preference for Fanta Naranja (orange soda) and Julie for Fanta Limón (lemon soda), so they knew what to order. After a little rest we headed back home, with the Iguanas’ music accompanying us.

Settling In, part 3

We had some weekend adventures in those early days. Mike wanted to see Cuenca, an unusual town southeast of Madrid. The point of interest there was the Casas Colgadas, a group of old houses that hung just on the edge of the cliff on which the town was built. Mike studied the Fodor’s guide, which was becoming our travel Bible for Spain. It was perfect for people with a car, because it provided a route to major destinations for visitors and always described other interesting sites nearby, in case you had the time—and we usually did.

In the case of Cuenca, Mike found that there was a place twenty miles north of the town that he thought might be worth a side trip—Ciudad Encantada, “a series of large and fantastic rock formations erupting in a landscape of pines,” according to the book. “That’ll be good for the kids,” he said. “They can run around and climb on the rocks.” He plotted our route using the Campsa maps, a spiral-bound atlas published by the Campsa gasoline chain. The maps were extremely helpful—detailed and up to date, with a section in the back (in Spanish, of course) listing every town in alphabetical order and every tourist destination in each town, along with restaurants and hotels. Our landlord had kindly left the atlas for us, and it was invaluable.

We set out for Cuenca on a Saturday morning, knowing that we had to be at our destination before lunch. “There’s a museum of abstract art in the Casas Colgadas,” Mike said. “It says it’s open till two, then closes for lunch and doesn’t reopen till four. If we get there by one we can see the museum, have some lunch, and go to Ciudad Encantada—it’s outside, so there won’t be any closing time.”

The day was sunny and warm, and the ride was easy. We had gotten used to following the pink “Casco Antiguo” signs that pointed to the old town of every village, so we picked our way through the small, winding, uphill streets to the uppermost part of the town. We found a place to park the Mercedes and walked past charmingly crooked old houses to the Casas Colgadas (hanging houses). “Oh, Mom, they look like they’re ready to fall!” Lisa said, seeing the way the houses really hung over the cliff, perched above a gorge.

“It gives me the creeps,” Julie said. “Are we going inside?”

“There’s a small museum here,” Mike said. “Let’s just go in and see what they have.” As rickety and antiquated as the Casas Colgadas looked from the outside, the inside had undergone a thoughtless renovation. It was plain, white, modern and boring. So we made a quick trip through the place, with the kids appreciating the bright colors of the paintings much more than they had liked the medieval and classical art at the Prado. Then we stopped nearby for some lunch—we were actually operating on Spanish lunchtime by then—and found another dish Julie and Lisa could bear to eat: sopa castellana (Castilian soup). Though in my view this barely qualified as a soup at all, I was delighted that we now had another menu item to work with.

Made of nothing more than water, garlic, olive oil and paprika, savory red sopa castellana didn’t have much to offend my picky eaters, except that it was always served with a slice of bread floating in the soup and a fried egg on top. Lisa was happy enough to eat the whole package, but not Julie. “I don’t want the egg,” she said before she even began. She lifted it off with her fork and put it on a paper napkin. She ate soup contentedly for a minute, until she found the submerged bread. “This soggy thing is gross,” she said, and she lifted the sopping red mess out of the soup and onto the same napkin. But then she finished the rest of the bowl, and we didn’t hear any more complaints.

After lunch we took the short drive to Ciudad Encantada (“enchanted city”). We parked in a gravel lot, paid a fee at the entrance booth, and walked into a garden of large, fascinating rock formations. “Look at this one!” Julie said. “It’s like a tree with a big hole in the middle.” She and Lisa ran and climbed through and around the rugged beige stones, ten and twelve feet high. Many of them had names based on their shapes—“El Tobagón” (the toboggan), an angled sled-looking thing, and “Mar de Piedras” (sea of stones), a landscape of odd-shaped rocks.

But as unusual as the natural setting was, I was more struck by the other people there—Spanish families out for a walk after the midday meal. Actually, it was the women who interested me, dressed in elegant suits and picking their way gingerly over the turf and through the stones in high heels. We, of course, were in jeans and T-shirts. By now I knew that Spanish women dressed beautifully for work or for shopping in the city or for a restaurant dinner on Saturday night, but I was amazed that they didn’t let down on the style even for a weekend walk in the country.

Settling In, part 2

Meanwhile, I went ahead and visited some gyms in the city. Lorraine, my 12-step friend, turned out to be a part-time aerobics instructor, and she had some advice for me. “I think the Holiday Gym chain is the best,” she said. “They have several locations in town. The really good one is at the Holiday Inn.” That was the gym Mike had used before the kids and I had moved to Spain.

I decided to visit all three branches of the gym. The one at the Holiday Inn was indeed large and glittery, with a generous schedule of classes, but it was in Mike’s old Madrid neighborhood—not too convenient for me to get to. There was a smaller branch near the American Women’s Club, also flashy, and also not too good geographically. But the branch at the HUSA Princesa Hotel turned out to be just right for me—easy to reach by bus or car, with a good selection of classes. The décor was jarring—lots of mirrors, carpeting in hot pink and yellow and turquoise, with a big window looking onto an underground parking garage—but the price was right. I could get a membership for about $400 a year, which would entitle me to unlimited classes. I decided to sign up.

The first classes I tried were at the time I was used to—9 and 10 a.m. But I could see right away that these were old-lady classes, not challenging at all, so I started moving my gym time to later in the day.

When I got to the 2:30 p.m. class, I knew I had found it. This was a lunchtime class attended mostly by young working people. There was a different instructor for each day of the week, and they gave very different kinds of classes—but all of them made us work like crazy. Most of the instructors were men, who, in my experience, gave much more demanding classes than women—just what I wanted. There was Mauricio on Monday, who was like an army drill sergeant. Tuesday was the outrageous Marcos, a Brazilian who spent most of his time playing air guitar while we danced the steps he gave us. Wednesday we had Fernando, a fiendish bleached blond who never failed to leave me heaving for breath after flying over and around my step. Thursday’s class never got adequately staffed—we had one girl after another, none of whom could hold a candle to our male instructors. And Friday there was the flaky Nacho, who devised demanding, intricate dance routines but tended to forget the sequence before he was halfway through.

Settling In

For my aerobics needs I decided I should find out more about the class I had heard about that an American woman gave in her house. I got Lauren Williams’s number and gave her a call.

“Yes, I live in Húmera, and I have a gym that I fixed up in my basement,” she said. “We do step classes in the morning and afternoon. It’s a nice small group. Why don’t you come and try a class?”

I got directions from her and decided to try a morning class. I drove over to Húmera, which I remembered from my house-hunting trip with Marilu. The cute little streets led past a riding club, as Lauren had told me, but then I got lost and went around and around the same four blocks, confused about which way to turn. Feeling frustrated and unhappy, I picked my way back down to the commercial part of the town and found a pay phone. Lauren redirected me up to her house, and I got there about twenty minutes late.

Lauren answered the door. Blond, pretty, and in great shape, she looked to be about my age. She had a rambling ranch house with a good-sized backyard, but we breezed through the house and down to her basement. The small room was mirrored and tiled, and four women were there taking a break from their workout. Mats and hand weights were stacked neatly in one corner. Lauren introduced me quickly to the others, among whom was Reina O’Hale, the wife of ASM’s headmaster, Bill O’Hale. Reina was tall and thin with long dark-brown hair.

Lauren led us quickly through the rest of the workout, which was reasonably challenging for me. I felt a little awkward and pretty much stayed quiet as the others chatted—clearly they had known each other for some time. After the class was over I signed up for five more, because I figured that would tide me over while I continued to look into aerobics classes at gyms in Madrid.

I was happy enough to be working out, but Lauren’s class was a good source of information, too. Reina O’Hale told me about a Spanish conversation class that was forming, so I got a phone number for that. Lauren mentioned that she was a serious classical pianist, and she told a story about Huibrecht Kruger’s husband, Piet, who had complimented her playing—it turned out that the Krugers lived just behind the Williamses. That reignited my desire to know Huibrecht better, so later I pulled out the phone number for the language school in Aravaca and signed myself up for the class she was taking. And I was fascinated to hear Lauren talk about her life as the wife of an international businessman (her husband worked for R.J. Reynolds). She had lived in Quito, Ecuador for many years and had now been in Spain for nine years. It hadn’t occurred to me that some people made a life doing what we were doing on a short-term basis. Lauren appeared to me to be very settled in Spain—she had a Spanish piano teacher, she had given birth to her son in Spain, she spoke Spanish fluently and seemed very entrenched in the American School—she knew everybody.

Orientation, part 13

As usual, I was nervous about using my Spanish, so I listened to the ordering routine as the customers before me were served. I would have to remember to order in kilograms, not pounds, I realized, and there was a little ritual for finishing up a purchase that I memorized.

Then it was my turn. “¿En qué puedo ayudarle, señora?” the cheese man asked me—How can I help you? “Quisiera un cuarto de kilo de cheddar, por favor,” I answered—I’d like a quarter of a kilo of cheddar, please. He turned to cut the piece for me, then wrapped it in paper and taped up the package. “¿Algo mas?” he asked, starting the ritual—Something else? “Nada mas,” I answered—Nothing more. “Gracias, hasta luego,” he said, sending me off—Thank you, see you later. “Hasta luego, adiós,” I answered, copying the customers before me—See you later, goodbye. Success! I had a hunk of cheddar and hadn’t embarrassed myself.

I rolled on past the light bulbs and found myself in a department I truly hadn’t expected to see—major appliances. There were dishwashers, clothes washers, and smaller appliances like vacuum cleaners and fans right in the grocery store. I studied disapprovingly the small size of the laundry machines and headed on toward the checkout counters.

It took me a minute to remember the routine at the cashier, which Mike had told me about—the cashier will eyeball your purchases before ringing them up and pull out enough bags for you to pack up your own groceries. The uniformed girl did just that, tossing a wad of plastic Hipercor sacks my way. I packed my things, happily paid with my credit card—something not yet common in Connecticut in 1994—and guided my cart toward the downward automatic ramp. I loaded the bags into the car, returned my cart to its corral, inserted its key into the next cart’s box, and—presto!—got my 100-peseta coin back. Feeling pleased with myself, I drove home.

I saw Ana later that afternoon and told her about my adventure. “You know, I’ve never been to an Hipercor,” she told me, “but I think those signs around town mean that we’re getting one here.”

“What signs?” I asked.

“Down past Pozuelo Estación, if you go toward Pozuelo Pueblo, there are some new roads,” she said. “If you look at the signs that just went up the other day over there, I think they direct you to a new Hipercor.”

“Are you kidding?” I said, incredulous. “That would be great! This store is incredible!”

“And I think it stays open through the lunch hour,” Ana added. “At least, that’s what I would expect.” So we started to watch the signs and look for the opening date.

We didn’t have to wait long. About a week later there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony on a system of roads and roundabouts that led up through neighborhoods of townhouses and homes for the elderly, then through empty fields, to a brand-new, gigantic Hipercor right in Pozuelo. Ana drove us up there the first time, because the route was complicated, though those new roads only really went to one place. And we saw that this Hipercor was even bigger and more wonderful than the one I’d gone to before. It had a post office and a row of cash machines; it had an optician and a cafeteria; it had a travel agency and a dry cleaner; it had a garden shop and a photo finishing place; it had a car repair shop and a car wash. We crammed dozens of bags into Ana’s Toyota Previa, happy shoppers, knowing we could now live a life of convenient American-style shopping. And that night I noticed that I could even see the blue light of the Hipercor sign from my bedroom balcony, shining down on me from a distant hill. It gave me a great feeling of security.

Orientation, part 12

My neighbor Lisa Mazzilli, who was always on a quest for American foods, said there was a place I should know about. “Hipercor is a gigantic department store with a whole grocery store inside,” she said, pronouncing the store’s name ee-per-CORE. “You can get some Kellogg’s cereals there, and they sometimes have peanut butter. My kids can’t live without that stuff.” The nearest branch was about twenty minutes away, south of Madrid, and she gave me directions to get there.

It was a little dicey finding the exit—I missed the it the first time around and had to circle back—but when I finally got to the gigantic shopping center, I was impressed. Normal Spanish grocery shopping is done in the old style: The housewife walks into the village every day and goes to the baker for her bread, the fishmonger for her fish, the greengrocer for her fruits and vegetables. In Pozuelo Estación you could drive to the village (but a parking place was hard to come by), and there was a little supermarket you could use instead of the specialty stores, but I didn’t like it much. The aisles were cramped, the selection of groceries was limited, and you had to wait in line for the fruit man to weigh your purchases and mark the price on a brown paper bag. This was shopping the way my mother had done it in the fifties, I thought. I wanted something much more modern, more convenient.

Hipercor was all that and more. There were huge shaded parking lots, as well as an underground garage. I chose the latter. As I approached the store entrance I found the grocery carts, which were hitched together using a method I’d seen in Stamford. Our Finast supermarket had once instituted a system that was supposed to encourage shoppers to return their carts. A little box on the cart had a sort of key that hooked it to the next cart. You had to insert a quarter in the box as a deposit to get the cart free. This had lasted about three months in Stamford, because the customers just hated it. But here at Hipercor you had to insert a 100-peseta coin—about 75 cents. That might be enough of a motivation to get me to return my cart, I thought.

To my astonishment, I saw that after you collected your shopping cart on the garage level you rolled it onto moving ramp—sort of an escalator without stairs. This made me feel silly, almost like I was on a carnival ride. A few seconds later the ramp delivered me to the grocery store level.

A bank of twenty-four cashiers was arrayed in front of me. I had never seen anything like it! I had to go all the way to the far side of the cashiers to get into the store. I rolled on in and started looking around.

Everything was colossal, bigger than anything I’d ever seen in the States. There were aisles of toys and clothing I went through before I even reached the groceries. This was like a whole Kmart, I thought with amazement. And just upstairs, I knew, was an entire El Corte Inglés department store!

The first food I saw was the produce—a tremendous courtyard full of it, beautifully arrayed, with colorful fruits everywhere. There were two kinds of bananas—you could choose between Central American bananas and Canary Island bananas. There were two kinds of tiny oranges—clementinas and clemenvillas. There were more kinds of beans than I’d ever seen before—green, yellow, flat, fava—I wouldn’t even know what to do with them.

Next up was the fresh fish counter. It floored me. I had never seen so much fish! The glass case went along one wall for about thirty feet. Eight or ten men were behind the counter, waiting on customers and custom-cutting the fish. Most of the whole fish there were unrecognizable to me, but I saw lots of octopus and squid, along with many large crabs. There was also a big pile of percebes. Mike had told me about this delicacy—actually little barnacles that were served cooked so that diners could pry them from the shells, sort of like snails.

I noticed with great surprise that this big, open-air fish area had no unpleasant smell at all—just a clean, briny odor. How do they manage that? I wondered.

Then I moved on to aisles and aisles of regular groceries—soap powders and cereals, cookies and diapers. The names and colors on the boxes were unfamiliar, so I took my time and examined whatever caught my eye. There were some packaged doughnuts that I thought the kids might like, so I got some of those. And I saw little shell-shaped madeleine cookies that looked interesting, so I threw a couple packages of those into the cart.

Then I came to an aisle that amazed me. It was filled with nothing but canned fish. Seventy-five feet of shelf space, four shelves from top to bottom, all canned fish. There were sardines and anchovies, tuna and salmon, which didn’t surprise me. But canned baby eels? Canned octopus? Multiple types of canned oysters? The selection was unbelievable! I think we’re not in Kansas anymore, I told myself.

Opposite this riot of canned fish were more items important in the Spanish diet—lentils, chickpeas and rice. And these three items filled their own side of the aisle. The rice was a stubby short-grained variety, and it came in 1-kilo vacuum-packed cellophane bags. The chickpeas and lentils were in bricklike vacuum packs, too, but you could also buy larger quantities packed in fabric bags.

After that came a whole aisle of the most important food in Spain: olive oil. There was nothing else in this aisle. There were many brands, many different-size bottles, many different labels, but inside was the thing used to cook and sauce virtually every dish made in a Spanish kitchen. As the U.S. government controlled the price of wheat, the Spanish government controlled the price of olive oil. And when there was a price increase, it was front-page news. Olive oil was the product of primary importance to Spanish farmers and was a critical item in the budget of a Spanish household. I could only stop and marvel at the pride of place it held there in the supermarket.

A little further along I found cookware, auto supplies, wine, and a whole aisle of the ultrapasteurized milk that my kids hated. But there were also refrigerator cases full of one-liter cartons of the fresh milk that I was having delivered to my house. There were cartons of fresh-squeezed orange juice, which I knew the girls would prefer to the juice-box kind I’d seen in other stores. And next to the orange juice was something I’d never seen before—a similar carton of gazpacho, cold vegetable soup. This was too intriguing to pass up, so I put one of those in my cart.

I rolled on to the meat counter, which looked pretty much like a service butcher at home. But there was a case full of pre-packed meats, too, and I noticed some unusual items in there—rabbit, partridge, quail. I didn’t buy any but made a mental note for the next time.

Next to the meat counter was a case with prepared foods. The item that caught my eye there was the row of tortillas españolas—potato omelets, some with sausage added, some with green peppers. I decided to try one of those, too.

Then came a whole store’s worth of cured meats. There was ham, chorizo and salchicchia sausages, and lomo (a cured pork loin) in vacuum packs. But the big statement in this department was the whole Serrano hams hanging from hooks near the ceiling. These large hams, as big as Thanksgiving turkeys, were arranged around the perimeter of the area in two rows—there must have been two hundred of them. The aroma of the salty meat was pungent but not unpleasant. A little further on was the narrow cheese counter, where a man cut Spanish cheeses to order. Lisa Mazzilli had advised me that hard-to-find cheddar was available here, so I took a number and waited for my turn.

Orientation, part 11

Karen called to let me know that her shipment would be arriving on Thursday, so we worked out a time for me to show up. I found the townhouse easily enough, just about five minutes away from my house. Kathleen, the baby, was fussy the whole morning, so I spent most of my time trying to jolly her along while Karen did the bulk of the unpacking. We talked as she worked.

“We have a house in Fairfax, Virginia,” she said, “but this isn’t our first posting abroad. Rich works for the State Department as a terrorism expert. We spent two years in Honduras.”

“What does a terrorism expert do?” I asked.

“Well, here in Spain he’s supposed to be a liaison with the local police,” Karen said. “So far that means he’s taken a couple of police chiefs out fishing, and they take him out for drinks and tapas.”

“Sounds pretty good,” I said, laughing.

“Really, you should let him take you out for tapas,” she said. “He knows all the good places already. That would be a thank-you for your help today, I think! The four of us should really do that,” she declared. I agreed happily.

* * *

I went to the Newcomers Club coffee the next Tuesday. The hostess, whose husband was some kind of missionary from the U.S., had a huge house in Aravaca, nowhere near Karen’s. The small yard was surrounded by a high fence, like most Spanish houses, but inside the fence were spectacular plantings. The landscaping was perfect.

The interior rooms were large and airy, with honey-colored parquet floors and white walls. Large plate-glass windows looked onto the beautiful garden.

About thirty women were there, and though I didn’t know anyone, I found that it was easy enough to make conversation. Some of the ladies had been in Spain for several years, and some were new like me. I thought I recognized a couple of mothers from the American School, so I introduced myself. One of the women, a Brazilian with very long black hair, was Clarice Scarritt. We found that Julie was in her daughter Natalie’s class. The other, a pretty South African, had a daughter, Rosanne, in that class, too. The mother’s name was Huibrecht Kruger—“Hy-brekt,” most people seemed to call her.

“What kind of name is that?” I asked.

“It’s actually Flemish,” she said. “We are Afrikaners, but my family originally came from Belgium, not from Holland.” She gave me a quick lesson in the correct Flemish pronunciation of her name—“Heh-bresht.” Her accent was musical, and she was stunningly dressed, with striking jewelry.

But I was thinking: South African? What’s wrong with you people? I thought apartheid was the worst thing I had ever heard of.

“Huibrecht is an artist,” Clarice said. “She has a business here painting ostrich eggs.”

“You’re kidding!” I said. “How did you ever get into that?”

“Well, my husband is a diplomat for South Africa,” she said, “and we’ve lived in many countries—Peru, Brazil, Mali and Malawi. I have to have a little portable business to make some extra money, so I started painting African designs on ostrich eggs.”

“How do you choose your designs?” I asked.

“Most of them are taken from nature,” she said. “We Africans generally appreciate our natural surroundings, because our homeland is so beautiful.”

And I was thinking: We Africans? Don’t you know you’re English?

So it was probably a good thing that the conversation turned to learning Spanish, because I was at risk for exposing my ignorance and judgmentalism. Huibrecht, who had moved to Húmera with her family the previous February, mentioned that she had signed up for the fall semester at a little language school right in Aravaca. The class was to meet three mornings a week, while the kids were conveniently at school. Thinking again of Eileen, and wanting to know Huibrecht better despite my bad attitude, I took the name and number of the language school.

Orientation, part 10

I made it to the opening event of the Newcomers Club, the potluck picnic at Felicia Morera’s house. Felicia was well known in the expat community for her home-based business in Spanish antiques, and also for the classes she gave every year in pysanky, the Ukrainian Easter egg decorating process. She had lived in Spain many years and had a big house out in Las Rozas, a suburb much further west of Madrid than Pozuelo.

Ana had mentioned that all the wives of the Office of Defense Cooperation officers were going together, along with some of the American Embassy wives, so I was feeling left out when I arrived. But before long I saw Karen Irwin, the mother of Lisa’s classmate, and we sat together and chatted.

“We’ve been living here for four months,” she told me, “with just folding chairs and some other temporary stuff the Embassy gives you. But our shipment is supposed to come next week! I can’t wait.” The shipment contained all the household goods they had sent. Her story made me feel happy that we’d rented a furnished house and had been comfortable from the first day.

Thinking again of Eileen, my good role model, I made an offer. “Would you like me to come and help you when it arrives? I could unpack, or if you’d like, I could watch the baby while you unpack.”

“Are you serious?” she asked. “That would be incredible! But I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“No, I’d like to help,” I said, so she agreed to call me when the shipment came.

Meanwhile, at the picnic it was announced that a series of get-acquainted coffee mornings would be held in various neighborhoods around Madrid so that new members could meet people in their area. I took the time and address for a coffee that was to be held in Aravaca the next week.

Orientation, part 9

Amazingly, we had our first visitors after just two weeks. Another college friend, Ross, a drug company executive who traveled extensively, had a conference to attend in Portugal, and he’d offered to come and see us. I jumped at the chance to be with a friend from home—I was delighted! Ross arranged to fly from Porto to Madrid on a Saturday, after his conference ended, and he convinced his wife Carol to fly in from New York so they could do a little traveling in southern Spain for a week.

Carol was coming in first, and I was to pick her up at the airport around 6 a.m. I got Mike to coach me on the route to take, and I found her with no trouble. I was thrilled to see a friendly face, but she was tired, so I dropped her at her Madrid hotel and said we’d get together later.

Ross took a taxi from the airport to the hotel, and once everyone had rested up we decided to have dinner together. “We rented a car for the trip,” Ross said, “so if you can give me directions to your house, we’d love to come out and see where you live!” I felt I knew enough by then to give the directions, so I told him how to take the A-6 out west to Pozuelo and then how to find us.

As I waited for them to arrive, I noticed that it was getting later and later. At 7 p.m. I looked at Mike. “They were supposed to be here by 6,” I said nervously. “Do you think they’re lost?”

“Don’t worry about them,” he said. “Ross speaks Spanish, right?” In fact, Ross had spent a semester after college teaching high school Spanish. “If he gets lost, he can get directions.”

It was after 8 when they finally arrived, looking frazzled. “That was really confusing!” Ross said. “You told me to take the A-6, but after a while I had to choose between the N-V and the N-VI—there were no other roads to choose from! Did I misunderstand?” he asked, showing great forbearance.

I went pale. “Oh, God, I never told you that the A-6 and the N-VI are the same! I’m so sorry!” I’d gotten conversant enough with the highway system that I’d forgotten that not everyone had my high level of competence. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I guess,” I said.

Of course, even 8:30 p.m. was quite early for dinner at a restaurant, which was what we had planned, so we gave them the house tour and relaxed for a while, which put everyone in a better mood. We drove to a newly opened restaurant nearby and had a delicious meal, and when it was time to say goodbye I took Ross aside.

“I am really sorry I put you through that mess getting here,” I said.

“No problem,” he said. “We got here, and it was an adventure. It’ll be another good travel story for me.”

“So can I ask you to do something for me?” I said. He nodded. “I cried to Evan on the phone for about half an hour the other day, and I think he might be worried about me. Could you call him when you get home and tell him I’m okay?”

Ross smiled. “Sure,” he said.

Orientation, part 8

During my second week in Spain I started to feel sick. Within a few days I began to recognize the symptoms of a urinary tract infection—the burning and discomfort were all too familiar to me, though I hadn’t had an episode for a couple of years. Spain had a socialized medical system, and I wasn’t part of it, but there were many doctors outside the system, in private practice. I was anxious about finding a doctor, but I figured that the easiest way to deal with this would be to get to Únidad Médica, an English-speaking medical group that advertised in Madrid’s English-language publications. I made my appointment—what a joy to be able to do it in my own language!—and plotted my route to the downtown area.

Mike was going to be leaving on a business trip that afternoon, and he’d decided that rather than leave his Mercedes in the airport parking lot, he ought to drive my old Alfa. So he’d driven my car into the city that morning and left his car for me.

It was a treat for me to have the fancy car, which drove so nicely. But the traffic into the city that morning was dreadful. Oh, God, I’m not going to make my appointment time, I thought, feeling panic as I watched the clock blink toward 10 a.m. I was miserable physically, and the cars ahead of me were crawling up Avenida Príncipe de Vergara.

Finally I reached the ramp leading down to an underground parking garage. Heart pounding, I threaded the narrow slope, took my ticket, and cruised for a space. I parked, locked, and ran, worried about finding the doctor’s office.

What I forgot to do in my state of fear was to remove the front of the car radio. Almost every car in the country had been equipped with a new kind of radio that had a removable front. There had been an epidemic of car-radio robberies, and this innovation had pretty well stopped it—the radio’s guts didn’t work at all without the front panel’s controls. But in my hurry I didn’t think to take mine.

The doctor at Únidad Médica was kind and helpful, and he sent me down to the corner farmacia (drugstore) with the name of an antibiotic. I didn’t need an actual prescription, I learned—you could go to any farmacia in the country and purchase any drug, except for the heaviest narcotics, on your own. Mentally relieved though still feeling rotten, I took the stairs down to the parking garage and approached my car.

Shock stabbed me as I noticed the shower of glass shards that had fallen next to the passenger door. I realized with mounting horror that there was glittering glass on the front passenger seat, too. I scanned the dashboard and saw the colorful spaghetti of wires sticking out of the hole where the radio had been. Oh, God, no! Not this! Not now!

My chest began to hurt, and I was about to cry. But I took a deep breath and dragged myself up to the cashier’s booth.

“Me han tomado la radio del coche,” I told the cashier shakily—they’ve stolen my car radio. He shrugged and suggested I call the police. I asked for a pay phone, but he said I’d have to walk down the street to find one. I felt totally defeated.

I went north on Calle Serrano, really struggling not to cry. I peeked into several shops, but I didn’t see a phone until I found a little basement bar. Would it even take my coins? I wondered. Many of the public phones in Madrid took phone cards only, and I hadn’t yet figured out where to buy one. But it did have a coin slot, so I called Mike’s office.

“I need some help,” I told him, gulping so as not to cry. “They smashed the car window and took your radio. I’m so sorry!”

He was sympathetic. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I was at the doctor. I was late, and I was in such a rush—I just forgot to take the front of the radio,” I said, finishing in tears.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Do you want me to come?”

“No!” I said without thinking. “Send somebody who speaks Spanish!”

At least my instinct was right—Mike and I would never have been able to handle the police by ourselves. He sent Chema Domínguez, the older brother of my babysitter Begoña, to take care of me. Chema was patient and helpful, getting a policeman to take a report and explaining that I’d still have to go to a police station and file a denuncia, a more formal description of what had happened.

“But you can do that in any police station in Madrid,” he said, “and that means you can do it at the suburban station in Aravaca, because Aravaca is officially part of Madrid.” I wrote down his instructions for how to find the station, and then he helped me carefully brush most of the glass out of the car so I could drive it home. I was still in all kinds of pain—from the infection, the crying, and the regret—but I was okay, and the car was fixable.

I got myself to the police station that afternoon without too much trouble, and the officer who took my report was perfectly nice and seemed to understand my Spanish. Then I had to make an appointment at the Mercedes dealer to have the window and the radio replaced. That went pretty well, too. But I was still feeling like a miserable failure later when I got a surprise phone call from my friend Evan back home.

Evan, a good friend since college days, was just calling to check on how I was making out in my new home, but he got an earful of what an idiot I considered myself to be and how impossible things were for me. “I’m sorry to dump this on you,” I told him, sobbing. “I’m really not this bad all the time, I swear!”

“Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it!” Evan said. “I know you’ll be fine. There’s bound to be a transition.” And he listened to my crying via satellite for a few more minutes.

Orientation, part 7

Soon I was able to find someone from my own program. I reached her by phone, using the number my friend from home had given me. Her name was Lorraine, and she sounded happy to hear from me. “It’s great that you’re here!” she said. “The group was getting so small—Marlene had to go back to the Philippines, and the two English girls finished school and went home. Everybody else is still on vacation, but I could meet you, if you want, and we could talk.” I was delighted, and I agreed to meet her at the church where the Thursday night English-speaking group met, in the northeast part of the city.

I took the train into the central station and got a taxi to take me to the church, because I couldn’t figure out exactly where it was. It was 8:00 on a September evening, still light out, and I saw that the church was a modern one with a large concrete entrance plaza. I tried the glass doors to the church’s school building, but they were locked.

“Are you Susie?”

There was a beautiful young blonde talking to me. “Are you Lorraine?” I asked her. She was!

Lorraine and I talked for two hours, sitting out on the plaza, watching the constant stream of people going in and out of the church and the shops on the street nearby. We watched the sky darken gradually as we told each other about ourselves. I confessed how scared I was, constantly, even though I was excited to be in Spain. I told her about my family and my history, and she told me hers. She was the daughter of an American woman and a Spanish man, her parents were divorced, and she’d grown up in both countries. Her father owned a language school in Madrid—thousands of Spaniards were in the process of learning English and other languages at commercial schools all over the city—and she did some teaching there, and some translating, and she worked as a freelance writer. She had published a couple of nonfiction books and was a little bit known, she said, from appearing on talk shows to promote her books.

We clicked immediately. Lorraine was warm and understanding about my fears and offered to help me and guide me in any way that would be useful. I was thrilled to connect with someone who was simpática and who understood what I was going through. She promised to call me as soon as the other members of the group returned, and she assured me that I would love them all.

Orientation, part 6

I knew it was important for me to get to an AA meeting to tide me over until the members of my own 12 Step program group returned to the city, so I got Mike to help me plan my driving route one night. He showed me how to go, and I took a deep breath and headed in alone.

The drivers were aggressive in Madrid, and the street signs were often hard for me to read, but I was following my directions pretty well, and I reached the church where the meeting was to be held. But I saw no public parking garages nearby, and the street spaces were jammed. Spaniards, I knew, would park on the sidewalk, on corners, at angles that left their cars sticking out into the street—but I didn’t have the nerve to do that. Scared to death, with no other ideas, I circled the block and prayed for a space—and on the second trip around, there was one! I took it gratefully and walked shakily toward the church.

I was early for the meeting, so I helped a friendly Englishman set up the room. Though the English-speaking AA group was fairly large, many of its members were out of town, like the members of my own program, but there was a group of fifteen or so present. I sat through the meeting feeling awkward, but I was happy to be there. A man who was visiting from California spoke of his gratitude to all the AA groups he’d visited during his trip through Europe. “I’d like to express my thanks to the drunks of Madrid for being here for me,” he said.

After the meeting I went up to him and welcomed him, and I told him a little about my situation as a newcomer in Spain. To my shock, I suddenly found myself crying. “I was so scared driving in here tonight, and I couldn’t find a parking space. I guess I’m frightened all the time,” I told him. “I didn’t even realize it till I started talking to you.” He was kind and let me sniffle on till I felt better, and I knew I’d done the right thing by coming to the meeting.

Orientation, part 5

We had seen Retiro, the big city park near the Prado, on a weekday when we’d first visited Mike in Madrid, but we heard that Sunday was a much better day to go, so we drove into town one early fall day around noon to see the goings-on. Sure enough, the quiet park we’d visited was teeming with people—Peruvian flute bands, puppeteers and dancers, merchants selling scarves and folk remedies. Two vendors caught the attention of Julie and Lisa—one who would write your name on a grain of rice, which would be sealed in a little capsule hung on a string so you could wear it as a necklace. The other had a sign that read “Trenzas”—and the woman there would braid a little segment of your hair and then wrap it with thread in whatever colors you chose. Of course, each girl got a rice necklace, and each got a trenza. “I can’t wait to show Alia at school tomorrow!” Lisa said, beaming. “She has a trenza, and now I have one, too!” It was a pleasure listening to the kids speak Spanish—though they’d learned only a little in these first weeks, their accents were perfect, because young children could expertly mimic their teachers, and the ASM teachers were Spaniards.

We took a walk over to the lagoon where you could rent rowboats. “I want to row,” Julie said.

“Are you sure?” Mike asked. “I’m happy to do the rowing.”

“No, I do it at camp! I can do it.” And she took us on a relaxing half-hour trip around the lagoon.

We walked back to the path where all the merchants were set up, and we came to a guy dressed in a swashbuckler’s cape who was setting up a tightrope between a couple of lampposts. We joined the gathering crowd, and we watched his theatrical turn as he swished his cape, did a little fire eating, and juggled a bit, all accompanied by nonstop patter in Spanish.

Suddenly I realized something. “I can understand this guy much better than I can most Spaniards,” I thought. “I think he must be American.” I focused more carefully on his speech as he did his tightrope act, eliciting squeals from the kids in the crowd.

“How can I find out if I’m right?” I wondered. I was too embarrassed to go up and ask the guy if he was American. But as the act ended and we pitched some coins in the hat for him, I heard somebody else pose the question.

“De donde es usted?” a girl asked—Where are you from?

He recognized her American accent right away and answered in English—“I’m from Baltimore.”

Orientation, part 4

When I arrived in Madrid in late August I knew that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, was coming soon, and though I was not a very observant Jew, I thought it would be great to attend services at the lone synagogue in the city. Mike had made a call for me and learned the address of the building and the times of the services. He had also been told that I should bring my passport with me, because security would be tight.

The kids had been in school just a few days when I drove into Madrid to attend Rosh Hashanah services. I found the street where the synagogue was located and noticed that there were no cars parked there. In fact, there was no parking allowed in that block, ever, to prevent anyone from setting a car bomb near the synagogue.

I showed my passport at the door and found my way to the women’s gallery of the sanctuary. The synagogue followed the Orthodox practice of separating men and women during worship. There were just two other women upstairs with me, both American college students spending their junior year in Madrid.

The service was long and difficult to understand. There was an array of prayerbooks available, but I wasn’t sure which one was in use. The language of the service was Hebrew—no Spanish was spoken, and no page numbers given. Nevertheless, I was fascinated to see the service, the elaborate motion the men used to put on their prayer shawls, the fashionably late arrival of the elegantly dressed Spanish ladies. Though most American Jews are, like me, Ashkenazim (European), the Spanish Jews are Sefardim—the original Spanish and Portuguese Jews who spread into Northern Africa and the Middle East after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. There had been no Jews in Spain from that year until after World War II, I learned. After the war some Jews who knew their origins to have been Spanish came back to reestablish their families in Spain. There was even a Spanish Jewish partner at Price Waterhouse.

Interesting as the service had been, I didn’t feel like a part of it, so I didn’t return after the first day. But when I left the synagogue, I saw down the street the little bagel shop I’d seen advertised in the American Women’s Club newsletter. It was the first bagel shop in Spain, and it had just opened. I bought a dozen bagels to bring home, and the family verdict was that they were dreadful. The bagel shop was out of business in less than a year.

Orientation, part 3

Mike was working on a project that was supposed to make our home life more pleasant: English-language television. The kids were pretty miserable with only Spanish shows to watch. We’d bought a special VCR—the European video system was different from ours—and brought a lot of tapes with us, but we knew they wouldn’t be interesting forever. Our house had come equipped with a fancy motorized satellite dish that could be moved by remote control to catch various broadcasts, but there wasn’t much in English that we could find. Someone had told Mike that there was a pay-satellite service from the U.K., Sky TV, that could be received in Spain if you had a confederate in England.

Reception of Sky required you to purchase both a decoder box and a Sky TV card. Mike had gotten the box, and he had an American colleague living in London who was willing to buy the Sky card for him. But it wasn’t really permitted to get the Sky signal outside the U.K. Sky prevented this from happening by using a setup procedure in which they called your U.K. phone number and instructed you on how to get the system working.

That meant that we had to have Sky call Andy Dunn, Mike’s London colleague, to give him the instructions while Andy’s wife relayed the instructions to Mike on a separate phone line. So on our second Saturday in Spain Mike was crouching on the TV-room floor, turning dials as Andy’s wife directed.

“Set the tuner to 141.2,” she told him, “and tell me what’s on the screen.”

“It’s blue and purple stripes,” Mike told her, and she told Andy, and Andy told Sky. But half an hour later, awkward as the system was, Mike had accomplished the goal. Now we had a year’s worth of British sitcoms, British weather, and Rupert Murdoch’s view of the news to look forward to!

There was another way to get English on our television: SAP, or secondary audio program. Sometimes, when there was an American TV show broadcast by a Spanish channel, you could press the SAP button on the remote and receive the original English soundtrack. And we even had a very fancy TV that you could use to display closed captioning on the rare occasions when it was available—for instance, when “ER” came to Spain.

The Spanish didn’t start broadcasting “ER” until about a year into its U.S. run, but the newspapers made a big deal about the show’s introduction. El País, the country’s most popular newspaper, said the show moved so fast and had so much overlapping sound that a special service was going to be offered to Spanish viewers: along with the dubbed dialogue, televisions equipped like ours could receive subtitles that would be displayed with a different color for each major actor—blue for Anthony Edwards, pink for Sherry Stringfield, yellow for George Clooney, and green for Eriq LaSalle.

Because Spaniards ate dinner at 10 p.m., prime time didn’t even get started till 11:30 or 12. But I was excited about seeing “ER,” and I stayed up till midnight for the first episode. It was a circus! The show did move along amazingly fast, with the Spanish dialogue going right over my head. My Spanish was good enough by this time that the opportunity to read the multicolored dialogue really helped. It didn’t take long to learn what color represented what character. But the show didn’t end till after 1 a.m. (they showed more commercials in Spain than in the U.S., I guess), so I never stayed up for it again.

The other way to get TV in English was to rent a video from Smith’s. Smith’s was an English shop located on Avenida de Europa, close to the American School. They had a small but decent inventory of English videos that would work on our dual-mode VCR, and you could buy a ten-rental card for about $25. They had a few shelves stocked with English groceries—including such exotica as lemon curd and Marmite—as well as a few racks of English paperbacks and some boxes of candies that Brits preferred, like toffees and Turkish delight. The British girls who worked the counter were friendly, and Smith’s became our home away from home. I began to understand the function that the Indian grocery/video stores in Stamford had performed for the Indian community there.

Orientation, part 2

The next morning Amy’s mother came to pick her up, and then Anna’s parents, Amy Levine and Eric Gronningsater, stopped in to meet us before taking their daughter home. Mike and I sat down with them to get acquainted.

“Eric started here in January,” Amy said, “but the girls and I just came this summer. We have an eighth-grade daughter, too. We live near Bernabeu Stadium.” That was the neighborhood where Mike had lived before we’d arrived.

“Where do you work?” Mike asked Eric.

“Banco Santander,” he said.

“That’s my client!” Mike exclaimed. “What kind of work do you do there?”

“I’m in risk management,” he said, and my jaw dropped. That was exactly Mike’s area!

The four of us quickly found that we had a great deal in common. Eric and Amy had met while working on MBA degrees at NYU in the late '70s—and Mike was doing the same thing at the same time at the same school. Eric was the same age as Mike and me, though Amy was several years older. They were happy Manhattanites who loved theater and museums as much as we did, and we were all equally excited to be in Spain.

A genial, baby-faced Yale graduate, Eric was the son of a Norwegian and an American. He grew up in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Amy, petite and animated, was from Boston and had been at Berkeley during the Free Speech movement. Fiercely intelligent and loaded with intellectual curiosity, she was a human compendium of knowledge and spoke several languages—though, like us, she was learning Spanish for the first time.

I found Amy to be a thoroughly impressive person. She was a librarian, she’d worked in corporations and in schools, she knew some of the rich and famous of Manhattan, mainly through her daughters’ exclusive private school. She’d traveled extensively in Europe, and she was well versed in anything she wanted to be well versed in, because she read voraciously.
“We’ll have to get together for dinner!” Amy said, and I agreed eagerly before they scooped up Anna and headed off to their older daughter’s basketball game.

“Can you believe the coincidence?” I asked Mike. We were both amazed. But things became even more amazing over time, as during the next year Mike’s boss, Juan Pujadas, left Price Waterhouse and went to work for Banco Santander—as Eric’s boss. A couple years later he came back to PW as Mike’s boss, and eventually he hired Eric to work for PW as well.

Orientation

The girls actually did get comfortable at school right away. As advertised, the other students were open and friendly. It was only the third day when Julie came home beaming. “Mom, Matty Shepard invited me to sleep over on Friday night! Can I go?”

“Sure,” I said, glad that she wanted to go. “Who’s Matty?”

“She’s from Iowa,” Julie said, “and she’s been here two years already. She lives in Majadahonda.” This was another suburb about 15 minutes west of Pozuelo.

Sleepovers were a big deal at the American School. Though many of the kids lived near the school, in Pozuelo or Aravaca or Humera, there were some who lived in Madrid and others who lived much further west. If your sleepover took place on a Friday night, you could take the bus home with your host, and your parents would only have to make one trip to pick you up.

I talked to Matty’s mother on the phone and got directions so I’d be ready to get Julie that Saturday morning after the sleepover. When I found my way out to the Shepards’ townhouse I met the smiling Matty, an auburn-haired tomboy, and her friendly parents, Martha and Jack. “We’re a little different from the average expats here,” Martha said. “We came because of my job.” Martha worked in systems with a big financial services firm; Jack had come along for the experience of living in a foreign country. “I work in television production, but I’ve only been able to pick up a little freelance work here,” he told me. “But with all my free time I’ve been able to do things like be the president of the PTA at the school.”

Julie appeared from upstairs, looking tired but happy. We headed out and drove through the half-dozen glorietas—roundabouts—that routed traffic back toward Pozuelo.

The next week Julie wanted to invite another new friend to sleep over. “Can I ask Anna to stay here Friday night?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I want to ask a friend, too!” Lisa said.

“Okay,” I told her. “Who?”

“Can I ask Amy?”

“Why not?”

So on Friday night I met two more girls: Anna Levine-Gronningsater, a skinny, freckled New York City kid who’d just moved to Madrid with her family, and Amy Fisher, whose family had been in Húmera for four years. The kids all played happily, running between the yard and the attic playroom, until I decided to take them out for pizza.

Since the kids always craved American-style food, we went to the Pizza Hut near the school. The booths were small, so Julie and Anna took their own table right behind the little girls and me.

Amy chattered endlessly while we waited for our pizzas. “We’re from St. Louis,” she said. “My older sister is in fourth grade now. My dad works for a big company. We have a really big house! I have a maid who stays with me when my mom and dad go out. She’s from the Philippines. I’m doing so well in school! My teacher likes me the best. I’m the best in my Spanish class, too.” Lisa was paying close attention, but Julie and Anna were rolling their eyes at the constant bragging.

“Do you know how to say butterfly in Spanish?” Amy asked the older girls. They blanched. They had only studied Spanish for a few days! “It’s mariposa,” Amy said helpfully. “How about highway?” She peppered them with questions she knew they couldn’t answer. Finally Julie started to get mad. “We just moved here! We’re only in beginning Spanish!” she said.

A light bulb went on over Anna’s head. “What level of Spanish are you in?” she asked. Amy’s eyes went wide. “I’m in advanced beginner,” she said.

“You’ve been here four years and you’re only an advanced beginner?” Anna said, with a note of triumph.

“Well, uh, I was going to move up this year, but Alfredo thought I ought to stay in advanced beginner for a little longer . . .” But Julie and Anna were already sporting smug grins, having put their little pest in her place.

Making the Move, part 10

By her own account Ana had been a busy Air Force wife, involved with PTAs and officers’ wives clubs wherever they’d lived. But now, back home, she was living a quieter life, seeing her folks and spending her days taking care of the house. She loved to do just what I couldn’t stand—she air-dried all the family clothing and ironed every piece, sometimes watching soccer or movies on TV. Her house was furnished with a combination of comfy American pieces and some truly beautiful Spanish antiques, which she bought from an American wife and Spanish husband she knew who owned an antiques shop.

Her kids were wonderful people. Troy, a baby-faced soccer star, was warm and funny, with a shock of straight blond hair and crooked teeth. Carmen, who became a favorite babysitter for Julie and Lisa, had long, wavy blond hair and was kind and studious. They gave Ana and Phil little trouble, even as teenagers.

Phil was not too happy in his work at the Office of Defense Cooperation, located in an impressive brick building in the northwest part of Madrid. “Everyone there is an officer, a major or a colonel,” Ana explained. “These guys are used to having a hierarchy, knowing who’s at the top and who has to follow whose orders. But here you have Army, Navy and Air Force guys all together, and everyone is used to being in charge.” The ODC’s function was to coordinate military relationships between the U.S. and Spain—everything from pilot exchange programs to joint military exercises to used airplane sales. With his excellent Spanish, Phil usually got along better with his Spanish counterparts than with his U.S. colleagues.

Ana became my close friend and my most valued resource—a cultural translator who could explain almost everything about Spain to me. When I was invited to a Spaniard’s home for dinner, she coached me on exactly how late I should arrive (an hour). She suggested good places to visit and taught me what to say when I wanted my hair cut. She advised me to tip the gas station attendant who filled my car—“That is a true service,” she said. And she took care of me the day my power was turned off for non-payment of the bill.

There were two ways to pay an electricity bill: by an electronic draft from your bank account or by going to a designated bank and paying in cash. Mike had asked me one morning if I could go down to the bank and pay the bill, since our own bank account wasn’t yet set up right for doing the electronic drafts. I was terrified. “I don’t know,” I said, and I really meant it: I didn’t know if I could go down there and do what had to be done. What if I made a mistake? What if I embarrassed myself and people laughed at me? I hadn’t yet recovered from the need to feel capable all the time.

I did go down there, though. I saw an armed guard near the door, and I asked in halting Spanish where to go to pay the bill I showed to him. He pointed to a teller, and I went over and paid her, heart pounding. I left in a panic, feeling no more competent in spite of my success.

But it turned out that the payment was credited incorrectly, and a week later we received—but failed to understand—a notice saying that the power was going to be cut off if we didn’t pay our bill that afternoon.

The next thing I knew, the power was off. It took us a while to figure out what had happened. The lights were out, and the TV wouldn’t turn on. Worst of all, my fancy motorized persianas weren’t working! Whichever ones were up stayed up, and the ones that were down stayed down. My great luxury turned instantly into a huge liability.

In the Spanish bureaucratic style that we came to know and hate, the bill could now be paid only at the power company’s office, and by the time we realized our predicament, it was closed. We would not be able to pay till the next day between 10 a.m. and noon, and the power would be turned back on sometime after that.

I called my sister and sobbed over the phone to her, totally defeated. “I didn’t know what to do, and we ignored the warning because we didn’t understand that it meant they were going to turn the power off,” I hiccuped. She tried hard to be sympathetic, but she could hardly contain her amusement. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “You’ll pay the bill and you’ll be okay. You’ve lived without electricity before! You’ll make it!” I knew she was right, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

It was at this point that Ana came by, saw the situation, and invited us over for dinner. It seemed to me the most generous thing anyone had ever done for me. The four of us trooped across the street at dinnertime, and Ana and Phil took care of us like the poor, pathetic creatures we felt ourselves to be, trying hard not to giggle at us. They were fully familiar with the mysteries of Spanish bureaucracy, and they often had to dodge difficulties like the one that had just hit us head-on. I was humiliated, but at least I was not hungry. We went back home and slept with our persianas up, and in the morning we paid the bill, and in the afternoon we got our power back.

Making the Move, part 9

I also thought long and hard about how to form some friendships. I decided that my friend Eileen, who had advised me so well on getting a babysitter, was a good role model for me, and I tried to imagine what she would do in my place. “She’d call Ana Douglas and ask her to be her walking partner,” I decided. So I did that.

“Sure,” Ana said. “I could really use the exercise. What time would you want to go?”

We worked out a time and started the next morning. I walked across the street and rang the bell on her gate. She came out into the chilly morning air, and we took a brisk walk all around the neighborhood, past the many townhouses under construction nearby. And we talked. In the way people learn about each other over time, I learned that her parents came from a little town in the mountains outside Granada. Her dad was from a modest family, but her mom had been a rich girl. They had three sons and two daughters. “My parents moved us all to Madrid because my older sister, Maricarmen, had heart trouble when she was little,” she told me. “You couldn’t get the right type of medical care where we were, so we had to come here for her treatment.” Sr. Romera, Ana’s father, became a traffic cop, and the family lived in an apartment on the east side of the city. As a city kid she had learned to navigate the Metro and the streets at an early age, and she remembered when a single peseta—now worth less than a penny—was a wonderful Sunday gift that could buy you a good amount of candy.

Ana had been working as a store clerk downtown when she met Phil at age 18. After they got married they moved in with his family in Texas, where she learned English by listening to the radio and watching TV as well as taking classes. She worked in retail stores there, too, before having Troy, who was a junior at ASM, and Carmen, who was now in 8th grade. The family’s years of world travel had yielded many stories that Ana shared with me during our walks. Most of the time, when we were done walking, we sat in her kitchen for another half hour just talking.

“When we moved here last year from Germany,” she said in her Spanish-Texas twang, “I thought we’d live in Aravaca, near the school. I’d never lived in this part of Madrid. I looked like crazy for a good house, and I found a real mansion—a great big house with a beautiful patio and pool. I bargained the owner down and got a good rental price, but right away we started having problems. There was a crack in the pool, and the water was always leaking out. And the house had damp walls, so there was mildew all the time. I had to keep calling the owner for repairs, and it was just driving me crazy! So even though it was a huge pain in the neck, I went looking for another house, and I found this one in Pozuelo. It’s much smaller, but we’ll be fine here. I don’t need such a grand place.”

Making the Move, part 8

After lunch we found our way by Metro to the Madrid branch of Marks & Spencer, the British department store. We went to the food department, and I got some English muffins for us, and some for my neighbor Lisa Mazzilli, who prized American-type foods that were difficult to find in Spain. And then we went to Turner’s, a bookstore that carried books in French, German and English as well as Spanish.

* * *

Finally the first day of school arrived. Julie and Lisa headed up the block to the bus stop early in the morning—Mike had already left, because the traffic into Madrid was awful if you didn’t start early—and I was alone, and nervous. Would the kids have an awkward and miserable first day? “This is a very welcoming school,” Mary Franco, the lower school principal, had told me. “Everyone is used to having kids come in for a year or two and then leaving. I think you’ll find it goes very easily for your girls.” I tried to put my faith in her judgment.

But how was I going to fill the hours till they came back? School ended at 4 p.m., and if they chose to do any after-school activities they’d be home even later. I watched the news on TV, trying to understand the Spanish. I already loved the weather lady, who methodically covered the high and low temperatures of each region of the country as she gave her forecast, pointing to sun and cloud symbols. Huddled in the shadows of my narrow TV room, I watched the music videos that came on afterward, at the strange hour of 9 a.m. I made some calls and found out that the International Newcomers Club’s opening event would be on Thursday—a huge potluck picnic at a big house in a distant suburb. I signed up for that and said I’d bring potato salad. I called the number I had for my 12-step program and found out that everyone was still on vacation, so there would be no meetings for a couple more weeks. Fortunately, my friend had told me that there was a hospitable open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that I could attend, and she’d given me the day and time for that.

Then I started to work on another job: finding a gym. I was a big aerobics fan, and I wanted to join a place with good classes at convenient midday times. Christine Lotto had told me about an American woman, Lauren Williams, who gave an aerobics class in a small gym she’d fixed up in her basement, and I figured I could go there till I found a place. I called her and got her schedule, then I looked through the phone book and wrote down the addresses of gyms in Pozuelo and Aravaca. I decided to go visit them, since I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to communicate well over the phone.

It was a frustrating search. I had to study my maps to get from one place to the other, and parking was often difficult. Narrow one-way streets popped up unexpectedly, and I continually got lost. Even when I found the place I was looking for, I had to work up my courage to actually go inside, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to understand what the desk person told me about membership. I knew how to ask people not to speak so fast, but they weren’t always able to slow themselves down. I collected a lot of schedules and papers, though, and when I got home and was able to review them at leisure, I found out that suburban gyms in Spain were pretty much like suburban gyms at home. Rats, I thought. All the morning classes sounded too easy. They saved the challenging classes for the evenings, for the working people. I wanted a good, demanding class in the daytime, and I realized I’d have to go into the city to get it. So I put that on my agenda for further investigation.