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.