Making the Move, part 5

One chore that had to be done was to buy school supplies. There was a list of needed items for each grade, and there was a little store out in back of the school, made of cinderblock and managed by a parent, Carol Marks. The line snaked out the door, but it moved pretty quickly, because Carol had a lot of assistants that day.

“What grade?” the clerk asked me when it was my turn.

“Second and fifth,” I told her. She scurried around behind the counter, amassing the items each kid was supposed to have. We paid and took our items home.

The kids had a good time looking through their new stuff, because much of it was unfamiliar. They each had several carpetas—these were large folders with attached elastics that could be used to hold them closed. The writing paper they’d been given was different from the 8 ½ by 11 that we were used to—it was a little longer and narrower, and eventually we found that flyers, computer paper—what have you—all came on this size paper.

Also, the pencils didn’t have erasers. Those had been purchased separately. It wasn’t till weeks later that somebody told us that Spanish pencils don’t have erasers because Spanish schoolchildren are expected to make no mistakes.

I had an additional mission to undertake when I got home. I had been given the phone number of another American School family, friends of a friend, who had been living in Madrid for two years. I screwed up my courage to call them. I got Christine Lotto on the phone, and she said she’d love to get together. Rather than make us try to find her house, which was far from the school, she offered to come over—and bring food!—during the weekend. She had a daughter between Julie’s and Lisa’s ages and two older sons, she said.

Another chore was to go to El Corte Inglés and buy plates. We drove into the city and figured out how to park in the store’s lot. Everything had to be learned; nothing was coming naturally. In this case, we missed the fact that the main parking area was underground, below the store. But we were lucky enough to find a space in a tiny surface lot just next door. We also had to learn that many parking facilities in Madrid required you to prepay at a cashier or a machine just before returning to your car. At El Corte Inglés you had to go to the basement level, pay a cashier, and receive a ticket that would get you out of the parking lot’s exit gate, as long as you reached that gate within twenty minutes. It was a challenge, but we were equal to it, and we loaded up on a nice set of flowered china and all the groceries we could manage.

I was terrified to use my Spanish, which I wasn’t sure would work on actual Spaniards, but I had an information sheet from the school that had the number for a dairy that delivered fresh milk. Spanish grocery stores sold ultrapasteurized milk in boxes, which had elicited a major “Yuck!” from my kids, so I took a deep breath and called the dairy. “Quisiera pedir la entrega de leche,” I began—I’d like to order milk delivery. Then came a response that was too fast for me to understand—for a few seconds. I found that if I didn’t immediately understand what I heard, it might still get through to my brain a second or two later. If I could slow down and not panic, I could answer! I told the clerk my address, how much skim milk I wanted, and how often. It worked!